NATIONAL INSECURITY: U.S. Intelligence After the Cold War.

• Author: Pincus, Walter
• Position: Review

NATIONAL INSECURITY: U.S. Intelligence After the Cold War by Craig Eisendrath Temple University Press, $34.50

READING THROUGH NATIONAL Insecurity: U.S. Intelligence After the Cold War I was Drought back to a seminar I tried to teach at Yale more than two decades ago to students who insisted that I could either teach them how to argue for the end of the CIA or nothing.

The Center for International Policy, which sponsored this volume, was initiated in the midst of those post-Watergate CIA exposures. It was, as Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), one of the cofounders of the Center, explains in his foreword to the book, a time when "our nation's support for dictators and our questionable tactics abroad had earned us a dubious reputation around the world as hostile to human rights." And Harkin sets out what must have been the starting point for each of the essayists: "Intelligence is still required (in the post-Cold War world), but it should be refocused. Its tactics should be circumscribed by the need to build a safer world, based on law and cooperation. Its operations should be less secret and more integrated with the needs of an open and dynamic foreign policy. It is time to forge a new path."

Few would argue with Harkin's words if he were talking about diplomacy and the State Department, But intelligence activities in the real world cannot be based on "law and cooperation." And as far as I can tell, being "less secret" means not being secret at all, particularly if it is tied to "the needs of an open and dynamic foreign policy."

There are a great many historic CIA failures in this book that are worth bringing together and which my 1976 Yale students could have used to write one hell of a manifesto. The first essayist, Roger Hilsman, who last served in government in the 1960s at the State Department during the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, writes: "Covert political action is not only something the United States can do without after the Cold War, it's something the United States could have done without during the Cold War" In a swift tour d'horizon of the Cold War intelligence effort, Hilsman summons up failed assassination attempts, the Bay of Pigs, and covert actions in Iran, Nicaragua, and elsewhere. That leads him to call the record of US. intelligence "mixed," giving more credit to satellite intercepts and imagery coverage, much as he found U-2 photos more important in the Cuban crisis than human intelligence. For Hilsman, the time has...