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The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency |  | Author: Matthew Aid
Publisher: Bloomsbury Press
Category: Book
List Price: $30.00
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Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 19051
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 432
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6.4 x 1.5
ISBN: 1596915153
Dewey Decimal Number: 327.1273
EAN: 9781596915152
ASIN: 1596915153
Publication Date: June 9, 2009
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Product Description
In the first complete history of the National Security Agency, America’s most powerful and secretive intelligence organization. In February 2006, while researching this book, Matthew Aid uncovered a massive and secret document reclassification program—a revelation that made the front page of the New York Times. This was only one of the discoveries Aid has made during two decades of research in formerly top-secret documents. In The Secret Sentry, Aid provides the first-ever full history of America’s largest security apparatus, the National Security Agency. This comprehensive account traces the growth of the agency from 1945 to the present through critical moments in its history, from the cold war up to its ongoing involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. Aid explores the agency’s involvement in the Iraqi weapons intelligence disaster, where evidence that NSA officials called “ambiguous” was used as proof of Iraqi WMD capacity, and details the intense debate within the NSA over its unprecedented role, pressed by the Bush-Cheney administration, in spying on U.S. citizens. Today, the NSA has become the most important source of intelligence for the U.S. government, providing 60 percent of the president’s daily intelligence briefing. While James Bamford’s New York Times bestseller The Shadow Factory covered the NSA since 9/11, The Secret Sentry contains new information about every period since World War II . It provides a shadow history of global affairs, from the creation of I srael to the War on Terror.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 10
 Looking Under the Covers November 11, 2009
Retired Reader (New Mexico)
The National Security Agency (NSA) wears one of the thicker cloaks of secrecy among the agencies of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). For this reason any book that purports to be "The Untold History of" the NSA ought to be viewed with suspicion. In this case however Matthew Aid has actually produced an accurate and compelling history of NSA. Perhaps equally important his book does not compromise any of NSA's sensitive sources and methods. This book can serve to provide the context for better understanding James Bamford's series of books on NSA and indeed to understand NSA itself.
That being said this book by necessity is very much a surface treatment of a very complex institution. For example it is focused entirely on the Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID) to the exclusion of NSA's equally important Information Assurance Directorate (IAD).
Also Aid is much too kind in his discussion of NSA management over the years. For example although he mentions the NSA unplanned three day outage, but fails to mention that NSA management had been repeatedly warned that this was exactly going to happen by folks both within the agency and by outside consultants for at least two years before the event (which was a lot more the "main processing computer"). As for General Hayden's fabled "100 Days of Change", it did not hit NSA "like a tidal wave", but more like another round of meaningless rhetoric. The only tangible result was the implementation of the disastrous `Trailblazer' initiative which succeeded in squandering millions of dollars and whatever goodwill NSA had left with the congress.
So a good book within limitations that provides probably the most solid unclassified history of NSA that has yet been written.
Bamford on Detail, Steele on Impact--Solid Five Stars October 17, 2009
Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States)
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
James Bamford is without peer in his understanding of the NSA. He supported it in its earlier books and turned against it in his most recent book, for the same reason we have turned against NSA: it does not provide a return on investment that is remotely tolerable by the taxpayer, who now has the added burden of warrantless wiretapping to deal with. NSA also ignored the Chinese threat that can now ride the electrical power lines into NSA's computers, and that is the real reason they want their own power generators (see our memorandum online, "Chinses Irregular Warfare"). In our judgement, the next President and the next Director of National Intelligence need to zero out the secret intelligence community, and start over, beginning with an Open Source Agency (see THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest) and a new Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as recommended by Charles Faddis in Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.
Bamford's trilogy on NSA in reverse chronological order:
The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency
The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization
We know Matthew Aid, his book should be considered a follow-on to the work of James Bamford, but as Bamford himself observes, the book on NSA leadership's high crimes and misdemeanors has yet to be written--it will start with fraud, waste, and abuse, and end with warrantless wiretapping and gross dereliction of duty.
Below are one line excerpts from his forthcoming NYT Review as printed in the Huffington Post; full paragraph excerpts are at the Public Intelligence Blog - Phi Beta Iota.
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One weakness that seems to recur is that the agency, set up in the wake of World War II to prevent another surprise attack, is itself frequently surprised by attacks and other serious threats.
