Inside CIA's Private World: Declassified Articles from the Agencys Internal Journal, 1955-1992

by H. Bradford Westerfield (Editor)

For forty years the Central Intelligence Agency has published an in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence , for CIA eyes only. Now the agency has declassified much of this material. This engrossing book, which presents the most interesting articles from the journal, provides revealing insights into CIA strategies and into events in which the organization was involved.

The articles were selected by H. Bradford Westerfield, an independent authority who teaches courses on intelligence operations but has never been affiliated with the CIA. Westerfield's comprehensive introduction sketches the history and basic structure of the CIA, sets the articles in context, and explains his process of selection. The articles span a wide range of intelligence activities, including intelligence data gathering inside the United States; analysis of data; interaction between analysts and policymakers; the development of economic intelligence targeted at friendly countries as well as at foes; use of double agents (the personal memoir of a CIA officer who pretended to the Russians to be their agent); evaluation of defectors (the Nosenko case); and coercive interrogation techniques and how to resist them.

Genres: Politics, History, Military Fiction

511 pages, Paperback

First published August 25, 1995

Reviews

[Nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Studies in Intelligence is CIA's intelligence journal. "Inside CIA's Private World" is a collection of articles from that journal. Simple enough. I checked this book out, to thumb through some of the declassified articles to try and satiate some of my current Nosenko / Golitsyn fascination and my Jimmy Angleton fetish. It was partially successful, as there are a couple of pertinent articles ("Nosenko: The Five Paths to Judgment"). It gets three stars because, hey, it's great that we live in a society that puts stuff like this out, etc, etc, yada. There are plenty of other fascinating articles with appropriate barely-English, governmentnese titles: "Clandestinity" and "UNCTAD V", and for the metaphysical among us, there's the article "Do You Really Need More Information?" There's also plenty of accidental irony, like the fact that the article "The Reports Officer: Issues of Quality" contains sentences that follow phrases like "our secret access to" or "US understanding of" with the cold black bar of a Redactor's redactor. (The word "declassified" is often used pretty loosely at CIA.) But "Inside CIA's Private World" is is not something anyone would really want to just sit down and read cover to cover. It'd frankly be impossible to do, without either going insane or falling asleep. After finally making it through most of this collection (it is just impossible to justify finishing every article without being on the agency payroll, frankly), I was left with the overwhelming feeling that the CIA needs more comedy writers. The moon isn't this dry. That said, there's some fascinating stuff here, and it is a fascinating peak at one of the more secretive American bureaucracies. A good collection for people deeply into reading about espionage and intelligence, but probably not good for someone looking for a starting point.

NC

[Darius · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of various articles from an internal CIA publication. If you're curious about intelligence agencies-- particularly what they would discuss about their own internal structures and systems -- some of the articles will be of interest.

For example, should the role of the CIA be to collect information not available to others (i.e. secrets from around the world)? Or is its role analysis and prediction? If it is the latter how different is the output of its analysts from a team of journalists covering a foreign country who know its history and current affairs well, and have contacts among the elite? Where do military style operations -- like killing someone -- fit into the CIA's role?

Insiders discuss these types of questions, along with even more mundane, day-to-day operational questions: like the relationship between the CIA staff and the state department staff in a U.S. embassy.

If this type of thing interests you, you will find some of the articles interesting. Be prepared to skip over articles that aren't.

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Directorate of Operations is certainly a huge division of intelligence. Thank God the pioneer William Donovan made it all functional.