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Title: Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage by Philip Taubman ISBN: 0-684-85699-9 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 12 March, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.78 (9 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: No new information here
Comment: 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: 5
Summary: The things I didn't know about espionage!
Comment: 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.
Rating: 1
Summary: Not worth your time
Comment: 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.
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Title: Khrushchev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman ISBN: 0393051447 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: The Main Enemy : The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB by James Risen, Milton Bearden ISBN: 0679463097 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 06 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda by Thomas Powers ISBN: 1590170237 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: December, 2002 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby by John Prados ISBN: 0195128478 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Eye in the Sky: The Story of the Corona Spy Satellites by Dwayne A. Day, John M. Logsdon, Brian Latell ISBN: 1560987731 Publisher: Smithsonian Institution Press Pub. Date: August, 1999 List Price(USD): $16.05 |
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