Government Agencies Books

The opening quotation from Harry Howe Ransom says it all-"Certainly nothing is more rational and logical than the idea that national security policies be based upon the fullest and most accurate information available; but the cold war spawned an intelligence Frankenstein monster that now needs to be dissected, remodeled, rationalized and made fully accountable to responsible representatives of the people."

Professor Johnson is one of only two people(the other being Britt Snider) to have served on both the Church Commission in the 1970's and the Aspin-Brown Commission in the 1990's, and is in my view one of the most competent observer and commentator on the so-called U.S. Intelligence Community. The book is a tour d'horizon on both the deficiencies of today's highly fragmented and bureaucratized archipelago of independent fiefdoms, as well as the "new intelligence agenda" that places public health and the environment near the top of the list of topics to be covered by spies and satellites.

Highlights of this excellent work, a new standard in terms of currency and breadth, include his informed judgment that most of what is in the "base" budget of the community should be resurrected for reexamination, and that at least 20% of the budget (roughly $6 billion per year) could be done away with-and one speculates that this would be good news to an Administration actively seeking trade-offs permitting its promised tax cut program. His overviews of the various cultures within the Central Intelligence Agency, of the myths of intelligence, and of the possibilities for burden sharing all merit close review.

He does, however, go a bridge too far while simultaneously rendering a great service to the incoming Administration. He properly identifies the dramatic shortfalls in the open source information gathering and processing capabilities of the various Departments of the Federal government-notably the Department of State as well as the Department of Commerce and the various agencies associated with public health-but then he goes on to suggest that these very incapacities should give rise to an extension of the U.S. Intelligence Community's mission and mandate-that it is the U.S. Intelligence Community, including clandestine case officers in the field and even FBI special agents, who should be tasked with collecting open sources of information and with reporting on everything from disease to pollution. This will never work, but it does highlight the fact that all is not well with *both* the U.S. Intelligence Community *and* the rest of the government that is purportedly responsible for collecting and understanding open sources of information.

On balance I found this book to be a very competent, insightful, and well-documented survey of the current stresses and strains facing the U.S. national intelligence community. The conclusion that I drew from the book, one that might not be shared by the author, was that the U.S. Government as a whole has completely missed the dawn of the Information Age. From the National Security Agency, where too many people on payroll keep that organization mired in the technologies of the 1970's, to the U.S. State Department, which has lost control of its Embassies and no longer collects significant amounts of open source information, to the White House, where no one has time to read-we have completely blown it-we simply have not adapted the cheap and responsive tools of the Internet to our needs, nor have we employed the Internet to share the financial as well as the intellectual and time burdens of achieving "Global Coverage." More profoundly, what this book does in a way I have not been able to do myself, is very pointedly call into question the entire structure of government, a government attempting to channel small streams of fragmented electronic information through a physical infrastructure of buildings and people that share no electronic connectivity what-so-ever, while abdicating its responsibility to absorb and appreciate the vast volumes of relevant information from around the globe that is not online, not in English, and not free.

It was not until I had absorbed the book's grand juxtaposition of the complementary incompetencies of both the producers of intelligence and the consumers of intelligence that I realized he has touched on what must be the core competency of government in the Information Age: how precisely do we go about collecting, analyzing, and disseminating information, and creating tailored intelligence, when we are all inter-dependent across national, legal bureaucratic, and cultural boundaries? This is not about secrecy versus openness, but rather about whether Government Operations as a whole are taking place with the sources, methods, and tools of this century, or the last. To bombs, bugs, drugs, and thugs one must add the perennial Pogo: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Of special interest to me were the detailed, almost day-by-day descriptions of events put together by the authors from as many sources as they could access. They begin to give a picture of a "day in the life" of at least some people involved in covert action, with secret supply missions by the Navy, flights to clandestine air strips, a sub popping up off the coast of Sumatra to rescue five CIA men, and a C-46 flying another bunch to safety at Clark AFB. As an American who has lived overseas for many years and met such people, I have long been curious about just what they do. (You can't ask them.)

No individual is portrayed in great depth and it is just as well since most are rather unappealing, coming off as either connivers or flakes, or both. One character that did catch my attention was Fravel "Jim" Brown, a CIA careerist who was present when rebels he was supporting were captured by government paratroopers taking an airfield. He walked up to the paratroopers' commander, introduced himself as "Brown from Caltex," made some small talk, then slipped away. A few days and hundreds of kilometers away Brown was in a rebel-held port as it too was captured, by the same paratroopers. Once again he slipped away. Is there a name for that personality trait, extremely valuable for people in certain professions, that combines chutzpah with blarney?

As an American living in Indonesia, I found the book interesting and very readable. However, I suspect that readers with no knowledge of Indonesian political history or geography will find the narrative a bit tedious unless they are fervent espionage afficionados.

What has not been known until Vizzard authored this book, even by many of it's own employees is the influences of not only other government agencies but the anti-gun control organizations as well as party politics in the development of polices and missions by the leaders in this Bureau.

I spent nearly a quarter of a century as an agent with ATF and it's predecessor organization. I arrived on the scene (1959) as the heyday of liquor enforcement was fading. I was assigned to Bureau headquarters during the years when the Gun Control Act of 1968, and the Explosives Control Act of 1970, were enacted into law. I served in various managment positions in Washington, DC and later spent time on the firing line in two district offices (Detroit and Louisville) as the Assistant and finally as the Special Agent in Charge. My last two years with ATF before my retirement in 1983, were spent working on the streets and I received first hand knowledge of what it meant to be a "street agent" operating under the rules established as the result of the influence of internal and external politics.

The author has managed to capture the nuances of the pressures involved in enforcing laws that are not popular with segments of our society that have political clout. Politics are not limited to outside the agency and Mr. Vizzard has analyzed these as well. This book should be required reading for all special agents now on the job, former agents will be surprised to learn just how little they really knew about what was happening behind the scenes while working for ATF, all persons interested in government operations and even those persons who take umbrage of the law! s enforced by this battered but still proud agency will be impressed with the contents of "In The Cross Fire."

Among other things, it provides the most concise, thorough, accurate and comprehensive account of the tragedy at Waco that most readers will ever review. For this alone it is worth reading (and this opinion includes my own study of (1) the Treasury Dept.'s own report on The Investigation of Vernon Wayne Howell, AKA David Koresh, which is for sale by the U.S. Gov't Printing Office, and is well worth reading in its own right; and (2) hours before the TV in 1995 watching the House Congressional subcommittee hearing on Waco, which was completely inadequate, confusing, misleading and an absolute failure at discovering the truth - proof once again that politicians fail to get almost anything right). So if you really want to build your understanding of the events at Waco, read this book.

And the book is about much more than just Waco. It tells the real source of ATF's strengths (its agents, not its management), and why, because of these agents, with their "determination to perform in spite of inadequate resources, training, policy, leadership, and political support", ATF has been able (at least in the past, but probably not now or in the near future) to successfully compete with the FBI, an agency that was/is "far larger, better known, more prestigious, and infinitely better funded". And if you read carefully, you might even learn why this superior performance is doomed not to continue.

If you are an ATF Agent, with the typical love/hate relationship that most agents have with ATF, this book will speed you again through all of the conflicting emotions you have felt. And if you are one of ATF's critics, you will learn many things you did not know or even consider knowing before reading this book, and hopefully will begin to understand that in many instances you have criticized things that do not deserve criticism, and have failed to criticize the things that do. If you care at all about ATF, pro or con, READ THIS BOOK!