5 Book Reviews
a reading list for spies, by FAOs
Agent 110: An American Spymaster and the German Resistance in WWII
Author: Scott Miller
Publication Information:
Hard Cover published March 2017, $28.00; eBook, $14.99
Paperback due out March 2018, $17.00; Simon & Schuster
368 pages, with annotated bibliography, endnotes, index, and photographs
ISBN-10: 1451693389
ISBN-13: 978-1451693386
Available at Barnes & Noble and most book sellers
Reviewer: Lieutenant Colonel Paul S. Gendrolis, U.S. Army, Retired
“It has always amazed me how desk personnel thousands of miles away seem to acquire wisdom and special knowledge about local field conditions, which they assume goes deeper than that available to the man on the spot.” Attributed to Allen Dulles.
What an interesting concept! And one that many people who have served in the field may also share. But what of the author of this statement? What an ego to cast aspersions on the expertise and abilities of higher headquarters! Apparently, his confidence in his assessment of the situation in northern Italy in early 1944 and the belief in his ability to bring about the surrender of the German Army fighting the Allies and Italian resistance there prompted him to intimate that he did not need the meddling of Washington in his business.
This ego belonged to Allen Dulles, the OSS chief in Switzerland and consummate intelligence operative.
Scott Miller has written a thorough and entertaining biography of Dulles, focused on his years in Switzerland. His intelligence career started in Switzerland with the entry of the United States into WWI, continued during WWII after being recruited by William “Wild Bill” Donovan, and culminated as the Director of the CIA during the early years of the Cold War. This book has three major themes that Miller skillfully weaves throughout his narrative: the life and career of Dulles through the war years, his work with the German resistance, and his growing distrust of and hatred for the USSR.
Allen Dulles' reputation and his intelligence contributions to the United States, especially during his tenure at the CIA, are well known. But what may be less known is the extent of the German resistance throughout the Hitler era and Dulles' efforts to capitalize on that resistance. Assigned to Switzerland, one of the few neutral European countries during WWII and a hotbed of “spy versus spy” activity, Dulles was tasked with learning as much as possible about the German military, the psyche of the German people, and any resistance activity. Through Dulles’ eyes and those of several people who worked closely with him during those years, Miller has provided an excellent look at what Dulles accomplished and at how he became such an ardent cold warrior.
Very early in his career Dulles said, “…my first lesson in intelligence. Never be certain that someone is not betraying you, just because you like and trust them.” Although uttered over 100 years ago, these words are still relevant today.
I highly recommend this book to all FAOs, intelligence professionals, and anyone interested in the history of intelligence.
Book Review: King of Spies
By Colonel Vince Alcazar, U.S. Air Force (Retired)
Title: King of Spies
Author: Blaine Harden
Publishing Information:
Viking, New York, 2017, 260 pages
ISBN 9780525429937
For those of you who have read the classics on the Korean War such as Fehrenbach and Blair, you will find no mention of Donald Nichols. Nor do those authors mention how his intelligence organization became the one that single-handedly enabled U.S. and UN successes. In modern military history, it is as though Donald Nichols never existed. For those who wonder how important targeted collection can be in America’s wars, read this excellent book by Blaine Harden. It is a must-own volume on intelligence in modern war.
Earlier this year I sat down with Kurt Marisa, president of the FAO Association, and Blaine Harden, author of King of Spies, to discuss the subject of the book, U.S. Air Force Major Donald Nichols. Nichols led what was arguably the single most important American intelligence unit during the Korean War. For 11 years, from 1946 until his forced departure from South Korea in 1957, Donald Nichols was a collector without peer.
Q: It’s not often that a FAO Association book review has a path that leads to the FAO Association President. Your links to the central character of King of Spies and U.S. intelligence in South Korea are rooted in firsthand experience.
