New Books in National Security

The CIA is a well-known agency to say the least. It is a key part of the United States’ national security apparatus and has been for the past 70 years. The CIA’s reputation is mixed though. From 1970s scandals to intelligence failures to its inherent secrecy, the agency can sometimes attract hostility and suspicion even from Americans. In his new book, The Foundation of the CIA: Harry Truman, The Missouri Gang and the Origins of the Cold War (University of Missouri Press, 2017), Richard E. Schroeder argues the agency filled an important hole in American national security in its creation, and does key intelligence work that must be considered in evaluating it. The Foundation of the CIA examines the creation and early years of the agency. Schroeder makes a strong argument that a centralized, permeant national intelligence agency was quite necessary for the United States. In each conflict before WWII, the United States set up systems for collecting intelligence and learned important techniques, but then lost these skills between conflicts. This loss could leave the United States vulnerable to threats when new conflicts emerged. Though the OSS, which served these needs during WWII, was terminated at the end of the war, the CIA was established shortly thereafter to meet these needs in a more permanent way. There were numerous challenges during the early years in the creation of the agency and for its first directors. Schroeder traces these foundations in his book. In this episode, Schroeder discusses his new book. He explains the need for the CIA and the important early years. Schroeder also introduces listeners to the Truman and the Missouri Gang to explain some of the important figures in these early years. Finally, Schroeder discusses the connection between this book and his own career in the CIA. His motivation to write this book stemmed from his career in the CIA and his time teaching students about national security. Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

Risk in Extreme Environments: Preparing, Avoiding, Mitigating, and Managing (Routledge, 2018), edited by Vicki Bier, is a series of multidisciplinary approaches to analysis of rare, severe risks. The essays demonstrate a wide variety of methods, from quantitative analysis to qualitative evaluation of organizations and case studies. Additionally, Risk in Extreme Environments tackles several hot-topics in risk management: managing black swans, balancing investments in preparedness versus response, and institutionalizing resilience. Bier and the other contributors do not stop at risk analysis, but also look at how to communicate risk analysis and translate analysis into good decision-making. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism (Columbia University Press, 2017), by Mark S. Hamm and Ramon Spaaij, identifies patterns among individuals that commit acts of terror outside of a group or network. Hamm and Spaaij follow these individuals, commonly called lone wolf terrorists, through multiple data points to inform a model of radicalization. The trends and changes in lone wolf terrorists, targets of violence, and radicalization pathways over time provides valuable insights for counterterrorism efforts. Finally, Hamm and Spaaij examine FBI sting operations that aim to prevent terrorist attacks. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

As a United States senator in the 1930s and 1940s, Arthur Vandenberg was one of the leading Republican voices shaping the nation’s foreign policy. Though initially a staunch isolationist, as Hendrik Meijer explains in Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Vandenberg eventually became one of the foremost advocates for America’s engagement with the world. As a young man Vandenberg embarked upon a career as a journalist, and soon rose to become the editor of the local newspaper in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Vandenberg’s platform made him a force in state politics, and his editorials enjoyed a national readership among Republican leaders. Appointed to the Senate in 1928, Vandenberg soon made a name for himself for his ability to compromise on legislation, and with the electoral decimation of the party in Congress in the 1930s he emerged as one of its most prominent figures. Meijer details the ways in which Vandenberg used his stature to shape American policy, from his role in the drafting of the United Nations Charter to his involvement in the passage of the Marshall Plan and the treaty that established NATO. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

On May 23, 1957, US Army Sergeant Robert Reynolds was acquitted of murdering Chinese officer Liu Ziran in Taiwan. Reynolds did not deny shooting Liu but claimed self-defense and, like all members of US military assistance and advisory groups, was protected under diplomatic immunity. Reynolds’s acquittal sparked a series of riots across Taiwan that became an international crisis for the Eisenhower administration and raised serious questions about the legal status of US military forces positioned around the world. In American Justice in Taiwan: The 1957 Riots and Cold War Foreign Policy (Kentucky University Press, 2017), Stephen G. Craft provides a multi-archival study of the causes and consequences of the Reynolds trial and the ensuing protests. After more than a century of what they perceived as unfair treaties imposed by Western nations, the Taiwanese regarded the special legal status of resident American personnel with extreme distrust. While Eisenhower and his advisers considered Taiwan to be a vital ally against Chinese communism, the US believed that the Taiwanese government had instigated the unrest in order to protest the verdict and demand legal jurisdiction over GIs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

