Secrecy: The American Experience.

• Author: Fialka, John J.

U.S. intelligence operatives first became aware of an American with "possible communist tendencies" in the fall of 1951. At the time the suspect was working in a low-level civilian position at a U.S. Air Force base in England. He was once observed to be reading the Daily Worker. He was known to frequent London's Unity theater, run by communists. It specialized in vaudeville skits of a pinkish cast. A report was quietly tucked into the suspect's FBI file: "Moynihan was either a communist or a communist sympathizer."

Now the suspect has filed a report on U.S. intelligence services. He is giving them failing grades for matters that go well beyond the misspelling of his name. For the suspect was Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, scholar, writer, politician, and, as long-term member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, a man with a ringside seat on the slow unveiling of the troubling performance record of the $28-billion-a-year U.S. intelligence establishment during the Cold War.

In his book, Sen. Moynihan asks you to consider this: In 1950 nearly every thinking American was caught up in a dispute over whether Alger Hiss, a State Department official, was a Communist spy. The politics of the Hiss case paralyzed the Democrats and reinvigorated the Republicans, who found a young congressman, Richard M. Nixon, eager to probe the case.

Was Hiss guilty? It would have been a godsend for President Harry S. Truman if he had had an agency that could give him a definitive answer. As a matter of fact, he had one. The Army's Signals Intelligence Service had quietly broken a Soviet diplomatic code and found messages implicating Hiss. But Gen. Omar Bradley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had determined that the matter was too secret to give to his commander-in-chief.

Presumably intelligence officials convinced Bradley that providing the information to the White House might, somehow, reveal the breaking of the code. But they needn't have worried. The code-breaking project, called Venona, had been tipped to the Kremlin four years earlier by a Soviet spy who had infiltrated it. The upshot: While the Kremlin knew about Venona, the president and the American people were kept in the dark until 1995 when the National Security Agency released the files.

Moynihan argues that the case shows the "essence" of the misfit existence of the intelligence establishment in Washington, how it had its analytical capability numbed and dumbed by politically correct "group...