Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage

Rating:
Summary: No new information here
Review: For academic historians of the Cold War, journalists are unwelcome but inevitable competitors. Journalists tend to write better than academics, and they certainly have better ties to the publishing world, but they often lack either historical training or deep knowledge of a specific topic. Admittedly, a good popular historical account of a subject can both add to the record and increase public interest in it. One person who did it in the mid-1980s was William Burrows, a former New York Times reporter who wrote one of the early books on satellite reconnaissance, Deep Black, and substantially advanced our understanding of this secretive world.

Philip Taubman is currently the Washington bureau chief for the New York Times and has written a new popular history of the early years of strategic reconnaissance called Secret Empire. The book largely focuses on the people who built the U-2 spy plane and the CORONA reconnaissance satellite. It is a readable book and Taubman certainly did a lot of research. But unlike Deep Black, or many other books before it, Secret Empire breaks absolutely no new ground and primarily repeats information that appeared in several books in the late 1990s. Most notably, several chapters in Secret Empire are simply retreads of information in Jeffrey Richelson's 2001 book The Wizards of Langley. Richelson's book did well and received wide exposure, but Secret Empire has the force of the Simon & Schuster advertising machine behind it.

After recounting the development of the U-2 spyplane, which has already been extensively covered in greater detail by author Chris Pocock, Secret Empire focuses upon the development of the CORONA reconnaissance satellite (spy satellite names were usually printed in capital letters). CORONA first achieved success in August 1960 after over a dozen failures, and over a hundred of these satellites were launched during the next decade. It was not declassified until 1995. The book also discusses the bureaucratic fights that took place between the US Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency during the mid-1960s and some of the satellite projects started during these fights.

One of the foundations of Cold War history is that the advance of time opens up new records and frees more people to speak about events, thereby enabling historians to write a richer historical account--we certainly know more about the Cuban Missile Crisis today than we knew 5 or 10 years ago. But Secret Empire actually contains less information than several books written before it, such as Jonathan Lewis' well-researched history of corporate involvement in CORONA, Spy Capitalism. It also contains less information than is available with careful research.

The book mentions almost nothing about the Samos satellite that CORONA eventually usurped. Samos was the primary satellite reconnaissance program during the early years of the space race and the Air Force spent huge amounts of money on Samos before canceling it without a single success. There are important lessons of technological hubris to be learned from Samos, and Air Force mishandling of the program explains later bureaucratic squabbles, but Taubman devotes only a few paragraphs to the subject. He also mistakenly states that Samos was simply a video relay satellite, whereas it also included film return capsules, just like its offspring, CORONA. Similarly, the author makes virtually no mention of the GAMBIT satellite that complemented CORONA. The two satellites worked as a team during the 1960s: CORONA was the binoculars that scanned the Soviet Union looking for targets and GAMBIT was the high-powered telescope that focused in on those targets. But unlike previous books on spy satellites, you will find no new information here about programs that the United States developed.

Similarly, Taubman pays no attention to the exploitation of the images returned by these satellites. What, exactly, did they see and how were their pictures used? A tremendous amount of information has been released on this subject in the past few years, but almost none of it is included here.

Taubman did extensive interviews to support this book, including interviewing several people who have not talked before. But the interviews appear to have merely provided the same information that has appeared in previous books. Certainly these people had other secrets to tell, but they did not do so in the pages of this book. The substantial list of documentary sources includes nothing that other writers have not already tapped. SImply put, if you have read any previous book on spy satellites or the U-2, you will learn nothing new from Taubman. If, however, you are completely new to the subject, this is not a bad book and has a decent overview of the period from 1954-1960. But you should be aware that there is much more information out there.

