"Spycraft": a good look at the CIA — of the past

"Spycraft: The Secret History

of the CIA's Spytechs from Communism to Al-Qaeda"

by Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton with Henry Robert Schlesinger

Dutton, 535 pp., $29.95

The title "Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs from Communism to Al-Qaeda" sets a high bar for its authors, and they don't fully live up to it.

That's because "Spycraft" is more about Communism than it is about al-Qaida, which gets scant mention. And the last chapter in the book, "Spies and the Age of Information," lays out today's challenges, which make spy technology from decades past seem downright quaint and very outdated, while giving readers too little information to apprise them of what's up in today's secret fight against the country's enemies.

If there's any assurance to be drawn from the book, it comes in the examples of innovation and resourcefulness shown in the past by the Central Intelligence Agency's developers of miniature cameras, invisible writing, audio-surveillance gear and encrypting methods. If that ingenuity continues in the digital age, then the country has a chance in the war on terrorism.

But we may have to wait another 40 years to find out how it went. For "Spycraft," the CIA's Publication Review Board approved an outline in 2004, and a 774-page manuscript in 2005. But in 2006, the board deemed 740 pages "inappropriate for disclosure in the public domain." After appeals to the board and to higher-ups at the spy agency, the authors — Robert Wallace, H. Keith Melton and Henry Robert Schlesinger — finally received approval to print "virtually all of the original manuscript."

Access to those bigwigs may have been helped by Wallace's 32-year career in the CIA, including seven years as deputy director and director of the agency's Office of Technical Service. According to the book's publicist, Wallace was also CIA station chief agent in Seattle earlier in his career.

After years of exposure to James Bond, "Mission: Impossible" and "Get Smart," it's tempting to dismiss spy gadgetry with a blasé "isn't that the way it's supposed to be?" But the book's stories of stealth and engineering rarely fail to amaze: Audio devices that can pick up conversations in a room through a pin hole. False silicone ears to cover receiving devices in earpieces used to pick up KGB radio transmissions, so agents would know when they were under surveillance. And while in the digital age we are used to tiny cameras, the CIA came up with a spy camera that could hold film, lens and shutter in an aluminum casing 1.5 inches long and 3/8-inch in diameter.

Not all CIA efforts worked — the effort to implant listening devices in pet cats being a prime example.

But while the stories on the development and use of spy gadgets are fascinating, the book is most valuable when it explains where espionage fits into national policy and diplomacy, and what good all this sneaking and peeking does the country.

The book recounts the key roles information collected from spies played in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) later in the 1960s and 1970s. Invisible writing methods hidden in mail sent between family members and prisoners of war in North Vietnam helped the U.S. learn the identities of other servicemen being held.

Information's vital role puts into perspective the enormity of betrayal by those who spied for the U.S.S.R. The book documents the havoc wreaked and the lives lost because of such men as Robert Hanssen, Aldrich Ames and Edward Lee Howard, who all sold information to the Soviets.

The preface suggests two choices on how to read the book: First read Chapters 1 through 19 on the story of spy-gear development, and then take on Chapters 20 to 24 about "the doctrine and terminology of espionage operations." Or, do that in reverse.

Here's another suggestion: Skip Chapters 20 through 24. Much of the information is repetitive, and it's difficult to understand why these chapters couldn't have been blended into the earlier ones.

Despite its flaws, "Spycraft" demonstrates the great ingenuity of the nation's chief spy agency and offers hope for the future — if you accept that a necessary part of the future is having the CIA skulking around the world in pursuit of ridding it of enemies of the United States.

If you are a doubter, this book may go a long way toward convincing you that the nation's past survival depended on its spy agencies, and that the technologies of the future will demand even more of them.

John B. Saul is a former editor at

The Seattle Times and teaches journalism

at the University of Montana. He can

be reached at jbsaul@me.com