Bledowska, Celina and Bloch, Jonathan. KGB/CIA: Intelligence and Counter-
Intelligence Operations. New York: Exeter Books, 1987. 192 pages.
At first blush, Bledowska and Bloch's KGB/CIA looks like yet another
oversized coffee-table picture book -- one that, inexplicably, turns out to
feature Cold War spooks rather than English gardens or the restored Sistine
Chapel. In fact, the book's well-chosen pictures tell a story in themselves.
But Bledowska and Bloch have also produced a literate, fast-moving narrative
that succinctly lays out their well-informed, independent perspective on
forty-odd years of spooking. As freelance journalists based in Britain, the
two have a salutary distance from apocalyptic Cold War attitudes. And as
Bloch was once targeted by Britain's wretched Official Secrets Act (see his
"British Intelligence and Covert Action"), they don't take at face value
every claim about "the interests of national security."
Books about intelligence often suffer from a deficient sense of
proportion -- overestimating the importance of some forgotten covert op, or
getting bogged down in technical arcana. This one treats intelligence work
as just one more human activity, one that ought to be subject to the same
rational and moral standards we apply to anything else. For a beginning
reader on the world of "intelligence," this is a reliable overview.
-- Steve Badrich
ISBN 0-671-08929-3
Extract the names from this source
Back to search page