Product Description

This book critically examines the weaknesses of U.S. intelligence led by the Central Intelligence Agency in informing presidential decision-making on issues of war and peace. It evaluates the CIA's strategic intelligence performance during the Cold War and post-Cold War periods as a foundation for examining the root causes of intelligence failures surrounding the September 11th attacks and assessments of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs in the run up to the Iraq war. Intelligence expert Richard L. Russell probes the roots causes of these failures which lie in the CIA's poor human intelligence collection and analysis practices. Russell argues that none of the post-9/11 intelligence reforms have squarely addressed these root causes of strategic intelligence failure and it recommends measures for redressing these dangerous vulnerabilities in American security.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #466699 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 228 pages

Review
"Here is a study of the CIA and its weakness that is both hard-hitting and well-informed. More in sorrow than in anger Richard Russell lays out the flaws in intelligence collection and analysis and points the way to improvements. Even if policy-makers do not respond, readers will learn a great deal."
Robert Jervis, Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of Political Science, Columbia University

"An impressively comprehensive, insightful, and revealing examination of why the CIA has made major intelligence mistakes in recent years and what might be done to lessen the chances of failure in the future. Richard Russell knows this subject inside-out, writes lucidly, and skillfully captures the strengths and the weaknesses of contemporary American intelligence capabilities."
Loch K. Johnson, Regents Professor, University of Georgia and editor, INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY

"Professor Russell has written a book that should be read by both those who are dismayed by the CIA''s dismal performance over the last two decades and those who are now trying to rebuild the Agency. Those who have been dismayed will certainly, after reading this book, understand why it has failed so often and will understand that the accountability for that failure begins at the very core of the institution itself. On the other hand, those who believe, and I count myself in this group, that an effective, strategically focused intelligence system is an absolute requirement for the survival in the dangerous and chaotic world in which we now find ourselves will come away from this book humbled by the immense task at hand. Simply rearranging the reporting arrangements of the various parts of the system and appointing a czar will have no real effect - except to delude those who have not read this book into believing that something meaningful has been done. Drawing on his own 17 year experience in the CIA and an exceptional ability to speak directly and with candor, Professor Russell has written a book that should be on the top of the reading list of those who aspire to power and will have to listen to the “truth” that comes from the current dysfunctional intelligence system. It also should find an avid readership among all those who worry that the United States is steaming into the eyes of multiple storms without any capability of discerning a strategic course that will avoid the certainty of disaster. For those who believe that US foreign policy has become all to ready to fall back on unilateral and even preemptive military force, this book provide the answer as to why this is so - we have lost our strategic intelligence capability and with it the capacity to be smart. We are left with only our military power and the loss and destruction that results."
David Kay, Senior Research Fellow, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies

"Richard Russell offers a compelling critique of enduring weaknesses in US intelligence. With a focus on the Central Intelligence Agency, he calmly dissects the most significant issue: why does intelligence get it wrong on the big picture, the mysteries of strategic shifts in geopolitics and the fortunes of nations? Russell brings all the right stuff - 17 years as a CIA analyst, fine academic credentials, deep knowledge of how policy and intelligence relate to each other, and a healthy disdain for the rule-bound culture of big bureaucracies."
Ellen Laipson, President and CEO, Stimson Center and former Vice Chairman of the National Intelligence Council

"Russell's overall diagnosis is damning, and the recommendations he makes are solid ones..."
The American Interest

"There is no critique more damning than that of a disillusioned insider. Russell, an award-winning intelligence analyst with 17 years of experience in the CIA,...takes a sober look at the intelligence community--in particular, the CIA--to show why failures of strategic intelligence have become the norm. He finds the problems extend far back into the Cold War and have not been corrected by the most recent round of 'reforms.' The author describes a system that rewards those who collect minutiae, but discourages anyone from looking at the big picture. He finds too many layers of management, weak professional training, and 'bureaucratic rot.' The book contains practical suggestions for improvement. This is a book that should be read by anyone who wants to know what is wrong with the system today, and what it would take to fix it."
D. McIntosh, Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania, Choice