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The most troubling pattern, however, is that the NSA, through gross incompetence, bad intelligence, or deliberate deception through the selective release of information, has helped to push the US into tragic wars.
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While much of the terrain Aid covers has been explored before, the most original areas in The Secret Sentry deal with the ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the NSA was forced to marry, largely unsuccessfully, its super-high-tech strategic capabilities in space with its tactical forces on the ground.
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Disappointingly, the weakest section of the book, mostly summaries of old news clips, deals with what may be the most important subject: the NSA's warrantless eavesdropping and its targeting of American communications.
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Beyond a brief mention, he also leaves other important aspects of the NSA's history unaddressed, including the tumultuous years in the mid-1970s when it was investigated by the Senate's Church Committee for decades of illegal spying; Trailblazer, the nearly decade-long failure to modernize the agency; and the NSA's increasingly important role in cyberwarfare and its implications in future wars.
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With supercomputers measured by the acre and estimated $70 million annual electricity bills for its headquarters, the agency has begun browning out, which is the reason for locating its new data centers in Utah and Texas. And as it pleads for more money to construct newer and bigger power generators, Aid notes, Congress is balking.
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Based on the NSA's history of often being on the wrong end of a surprise and a tendency to mistakenly get the country into, rather than out of, wars, it seems to have a rather disastrous cost-benefit ratio.
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END EXCERPTS
 Well-Done History of Fascinating Organization October 14, 2009
zorba (Bala Cynwyd, Pa USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is the most comprehensive history I've read about the NSA, but if it has a fault, it is what seems to be a slight tendency to overplay the agency's failures and underplay its many successes. However, the agency, faced with a Herculean -- arguably impossible -- task comports itself pretty well throughout the book. Also, the author seems to suffer from the same problem the agency does: far more information than he can process in a book of some 400 pages, almost a hundred pages of which are footnotes. But, I found it mostly interesting -- riveting in a few spots -- but Aid tried to do too much here. For instance, I think he would have had a better book if he had cut way back on the details about NSA's tactical role in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I wish he had gone into more detail about how the agency processes the enormous amounts of information it takes in, especially since he cites that as one of the major problem areas facing the NSA and, in fact, may be the one problem that may doom it. I always get a sense of dread when journalists write about our intelligence organizations because the articles or books often turn into political diatribes or they give away too much information that could be useful to our foes. I must say that Aid, unlike some others who write about NSA and seem to have a political agenda, mostly resists this unacceptable trend. "Mostly," I said. But, all in all, it's a pretty good book.
Secret Sentry best book on NSA History October 1, 2009
Carl G. Finstrom Jr. (VA)
Secret Sentry is by far the most comprehensive, up to date and detailed history of the National Security Agency and Signals intelligence in the USA. Outstanding use of references and sources. A land mark book.
Joe McCarthy would be proud September 19, 2009
A. Marciniszyn (Detroit, MI United States)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Not a book for the casual reader but an excellent overview of the NSA. The story begins during World War II and it is revealed that many countries, enemies and allies, were targeted by those working in Signals Intelligence. Cracking Russian codes began in January 1943 on the orders of Brigadier General Carter Clarke. The FBI's Special Intelligence Service knew about Russian spies in the United States (see The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence by Raymond J. Batvinis), but could do little about it. This book reveals why. Even though a large number of Soviet spies were identified in the late 1940s and the 1950s, there were not many criminal indictments or convictions. From this book: "But most of the agents who spied for Russia were never indicted because it might (?) have revealed U.S. success in breaking Russian codes." I mention Joseph McCarthy because of a new book titled Blacklisted by History by M. Stanton Evans. It is now obvious that he could not be allowed to succeed against a very real Soviet menace in the United States. In light of this, I think it is necessary to correlate this information and rewrite Cold War history, especially regarding the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union beginning in World War II. The Signals community could not publicly tell what it knew at the time.
That said, I am in general agreement with the other reviewers regarding NSA history from the Korean War to the present. I think any errors would only be apparent to those with specialized knowledge. In any case, it is disquieting to see that such intelligence was sometimes used selectively or disregarded, apparently on the hunch of those in charge in the military. The only "flaw" in the book is that the roles played by other intelligence agencies who were also gathering Signals Intelligence, especially the CIA, are not made quite clear. However, that would have likely expanded the page count considerably.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 10
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