F ew subjects can as reliably command readership as do books on espionage. Each year hundreds appear, both fiction and nonfiction, tapping a limitless fascination with the black art. Readers seem as avid to find the dagger under the cloak as the spies themselves, often having lived for years under cover, are eager to reveal what they have done, or as historians and journalists are determined to uncover their stories.
The effectiveness of espionage is the subject of endless debate. For instance, it can be argued that during the Cold War, while the United States was well-informed by its intelligence community on Soviet force levels and nuclear capability, U.S. intelligence failed miserably to predict the humiliation of the Bay of Pigs invasion and, later, the fall of the Soviet Union, and, with a budget of about $30 billion, it could not put together numerous clues that might have provided forewarning of Sept. 11.
Another problem, which most books do not reveal, is that, like all government agencies, intelligence agencies like the CIA and FBI are large, self-protective bureaucracies. That at the time of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, U.S. intelligence was still waiting to change its focused targeting on the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. That it had failed to recruit adequate numbers of agents and analysts with language and area expertise in the Middle East, despite a long history of terrorism beginning with the Afghan insurrection. And that the CIA would rather war than cooperate with the FBI. All of those thats indicate that the community has a long road to travel before it will justify its enormous expense and fulfill its responsibilities.
Despite continual failures of intelligence, however, the public's interest cannot be sated. One reason for renewed attention has been the opening up of sources from the former Soviet Union, providing new insights.
Examples are Jerrold and Leona Schecter's Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History (Brasseys, 320 pages, $26.95) and Jonathan E. Lewis' Spy Capitalism: ITEK and the CIA (Yale University Press, 336 pages, $29.95).
For those who want to go to the source, an ideal book is Christopher Andrew's The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (Basic Books, 700 pages, $17.50), which is based on KGB files from 1918 to 1984, transcribed by KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin. While the detail of the book is sometimes overwhelming, Andrew writes well, and the book contains information that will be mined for decades as others attempt to re-create the history of the Soviet Union and the Cold War.
As Andrew points out, "No one who spied for the Soviet Union at any period between the October Revolution and the eve of the Gorbachev era can now be confident that his or her secrets are still secure."
Another course of continuous interest is code breaking, which has reached new heights of sophistication as indicated in James Bamford's masterful account, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency From the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century (Doubleday, 400 pages, $29.95). Another excellent work on technical intelligence is Jeffrey T. Richelson's The Wizards of Langley (Westview Press, 416 pages, $26), which provides a wealth of astonishing detail in its documentation of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology.
A third source of interest has been a series of spectacular revelations of the failure of the FBI and CIA to protect the country from the espionage conducted by Americans, particularly by these agencies' own agents. For example, alternative interpretations of FBI traitor Robert Hanssen, who compromised decades of U.S. intelligence work, are provided by Norman Mailer and Lawrence Schiller's Into the Mirror: The Life of Master Spy Robert P. Hanssen (HarperCollins, 336 pages, $25.95) and David Wise's Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (Random House, 256 pages, $24.95).
As Attorney General John Ashcroft sanctions the turning of U.S. intelligence on U.S. citizens, interest is likely to increase in earlier histories of these efforts, as depicted in Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in Counterintelligence but Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years by Athan Theoharis (Ivan R. Dee, 320 pages, $27.50). Here the reader might also want to consult Thirty Years of Treason: Excerpts From Hearings Before the House Committee on Un-American Activities 1938-1968, selected and edited by Eric Bentley, with an introduction by Frank Rich (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1,000 pages, $24.95), which contains almost a thousand pages of HUAC's treatment of artists and intellectuals and public figures as diverse as Lillian Hellman, Paul Robeson, Arthur Miller and Zero Mostel.
The sheer aggressiveness of the committee, with its clear disdain for human rights, represents a warning that the Constitution may offer Americans insufficient protection without strong support from active citizen groups.
For books that attempt a more sweeping interpretation of U.S. intelligence, readers have Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones' Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence (Yale University Press, 384 pages, $29.95), which is a mixture of genuine insight into the budgetary process supporting U.S. intelligence and uneven reporting on its operations and effectiveness. Little is said, for example, about the effectiveness of congressional surveillance, less on the operation and effectiveness of the community as a whole, virtually nothing on the intelligence disaster of Sept. 11.
Like the intelligence system itself, whole topics fall through the cracks, although Jeffreys-Jones' engaging style often makes the reader forget what he or she is missing.
William Turner, a former FBI agent who turned on his boss, J. Edgar Hoover, to write the scathing Hoover's FBI, subsequently became an investigative reporter and senior editor of the radical magazine Ramparts.
His Rearview Mirror: Looking Back at the FBI, the CIA and Other Tails, with a foreword by Oliver Stone (Penmarin Books, 350 pages, $24.95), reworks former reporting to offer an insightful, overtly hostile, and sometimes lurid and unsubstantiated account of incidents from mostly three or more decades ago, which still merits reading today.
Still another sweeping look at the intelligence community from the opposite political side is provided by Stealing Secrets, Telling Lies: How Spies and Codebreakers Helped Shape the Twentieth Century (Brassey's, 352 pages, $26.95), by James Gannon. This study combines meticulous research with a Cold War style that occasionally lessens Gannon's credibility.
Particularly convincing, however, are its chapters on Soviet spying, which shortened the development time of Soviet nuclear weapons.
Craig Eisendrath is a senior fellow of the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C., and a former foreign service officer. He is the editor of National Insecurity: U.S. Intelligence After the Cold War (Temple University Press).