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This book describes what Intelligence Community (IC) analysts do, how they do it, and how they are affected by the political context that shapes, uses, and sometimes abuses their output. It is written by a 25-year intelligence professional.
In From Mandate to Blueprint, Thomas Fingar offers a guide for new federal government appointees faced with the complex task of rebuilding institutions and transitioning to a new administration. Synthesizing his own experience implementing the most comprehensive reforms to the national security establishment since 1947, Fingar provides crucial guidance to newly appointed officials. When Fingar was appointed the first deputy director of National Intelligence for Analysis in 2005, he discovered the challenges of establishing a new federal agency and implementing sweeping reforms of intelligence procedure and performance. The mandate required prompt action but provided no guidance on how to achieve required and desirable changes. Fingar describes how he defined and prioritized the tasks involved in building and staffing a new organization, integrating and improving the work of sixteen agencies, and contending with pressure from powerful players. For appointees without the luxury of taking command of fully staffed and well-functioning federal agencies, From Mandate to Blueprint is an informed and practical guide for the challenges ahead.
This book brings together leading China specialists to offer a retrospective on relations between the United States and China over the last half-century and consider what might be next. The contributors include academics, leaders of China-related nongovernmental organizations, and former diplomats and government officials.
As China and the U.S. increasingly compete for power in key areas of U.S. influence, great power conflict looms. Yet few studies have looked to the Middle East and Africa, regions of major political, economic, and military importance for both China and the U.S., to theorize how China competes in a changing world system. China's Rise in the Global South examines China's behavior as a rising power in two key Global South regions, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. Dawn C. Murphy, drawing on extensive fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, compares and analyzes thirty years of China's interactions with these regions across a range of functional areas: political, economic, foreign aid, and m...
North Korea is consistently identified as one of the world’s worst human rights abusers. However, the issue of human rights in North Korea is a complex one, intertwined with issues like life in the North Korean police state, inter-Korean relations, denuclearization, access to information in the North, and international cooperation, to name a few. There are likewise multiple actors involved, including the two Korean governments, the United States, the United Nations, South Korea NGOs, and global human rights organizations. While North Korea’s nuclear weapons and the security threat it poses have occupied the center stage and eclipsed other issues in recent years, human rights remain important to U.S. policy. The contributors to The North Korean Conundrum explore how dealing with the issue of human rights is shaped and affected by the political issues with which it is so entwined. Sections discuss the role of the United Nations; how North Koreans’ limited access to information is part of the problem, and how this is changing; the relationship between human rights and denuclearization; and North Korean human rights in comparative perspective.
This second edition of The National Security Enterprise provides practitioners’ insights into the operation, missions, and organizational cultures of the principal national security agencies and other institutions that shape the US national security decision-making process. Unlike some textbooks on American foreign policy, it offers analysis from insiders who have worked at the National Security Council, the State and Defense Departments, the intelligence community, and the other critical government entities. The book explains how organizational missions and cultures create the labyrinth in which a coherent national security policy must be fashioned. Understanding and appreciating these or...
Constructing Cassandra analyzes the intelligence failures at the CIA that resulted in four key strategic surprises experienced by the US: the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the Iranian revolution of 1978, the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks—surprises still play out today in U.S. policy. Although there has been no shortage of studies exploring how intelligence failures can happen, none of them have been able to provide a unified understanding of the phenomenon. To correct that omission, this book brings culture and identity to the foreground to present a unified model of strategic surprise; one that focuses on the internal make-up the CIA, and takes seriously those Cassandras who offered warnings, but were ignored. This systematic exploration of the sources of the CIA's intelligence failures points to ways to prevent future strategic surprises.
The founder -- Shadow diplomacy -- War by other means -- Chasing respectability -- Between truth and lies -- Diplomacy in retreat -- Selective integration -- Rethinking capitalism -- The fightback -- Ambition realized -- Overreach.
Using espionage as a test case, The End of Intelligence criticizes claims that the recent information revolution has weakened the state, revolutionized warfare, and changed the balance of power between states and non-state actors—and it assesses the potential for realizing any hopes we might have for reforming intelligence and espionage. Examining espionage, counterintelligence, and covert action, the book argues that, contrary to prevailing views, the information revolution is increasing the power of states relative to non-state actors and threatening privacy more than secrecy. Arguing that intelligence organizations may be taken as the paradigmatic organizations of the information age, a...
The U.S. intelligence community (IC) is a complex human enterprise whose success depends on how well the people in it perform their work. Although often aided by sophisticated technologies, these people ultimately rely on their own intellect to identify, synthesize, and communicate the information on which the nation's security depends. The IC's success depends on having trained, motivated, and thoughtful people working within organizations able to understand, value, and coordinate their capabilities. Intelligence Analysis provides up-to-date scientific guidance for the intelligence community (IC) so that it might improve individual and group judgments, communication between analysts, and an...