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Summary: Body of Secrets
Review: The accounts of cold war incidents like the attack on the USS Liberty read like a good novel. Also , very interesting are the more documentary segments about some of the clandestine activities of people like Ariel Sharon. I found the small errors of fact like his references to .50 caliber machine guns on the Liberty as 50 mm machine guns mildly annoying in a book purporting to uncover the truth of many secret activites. All in all it's an informative and interesting book worth the reading.
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Summary: Great Research Book for Writers
Review: Bamford's book, "The Puzzle Palace" is now considered a classic.
"Body of Secrets" has a wealth of information for those like myself - writers doing research about the Cold War era - and should also be considered a classic in time. Bamford has written about areas of intelligence that only those men and women involved in the Cold War know and can't tell. They are all under an oath of silence, even after 40 years.Bamford managed to get into the Top Secret Archives at NSA. Wish I could. Trish Schiesser, Literary Consultant and Author.
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Summary: Bamford does not "get it"
Review: I had a difficult time distinguishing fact from fiction as Bamford most certainly authored this with a biased view. It wasn't even worth finishing.
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Summary: Castro and the United States
Review: I wish I had the e-mail address of the author , James Bamford. I would tell him the following: If every other story is as accurate as yor portion covered in Chapter 5 on the secret activities of the Castro Government with our Government just before the assasination of President Kennedy, this book is a very, very historical book. To confirm this, the book "Secret Missions to Cuba : Fidel Castro, Bernardo Benes and Cuban Miami" is a historical testimony of the statement made by a diplomat from Guinea to our UN Official, William Atwood ( page 129 ) on Fidel Castro's willigness and desire for a reproachment with Washington, D.C.. And this was in 1963, almost 40 years ago.
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Summary: EXPLAINS THE ORIGIN OF THE ASSASSINATION OF JFK
Review: Perhaps without appreciating the importance of his discoveries for understanding the origins of the conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy, James Bamford's BODY OF SECRETS (2001) reveals the preoccupation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, especially its chairman, Lyman Lemnitzer, with invading Cuba and removing Castro, an approach to which President Kennedy proved a major obstacle. Everyone who cares about our country needs to understand this development.Take a good look at pages 78 (bottom) to 91 (top), which discusses Eisenhower's preoccupation with Cuba and his suggestion that, if no actual pretext for an attack were available, then a pretext (a phony event) might be created that could be used to justify an invasion of the island. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General Lyman Lemnitzer, took this message to heart and because obsessed with the Communist threat and the destruction of Castro. A report from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to the President warned of the major problem with right-wing extremism running through the military. "Among the key targets of the extremists, the committee said, was the Kennedy administration's domestic social program, which many ultraconservatives accused of being communistic. The 'thesis of the nature of the Communist threat', the report warned, 'often is developed by equating social legislation with socialism, and the latter with Communism . .'" "For those military officers who were sitting on the fence, the Kennedy administration's botched Bay of Pigs invasion was the last straw. 'The Bay of Pigs fiasco broke the dike', said one report at the time. 'President Kennedy was pilloried by the superpatriots as a "no win" chief. . . . The Far Right became a fount of proposals born of frustration and put forward in the name of anti-Communism. . . ." The Joint Chiefs prepared a plan, called OPERATION NORTHWOODS, which "called for a war in which many patriotic Americans and innocent Cubans would die senseless deaths--all to satisfy the egos of twisted generals back in Washington, safe in their taxpayer-financed homes and limousines. . . ." It reflects what can only be adequately described as a form of group-insanity that had overtaken them. These plans included blowing up the NASA rocket carrying John Glenn into space; arranging a series of fabricated attacks upon our base at Guantanamo Bay; blowing up a ship in Guantanamo Bay and blaming Cuba, where "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of indignation"; a Communist terror campaign in Florida; sinking a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated); or loading a plane full of college students into a chartered airline that would be shot down over Cuba. "Lemnitzer was a dangerous--perhaps even unbalanced--right-wing extremist in an extraordinarily sensitive position during a critical period. But OPERATION NORTHWOODS also had the support of every single member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and even senior Pentagon offical Paul Nitze argued in favor of provoking a phony war with Cuba. The fact that the most senior member of all the services and the Pentagon could be so out of touch with reality and the meaning of democracy would be hidden for forty years." Now, given this background, it is no stretch to imagine that the Chiefs came to the conclusion that the only obstacle between them and a Cuban invasion was their Commander in Chief himself. The President's enormous popularity meant, in their minds, that his assassination by a pro-Cuban, Communist sympathizer would not only remove a weak and spineless leader from the nation's stage but almost certainly lead the country to rise up and demand retaliation by a full-fleged invasion of Cuba that would--finally and permanently--rid the world of Castro and demonstrate the importance of the military power exercised by the Chiefs. This plan was far more elegant than blowing up a plane-full of college students, because the only casualities would be a pinko-wimp president and a suitable designated patsy, a small price to pay for strengthening freedom and democracy. Although Bamford himself may not realize it, he has identified the most important missing piece of the puzzle as to why JFK was killed. BODY OF SECRETS provides a framework that illuminates everything we know about the death of our 35th president, which has now been published in ASSASSINATION SCIENCE and in MURDER IN DEALEY PLAZA.