"...it is a brutally candid critique of the bureaucratic and operational problems in the CIA and the Intelligence Community...Russell outlines the fundamental changes required to produce accurate and timely intelligence and, incidentally, to keep others from quitting as he did...for the intelligence professional and the decision makers, it is a book worthy of close and serious scrutiny."
Hayden B. Peake, Studies in Intelligence

"Sharpening Strategic Intelligence is a cut above other books by former officials, and offers much-needed insight into the CIA's history and current challenges."
Amy B. Zegart, Political Science Quarterly

"In this book, Dr. Russell methodically integrates official reports and the observations of intelligence and national security professionals to make a compelling argument in support of his central thesis that the CIA's seemingly intractable flaws have resulted in a 'systemic failure to deliver firstrate human intelligence and analysis to the commander in chief.'"
American Intelligence Journal

About the Author
Richard L. Russell is Professor of National Security Affairs at the National Defense University's Near East and South Asia Center for Strategic Studies. He also holds academic appointments as Adjunct Associate Professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University and Research Associate in the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. Russell is the author of Weapons Proliferation and War in the Greater Middle East: Strategic Contest and George F. Kennan's Strategic Thought: The Making of an American Political Realist. He previously served seventeen years as a political-military analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, where he analyzed security issues in the Middle East and Europe. He received numerous CIA Exceptional Performance Awards, two of which were for his work during the Gulf War and the Kosovo War. Russell has been interviewed on National Public Radio, ABC News, and CNN and his analysis has appeared in leading publications to include the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, USA Today, and US News and World Report. He holds a PhD in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia and is a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Customer Reviews

Why Analysis?
It is difficult to imagine a better qualified individual to dissect the institutional being of CIA than Richard L. Russell. He is a 17 year veteran of that agency and is now a distinguished academic. Russell is unique among the many authors writing about CIA in that he was a real `working stiff' (intelligence analyst if you prefer) who actually observed and pondered what was going on around and above him.

Russell has produced an insightful, but devastating criticism of CIA and its inner workings. He goes to the heart of bureaucratic ineptitude that has become the norm for the analytic arm of CIA, the Directorate of Intelligence (DI). In this discussion he describes in a good deal of detail how managerial incompetence has combined with a deep seated anti-intellectual bias to produce DI analysts incapable of conducting substantive analysis. He is unique among intelligence writers in his recognition that to be effective, analysts must have target expertise. This look at the DI and the entire process involved in intelligence analysis and production is by itself a unique and invaluable contribution to understanding what is needed to truly reform the U.S. Intelligence System. This alone would be worth the price of the book, but Russell has also done an excellent review of the problems and foolishness that plague CIA's other arm, its clandestine service. Moreover, Russell provides a good deal of useful information on the theories supporting the concept of strategic intelligence and the related issue of the differences between `secrets' and `mysteries'. This is important to understanding what it is that the DI and its former senior branch, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) are supposed to produce. His discussion of the ill advised decision to create the position of Directorate of Intelligence and subordinate the NIC to it mirrors what most informed observers feel about the DNI.

This book is about CIA not the U.S. Intelligence System as a whole. Yet Russell's criticism of CIA and especially his observations on managers and analysts accurately describe analogous problems with the technical intelligence agencies (i.e. the National Security Agency (NSA) and the National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency (NGA)). It does not take a good deal of imagination to interpolate from this book that the entire U.S. Intelligence System is broken almost beyond repair. Russell offers some very good suggestions about how to repair the analytic capability of CIA, but these would only fix a part of the problem.

Hit Job, Somewhat Shallow, Misses 90% of the Strategic Picture

I might have leaned toward four stars on this book, which is certainly a useful contribution, but it falls into the second tier for being a clear hit job---and shallow to boot. Gaps in the author's reading (or writing) appeared from the very beginning. Lost first star there.

He defines strategic intelligence as focused on threats and the use of force. Despite his mention of Adda Bozeman, he does not seem to have understood that the heart of strategic intelligence is deep and sustained study and understanding of foreign cultures, histories, languages, genealogies, and ties that bind--financial, religious, tribal, ethnic, etc. Lost second star here.

