Customer Reviews (1)

Mighty Work but Now Very Dated.
This work was originally prepared in two volumes after the Korean War for use as a textbook at the Army Intelligence School located at Fort Holabird, MD. The first volume was declassified and printed by a commercial firm. The second volume to my knowledge has yet to be released and has attained the mythic reputation akin to that of the erstwhle true history of the British Security Coordination in America during WW II. That volume has just been released with a commentary by Nigel West. The rather embellished work "A Man Called Intrepid" was based loosely on the latter.
But back to the work at hand. Since was prepared almost fifty years ago, and purported to cover everything from the operations overseen by George Washington to the current day, it was necessarly based on what was available at the time. Most of what it was based on has proved in the light of more modern and rigorous scholarship to be pure brag, boast, and BS, especially the memoirs covering the Civil War. As to operations later during the Spanish American and Phillipine wars, there was precious little documentation used. The operations during the Mexican Punitive Expedition and on the border were slighted in a few pages.
Once one gets into living memory (and even much of that was mistaken) it gets much better. The story of operations in France and in the 1930s is as complete as could be done at the time and is based on archival research in part.
But there are several major gaps. Due to security concerns and the emphasis on wartime support of the army in the field, there is nothing on SIGINT, very little on IMINT, and little on Counter Intelligence and HUMINT.
The book is still a must for the serious collection of books on intelligence process and organization. So start using it for the period after 1917 and you will not go far wrong. Ignore all the 19th century material.
A much better overview of the period is "American Espionage: From Secret Service to CIA" by the British scholar Rhodri Jefreys-Jones which does have the advantage of covering SIGINT in WW II and is based in part on archival research. ... Read more

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One of the sharpest debates being played out during America's war on terror pits the government's national security interests against an individual's right to privacy. Recent amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance act have given the government expanded powers for electronic investigation under the act. Many have voiced concerns that with such broad rules the personal freedoms enshrined in American tradition are in danger, despite the protestations of federal officials who say they will not abuse their authority. Given the current threats to U.S. security and revelations about intelligence failures leading to September 11, 2001, there is a case to be made that national security trumps individual liberty in certain cases. As questions arise over "battlefield detainees" and the fate of those held for undisclosed violations, the importance of law enforcement regulations takes center stage.

This book provides an overview and analysis of one the United States' most crucial intelligence-gathering statutes. In order to fully comprehend the domestic battles being waged over the proper balance between national security and personal liberty, the study presented here is an invaluable resource. ... Read more

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This edited book examines the East German foreign intelligence service (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, or HVA) as a historical problem, covering politics, scientific-technical and military intelligence and counterintelligence.

The contributors broaden the conventional view of East German foreign intelligence as driven by the inter-German conflict to include its targeting of the United States, northern European and Scandinavian countries, highlighting areas that have previously received scant attention, like scientific-technical and military intelligence. The CIA’s underestimation of the HVA was a major intelligence failure. As a result, East German intelligence served as a stealth weapon against the US, West German and NATO targets, acquiring the lion’s share of critical Warsaw Pact intelligence gathered during the Cold War. This book explores how though all of the CIA’s East German sources were double agents controlled by the Ministry of State Security, the CIA was still able to declare victory in the Cold War. Themes and topics that run through the volume include the espionage wars; the HVA's relationship with the Russian KGB; successes and failures of the BND (West German Federal Intelligence Service) in East Germany; the CIA and the HVA; the HVA in countries outside of West Germany; disinformation and the role and importance of intelligence gathering in East Germany.

This book will be of much interest to students of East Germany, Intelligence Studies, Cold War History and German politics in general.

Kristie Macrakis is Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. Thomas Wegener Friis is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern Denmark’s Centre for Cold War Studies. Helmut Müller-Enbergs is currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Southern Denmark and holds a tenured senior staff position at the German Federal Commission for the STASI Archives in Berlin.

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Intelligence operations face the challenging task of predicting the shape of future wars. This task is hindered by their limited ability to warn of peacetime foreign military innovation. Using formerly classified sources--in particular, the reports of military attachés and other diplomat-officers--Thomas G. Mahnken sheds light on the shadowy world of U.S. intelligence-gathering, tracing how America learned of military developments in Japan, Germany, and Great Britain in the period between the two world wars.

The interwar period witnessed both a considerable shift in the balance of power in Europe and Asia and the emergence of new ways of war, such as carrier aviation, amphibious operations, and combined-arms armored warfare. American attempts to follow these developments, Mahnken says, illustrate the problems that intelligence organizations face in their efforts to bridge the gulf between prewar expectations and wartime reality. He finds three reasons for intelligence's relative lack of success: intelligence agencies are more inclined to monitor established weapons systems than to search for new ones; their attention is more likely to focus on technology and doctrine already demonstrated in combat; and they have more success identifying innovation in areas their own country is testing.