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Summary: Disappointing follow-up to Puzzle Palace
Review: I read the author's previous book when it first came out. It was a ground-breaking exploration of the NSA and the role it has played. I stopped reading Body of Secrets after 85 pages because it veered suddenly into unsubstantiated conspiracy-theory hogwash. The text has no footnotes, so it is impossible to find the author's source precisely. However he has page indexed notes at the back which cite zany assasination-theory groups (the kind with the storefronts at Dealey Plaza!) Too bad he couldn't stick to the facts about a truly fascinating subject.
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Summary: ENEMY OF THE STATE REVISITED
Review: This book is a mix of facts and controversial episodes in SIGINT. But if you think that Enemy of the State is merely a science fiction movie, and that computers evolved only because of private inventive or effort, then you should read this book. The influence of Government's extensive funding and research, under the NSA umbrella, upon the development of modern computers is exposed in its magnitude and purpose. The author also dwells with the episode of KFK assassination, which has more to do with the CIA than the NSA. Some interesting episodes are presented in a different light, but then we get a chapter that deals with the attack to the USS Liberty by the Israelis, which is still a very controverted issue.
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Summary: The Realities of American "Democracy"
Review: The book contains many notable facts, such as the gory details of the attack on the spy ship, USS Liberty, by Israel. Those who believe in Israeli infallibility will be dismayed to learn that only one of six torpedoes hit this plodding old liberty ship, already partly disabled by small-bore cannon fire, which is the only reason anybody onboard survived. The larger message that comes through is that our "bipartisan" foreign policy elite is totally out of control. The way the events of September 11, 2001 have been manipulated to increase the power of those most responsible for that debacle is the final death notice for the legalistic notion of constitutional government. Both the U.S. Congress and the voters have completely abidicated their responsibilities, not for the first, but perhaps for the last time. As for U.S. domestic policies, they are best described as "dividing up the booty," with the Democrats representing the education-welfare complex and the GOP, the military-industrial complex. Bamford did err on one technicality: the NSA rarely collects "electrons," doing so only when it taps an electrical circuit. Electromagnetic radiation is transmitted by photons, which have energy and momentum, but no (known) mass, whether the medium is the atmosphere, outer space, or fiber optics. Receivers (optical or radio frequency) convert the energy in the photons into a stream of electrons. One final word: Anybody who wants to know what is really going on in the USA must read this book. It doesn't tell you everything, but it does tell you a lot that you won't find in the mass media, not even burried on page 47B, or elsewhere.
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Summary: One word: STUNNING!!!!
Review: Bamford turns upside down the history we think we know based on actual signals intelligence collected by the NSA. Bamford releases classified information gathered by the NSA on some of our nations most controversial actions..Bay of Pigs, Kennedy assasination, Vietnam, Six Day War and more. The book is extremely well written as well as eye opening. Very exciting and hard to put down.
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Summary: An Amazing Collection of Facts
Review: As American's desire to know the hidden secrets of the government grows, books detailing the inner workings of secret agencies are coming out in greater number. The NSA (often said to stand for No Such Agency), the nations signal gathering, code-breaking and code-making branch of the government, does a good job of staying under the radar when people think of the government's espionage agencies. Yet, having almost all the expert number theorists in the US on its payroll, the NSA is powerhouse of intellectual capital in the world. James Bamford's book follows the complete history of the NSA detailing its leaders and important events throughout its history. The book is incredibly dense and Bamford goes into intricate detail and minute by minute accounts of some of the most amazing moments in the past of the NSA. This is not a light read, but a very pack volume throwing far more facts and details than the average reader may want to be confronted with. But that slew of facts strongly demonstrates that Bamford has done his research and knows many things about this agency they would probably prefer were not made public. This book is likely to find some chapters that call out to you and others that don't. It ranges from the NSA political involvement in the world, to a description of its campus, to talk of the evolution of code breaking supercomputers. The only thing missing, and I'm a little glad for it, would be a foray into the world of number theory and abstract algebra. So if you want to know about the inner workings and history of the NSA, and aren't afraid to take on a six-hundred page densely written book, then the things you learn will probably amazing and astound you.
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