A View from the Right

...His days as a World War II intelligence officer for the United States Army evidently provided him with a sufficiently abiding interest in the subject to undertake what is in effect a synthesis of the uses intelligence material has been put to by national leaders and military commanders over roughly the past 100 years...

...foreign policy and intelligence, is dominated by the Left, his attack from the Right has a certain undeniable balancing effect...

...Unfortunately, it is clear that the author did not have the time or the patience for serious research into the pros and cons of the CIA, the reasons for its failures and its current difficulties...

...above all, Roosevelt revealed himself to be a complete idiot where understanding the Soviet dictator was concerned...

...A facile, prolific writer (11 works of fiction, 16 nonfic-tion), he preferred for the most part to warm over information already in the libraries, throw in some notions of varying interest, spice with a few interviews, and whip together under one title...

...The resulting brew has possibilities, but none of them are ever quite fulfilled...

...Such conclusions are standard among Western intelligence analysts, though one wonders if Soviet or Iranian or Chilean experts on the topic would agree...

...Reviewed by Donald Kirk Author, "Tell It to the Dead: Memories of a War" The title of this book is slightly deceptive...

...That last emerges as a major point of Secret Intelligence: "In America President Roosevelt, no doubt to the pleasure of his quasi-Communist wife and of his Vice President Henry Wallace as well as to justify to the people and Congress American aid, had nothing but praise for the Soviet Union, for dear old Uncle Joe, and indeed through his wife and Vice President for the Soviet penal system...

...If the book had been limited to this theme then it could have made an original contribution to our understanding of the intelligence game...

...Constantine FitzGibbon does not focus so much on the development of, the art of intelligence as on its historical, social and political contexts...

...This is particularly true, I think, in his remarks on the CIA, whose dabbling where it doesn't have any business worries him less than its plain ineptness: "The almost incredible clumsiness which permitted the Soviet government nearly to install nuclear weapons on Cuban soil, the folly of American policy in the Middle East in 1956, the American defeat in Southeast Asia, all these show how deplorably inadequate the CIA must have been as a centre of evaluation...

...But readers will find no revelations here of the sort they have become accustomed to in exposes—or, for that matter, in carefully researched explorations of a single event or period in the past...

...The author's analysis of 20th-century history also reflects a strand of conventional wisdom...

...Deserters, as opposed to genuine prisoners of war, are automatically suspect," he tells us, because they "may be deliberately planted" or "more probably they are men of weak moral fiber, anxious above all to escape the war and therefore to tell their captors whatever they assume those captors might be expected to wish them to say...

...It could be a wonderful antidote to the kind of intelligence literature currently making the best seller lists...

...Unattractive and not very competent, it became an obvious Aunt Sally for America's enemies even before it was found to have broken its constitutional rights by internal espionage...

...Moreover, at a time when criticism of U.S...

...Similarly, explaining why torture is not a favored method, FitzGibbon informs us that it "will, in the end, compel almost any man to talk, but only by reducing him, and consciously, to the degraded status of a deserter...

...From the American point of view it is to be hoped that this lame duck is a decoy and that a real secret intelligence service exists...

...In retrospect it is almost incredible, were it not being repeated in other terms, by other people, today...

...One hopes that some day soon Constantine FitzGibbon will produce a much more careful treatment of the subject...

...It should perhaps be noted that FitzGibbon is hardly a neo-Mc-Carthyite...

...Indeed, FitzGibbon seems mostly to have been culled from basic history texts, with little more than his own wit and style to justify the exercise...

...The Americans displayed incredible stupidity in settling World War I and setting up the League of Nations...

...Stalin's assessment of Nazi intentions before World War II was equally dumb...

...And frequently his perceptions are as hackneyed as his facts...