Colonel Kurt Marisa: “I first heard and read about Don Nichols in 1988 in some historical summaries of Air Force intelligence and special operations, when I joined Air Force intelligence special activities. When stationed in South Korea years later in 2002 at the successor intelligence organization to Nichols' unit, I was again exposed to this chapter of Air Force intelligence and also some of the South Korean agents who worked for Nichols during and after the Korean War at the 6004th Air Intelligence Service Squadron (AISS). One of these Koreans, who worshipped the memory of Nichols, was still working at the successor unit at the time, almost 50 years later. During the Korean War, Nichols' unit was Detachment 2 of the 6004th, but it was more commonly known in theater as “Nick’s Outfit” or NICK. As I got to know this individual, I got a sense of what he and the other surviving Korean agents of NICK did during the war and their relationships to Don Nichols. Those remaining men maintained a deep respect and reverence for Don Nichols. Though many of the records from the war era no longer existed, it was difficult – though not impossible – to put together a basic picture of Don Nichols during the war years. Through a library loan I obtained one of the two remaining copies of his vanity autobiography; only 100 copies were ever printed. Next, I located members of Nichols’ extended family in the U.S. and established a relationship with them to gather background information to better support a story of Nichols and his service. Years later, I was contacted by the family after author Blaine Harden reached out to them researching his book, King of Spies. I agreed to help the author with his research on the book, assisted him in locating and contacting surviving U.S. Air Force members of NICK, and also coordinated the release and declassification of Nichols’ personnel records with the Air Force Personnel Center by getting Nichols classified as a Person of Historical Significance.”
Q: One of the revelations of King of Spies is the failure of chroniclers of the Korean war to identify the hidden ingredient disclosed in Harden’s book: Major Nichols’ possession of NKPA code books and their exploitation that allowed U.S./UN forces to break out of the Pusan Perimeter. In your view, what does this say about the importance of serendipity in intelligence exploitation?
Marisa: “I found that [Nichols’] methods were somewhat sensationalized when you put that up against all of the intelligence outputs you usually see in war. But, seriously, I would ask, since when does intelligence get the praise and recognition it deserves? If you look back through the history of war, there’s plenty of finger-pointing at intelligence. But, when intelligence gets it right, somebody or something else gets the credit. Then- Sergeant Nichols got it right in his prewar reporting as to when, not if, the North Korean People’s Army would invade South Korea. Events and developments in South Korea were not considered significant to U.S. foreign and military policy after WWII. At the time, it seemed that the entire Far East Command under General MacArthur in Japan took no interest in what this intelligence sergeant in South Korea was collecting and reporting. Along with that, no one built a pre-war human intelligence network in South Korea. When war came, only Sergeant Nichols had a network in place, already providing vital intelligence. Next, look at his contributions from the field. He was the first person to document the structural weakness of the NKPA T-34 tank, a weapon that had defeated the U.S. infantry antitank weapons of the day. He showed that the T-34 had a critical rear-side vulnerability. Next, he was the first American to get his hands on the remains of a MiG-15. He photographed the crash hulk, and that report got engineers in the U.S. pointed in the right direction as to how to design better U.S. fighter aircraft to defeat the MiG-15. Just after the war, when a North Korean pilot flew his intact MiG-15 to South Korea, Nichols provided the airplane to the U.S. test pilot community for testing and exploitation. No one else had the ability to get onto the battlefield and behind enemy lines the way he and his collectors did. And yes, NICK also correctly showed where NKPA forces and armor were located to improve aerial targeting to enable the break-out from the Pusan Perimeter.”
Q: At a minimum, Nichols operated at the edges of the boundaries of sound judgment and good practice. What is your sense of his actions during the war years? What does his story say to field supervisors?
Marisa: “We have hindsight of how the war turned out. Nichols did not. He needed to do what needed to be done. Today is arguably different, and someone like Don Nichols and his unit probably could not exist today. I think what he did during the Korean War does not mean that the ends justify the means. Keep in mind that in that time, the CIA – still new – was seeking to assert its role. By the time it got fully engaged in the Korean War, Nichols' prewar collection and network building had been going on for almost three years. During his many years “homesteading” in Korea, Nichols was also doing classic FAO work –
learning the language, region, culture, and personalities. Nichols did his initial assignment as an Army CIC agent – his first spy work – then he was chopped to AFOSI until 1951. At that time, Ambassador Muccio moved Nichols and his work under the umbrella of the Korean Military Assistance Group security cooperation organization. What we do not get in the book or any of the records that survived, was how the Defense Attaché Office was involved before and during the first year of the war. Given that, you can see how some of the historic firewalls that we still have today between Attaché and Security Cooperation activities got their start. Interestingly, the U.S. Ambassador in Seoul, John Muccio, never threatened to send Nichols home even when he was being threatened by the Army intelligence leadership and the new CIA and NSA. As far I can tell, Nichols was protected and appreciated by both ambassadors he served while in the security cooperation organization, first John Muccio, and then Tyler Thompson.”
