Product Description

The NSA is the largest, most secretive and most powerful intelligence agency in the world. It dwarfs the CIA in budgets, manpower and influence. Using internal documents and interviews with NSA officials, this text offers details about the workings of the agency. It exposes the role the NSA played in many Soviet bloc Cold War conflicts and discusses its undercover involvement in the Vietnam War. Author, James Bamford, also looks at the technological advances that the NSA have employed since 1985 and brings to light the NSA's network of global surveillance ranging from on-line listening post to intelligence-gathering satellites. Bamford warns that the NSA is a double-edged sword, its eavesdropping offers the potential for tracking down terrorists and uncovering nuclear weapons deals, but it also has the capacity to listen in on global personal communications.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36236 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 736 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
James Bamford's explosive book, Body of Secrets, not only lifts the lid on the world's most powerful intelligence agency, but warns that it is a double-edged sword. Everybody knows about the CIA--the cloak-and-dagger branch o f the US government. Many fewer are familiar with the National Security Agency, even though it has been more important to American espionage in recent years than its better-known counterpart. The NSA is responsible for much of the intelligence gathering done via technology such as satellites and the Internet. Its home office in Maryland "contains what is probably the largest body of secrets ever created".

Little was known about the agency's confidential culture until veteran journalist James Bamford blew the lid off in 1982 with his bestseller The Puzzle Palace. Still, much remained in the shadows. In Body of Secrets, Bamford throws much more light on his subject--and he reveals loads of shocking information. The story of the U-2 crisis in 1960 is well known, including President Eisenhower's decision to tell a fib to the public in order to protect a national-security secret. Bamford takes the story a disturbing step forward, showing how Eisenhower "went so far as to order his Cabinet officers to hide his involvement in the scandal eve n while under oath. At least one Cabinet member directly lied to the committee, a fact known to Eisenhower". Even more worrisome is another revelation, from the Kennedy years: "The Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the US government. In the name of anticommunism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba."

Body of Secrets is an incredible piece of journalism, and it paints a deeply troubling portrait of an agency about which the public knows next to nothing. Fans of The Sword and the Shield will want to read it, as will anybody who is intrigued by conspiracies and real-life spy stories. --John J. Miller

Literary Review
‘Bamford has managed…to unearth one major scandal of international dimensions’

Manchester Evening News
‘…paced like a Forsyth thriller.’

Customer Reviews

Allegations of High Crimes, Murder, and Fatal Negligence
A book like Body of Secrets is impossible to rate accurately this soon after publication. If its claims were all true, it would deserve beyond five stars. If its claims were all untrue, it would not deserve one star. With so many sensational claims, surely the truth lies somewhere in between. But where? On the one hand, I don't know. On the other hand, I sure would like to know. These allegations are so serious that they demand verification or refutation by objective parties. To properly reflect my ignorance, I have split the difference and given the book three stars. The only thing I know for sure is that this is the wrong rating for the book. I apologize to the author and to readers for my inability to do better.

From the book's title, a reader might imagine that the subject is a history of the National Security Agency (often referred to as "No Such Agency"). This organization provides the bulk of signal and electronic intelligence gathering and code breaking for the United States.

I was attracted to the book because I love reading about how codes are broken and countermeasures developed. Well, there's almost nothing about the details of either subject here. But the book got off to a fast start for me by identifying that the United States had a commanding edge in code breaking between 1945 and 1948 due to piggy backing on the expertise of captured Germans who had broken the main Soviet codes and those of many other countries. In many other places in the book, there are excellent descriptions of how technology was used to capture electronic information and the locations of defensive bases in the former Soviet Union. I was especially fascinated by how signals could be captured from stray reflections from the moon, and other far away locations could sometimes listen in very effectively to what was occurring thousands of miles away.

The book primarily addresses the major international relations issues the United States has dealt with since 1945, with as much of a focus as is possible on whatever connection the NSA had to the event. Here's where the reader's attention is attracted. I could outline over 30 places where significant issues were raised that I had never heard about before.

Let me list just a few where high-level U.S. policy decisions were involved.

