A World of Secrets: The Uses and Limits of Intelligence

New York: Basic Books, 1985. First Printing. Hardcover. Fair/Good. 25 cm, xii, 404 pages, notes, index, ink note on front endpaper, front board weak/reglued at title page, name on fore-edge, highlighting/underlining. Walter Ze'ev Laqueur (26 May 1921 - 30 September 2018) was a German-born American historian, journalist and political commentator. He was an influential scholar on the subjects of terrorism and political violence. From 1944, when he moved to Jerusalem, until his departure in 1955 he worked as a journalist for the Hashomer Hatzair newspaper, Mishmar, and for The Palestine Post (later, The Jerusalem Post). He was the Middle East correspondent for journals in the United States and a commentator on world politics for Israel radio. Laqueur founded and edited Soviet Survey, a journal focusing on Soviet and East European culture. Survey was one of the numerous publications of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom to counter Soviet Communist cultural propaganda in the West. Laqueur was Director of the Institute of Contemporary History and the Wiener Library in London from 1965 to 1994. From 1969 he was a member, and later Chairman, of the International Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington. He was Professor of the History of Ideas at Brandeis University from 1968 to 1972, and at Georgetown University from 1976 to 1988. Laqueur wrote extensively about the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Zionism, the Weimar Republic, Communism and the Soviet Union, the Holocaust, the Cold War, fascism, the decline of Europe, and antisemitism. He pioneered the study of guerrilla warfare and terrorism. In this magisterial survey and assessment of U.S. intelligence activities over the last forty years, a world renowned scholar provides the first systematic and authoritative evaluation of this country's intelligence gathering machinery. An assessment of U.S. intelligence gathering pinpoints its successes and failures and examines where improvements are needed based on an analysis of previously inaccessible material and personal interviews with leaders of government and the intelligence community. Derived from a review/commentary found on-line: Laqueur, an experienced historian and political commentator, closely examines the uses and limits of intelligence in this 400-page book, including its excellent endnotes. His context is the spate of intelligence "failures" associated with the Vietnam and Cold Wars, and the investigations into those failures. The author spends some useful time on commonsense definitions, but the heart of the book is a series of case studies, including the so-called missile gap of the 1950's and the Cuban missile crisis. His analysis is pitched at the strategic level, and his findings are a recognition of the reality of life in the intelligence business, and of the limitations of what intelligence can accomplish for decision-makers. The Cold War was still undecided when Laqueur wrote this book; much attention is paid to the then-ongoing competition with the Soviet Union and its intelligence agencies. The closing chapter, with its eleven principles of intelligence, is worth the price of the book all by itself. There are no photographs or other graphic aids.
"A World of Secrets" is highly recommended to students of the intelligence community as a clear-eyed look at a difficult but essential business.