Q: Do you think it is accurate to characterize Nichols as a member of U.S. military intelligence gone native? If yes, what do we owe each other in the field to recognize “going native”?
Marisa: “Don Nichols was never a role-model commander. He was what he was, a WWII supply sergeant who volunteered to go to Korea when other people were working hard to avoid being stationed there. He gets rapidly promoted during the war because of the value of his work to Air Force General Earle E. Partridge in his role as Commander Fifth Air Force. With Partridge’s top cover, Nichols could sidestep all the things that MacArthur’s G-2 (Willoughby) was doing to try to limit and thwart Nichols. Given access to resources and opportunity, Nichols did what he thought was right in setting up his organization to fill a void. But, do I think he went native? No. I think he operated with incredible skill among native Koreans. To outsiders though, Don Nichols’s closeness to the Koreans probably looked like going native given how far outsiders were from the battlefield, with an inability to replicate what he did. If he had a fault, it was a failure to make the shift into a peacetime mindset after the armistice. He never knew anything but war after entering military service in 1940. He made few visits back to the US. Some of the people assigned to his unit after the war complained about his eccentricities, his lack of regular uniform wear, his physical appearance, and his dogs. This was a guy who, today, we would call continuously deployed.”
Q: Every book has an inception story. What is the inception story of King of Spies?
Blaine Harden: “The book I wrote before King of Spies was called The Great Leader and The Fighter Pilot. The fighter pilot in that book is named Kenneth Rowe, but when he was in North Korea his name was No Kum Sok. When he defected in a MiG-15 in September 1953 and landed at a U.S. airbase near Seoul, the first person to interrogate him was Donald Nichols. Ken Rowe told me that Nichols was an unforgettable character, very tall, very fat, and very talkative. Nichols spoke decent Korean, Rowe told me, and was an expert on the inner workings of the North Korean Air Force (NKAF). Nichols even knew Rowe’s NKAF commander, bragging that they had exchanged letters during the war. Rowe also told me that Nichols was kind to him and that during the interrogation he advised Rowe to demand that he beallowed to go the United States, attend an American college, and become an American citizen. I was intrigued by what Rowe told me about Nichols. I was also impressed by a 55-page report that Nichols wrote in less than a week about his interrogation of the pilot. The report, which was not declassified until 2013, was accurate, well written, and it expertly explained the military and strategic value of the pilot’s defection. But what really made me want to write a book about Nichols was his absence from the mainstream history of the Korean War. I wondered why. That was my question as I started to dig.”
Q: As you wrote in the book, the Air Force has been silent on the story of Nichols. I understand that you worked with Colonel Kurt Marisa. Please elaborate on his involvement in your work.
Harden: “Initially, I could not understand the Air Force silence on Nichols. It was clear from my research that Nichols had an extraordinarily close relationship with a head of state, Syngman Rhee of South Korea. He saw Rhee regularly for 11 years. I discovered previously unknown documents and letters from Rhee to Ambassador Muccio requesting that Nichols be allowed to remain in South Korea and become Rhee’s personal advisor for the creation of a South Korean Air Force. What made this so amazing was that Nichols was a nobody – just 26 years old and a lowly chief warrant officer in the Air Force. The difference in age, position, and relative status between Nichols and Rhee, 70 when they first met, was incredible. Nichols became an even more important figure as the war approached. The Air Force’s silence on Nichols only became understandable to me as I uncovered the dark side of his career – and the previously unknown decision by the Air Force to remove Nichols from Korea in a straitjacket and force him into a military hospital to receive electroshock. I could not have uncovered some of this information without the help of Kurt Marisa. He helped me locate people in the Air Force who could make decisions on access to Nichols’ military service record. That was the key document that unlocked the book. It told the story of his work ethic, what his superiors thought of the incredible job he was doing, and it shed new light on his sudden removal from command in Korea. The Air Force confined him to the psychiatric wards of two military hospitals, diagnosed him wrongly as “severely schizophrenic,” and forced him to endure months of electroshock. Nichols’ remarkable career ended in secret disgrace. If he had not agreed to take a medical retirement in 1958, he would have been thrown out of the Air Force, according to unambiguous language I found in his service record. Why Air Force doctors diagnosed Nichols as they did is an open question. But, based on my research and interviews with Air Force intelligence officials and with Nick’s own colleagues in Korea at the time, I strongly believe that the Air Force removed him from command – using mental illness as an excuse – because he had become a security risk. Up until 1957, when he was suddenly removed from Korea in the dead of night by military police, Nichols had shown no symptoms of mental illness. But, he had continued to be close to Syngman Rhee, a dictator who was killing his political opponents and who had become a major embarrassment to the United States. It was clear by then that Nichols was too close to Rhee, and it was time for Nichols to go.”
