The father of our country was also, it turns out, the father of its spooks.
"The necessity of pro-curing good intelligence is apparent & need not be further urged," General George Washington wrote to a military colleague in 1777. " All that remains for me to add is, that you keep the whole matter as secret as possible."
More than two centuries later, in his January 1993 valedictory address as president to the Central Intelligence Agency he had once headed, George Bush pondered the end of the Cold War and declared, "We need more intelligence, not less."
Of all the American presidents, the two Georges probably were the most professionally versed in the ways of espionage. But as Christopher Andrew amply demonstrates in this sweeping history of American intelligence, every president has come to rely upon secret reports on the capabilities and intentions of other nations.
This is no thriller for the fan of le Carre or Ludlum looking for a quick read. It is a fat, studious history with more than 100 pages of notes, compiled largely from published memoirs and presidential libraries and offering few brand-new revelations. Mr. Andrew is a Cambridge University historian whose " KGB: The Inside Story," written with the Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky, is by far the best book on the subject.
By viewing intelligence through the eyes of the presidents, however, Mr. Andrew focuses on the interesting crux of the matter, where murky and contradictory evidence from spies and satellites gets turned into policy. That drama makes the book, despite its bulk and unadorned style, quite readable.
There's Eisenhower, welcoming the youngest Eagle Scout ever to the Oval Office for a photo session while he is gnawed inwardly by fears that Soviet intervention in Hungary may touch off a Third World War. LBJ furiously orders the CIA to find " Castro-types" and " headless bodies in the streets" in the Dominican Republic to justify his already announced conclusion that unrest there was Communist-inspired and brutal.
Earnest Jimmy Carter takes speed-reading lessons to cope with voluminous daily intelligence reports. A befuddled Ronald Reagan tells the public successive untruths about the Iran-Contra machinations, partly to cover up but partly because he doesn't understand them himself.
The book illustrates strikingly how the intelligence business was transformed in this century from a business of gentlemen amateurs who traveled abroad and then shared their impressions with the president over dinner to a high-tech industry employing tens of thousands and costing billions. It gives appropriate weight to the satellite photos and electronic .. eavesdropping that have come to supplement, and often to supplant, traditional human spies.
But despite it all, Mr. Andrew notes, major world events, from Pearl Harbor to the Soviet atomic bomb, from the fall of the Shah of Iran to the collapse of Soviet communism, have taken presidents by surprise. Peacetime covert action, meanwhile, an abiding temptation for American leaders, has generally ended in failure or fiasco, he argues.
The most impressive achievement of post-war intelligence, he suggests, may have been to stabilize the Cold War, letting the superpowers know so much about one another that neither was spooked into a nuclear first strike.
As Mr. Andrew notes, many crucial intelligence documents, some dating from as long ago as the 1920s, remain classified. Someday they may revise historians' views. But for now Mr. Andrew has done a great service by organizaing for the rest of us this grand tour of what once was intended for the presidents' eyes only.
Scott Shane has been a reporter for The Sun since 1983, and before that was with The Washington Star and The Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record. He was The Sun's Moscow correspondent from 1988 to 1991. His book on the collapse of communism, " Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union," was published last year.
"For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush," by Christopher Andrew. Illustrated. 660 pages. New York: HarperCollins. $30