There are ten high-level threats, twelve remediation policies, and eight global challengers, and all 30 of these factors must be studied as a whole and in relation, in the present, near, and far term. Anything less is not strategic intelligence.

I am troubled by the author's rather black and white bias in tarring CIA with all the wrongs and exempting the policy-makers, and especially Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith, for their many errors and omissions as well as 25 specific high crimes and misdemeanors committed by Cheney alone as detailed in The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 and Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency.

The author has read (or written) selectively. His examples of failure on Korea do not include reference of the Secretary of State's Press Club appearance in which South Korea was explicitly left out of the American orbit. His shallow coverage of Viet-Nam does not benefit from a lack of reference to None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam, War Without Windows: A True Account of a Young Army Officer Trapped in an Intelligence Cover-Up in Vietnam, or Who the Hell Are We Fighting?: The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars, among others.

His coverage of 9-11 is also deficient. While he properly criticizes CIA for failing to actually ramp up both clandestine penetrations and analytic talent, and he faults the FBI for not sharing with CIA, he fails to mention the 9 specific warnings from foreign governments that the White House chose to exploit to achieve "our Pearl Harbor"--the Israeli's even sent a video crew to capture the known-in-advance event for their archives, while Dick Cheney organized an "exercise" with a command center NOT in the target building where the command center was originally built at great expense.

On Iraq, I found the author irritating--almost whining--in his never-flagging effort to tar the CIA. Evidently he is not aware of, or does not wish to credit, the defection of Salaam Hussein's son in law and the 25+ line crossers Charlie Allen is said to have sent in, as recounted in Bob Woodward's State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III all of whom came back with the same story: kept the cookbooks, destroyed the stocks, bluffing for regional influence's sake.

I agree with the author on some key points:

1) DNI should not have been created, this just created another layer of bureaucracy so we could promote the losers who got us here one more time.

2) CIA is out of touch with reality. While the author glosses over the importance of open sources of information, he is evidently completely unfamiliar with what properly done OSINT can do, to include tribal genealogies and orders of battle, financial-family ties and asset mapping, and so on.

3) The author is certainly correct to whale away at CIA security. On the one hand, they did not want my wife's report on the 300 foreign intelligence officers she met at one of my conferences, including the LtGen from the KGB ("did you sleep with any of them? No? Forget about it.") and on the other these are the morons who harassed a GS-15 who dared to call Kazhikistan to solicit local views, to the point that she quit CIA and is now very happy as the Chief of the Intelligence Analysis Division at one of the Combatant Commands. I was barred from the campus by these fools for properly returning a classified document from USMC to CIA, taken with permission and transported both ways via authorized couriers.

4) The author is correct on the fossilized layers of "management" and bureaucracy, and he does provide a good review of shortcomings, but I for one, with experience across three of the four Directorates back in the day, consider this book to be a case of "several hundred bleats too many." Yes, CIA is a mess. Yes, CIA should not have 800 SES positions and 200-400 compartments that do not share with another. It is all that bad? No. I could turn CIA around in 90 days just by recruiting Amazon to mobilize all the top authors and readers on every topic; by creating external non-secret multinational intelligence-policy councils on every topic of importance as I am doing now with the Earth Intelligence Network; by asking DoD to make the Coalition Coordination Center into a Multinational Information Sharing Hub that does OSINT as well as multinational HUMINT and close-in emplacement of US-provided technical devices. Somewhere in there I would fire two thirds of the contractors, half of the security people, two thirds of the lawyers, and most of FBIS. This is not rocket science.

The book ends weakly, with a mention of horizon scanning, which Singapore has turned into a 21st century new craft of intelligence, but the author evidently has not read Tom Quiggin's Seeing the Invisible: National Security Intelligence in an Uncertain Age, and is unfamiliar as well with the broader literatures on information society, modern intelligence, strategy & force structure, emerging non-traditional as well as catastrophic and disruptive threats, anti-Americanism and blow-back, and the negative impact of domestic politics on sound foreign and national security policy.

This is not suitable as a textbook.

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