Q: In your view, what were the circumstances that allowed an Air Force chief warrant officer to build an incredibly effective intelligence apparatus on the ground in South Korea?
Harden: “Nichols arrived in South Korea in the summer of 1946, when the newly created country was sinking into a bloody civil war. There were more than 40,000 US troops in the South, but they were poorly disciplined, incompetently led, and widely disliked by many South Koreans, who viewed the Americans as impediments to social change, land reform, and economic equity. Soon, angry Koreans on the Left were fighting a civil war against American-backed champions of the Right, led by Syngman Rhee. Nichols saw the chaos in Korea as a career opportunity. South Korea in the late 1940s was a place where a poorly educated guy like Nichols, who was ambitious and willing to work hard, could get ahead and build a power base. He succeeded, in large measure, because he filled a vacuum. Nobody told him he could not do what he was doing. He was an unleashed intelligence entrepreneur, and he shrewdly developed a personal relationship with Rhee, who was scheming to become president of South Korea, a goal he soon attained. Nichols became the only American intelligence operator who could talk to Rhee anytime he wanted to. Everyone in the South Korean government knew about Nichols’s relationship with Rhee. This proximity to power gave Nichols access to every level of South Korea’s intelligence apparatus. His unrivaled access to information allowed Nichols to build and consolidate power on the ground.”
Q: You paint a thorough picture of Donald Nichols’s extraordinary post-WWII career. In his early years as an enlisted man, what was it that foreshadowed his meteoric rise later in South Korea?
Harden: “Nichols grew up the youngest of four boys in an operatically dysfunctional family in Hackensack, New Jersey. His mother took many lovers and abandoned the family when Donald was seven. His heartbroken father, a postman, then moved with his boys to South Florida, where they stumbled miserably through the Depression. Donald was constantly hungry. He put food on the table by becoming a thief and an expert scrounger. This was the foundation of who he was when he enlisted in the Army at 17. Really, he joined the Army to get three meals a day, as well as underwear, clothes, and shoes. After he entered the Army, World War II began and he was trained to be a carburetor mechanic. He was sent to Karachi, where he learned important lessons about how to get ahead in the military. He spent much of his time working unit supply issues and fiddling with paperwork, not repairing vehicles. His cunning performance as a hustler impressed his commanders, and he was rapidly promoted to master sergeant at age 19. In Karachi, Nichols gained a key insight that would guide his career: the chain of command does not care how you do something, only that you get things done. Rules, laws, and ethics do not matter so much as results. Nichols brought this ethos to his spying days in Korea.”
Q: How differently would his story have turned out if Nichols made his sources, methods, and work transparent to his chain of command and its personalities?
Harden: “If Nichols been better supervised, he probably would not have developed his close relationship with Syngman Rhee, and he probably would not have been permitted to operate so freely in a world of mass killings and torture [in South Korea]. Had his supervisors known what he was doing, he probably would have been forced to pull back and end his activities. That, of course, would have limited his effectiveness and restricted his access to Syngman Rhee, which made him so invaluable to the Air Force. The American military was disastrously unprepared and desperate for information when the war started in the summer of 1950. The Air Force, in particular, was utterly without sources, targets, and contacts. Nichols’s on-the-ground expertise, his intelligence contacts, and his ferocious courage in the first months of the war put him in the catbird seat. He was in a great position to be exploited by the [chain of command] in the way that a rich source should be used. He served American interests in a brilliant and very helpful way that saved U.S. and South Korean lives. He accomplished three crucial tasks: He found a weakness in the Soviet T-34 tank that was punishing American ground forces. He located and salvaged parts of a MiG-15, a fighter that was tormenting U.S. bombers, and got those parts back to the States to aid in the redesign of the F-86 Sabre. Thirdly, he pulled together a team of cryptographers -- led by a North Korean defector who Nichols found before the invasion -- to intercept and break NKPA battle codes. Nichols put the codebreakers to work at a perilous moment in the first months of the war when the U.S. Eighth Army was trapped inside the Pusan Perimeter. That information helped General Johnny Walker, Commander of the Eighth Army, and General Earle Partridge, Commander of the Fifth Air Force, to withstand and breakout of the siege. Nichols proved himself as a genuine war hero – an incredibly effective intelligence operative who was worthy of his decorations. Indeed, he won the Distinguished Service Cross and the Silver Star and more than 20 other medals for valor. He has not received the recognition he deserves.”