Uncovering Ways of War substantially revises the perception of how American intelligence performed prior to World War II. Mahnken challenges the assumption that intelligence regarding foreign militaries had little influence on the development of U.S. weapons and doctrine. Finally, he explains the obstacles these agencies must still negotiate as they seek to understand foreign efforts to exploit the information revolution. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Uncoverinng the Ways of Military Attaches
In the period between WWI and WWII the U.S. Army and Navy struggled to maintain their military capabilities in the face of drastic budget cuts, manpower limitations, and, in the case of the Navy, treaty limitations.This book fills an important gap in the story of this struggle in its account of the efforts by the Office of Naval Intelligence (est. 1882) and the army's Military Intelligence Division to track military developments, especially technical innovations of selected countries. The most important countries singled out for such attention were Japan, Germany, and the UK. The U.S. largely chose to ignore the Soviet Union in this period.

That the both the Army and the Navy were able to acquire reasonably good intelligence on both Japanese and German technical innovations and military doctrine was do primarily to an extremely effective military attaché system supplemented especially in the case of Japan by Communication Intelligence (COMINT). Again especially in the case of Japan the intelligence that was gathered was often ignored or otherwise discounted by senior officers who allowed their own mindsets and ethnocentrism to override good information. As always intelligence is only as good as the system it serves.

To understand the drivers in this period of both U.S. intelligence programs and military innovations, this reader would recommend that these books should be read as well: Military Innovation in the Interwar Period (Cambridge University Press 1996); Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers (Cornell University 1998); and Agents of Innovation (Naval Institute Press 2008).These readings will flesh out the background for the activities this book so well describes.

An in-depth look at inter-war military intelligence.
Most historians have given the pre-World War II U.S. intelligence community a rough time. It is portrayed as primitive, secondary, and lacking influence.The author works to dismiss many of these perceptions.

By using hundreds of original documents culled from the national archives the author's attempts to paint a picture of inter-war intelligence that was more comprehensive and insightful then often given credit far.The book is very tightly structured as the author moves from covering the analysis of Japan, Germany and England. Each chapter has a pre-view and a review that sums up what has been said.The use of original sources is first rate, the author obviously spend hundreds of hours sifting through old intelligence documents. The only down side is the book tends to read a bit dry in parts, but everything is well cited.

The author makes a convincing case that the military services each had a robust intelligence collections system based on their attaché corps.What the author does not touch on is how there was little strategic intelligence above the military services and that the military services rarely ever worked together to paint a common picture of potential threats.The U.S. entered World War II without a strategic intelligence capability to conduct collection or analysis.

If you are looking for a description of the inter-war attaché system, this work can not be beaten.

An important book
Part scholarly history, part political science and part policy document, Thomas Mahnken's "Uncovering Ways of War" - one of the latest editions in Cornell's distinguished Studies in Security Affairs series - is an important book for two distinct but related reasons: one historical, the other practical.

From an historical perspective, Mahnken makes a significant contribution by convincingly arguing that US military intelligence was much more competent and effective in the period between the two world wars than has previously been asserted by some of the most respected scholars in strategic studies.With an impressive attention to detail and exhaustive primary research, Mahnken demonstrates that the US attaché corps was better funded, better manned and better managed than most other major powers during that time.And far from being the career backwater it has often been depicted as, he shows that most of the officers assigned to the attaché corps were quite skilled and more than competent at their mission, with many of the services' top talents - such as Spruance, Halsey, Pershing, and March - having served in their ranks.Finally, and most importantly, Mahnken concludes that military intelligence was, on balance, successful in identifying, analyzing and correctly assessing the implications of new technology and innovative doctrine.For instance, Japanese amphibious vehicle design directly influenced the Marine Corps development of a similar craft, while German combined arms armored doctrine was recognized as revolutionary far before the Wehrmacht's stunning victories in 1939-1940.In short, the notion that the US armed forces were poorly informed on the dramatic changes to military equipment and operations that had developed since the First World War needs to be fundamentally reassessed in light of the findings clearly laid-out in this book.

From a practical perspective, "Uncovering Ways of War" makes a critical examination of the US intelligence agencies' "mixed record" during the interwar period and looks for clues to help uncover how and why the attaches succeeded in some cases and failed in others.For example, why was US intelligence able to accurately (and independently) track and assess British and German armored warfare doctrine, yet completely miss other important innovations such as the British development of radar and German advances in rocketry?Mahnken concludes that intelligence organizations are severely handicapped in their ability to detect concepts that have been ignored or already rejected by their own militaries or have yet to be employed successfully in combat or realistic war game maneuvers.However, when it comes to concepts or technologies that their parent services are actively pursuing, the intelligence apparatus has a remarkable track record of success.

As someone with an education and passion for strategic studies who has spent most of their career in strategy and analysis positions in a Fortune 500 software company, this book appealed to me on both a personal and professional level.The interwar period has long been recognized as the ultimate case study in the rapid and discontinuous change that can occur when military forces meld new technology into new organizations with an entirely new way of fighting.The fact that Mahnken has made such a dramatic and credible revision to the history of a period that has been so thoroughly researched is laudable and, indeed, impressive.As a practitioner of competitive strategy and analysis, I can attest to the fact that many of the insights the author uncovers are directly applicable to the private sector.The time-cycles in industry - especially information technology - are dramatically shorter and the nature and gravity of the competition is, needless to say, quite different; however, the framework of theorizing, experimenting and implementing new concepts or technologies is very similar.It is unfortunate that most people in strategy and analysis roles in industry avoid or are completely ignorant of books like this and others ("The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War" by James Wirtz is another excellent and highly relevant work in the Cornell series that is well worth reading).There is much to be learned from the experience - both positive and negative - of government and military intelligence and planning agencies throughout history as "Uncovering Ways of War" lucidly demonstrates.