(1) General MacArthur was alerted by the NSA that Communist Chinese intervention in Korea was almost certain if he proceeded north. General MacArthur told President Truman that this was highly unlikely. If true, this meant that much of the dying and wounding in Korea on all sides was unnecessary.

(2) President Eisenhower ordered his cabinet to lie under oath about his involvement in the U-2 overflights over the Soviet Union.

(3) The Joint Chiefs failed to let President Kennedy know that the CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion plan had no chance so they would have the opportunity to propose a U.S. invasion of Cuba.

(4) The Joint Chiefs recommended to President Kennedy that an incident be staged in the United States involving murders of U.S. citizens to provide an excuse to invade Cuba.

(5) President Johnson refused to hold an inquiry into the Israeli destruction of the electronic surveillance ship, USS Liberty, during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War as part of a cover-up of Israeli atrocities in the Sinai. Please note that a number of reviewers have challenged the accuracy of this allegation.

(6) Putting another electronic surveillance ship, USS Pueblo, into Korean waters represented an unacceptable potential danger to U.S. intelligence secrets and the crew of the Pueblo.

(7) During the Vietnam War, U.S. forces routinely transmitted signals in clear or using homemade codes that were easily broken. This meant that most offensive and defensive plans were compromised, and often turned into ambushes. Despite warnings by the NSA, senior military officials continued to ignore the need to enforce basic signal security precautions. Once again, this suggests that hundreds of thousands may have died or been wounded unnecessarily as a result.

The book has some obvious weaknesses. First, where there is a lot of information available, the reader also gets a lot of information. For example, the attacks on the USS Liberty and USS Pueblo are quite long sections. Also, Mr. Bamford seems to have picked up a lot of random statistics on Crypto City, and I think they are all in this book. I didn't really need to know that there's a Taco Bell there. Second, with allegations as fundamental as these, any author would assume that challenges would follow. I found that the arguments were usually presented without much of an attempt to balance the likely counter-arguments. Third, how can you write so little about code breaking (as I mentioned earlier) in a book about the world's premier code breaking organization? There is a lot of public domain information that could have been referenced, if nothing else. Fourth, the book lacks a clear set of proposals for how to manage a large secret organization like the NSA as part of a democracy.

I would like to commend and thank the NSA and its leadership for their cooperation in helping make this book possible. Even though I still don't understand very much about what the NSA does, I'm glad that I know more than I did before I started reading this book.

After you finish Body of Secrets, I suggest that you think about where secrecy helps and hurts the United States. How should we be pursuing appropriate uses of secrecy, while upholding our governmental and personal ideals?

Watch what you say . . . whether or not it is a secret!

Donald Mitchell...

Doesn't do what it says on the tin!
"Body of Secrets: How America's NSA and Britain's GCHQ Eavesdrop On The World". Really? As a British reader I was interested in how GCHQ operates; you'll learn virtually nothing buying this book! This is essentially a history of the U.S. intelligence services with some passing references to "foreign" agencies such as GCHQ. Don't get me wrong, this is a well researched and interesting book but it isn't what it claims to be. Interestingly the U.S. version of the book is entitled "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency", so it would appear that the U.K. version is simply a re-badged version of this one.

Entertaining, but alarming
As a general introduction to the NSA and its activities this book is succinct, despite its 700 pages, and from what i understand accurate. The bonus from my point of view is learning of their involvement, passive or otherwise in certain recent (last 50 years) historical matters- Cuban missile crisis, cold war, Bay of Pigs etc. It does raise questions of how much monitoring goes on, under whose authority and what purposes that intelligence is put to.
The original 'war footing' brief of the NSA seemed to become outdated in the demise of the cold war and indeed the resources of the NSA were put to domestic and non military targets- this is questionable in the light of privacy and human rights issues, however after recent tragic world events the scope of their work is likely to increase somewhat.
The subject matter is well explained and you will soon find yourself understanding the acronyms and terms. If you are in anyway interested in the role of the security services in our lives do take time to read this book.
As it is becoming evident that our lives are being ruled by information and access to it, this book serves as a good introduction of what has happened, is happening and what could happen. The changing governers of our lives, information and corporations- Body of secrets covers information, try Noreena Hertz The Silent Takeover for a view on corporate influences on our lives.