July 23, 2007

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Failures of Clandestine Imagination

Good NYT review of a book I’ve been eying — Legacy of Ashes, a damning history of the C.I.A. by Tim Weiner. The book is apparently a depressing chronicle of one disaster after another, but somehow the reviewer, Evan Thomas, ends like this:

After following along Weiner’s march of folly, readers may wonder: Is an open democracy capable of building and sustaining an effective secret intelligence service? Maybe not. But with Islamic terrorists vowing to set off a nuclear device in an American city, there isn’t much choice but to keep on trying.

Er… okay? We couldn’t invent some new ways of gathering and synthesizing information? Seriously?

P.S. Besides, the real action at any intelligence agency these days is all in the internet teams that scour terrorist recruitment forums on the web… and sometimes even pose as members! It’s totally cloak and dagger — and it actually works.