Understanding Successes & Failures in Military Intelligence
What constitutes success and failures in military intelligence (M.I.), and why do military intelligence agencies succeed and why fail?These questions come to light in the public most often when there are apparently blatant intelligence failures, such as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the nuclear programs of India or Pakistan, and most recently and painfully, the terrorist attacks of September 11th.

"Uncovering Ways of War" addresses these and other questions by using the context of the interwar period (generally considered the twenty-year stretch, 1919 to 1939. between the two world wars) and builds a series of case studies that describe U.S. military intelligence efforts to study and learn from Japanese, German and British military experimentation and innovation.

The case study approach that the book uses is a wonderful device for demonstrating both the good and sometimes poor performances of the U.S. military intelligence system.It highlights the adept work of a number of military attaches (who collectively were the strength of U.S. intelligence capabilities at that time) whose professionalism provided the United States with insights that contributed significantly to some of the concepts of operation that helped win the war (e.g., learning from Japanese amphibious operations shaped USMC concepts.)"Uncovering Ways of War" also highlights how institutional deficiencies can limit the effectiveness of military intelligence activities.For example, there was little institutional impetus for the United States regarding Germany's ballistic missile development, British use of radar and Japanese night time naval surface warfare concepts.The case study approach highlighting these "intelligence failures" gets the point across behind the old intelligence addage: "I can't tell you about things that you don't ask about," meaning that institutional preferences for certain things lead to other things being overlooked.

Subtly, the book describes for the reader how the military intelligence process works.Some of it is detective work - what you don't see is sometimes more important that what you do see.Another important task is sleuthing: piecing together the information that you have and don't have and assessing the possible outcomes.Some of it is flat-out spying; others is just "networking" amongst peers while abroad.The hardest part of learning about M.I. is how some activities fail and others succeed comes through to the reader in discussion of how the U.S. military institutionally processed the information received.In some areas, the U.S. had an inclination to learn and adapt based on what foreign militaries were doing because those areas tended to be ones in which the United States believed to be important to future warfare.In areas in which the U.S. tended to have limited success or perhaps outright failure, these areas were deemed of lesser importance.Mahnken correctly avoids addressing the question that naturally follows, which is "how do or should militaries determine which attempts at innovation are important and which are not?", but instead highlights the crux of the matter: the determinant of success or failure depends on the ability of the perceiving institution to adapt to changes in warfare. ... Read more

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Peru Business Intelligence Report (World Foreign Policy and Government Library) ... Read more

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Using documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, recently opened archival collections, and interviews with the actual participants, Immerman provides us with a definitive, powerfully written, and tension-packed account of the United States' clandestine operations in Guatemala and their consequences in Latin America today. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Factual, balanced account
This is a good, factual balanced account which brings to bear all the relevant facts and leaves out any ideological bias. It's also very well written and makes for an easy read.

The harsh reality of American Policy of Intervention
The CIA in Guatemala offers the reader a compeling and shocking truth regarding the involevement of the American government in third-world country. Immerman relates in detail how the CIA and United Fruit magnates paint the guatemalan flag red and declare the country communist because they misinterpreted Agrarian Reform as a direct threat to "National Security." Boldly told, the reader finds himself amist a sea of revelations and a little confusion as the story unfolds, but it is only natural for a book of this nature. Immeran has done a wonderful job explaining foreign and political intervention about the american titan otherwise know as the "Gobierno Gringo." A marvelous account of past events are exposed after years of being witheld by the CIA as classified documents. I invoke anybody with an interest in politics, governmet intervention or just to inderstand how foreign interests dictate a small nation by placing puppet presidents to do their bidding to read this book.

a fact-filled disappointment
This is a useful book.It is very well researched, extraordinarily documented and tells you essentially anything you need to know about the CIA's plot to overthrow the Arbenz government in Guatemala.Unfortunately, the writing is so turgid and dull it's difficult not to nod off in the middle of a particularly gritty section of history.I applaud Immerman's effort and the completeness of his overall work, but he really should have taken on a jounrnalist to help him get through the rough spots and make the book actually readable. ... Read more

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This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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The growing complexity of many real world problems is one of the biggest challenges of our time. The area of international finance is one prominent example where decision making is often fraud to mistakes, and tasks such as forecasting, trading and hedging exchange rates seem to be too difficult to expect correct or at least adequate decisions. From the high complexity of the foreign exchange market and related decision problems, the author derives the necessity to use tools from Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, e.g. Support Vector Machines, and to combine such methods with sophisticated financial modelling techniques. The suitability of this combination of ideas is demonstrated by an empirical study and by simulation.