In the final chapter of the book Taubman makes an assertion that many journalists now consider proven beyond all doubt--that the United States has put too much faith in satellites and consequently neglected plain old fashioned spying. The claim does not stand up to even the slightest scrutiny. After all, Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen were not trading satellite secrets to the Soviets in return for all that money, they were giving them the names of people spying for the United States. Satellites have always had limitations, but so do spies, and the CIA never missed an opportunity to snare a good human because it was too focused on its amazing orbiting robots. A deeper and broader analytical approach would have explored these issues more fully, rather than resorting to what amounts to a sound-bite summation of a complex topic.

Rating:
Summary: The things I didn't know about espionage!
Review: I forced my way through this book in hopes that some new information or analysis would justify the reviews this book has received. I was very impressed by Mr. Taubman when he appeared on CNN and was looking forward to his take on the spy programs of the 40s and 50s. Very few new facts about the era, poor chronological organization, and the frustrating use of adjectives (one paragraph describes a man as a "precocious physicist" who was a "cheerful, cherubic dynamo" and worked with a "taciturn, laconic scientist") make this a very frustrating read.

If you are a spy/history buff you can do much better than this.

Rating:
Summary: Not worth your time
Review: I forced my way through this book in hopes that some new information or analysis would justify the reviews this book has received. I was very impressed by Mr. Taubman when he appeared on CNN and was looking forward to his take on the spy programs of the 40s and 50s. Very few new facts about the era, poor chronological organization, and the frustrating use of adjectives (one paragraph describes a man as a "precocious physicist" who was a "cheerful, cherubic dynamo" and worked with a "taciturn, laconic scientist") make this a very frustrating read.

If you are a spy/history buff you can do much better than this.

Rating:
Summary: Gets bogged down in mundane details
Review: I heard Taubman touting Secret Empire on NPR and was expecting a really good book. Nevertheless, the book disappointed me. Although it does contain some useful background material on US reconnaissance efforts in the 1950's, the book's hundred pages of interesting material are interspersed with three hundred sixty pages of dull banter about bureaucratic turf battles, tedious background information on personnel, and other tiresome detail. Oddly, what I felt were the most compelling stories often got short shrift. The development of the SR-71 Blackbird, for example, merits only a couple pages. The U2's operation over Cuba also got virtually zero coverage. I find it incredible that this book could have been written without a comprehensive telling of the story behind the Cuban U2 flights and Adlai Stevenson's presentation of US reconnaissance images before the UN in 1962.

I was also caught off guard by the somewhat odd, non-chronological format of the book. Taubman will spend an entire chapter discussing the United States' utter inability to get a reconnaissance satellite into orbit, then a few pages later in the next chapter he will jump to another subject, only to refer in passing to a constellation of advanced US spy satellites. I couldn't help but think that the subjects were portrayed in a hit or miss fashion, and perhaps I had missed the best parts.

Finally, the terrorism add-on at the end of the book seems like a half-hearted (and somewhat cynical) attempt to keep the book's material relevant in the post 9/11 world.

Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly Bland
Review: I saw Philip Taubman on a news show shilling for this book and immediately ordered it. How could I resist? In 1973 and 1974 fresh out of college my first "real" job was as an Intelligence Operations Specialist at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Armed with all kinds of fancy clearances, I sifted through reams of roll paper teletypes from the CIA and DIA to create a daily briefing for Fred Ikle (then head of ACDA) John Lehman (Deputy) and the Assistant Directors (like Amron Katz - a character in this book). The intelligence was actually incredibly boring and banal. Ikle used to complain that the morning briefing was pathetic next to the news from the Washington Post and NY Times. It might have been banal but it was all very "important" and secretive with silly code names for special clearances. The mere existence of satellites was called the "fact of" and was classified Top Secret. They had regular meetings for about five years before they decided to downgrade it to Confidential, and it took another ten years to declassify it. The National Intelligence Estimates (which Taubman mentions but doesn't explain) were rediculously out of sync with the "raw" intelligence we got every day. The "raw" intelligence pretty clearly showed - if you actually paid attention to it - that the allegedly awesome Soviet military was pretty close to pathetic.

