Product Description

Whether from satellites or spies, weapon caches or phone records, intelligence is valuable to governments for the information and power it affords policy makers. With the constant need for background, context, and warning as well as an assessment of risks, benefits, and likely outcomes, the intelligence community plays a pivotal role in policy formation. As an intelligence veteran of 30 years, having worked both inside and outside of government, Mark M. Lowenthal details how the intelligence community's history, structure, processes, and functions affect policy decisions in consequential ways. He expertly shows how the intelligence process serves a continually changing agenda given post-9/11 needs and concerns. Moreover, he analyzes how the war on terrorism impacts collection, analysis, and counterintelligence, as well as ethical and moral standards.

Given all of the hearings, briefings, and reports focused on the reorganization and reform of the intelligence community, the third edition of Intelligence represents a major revision. Lowenthal has updated each and every chapter with new material and analysis, including:

• the strategies, influence, and goals of the congressional Joint Inquiry and 9/11 Commission and their recommendations for restructuring the intelligence community
• assessment of the new office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the political pressures that led to its creation
• the bureaucratic maneuvering and power struggles that led to passage of the National Intelligence Security Reform Act of 2004
• the issues surrounding the claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and the subsequent "WMD commissions" appointed by the U.S., Britain, and Australia to investigate this massive intelligence failure
• more integration and comparative analysis of the similarities and differences of intelligence services in Britain, China, France, Israel, and Russia
• a new list of acronyms for handy reference

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #458463 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 334 pages

About the Author

Mark M. Lowenthal has thirty years of experience as an intelligence official in the executive and legislative branches of government and in the private sector. He retired from government service in 2005 after serving for three years as the assistant director of central intelligence for analysis and production and vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council for Evaluation. Dr. Lowenthal is the president and CEO of the Intelligence & Security Academy, LLC, a national security education, training and consulting firm. He is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University.

Customer Reviews

A significant contribution to intelligence literature
This valuable and recent contribution to the intelligence bookshelf promises to become a classic text for any practitioner and student of intelligence. Understanding how the intelligence process can work efficiently, how consumers of intelligence can best utilize the process, and how essential it is for producers of intelligence to receive feedback by consumers (a critical and often lacking element), are among some of the major themes discussed. Perhaps one of the most valuable sections of the book is the chapter on the analysis process itself, considered to be the most difficult process in the intelligence cycle. The author clearly provides the reader with exceptional comments regarding analyst training, politicized intelligence, and mirror imaging, and offers many unique insights into the process itself. Intelligence: From Secrets To Policy, contains well developed chapters on Counterintelligence, Covert Action, and Ethical and Moral Issues. Mr. Lowenthall also provides the reader with unique appendices that include excerpts from the National Security Act, Executive Order 12333, and a listing of intelligence related web sites. Comprehensive and yet easy to understand, this publication is highly recommended for those of us wishing to examine, or reexamine, the crucial roles of consumer, producer, and analyst, and the ever-increasing importance of feedback in the intelligence cycle.

A readable, well balanced treatise on the subject
Mark's latest book is a well-written, accurate depiction of the US intelligence business and various areas of intelligence tradecraft. His section on the US intelligence community will become outdated in time, but in it he develops an interesting functional view of the community. The book is very readable for newcomers while still being of interest to veterans of the business. It is intended to have broad coverage rather than depth. It would be admirably suited as a textbook for a short course on intelligence.

Primer for Presidents, Congress, Media, and Public

Mark Lowenthal, who today is the Associate Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production (ADCI/A&P), was briefly (for a year) the President of OSS USA (I created OSS Inc., the global version). So much for disclosure and "conflicts of interest". The previous review, after a year of being irritatingly present, needs to be corrected. Dr. Lowenthal was for many years the Senior Executive Service reviewer of intelligence affairs for the Congressional Research Service, then he went on to be Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence & Research (Analysis), and then he became the Staff Director for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where he supervised one of the two really serious really excellent studies on all that is wrong with intelligence and what needs to be fixed. OSS was lucky to have him contribute to its development for a year before he moved on to another corporation and then to the #5 position in the US Intelligence Community. He needs no help from me in either articulating his ideas or doing good work.

What the previous reviewer fails to understand is that Dr. Lowenthal's book represents the *only* available "primer" on intelligence that can be understood by Presidents, Congressmen, the media, and the public. While my own book (The New Craft of Intelligence) strives to discuss the over-all threats around the world in terms meaningful to the local neighborhoods of America, Dr. Lowenthal's book focuses on the U.S. Intelligence Community itself--the good, the bad, and the ugly. He is strongest on analysis and the politics of intelligence, somewhat weaker on collection and counterintelligence covert action. There is no other book that meets the need for this particular primer, and so I recommend it with enthusiasm. It is on the OSS.NET list of the top 15 books on intelligence reform every written.