Volume 49, Number 14 · September 26, 2002
The Secret Intelligence Wars
By Thomas Powers
Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence
by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones
Yale University Press, 357 pp., $29.95
The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI
by Ronald Kessler
St. Martin's, 488 pp., $27.95
Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI’s Robert Hanssen Betrayed America
by David Wise
Random House, 299 pp., $24.95 (to be published in October)
The Bureau and the Mole: The Unmasking of Robert Philip Hanssen, the Most Dangerous Double Agent in FBI History
by David A. Vise
Atlantic Monthly Press, 272 pp., $25.00
The Spy Next Door: The Extraordinary Secret Life of Robert Philip Hanssen, the Most Damaging FBI Agent in US History
by Elaine Shannon and Ann Blackman
Little, Brown, 247 pp., $25.95
The first task of any intelligence organization is to establish where danger lies. In the Arab world it is traditionally considered to lie within, where revolutionaries, religious zealots, and ambitious military officers plotting to seize power are watched and periodically arrested by the local security service, the mukhabarat. In Egypt and Iraq, in Jordan and Saudi Arabia it is always the same: the real interest and expertise of the secret police are concentrated on the home-grown opposition. The United States may speculate obsessively on the military programs of Saddam Hussein or on Iranian ambitions in western Afghanistan, but the Arab countries worry less about neighbors, including Israel, than they do about the contacts and travels of their own radical university students, the commanders of armored divisions in urban centers, and impassioned mullahs preaching a return to fundamental Islam. Arab secret services hold tight to what they know, and are sphinxes about the things they don't know—a source of deep frustration to American intelligence officers trying to sort out the background and contacts of the aircraft hijackers of September 11.
Review, 5689 words
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