Q: If we take a step back and look at the key people in wars as being products of their era, how in your view, can we fairly and objectively evaluate people in wars over different times and places?
Harden: “I think with regard to Nichols’ best-known superiors, particularly MacArthur and Willoughby, they did a criminally poor job in the run-up to the war. They knowingly ignored Nichols’ intelligence reports, which made it abundantly clear that the North Koreans and the Soviets were preparing an invasion as early as 1949. The CIA itself has looked back to that time and has come to the same conclusion: MacArthur had his eyes closed. He ignored his own intel sources. MacArthur should have put more U.S. troops on the ground in South Korea before the war. That may have prevented Stalin and Kim Il Sung from initiating the war. So, I think it’s fair to say they [chain of command] were derelict in their responsibilities to prepare for war. As for Nichols, I believe he became much too beholden to Rhee. Nichols knew that his special access to the South Korean leadership would be cut if he told his bosses about all the torture and mass killing that Rhee’s government was responsible for. So, Nichols strategically kept his mouth shut. He maintained his special ties to Rhee. Had Nichols done the right thing and alerted [the chain of command] to the egregious human rights abuses he had personally witnessed, I think it’s likely that the Americans would have leaned on Rhee’s government earlier to stop the torture and killings.”
Q: Your previous books leverage your historical and cultural links to Korea. Your books capture the unusual events and people of Korea during war 1950-1953. What is it about Korea that produces this interesting spectrum of people and personalities?
Harden: “At the beginning, it was my job to be obsessed with Korea. Between 2007 and 2010, I was working in Northeast Asia as a reporter for the Washington Post, with a special focus on North Korea. I tried to understand and explain the unique longevity of totalitarianism in North Korea and its punishing impact on the daily lives of people in that country. When I left the Post my obsession with Korean became more personal and more passionate. In 2012, I wrote Escape from Camp 14, a book about a young man who was born and raised in a political prisoner camp and then escaped to the West. In the second book, I wrote about the rise of Great Leader Kim Il Sung, where he came from, and how he created the world’s only hereditary Communist dictatorship. In that book, I also focused on a young man who desperately wanted to flee Kim Il Sung’s clutches. He was the fighter pilot, No Kum Sok. He volunteered to become a fighter pilot in the hopes that he could steal a MiG and escape. This book on Nichols explains the arc of U.S. involvement on the Korean Peninsula. It is intended for an American readership that is worried about nuclear attack by North Korea, but is largely ignorant about the historical role of the United States in creating a divided Korea. I also wanted to show how America’s inept management of South Korea in the late 1940s gave Stalin and Kim Il Sung an opening to initiate a catastrophic war in 1950.”
BOOK REVIEW
Practise to Deceive: Learning Curves of Military Deception Planners
Author: Dr. Barton Whaley
Editor: Susan Stratton Aykroyd
Reviewer: Vincent A. Dueñas, Major, U.S. Army
Publication information:
Naval Institute Press, 2016
ISBN-978-1-61251-982-1
As Russia’s Gerasimov doctrine continues to spark debate in defense forums, the late Dr. Whaley Barton’s Practise to Deceive: Learning Curves of Military Deception Planners reminds readers that the art of military deception is a perishable skill that requires practice. It is useful to consider Russia’s incursion into Ukraine through the lens of deception operations intended to mask mobilization and preparation efforts for what it believes might be an eventual return to great power conflicts.
The possibility that Russia is practicing deception to develop new operational systems and capabilities is precisely the kind of scenario through which Practise to Deceive guides readers. If the goal of wartime strategy is to design the path to victory over one’s enemy, then one of its principle mechanisms is through achieving surprise. Whaley defines deception as “the only weapon that a warrior can wield that, to the extent it succeeds, will impose uncertainty and the element of surprise on the opponent.”
