Rating: 
Summary: Comprehensive information packaged into poor writing.
Review: As with Bamford's "Puzzle Palace", if you want information on the NSA, "Body of Secrets" is one of the few comprehensive books you'll find. Unfortunately, Bamford needs to learn how to write. Chapters are chaotic. He even includes entire chapters that have nothing to do with the NSA! Grammatical problems abound. I'm surprised it was published in such a state of disarray. Nevertheless, you will marvel at Bamford's voluminous and generally objective information on this fascinating agency.
Rating: 
Summary: Many Inaccuracies
Review: Aside from the shotgun approach Mr. Bamford uses to fill his book with all sorts of tangential information remotely relating to the NSA, his style approaches the fevered tone of a Tom Clancy novel. He also seems to be deficient in all technical aspects of sigint collection. His errors in this regard are too numerous, and are mostly of interest to specialists, to detail here. However, my biggest criticism concerns his obvious bias and errors of fact about the Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty (AGTR 5.) No one disputes that the attack took place. The big questions are why and was it deliberate. In Mr. Bamford previous book "The Puzzle Palace," he offers the reason that the Israelis did not want the world to know that they were winning a lopsided victory and force a cease fire before they captured the Golan Heights. An examination of the time-line of events reveals that at the time of the Liberty attack, the extent of Israel's victory was obvious to all intelligence agencies and news services. In "Body of Secrets," he instead offers the reason that the Israeli's were killing prisoners in El Arish and wanted to keep the killings a secret. Mr. Bamford offers no credible evidence that such an action took place, nor do any other sources provide such evidence. His chapter on the Israeli assault on the Liberty is filled with factual errors: the ship's name was not painted in black letters; the Israeli aircraft did not carry 1,000-pound bombs or rockets. They were equipped with cannon, Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, and napalm. The napalm, one canister may have hit the ship, did not turn the Liberty into a "crematorium." The U.S. Navy's court of inquiry stated that no napalm wounds were treated Lastly, Mr. Bamford claims that the recollections of Chief Petty Officer Marvin Nowicki prove that the Israelis saw the American flag on the Liberty and knew the ship?s nationality before the attack. Marvin Nowicki was a supervisor and Hebrew linguist on the Navy EC-121 circling above the action and monitoring the radio transmissions. Nowicki stated in a letter to The Wall Street Journal, that he told Bamford just the opposite, and sent Bamford an e-mail on 3 March 2000 setting out the facts. His position, Nowicki declared, was that the aircraft and motor torpedo boats prosecuted the attack on the Liberty until their operators had an opportunity to get close-in and see the flag, hence the references to the flag; and the attack was a gross error. The now-available transcript of the EC-121 intercepts bears out Nowicki's statement.
Rating:
Summary: An axe to grind
Review: This otherwise thorough history of the NSA is tainted by several major flaws. The book covers fascinating bits of history from the USS Pueblo and USS Liberty incidents to stories of electronic espionage from the arctic to central Africa.
One of the problems is focus. Bamford often digresses, for example, he writes profusely about the betrayal of the bay of pigs and the cuban missile crises and when he does this, he is diverging far from subject matter of the NSA and cryptology.
The quality of writing and style is most inconsistent and makes me wonder if an initially broadly researched topic was rushed towards the end of the writing process.
Overall, I would only recommend Body of Secrets to those especially interested in espionage history and technology. There are amazing facts to be gleaned after sorting through the chaff.. Never thought there were so many divisions. Bamford takes the reader from the beginnings of NSA during the early cold war, through the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War, to the sophisticated developments in information technology taking place within NSA today in the final chapter. The various directors are studied. Bobby Inmann from Texas is an interesting and odd story. Only 2 women have been deputy directors. Bamford appears to alert us as to when lying by public officials began. He tells of President Eisenhower's decision to lie to the public in order to protect a national-security secret, but he takes the story a step farther and shows how Eisenhower "went so far as to order his Cabinet officers to hide his involvement in the scandal even while under oath. At least one Cabinet member directly lied to the committee, a fact known to Eisenhower." Was this a first? One more 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 U.S. 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." This one is truly scary. Says a lot about power. Bamford tells of the headquarters, known as "Crypto City," which has its own totally self-contained community. They are complete unto themselves. A fiefdom. What NSA is capable of certainly makes me uneasy: more and more sophisticated surveillance techniques can enfringe upon the basic rights of individual privacy. In a computer system that can store five trillion pages of text, anyone and everyone can be monitored. It brings up the unspoken question: Should we do this just because we are able to? The NSA is the largest, most secretive, and most powerful intelligence agency in the world, but even it had its moment of breakdown. Not 2 weeks after NSA had survived Y2K, the complete computer system went down for 3 days. Talk about a secret! But how did Bramford find out? That is a story in itself. I would think that Body of Secrets is a must-read for people fascinated by the intrigues of a shadowy underworld, actually all U.S. citizens. Orwell's Big Brother has arrived.