In Insider Threats (Cornell University Press, 2017), co-editors Matthew Bunn and Scott D. Sagan bring together a series of case studies and lessons learned spanning public and private sectors. Essays include discussions of the American anthrax attacks and the Fort Hood shooting with examinations of organizational issues that allow insider threats to emerge. A study of the gaming and pharmaceutical industries provides alternative frameworks to preventing theft and loss. Insider Threats concludes with a “Worst Practices Guide,” to help high-security organizations dismantle assumptions that lead to security vulnerabilities. Read more about Insider Threats at the Belfer Center. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

The Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the World (Brookings Institution Press, 2017) is an important and in depth study of American interaction with the intricate concept of Sovereignty, from the Founding Fathers to Donald Trump. Stewart Patrick delineates for the reader the fraught concept of sovereignty, showing how it has changed in both meaning and importance for Americans since the foundation of the United States. Going back to John Locke and going forward to John Bolton, Patrick demonstrates that sovereignty is not a static or monolithic concept or idea, but one which is both flexible and enduring. Stewart Patrick is the James H. Binger senior fellow in global governance and director of the International Institutions and Global Governance Program at the Council on Foreign Relations. Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

The Transparency Fix: Secrets, Leaks, and Uncontrollable Government Information (Stanford University Press, 2017) dispels the myth that transparency of information will result in a perfect government. Dr. Mark Fenster discusses the motivations of transparency movements and justifications for state secrecy. Through the lens of communications theory, Fenster raises questions about the utility of disclosed information and how it may or may not be deemed valuable by the public. Fenster also examines the state’s ability to keep secrets and what, if any, outcomes result from information disclosure. In conclusion, Fenster asserts transparency, on its own, will not fix the state, but focused efforts on good governance just might. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

David Morgan-Owen‘s The Fear of Invasion: Strategy, Politics, and British War Planning, 1880-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2017) tells a complex story clearly and concisely. In the decades prior to the Great War, British preparations for defense of its commercial and imperial interests were warped by fears of an invasion of the home islands. The specter of a French, or after 1905, a German invasion prevented British officials in the Cabinet, the War Office, and the Admiralty from thinking clearly about how to prosecute a European war. Planning to prevent or defeat an enemy landing kept the Royal Navy in a defensive mindset and kept the British Army from thinking clearly about sending an expedition to the continent. Ironically, whether or not the French or Germans themselves had any clear plans to invade Britain went largely undiscussed. As Morgan-Owen makes clear in the interview, even those who consider themselves well-read on the subject of British grand strategy will learn much. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security

From the export of the Chicago Police Department’s interrogation experts to Iraq after 2003, to casual references of the US-Indian Wars by US soldiers in Vietnam, Race and America’s Long War (University of California Press, 2017) highlights how the policies and cultural norms of war have become deeply intertwined with, and often dependent on, the architecture of racial difference inside and outside the United States. Blurring the lines between domestic and international affairs, configurations of war represent subtle and direct continuities of US imperialism, colonialism, and structural racism, sometimes across centuries and other times within the same Presidential administration. This book is a collection of essays by Nikhil Pal Singh in which he traces the racialized narratives of security in the United States from the settler colonial wars to acquire Indigenous land, through several centuries of slavery and the period of Reconstruction that followed, through the Civil Rights era and Black Freedom struggles to the Vietnam and Iraq Wars among many other periods and movements, and finally in the context of the more amorphous Wars on Drugs and Terror. Singh draws out one of the core paradoxes of contemporary liberalism, long posited as a remedy to perpetual war, in highlighting that while, “racial exclusion and inclusion have arisen in tandem, so have colorblindness and multiculturalism.” Published in a year of political transition often depicted as a grave departure from the country’s structural and moral past, Singh alternatively frames the current political crisis in terms of five hundred years of continuous inner- and outer-wars, suggesting alternatively that this political transition is a period to confront the long held norms of public life that produced it. Nikhil Pal Singh is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History. He is author of Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. Anna Levy is an independent researcher and policy analyst with interests in critical political economy, historical memory, histories and philosophies of normalization, accountability politics, science and technology, and structural inequality. She is based in Brooklyn, NY. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/national-security