In Practise to Deceive, Whaley does not seek to make the case for deception, but rather to elucidate the factors that appear across 88 deception case studies. His analysis is based on the premise that deception is the most effective means of achieving surprise and that the case studies presented give key insights that can help in the planning of deception operations today. Whaley succeeds in creating an excellent resource that emphasizes the need to consider the enemy’s deception efforts and offers best practices to improve one’s own military deception efforts.
One of his noteworthy deception planner examples was General George Washington, who changed the course of history with his strategy. Although a monumental accomplishment, Washington’s deception examples unfortunately did not inform subsequent generations of commanders because he did not leave a clear outline of his strategic planning. As the commander of the all-volunteer Continental Army, Washington had to be exceptionally judicious and cunning in order to defeat his better-equipped and better-trained English foe.
In the section analyzing planners, Whaley details Washington’s execution of the Yorktown campaign of 1781 as one of the better examples of "operations-based deception." Washington purposely leaked intelligence to describe both a raid along the coast of Canada, as well as disseminating a proclamation requesting Canadian support with a notional French fleet and a notional American force that were headed to Canada. These two leaks encouraged the confident British Commander, General Sir Henry Clinton to split his forces in New York in order to pursue the recapture of the southern states. Washington’s deceptions encouraged Clinton to believe that New York was his intended target. In reality Washington had maintained his internal lines of communication close enough to allow shifting of his forces more quickly than the British. As New York’s British defenses were strengthened, Washington negotiated a French blockade of the Chesapeake Bay and laid siege to Lord Cornwallis’ forces, resulting in a crucial British surrender.
Washington’s example highlights a main conclusion that the most important objective in deception is to ensure the enemy “does” what you want them to do, not “think” what you want them to think. If the enemy does not do what you want them to do, then the deception has failed, regardless of what they might think. Furthermore, this example emphasizes that deception is an operational matter versus an intelligence matter. Intelligence is absolutely key and drives the premise upon which all deception is based, but does not alone offer the resources to enact the deception. Whaley’s analysis throughout the book draws out these types of lessons from its various examples to determine the key characteristics for mounting deception operations. He focuses on how the subjects thought about the dilemmas posed and how they implemented a deception plan from amongst limited options.
Dr. Whaley’s own experience with deception began with Army intelligence service during the Korean War. After leaving the Army and earning his doctorate at MIT, he published the landmark Stratagem: Deception and Surprise in War. Whaley’s career focused on deception as well as a deep interest in magic and by the time of his death in 2013, he had become recognized as one of the foremost authorities on deception in the US. Whaley was affiliated with Department of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School and also conducted research for the Director of National Security’s Foreign Denial and Deception Committee under the Director of National Intelligence. Practise to Deceive was published posthumously and edited by his wife, Susan Stratton Aykroyd.
The book is a qualitative study broken down into an executive summary, followed by three main sections and appendices. The executive summary provides all his findings up front in a concise manner. The parts of the book most interesting, however, are his analysis and conclusions within the 88 case studies. Whaley readily explains his thesis and how he proceeded to execute the study. Some examples in the case studies come from antiquity, but most are taken from the 20th century. Whaley uses the examples of magicians and con-artists to emphasize the value of the deceptive mind. He further sub-categorizes the case studies into sections detailing the process of learning to deceive, planning in specific operations, selling the concept to the commander, and institutional deception planning. The final section details his conclusions at length. Whaley analyzes the best practices in the planning process, social/institutional factors, cultural factors, personality factors, and in the selection of deception planners. Whaley also includes appendices that offer expanded details of some deception operations, as a well as a great bibliography offering a starting point for more in-depth reading on deception.
What emerges from this cumulative study over a lifetime of scholarship is an easy-to- reference manual for organizing effective efforts to plan military deception operations. By the end of the book Whaley culls from his case studies a key formula for planning deception operations: organize the right personalities in order to acknowledge your implicit biases so that you can best exploit your target’s biases, capitalize on real or fictionalized weaknesses, and then practice, practice, practice.
Whaley does acknowledge the limits of the book inherent in the limited data available. The most critical drawbacks to the book are the numerous grammatical errors that detract from the overall message. Whaley also acknowledges that he compiled this book with as many primary sources as he could, sometimes relying on secondary sources if they clearly showed use of primary sources. Much of what was left out was hearsay or uncorroborated stories. The end result is a review that draws mainly from American and British sources, but leaves open opportunity for continued future research.