Rating: 
Summary: Very good, highly readable history, with flaws
Review: Since 9/11, I have read many books about our national security and intelligence operations, and found this book to stand out among them. It is relatively recent, very thorough, and highly readable. It gives the reader a rare and revealing look at the inner workings of the NSA, much, if not all, of which will be completely new to most readers. I was very interested and surprised to learn of the enormity of the organization and of its storied history, accomplishments, and failures. It makes for fascinating reading, and is written in a highly accessible style. Some flaws: - The organization by body parts, playing off the name "Body of Secrets" - is confusing and gimmicky. So, chapters are titled "Muscle," "Heart" "Adrenalin" etc. - Perhaps too much time is spent on particular episodes. Fascinating though they may be, at some point the detail overwhelms the place the episode plays in the history of the agency. - The Liberty section suffers from an overly emotional approach. It's clear that the author found evidence that he felt showed the Israelis knew the Liberty was an American NSA ship, and that this evidence outraged the author. While we may certainly understand and sympathize with such feelings of outrage, the author's responsibility in a non-fictional, historical account should be to refrain from letting personal emotions cloud the writing - in fact, such emotionalism seriously detracts from the author's credibility. The point of the book is to write a history of the NSA, and not to "expose" what really happened over thirty years ago. I found particularly disappointing the author's reliance on very flimsy evidence to conclude that the entire six-day war was based on Israeli deception and that major war crimes were routinely committed. In short, I think the book is well worth reading, and would caution people to simply read the Liberty discussion with normal, healthy skepticism. I do not believe that the author's views on that topic should cause people to disregard the book or view the rest of it as untrustworthy.
Rating: 
Summary: Informative and Highly Entertaining.......Recommended
Review: Body of Secrets is a detailed expose in the NSA as well as an informative history of the ultra secret organization. The first few chapters deal with major events and their relationship with the NSA (eg. Vietnam, Korea, Israel and the Six Day War, etc.).
The final four or five chapters deal with the NSA's operations and recent history. For a spy buff, this is very interesting. The best thing about Body of Secrets is that it is written to entertain as well as inform. Bamford realizes that the best way for your audience to digest information is to enjoy reading it. Overall, it would appear that exhaustive research has gone into the book and the author deserves credit. Highly recommended
Rating:
Summary: Biased and Disorganized
Review: The author's anti-establishment bias shows in every chapter. The book has no logical organization, no evident chapter themes, no structural consistency, no recognized method of citation for source material. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition
Rating:
Summary: Presents the right facts and makes you think!!!!
Review: I see many people have criticised James Bamford fact presentation and asked readers to view it as fictional. Well it is not fictional to think that Isreal's intention in USS Liberty's case was to sink it completely and then put the blame on Egypt. Unfortunately USS Liberty turned out to be a hard piece of metal to sink. It makes you think that how Israel could possibly play both sides and get USA involed in a mess of hatred that dates back centuries.
Rating: 
Summary: A Weak Finish
Review: I bought this book on a whim after realizing that Mr. Bamford also wrote The Puzzle Palace. I call it a whim because I have neither read The Puzzle Palace, nor have I ever been interested in the NSA. The majority of the book is dedicated to the operational aspects of gathering signals intelligence. This is, by far, the most compelling subject contained therein. Mr. Bamford does a fine job of describing the sacrifices made by aircrews of RB-47s and EC-121s, along with sailors on the USS Liberty and USS Pueblo. Their mission was to collect as much communist SIGINT as possible without starting a war. Body of Secrets is generally broken into episodes from the last half of the previous century. Some episodes are worth mentioning more than others. Mr. Bamford devotes a substantial chapter to the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty stationed in the Mediterranean in 1967. The facts speak for themselves: Israeli jets and torpedo boats launched multiple attacks on a non-hostile American vessel. As a result 34 Americans died and 171 more were wounded. Mr. Bamford's conclusion that the attack was deliberate has generated some controversy, and for good reason. Most would doubt that Israel would brazenly mount an attack to sink an American ship. I am of this opinion. The author attempts to substantiate his conclusion using SIGINT evidence gathered by an EC-121 during the attack. The final five chapters, which deal most specifically with the organizational aspects of the NSA, make for slow reading. In fact, I found myself skipping over the majority of these pages. Mr. Bamford does little to dispel the caricature of a calculator-toting weenie, the image most would have of an NSA cryptologist. There have to be some interesting, if not eccentric, individuals working in Crypto City. I wouldn't know from this book. The only part that kept my attention was the description of polygraph exams administered to NSA employees, along some of the more unsavory techniques performed in the 1950s. The afterword has the feel of a "Dateline" feature; it is only a summary of the events of September 11. Unfortunately, Mr. Bamford's catch phrase, "According to information obtained for Body of Secrets...", does not appear anywhere in the afterword. The reader is not presented with any new evidence regarding the terrorist plot, other than the fact that NSA can listen in on bin Laden when he uses a satellite phone to call his wife.
Rating:
Summary: A citation system that the nsa would love...
Review: Many other readers have commented on the poor quality of this book and i agree 100%. The most troubling aspect of the book for me is the citation system. The author makes it very hard to track down sources used for the book. Furthermore the author does not use footnotes, endnotes or in text citations. If you are curious about the source of information you must turn to the back of the book where there are "citations" (if you can cal them that) arranged by page number. Many times the author uses supposed direct quotations without any reference to the source. The book should be read as a work of fiction...
Rating:
Summary: Great
Review: Great book, I believe this is one of those books that must be read.
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