Codevilla, Angelo. Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century. New York: The Free Press, 1992. 491 pages.

Angelo Codevilla, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, presents the conservative argument for major reform of the U.S. intelligence community. It's not because he has ethical objections to spying or covert action -- on the contrary, Codevilla is an admirer of Machiavelli. It's just that the taxpayers are not getting much more than incompetence and a self-serving bureaucracy for their $31 billion per year. To put it indelicately, U.S. intelligence is a boondoggle.

Over half of this budget figure is for expensive snooper satellites, many of which are focused so narrowly that they produce little that's useful. The rest is a combination of military and the CIA (the CIA gets $3.5 billion), and includes both technical and human intelligence. Counter- intelligence, mainly through the FBI, ends up with very little. To the extent that the CIA pretends to do counterintelligence at all, Codevilla feels that they're doing it all wrong. Moreover, the CIA's officers stationed in U.S. embassies throughout the world are useless, and the CIA should be stripped down to a clearinghouse. Unfortunately for his detractors, Codevilla is not just another professor with a new book: as a senior staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee from 1977 to 1985, he learned where all the billions are buried.
ISBN 0-02-911915-4

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