Burn Before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Central Intelligence Tom Grassey
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Naval War College Review Volume 59 Article 16 Number 4 Autumn 2006 Burn before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Central Intelligence Tom Grassey Stansfield urT ner Follow this and additional works at: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review Recommended Citation Grassey, Tom and Turner, Stansfield (2006) "Burn before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Central Intelligence," Naval War College Review: Vol. 59 : No. 4 , Article 16. Available at: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol59/iss4/16 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Naval War College Review by an authorized editor of U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Color profile: Disabled Composite Default screen 142Grassey NAVAL and WAR Turner: COLLEGE Burn REVIEWbefore Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Central Intel find a single plan laid out in such com- expected to produce an atomic bomb is plete detail. mid-1950 and the most probable date is mid-1953.” RICHMOND M. LLOYD William B. Ruger Chair of Turner recounts subsequent intelligence National Security Economics failures, but because the manuscript was Naval War College submitted to the CIA for security review, few readers should be surprised by this history. While most facts are familiar, Turner’s Turner, Stansfield. Burn before Reading: Presidents, thesis is that the director of Central In- CIA Directors, and Central Intelligence. New York: telligence serves the president in two ca- Hyperion, 2005. 319pp. $23.95 pacities: leading the CIA in providing Presumably Stansfield Turner did not unbiased intelligence; and heading the devise the nonsensical title of this history intelligence community, “fifteen federal of the DCI’s (Director, Central Intelli- agencies, offices, and bureaus within the gence) relationship with the president of executive branch.” Turner evaluates the the United States. eighteen DCIs before Porter Goss on how each performed both tasks, includ- In twelve chapters on chief executives ing his own service under Jimmy Carter. from Franklin D. Roosevelt through George W. Bush, Turner discusses the If Turner is frank about errors he made, nineteen men who headed America’s in- he excoriates his successor, Bill Casey. telligence organization. “Within six “Overall, I found this transition group to months of Pearl Harbor, FDR’s enthusi- be as unbalanced, opinionated, and un- asm for ‘Wild Bill’ [Donovan’s] ‘innova- willing to listen as any group I have ever tive thinking’ had evaporated,” Turner encountered. They came to their task writes, noting that Donovan was never with their minds made up, and no facts given access to the ULTRA/MAGIC were going to change their conclusions.” code-breaking program, and he regularly Fifteen blistering pages recount Casey’s lost struggles with the Joint Chiefs of politicization of the agency and obses- Staff and J. Edgar Hoover. sion with covert actions, culminating in his leading Ollie North to undertake In January 1946, Harry Truman created “two highly illegal operations—selling the Central Intelligence Group and ap- arms to Iran and funneling the money to pointed Sidney Souers as the first direc- the contras in Nicaragua.” tor of central intelligence, with simple expectations: “to keep him personally Turner devotes the final chapter to re- well-informed of all that was going on in flections on the 2005 Intelligence Re- the outside world.” By September 1949, form Act. “The big question, then, is however, the CIA had not been privy to whether President Bush will line up with Atomic Energy Commission informa- the presidents since FDR who have fa- tion, so the day after Truman learned vored giving more authority to the DCI that the Soviet Union had exploded its or whether he will give in to the Defense first atomic bomb, he read Intelligence Department’s persistent efforts to keep Memorandum 225: “The earliest possi- the DCI’s authority limited.” Noting that ble date by which the USSR might be “the CIA’s reputation in the country is at Published by U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons, 2006 1 C:\WIP\NWCR\NWC Review Autumn2006.vp Tuesday, October 10, 2006 8:31:22 AM Color profile: Disabled Composite Default screen Naval War College Review, Vol. 59 [2006], No. 4, Art. 16 BOOK REVIEWS 143 a nadir today,” Turner calls for “the dis- was obsessed with missiles and nuclear solution of the CIA” as part of “a bold weaponry. Over his thirty-year tenure transformation” of U.S. intelligence. Gorshkov brought the Soviet navy “into The 444 endnotes citing interviews, the world ocean” and seriously chal- NARA files, articles, and many books lenged American-led Western suprem- prove that Turner has maintained a acy at sea. From the official Soviet scholar’s interest in the field he once perspective, this work dissects the practiced. A surprise may be that no smaller debates that attended this endnote cites John Ranelagh’s The growth: coastal versus oceangoing; Agency or any book written by Jeffrey offensive versus defensive; submarines Richelson—or perhaps Langley’s review- versus balanced fleet; navy nuclear first ers extirpated every one of them. strike versus strategic reserve. If one follows the maxim that “budgets TOM GRASSEY Naval War College are strategy,” Gorshkov comes out the clear winner in his competition within the Soviet bureaucracy, ultimately build- ing not only a bigger navy, but also a “balanced” blue-water force. In fact, the Herrick, Robert Waring. Soviet Naval Doctrine book would offer additional insights if it and Policy 1956–1986. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin managed to relate official pronounce- Mellen, 2003. 3 vols., 1,415 pp. $129.95, $129.95, ments with actual building programs. $139.95 This would lay to rest the speculation It is no accident that each volume in made throughout the book that some of this set comes with Fleet Admiral Sergei these official pronouncements were un- Gorshkov’s picture on the cover. In varnished reality while others were exag- fact, the time period encompassed by gerations or Aesopian fables in which this trilogy coincides precisely with the the Navy lobbied for forces as projec- Gorshkov era—the central figure in all tions of Western successes. of the strategic and doctrinal debates of The most useful contributions this this study. This massive series is the study offers are found as Gorshkov capstone achievement of Robert Waring evaluates and assesses the effect of the Herrick, a former U.S. naval attaché to growing U.S. Navy during the Reagan the Soviet Union and an experienced administration. Most notably, Herrick student of Soviet navy development. shows that Western practices were the The subject, the Soviet navy’s growth foundation upon which Gorshkov built from a small coastal force into a bal- his navy. The Lehman “Oceanic Strat- anced force capable of contesting the egy” of the early 1980s gave a second United States for command of the seas, wind to Moscow’s shipbuilding pro- is similarly the capstone achievement of gram. Herrick also reveals the complete Admiral Gorshkov, who played a key disutility of using “dissuasion” as part role in its development. Appointed of a deterrence strategy with the Sovi- chief of the Soviet navy in 1956, he ets. Could a nation ever build a navy so took the job surrounded by an army- large that the nearest competitor simply oriented general staff and the political was dissuaded from trying to keep up? leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, who Reflecting classical balance of power https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol59/iss4/16 2 C:\WIP\NWCR\NWC Review Autumn2006.vp Tuesday, October 10, 2006 8:31:23 AM.