Reviews for The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency

The average rating for The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-01-21 00:00:00 Richard Jamerson Artlessly written, but interesting book about the NSA. One gets the impression that the editor had to remove a lot of lines like "I'd tell you but then I'd have to kill you." This history starts with the code breaking at Bletchey Park and continues all the way through post-invasion Iraq and Afghanistan. The NSA starts out with a handful of people and by the end of the book is the majority of the people (~65% or so) of the entire intelligence community. Along the way are some amazing revelations about the kind of intelligence the US had access to and used to their advantage, especially in the Korean war and during the SALT I talks. Because I knew nothing about the NSA, everything was new to me and I couldn't tell what were the blockbuster revelations and what was already generally known. It seems like intelligence failures fall into four main buckets: 1. The information is so secret that it doesn't get to the people who could use it, and something bad happens 2. The secret information is shared or leaked (sometimes by the President, usually by the New York Times), and then the intelligence source dries up immediately 3. Intelligence is correct and in the right hands, but a political dunderhead completely ignores it to serve their own purposes, the main culprits in this book being Rumsfeld and MacArthur. 4. The guy running the NSA is a complete idiot who misallocates resources and kills morale to the point where there is no possibility of getting good intelligence There are lots of all four scenarios mixed in with spot of very impressive intelligence gathering. I was interested to learn that although we couldn't decipher any Russian communications (because they used a one-time pad) we were able to learn a ton just from traffic analysis. We were also able to decrypt their car phone messages from listening posts in UK, Canada, and US embassies. That is until the information was leaked and the Russians started bombarding these embassies with microwaves to jam their receivers. I want to learn more about the actual NSA trade craft, especially the eavesdropping technology and the decryption methods. There are occasional references to very interesting things like an NSA device attached to a transatlantic cable that was discovered by the Russians and a bunch of NSA bugs in the Chinese equivalent of Air Force One. I would love to know more about these. The section from 9/11 on is really fascinating and almost scary. I was shocked to learn that that Chalabi guy leaked information about our ability to eavesdrop on Iran, which immediately dried up an important intelligence source that could possibly prevent a war. (We found out because the Iranian that Chalabi leaked to didn't believe him and reported it over a communication line that the NSA intercepted.) Also fascinating is what is known about the Echelon eavesdropping program that is being used to spy on US citizens without warrants and the very flimsy and contradictory legal reasoning being used to prop it up. I'm sure we will be seeing more of this kind of Keystone Cops meets Philp K. Dick type shenanigans from the NSA in the future. But then again if you have nothing to hide, then there is nothing to be worried about...

Review # 2 was written on 2012-05-26 00:00:00 Robert Bodowski This is a very well-written, intensely detailed, and massively footnoted (95 pages of 'em), history of the National Security Agency (NSA), from its inception up to the book's publication. The earlier parts are more detailed - and less interesting - than I would wish for; but the sections depicting the NSA's role in the second Iraq war are brilliant. The author carefully phrases his depictions of how the NSA's intelligence products - especially its signals intelligence (SIGINT) products - were ignored, discounted, and twisted by various Presidents, Secretaries of Defense, etc., to avoid direct criticism of those officials.