Product Description

This book is the sequel to ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (AFCEA International Press, 2000). That book, written largely for government and corporate intelligence professionals, remains the basic reference volume for the future of global intelligence enterprises. This book, by contrast, is a completely new effort that is written for every citizen of every country—the "intelligence minutemen" of the 21st Century. In the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, attacks carried out by a non-state actor skilled at asymmetric warfare and using our own capabilities against us—attacks followed quickly by a nation-wide anthrax assault that closed Congress and terrified the U.S. Postal Service—it is imperative that every citizen have a clear-headed understanding of what is at stake and what needs to be done to keep not only America, but all civilized communities safe. It is especially imperative that citizens understand that the world is already at war, with millions of refugees in 67 countries, plagues sweeping across 59 countries, mass starvation in 27 countries, and deliberate genocide campaigns in 18 countries. These are "facts of life" that our schools, our media and even our intelligence communities have been unwilling and unable to represent intelligently to the public. It is against this backdrop of global chaos that terrorism rises.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #668211 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 438 pages

Review
(Steele) has written a book that can bring us together in facing our greatest enemies: ignorance, poverty, and mistrust. -- Hamit Gulemre Aybars, Rear Admiral, Turkish Navy (Retired)

As always, (Steele) is at once a teacher, historian, critic, and guide to the future. -- Dr. Loch Johnson, Regent Professor, University of Georgia

Constantly committed to truth and honesty...(Steele) demonstrates his ability to grasp the real issues. -- Pierre Lacoste, Admiral, French Navy (Retired), former Director of Foreign Intelligence (DGSE), France

No one is better at looking at intelligence issues "out of the box" than Robert Steele. -- Bill Gertz, author of The China Threat: How the People's Republic Targets America

Robert Steele is the Thomas Edison of the Information Age!...should be required reading for politicians, students, and concerned citizens. -- A Reader from APO AE

Steele consistently has been ahead of the pack in his appreciation of everything...his work thrills with its insights. -- Ralph Peters, Author of Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph

Steele consistently has been well ahead of the pack...his work thrills with its insights and ideas. -- Ralph Peters, Author of Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph?

[Steele's book] is the perfect weapon in our war against terror. -- Robert Young Pelton, Author of The World's Most Dangerous Places

From the Publisher
9/11 is for intelligence what Sputnik was for science. The across-the-board failure of clandestine intelligence (overseas), counterintelligence (at home) and our generally mediocre understanding of the real world (since we lack a properly funded, language-qualified foreign or diplomatic service), all contributed equally.

Henry Kissinger is absolutely right when he laments the lack of any serious consideration of foreign policy in recent presidential and congressional elections, and that is what 9/11 must change--this book is intended to be useful to citizens as well as government and business intelligence professionals. It lays out with great precision (see the index) both $11.6 billion dollars (out of $30 billion a year) in potential savings that could be applied to the new craft of intelligence, and it recommends with great precision all that should be in a new National Security Act of 2002.

Intelligence in the 21st Century is too important to be relegated to a chaotic cluster of secret government agencies. It is time for all citizens to take an interest in intelligence, to migrate the proven process of intelligence (there is a great deal that is good about the U.S. intelligence community) into the business sector as well as over to the sovereign states and their localities, and to demand of our elected representatives a proper accounting for the failure, and measures to prevent future failures.

Less than 2% of the $30 billion a year intelligence has been spent on terrorism--the policy and intelligence leadership over several administrations have given lip-service to the war on terrorism--and there will be no improvements, no matter how much money we pour into intelligence and counterintelligence, unless we change the fundamentals--who's in charge, how we do it, who we do it with, and how seriously we take our responsibilities for protecting America.

From the Author
The current hearings, being held in secrecy and focused only on secret intelligence stovepipe failures, are largely political theater and beg the larger question of government competence in international affairs. The sad truth is that the entire government failed, beginning with the Department of State and the Immigration and Nationalization Service, and certainly including the Office of the President (both the past and present Administrations). This book supports citizen-centered intelligence, and calls for a new form of public intelligence community in which our state & local authorities as well as our international partners are fully integrated into a global Internet-based network for sharing the cost, time, and knowledge burden of 24/7 monitoring of important foreign area and foreign language information--in 29 languages that are not now effectively monitored by NSA, CIA, or anyone else.

Customer Reviews

Superb
Anybody that Generalizes Conspiracies or anything else for that matter is a raving idiot. And BTW, following the party line isnt going to save your retirement or investments.

Ironic
I find it difficult to believe that someone who endorses 9-11 conspiracy theories (see the authors review of "9-11 Mysteries" on December 7th) could be viewed as an authority on intelligence issues. If he ever had any credibility in the field, he's long since gone over the deep end.

Ironically, its people like him and his ilk, who believe a neconservative/Israeli conspiracy was behind the destruction of the twin towers, that best undermine the central premise of his book: that ordinary citizens need to take a greater role in intelligence. If 9-11 conspiracy theories are the sort of mind-numbingly stupid, paranoid output that can be expected from the sort of amatuer intelligence agents Steele wishes for, I'd prefer to leave it to professionals.

The Peoples' Intelligence Agency
This was in many ways a difficult book to read and is even more difficult to review. It contains a number of original ideas on intelligence reform, national security, and the general state of the world. Yet they are presented in a rather choppy style that relies rather heavily on numerous diagrams, charts, and tables as well as lists of thoughts. Still this book is worth reading because Robert D. Steele takes on the business of intelligence reform in a comprehensive and refreshingly different approach.

The guiding, but unstated premise of this book appears to be that in the chaotic world of the 21st Century, intelligence is too important to be left only to the intelligence bureaucracy of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). According to Steele, it is time that the business of producing national intelligence was shared with the academic and business communities, with state and local authorities, and even with private citizens. Steele also makes the perfectly valid point that open sources can supply up to 80 per cent of the unprocessed data required to produce intelligence. Incidentally, Steele recognizes the quagmire the Internet poses to researchers and wisely offers suggestions for avoiding the large amount of misinformation that can be found on the net. The book offers some structural reforms to the IC, but its most valuable contributions are its proposals for cultural changes in the way that intelligence is produced and used.

Beyond its choppy style, however, the book is flawed. Steele seems curiously ignorant of the actual processes of intelligence production where by unprocessed information (data) acquired by source(s) is transformed into useful knowledge (intelligence) organized by subject(s). This transformation is accomplished by various combinations of processing, research, and analysis. His suggestion to concentrate processing of data from all sources into one agency is incredibly ill informed. In the same manner, he treats Geographic Information Systems (GIS) rather lightly, although they have been proven to be invaluable not only for visualization, but also for organizing and interpreting collected data and would be an ideal medium for integrating and presenting all source data. Finally he clearly does not know as much about the arcane world of technical intelligence as he thinks he does which leads him to some erroneous conclusions.