Practise to Deceive is an outstanding resource for strategists, intelligence professionals and general students of war. Whaley’s work stands out as a thorough review of the practical considerations necessary to begin planning military deception operations and offers a framework for readers to consider what deception efforts may currently already be underway.
About the reviewer: Major Vincent Dueñas is a U.S. Army FAO focused on the Western Hemisphere. He is currently assigned at the Inter-American Defense College. He has deployed multiple times with experience at the tactical, operational and strategic levels. Major Dueñas obtained his graduate degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and is a proud Associate Member of the Military Writers Guild. His writing has been featured in FAOA’s Journal of International Affairs, The Strategy Bridge, Divergent Options, and Small Wars Journal, among others.
BOOK REVIEW
Spy Chiefs: Volume 1 Intelligence Leaders in the United States and the United Kingdom; and
Volume 2 Intelligence Leaders in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia
Editors: Christopher Moran, Mark Stout, Ioanna Iordanou, and Paul Maddrell
Reviewer: Colonel Peter L. Larsen, U.S. Air Force
Publication Information:
Georgetown University Press, 2018
ISBN-10: 1626165254
Through a series of biographical leadership profiles, the authors of these two edited volumes attempt to define the unique traits and practices inherent to leading an intelligence organization. Specifically, the editors seek to answer six questions in the two volumes. How do intelligence leaders operate in different national, institutional, and historical contexts? What role have they played in the conduct of international relations? How much power do they possess? How secretive and accountable to the public have they been? What qualities make an effective intelligence leader? Does popular culture (including the media) distort or improve our understanding of intelligence leaders?
The biographical sketches used to answer the posed questions span six centuries and the globe. Most of the authors take on a either a spy master charged with the formation of a new organization or for transforming an existing one. Common threads between the leaders indeed emerge. Leaders such as William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Allen Dulles, Bill Casey, and Feliks Edmundovich Dzrezhinsky (the father of the Soviet security services) all had to work within the space defined by their political masters. Furthermore, common to all intelligence leaders is a requirement to balance between compartmentalization and sharing with the other arms of their governments and allies. Too much secrecy and too many siloed processes break down public, interagency, and allied trust and prevent intelligence from informing policy decisions. The authors make clear that excessive secrecy risks the very relevancy of intelligence organizations and by extension the legacy of their leaders.
The two volumes offer much for the general history enthusiast, as the authors set the intelligence leaders against backdrops such as the rise of communism, World War II, and the Cold War. Iaonna Iordanou’s chapter on the formative years of formal intelligence services delves into the clandestine networks established by Venice’s Council of Ten during the early modern-renaissance period. The Council’s operations, collection, and analysis practices served as an enduring intelligence service blueprint, relevant even today. Micheal VanBlaricum’s analysis of Ian Fleming’s “M” and Joseph Oldham’s chapter on the portrayals of intelligence leadership in British spy series explore the relationship between fiction and reality. The “man behind the desk” leadership style depicted in film and television influenced the popular understanding of how spy chiefs operate. As many of the two volumes’ authors prove, the narrative was largely true to form -- at least until bold leaders such as General Michael Hayden sought to ease a growing public skepticism of intelligence agencies with a balanced degree of transparency.
From the volumes’ biographies, the editors ultimately conclude that three skills are essential for intelligence leaders: the ability to maintain positive relations with the public and their governments; the dexterity to shape the sociopolitical environment that is favorable to their strategy; and the skill to navigate the relationships with superiors, peers, and subordinates. That said, one could argue that the skills necessary to succeed as a spy master are universal to all leaders. Nevertheless, the two volumes are superbly researched and fill a scholarly gap. While there is no dearth of historic military leadership profiles, these volumes serve as ideal readings for intelligence and government courses. Finally, in that the chapters detail the contextual relationships between the intelligence leaders, their governments and the international system in which they operated, the volumes add to the political science literature on agency versus structure. As the first volume focuses primarily on American and British spy chiefs and the second on soviet and authoritarian regimes, the books serve well as a stand-alone exploration on the limits and opportunities of leadership vis-à-vis respective polities.
Pete Larsen, Middle East Foreign Area Officer