There are several very exciting stories to be told in all this. A lot of it about political bumbling, military agendas that needed to aggrandize the struggling Soviet Union, a giant man-boy dominated environment with no place for women and a big penchant for expensive toys.

This book does fill in a few gaps in the espionage story that I didn't know, and it does a pretty good job of giving credit to the leadership role of Eisenhower. However, I found it frustrating - exactly how did they manage to divert such large sums without most of Congress knowing? How did some reporters pretty much know the whole thing? Exactly how were they persuaded not to print the story? What did happen to Humint? If Humint was dormant for so many years how could it fire up so fast after 9/11? The questions that could have made a more exciting story if examined in depth were not even asked. It seemed to me that the information in this book, if well-edited, would make a great magazine article. However, despite it's occassionally breathless tone and offers of exposure of secrets I found it repetitive and slightly boring. Someday someone is going to write a great book about the period of American espionage covered in Secret Empire, but this isn't it.

Rating:
Summary: Making rocket science accessible
Review: Taubman is a fine wordsmith, but his book reads unevenly and his
book is well researched (he had cited the major books on the
topic, and he has interviewed most of the surviving principals),
but some of the format decisisons could have been better
[a map of the ground tracks for the spy sats overflying the
USSR would convey more information, better, used in Day, Peebles,
and McDonald's 3 books].

The reviews of this book by the Washington Post and other
print newspapers are right on. If you want to be technically
more accurate, McDonald's book on Corona will be better.

Where Taubman does better is sew a better picture that technical
intelligence was not initially appreciated by A. Dulles
(traditional spying [human intelligence] {HUMIT}). More detailed
histories of the U-2 and Kelly Johnson exist [More than My Share]
and people liking spy fiction will tend to find the story dry.
While this book was published half a dozen years after the
major books, it mentions a few events post-9/11.
The book glosses over events after 1974. The photos/imagery
in the center includes one sanitized image of Iraqi bombed out
hanger lacking any relevance to the text.

Taubman does not take the time to point out that overhead
imagery contains a significant amount of cloudiness (to imagery's
detriment: still a problem in 25% of all imagery as pointed
by Day, McDonald, and Peebles).

The book is written to attempt to wow those readers of current
events to dangle secrecy as bait to buy the book. It's not
specifically a bad book, it's just that readers can learn
many of the pieces of information better. The book is at least
an institutional purchase (for libraries and the like).
Technical readers can gain benefit by seeing the interaction
of people in policy making positions (if you like Edwin Land,
he comes out fine: how he got in Nixon's enemies list, this
book won't explain).

Check the book out. It's mostly for completeness that a reader
should get the book. Other sources will display photos that
Taubman cites in the text (e.g., the pool party).
Enough said.

Rating:
Summary: Recommended reading for IKE and COLD WAR insights
Review: Taubman offers a fascinating insight into how the Eisenhower Administration confronted the risk of surprise attack at the outset of the nuclear era. He provides a fascinating insight into Ike. The 34th President is fondly remembered for ending the Korean War and presiding over eight years of relative peace and prosperity. Less well-known is that he championed the CIA in its formative years, and patiently advocated risky technologies (U2, Corona, satellites, etc.) that gave us hope for early detection of surprise attack, a grave threat in the 40s and 50s.

I recommend this for readers who enjoy learning about the WWII and early Cold War years.

Rating:
Summary: The things I didn't know about espionage!
Review: This is a really interesting book, especially for cold war history buffs. The author is a NYTimes reporter who has taken a bunch of material that used to be classified, and stitched together an amazing portrait of cold war espionage. Did you know the earliest U-2 planes could see stripes in a parking lot from 70,000 feet? I didn't. There is plently of political history, and Mr. Taubman does a good job of explaining Eisenhower's motives for various things he did at that time, especially things that didn't seem obvious from the unclassified information available.