Rating: 
Summary: Read this review! (The NSA probably has.)
Review: With the great attention being paid now to America's intelligence agencies and their alleged 'failures,' James Bamford's breakthrough 'Body of Secrets' has become a more important, interesting, and rewarding read than ever.'Body of Secrets' is a fascinating mix of technical history, behind-the-scenes revelations, and action-packed storytelling. Much ink, and many more bytes, have been spilled about Bamford's description of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, but his depictions of Cold War confrontations, or 'sigint' (signals intelligence) work on the front lines of Viet Nam, are equally vivid. As with Robert Stinnett's 'Day of Deceit,' people may disagree about the conclusions drawn, but it's much harder to dispute the accounts and impressions of those who witnessed the events first-hand. In nearly every chapter, Bamford uncovers new facts -- or draws old facts out of the shadows. A friend who recently commented that America 'won the Cold War without losing a life' would no doubt be shocked by Bamford's counting the cost, in blood and treasure, of America's secret wars. Others may be amazed or appalled by NSA's ability, amply explained in this book, to snoop on communications seemingly anywhere in the world -- including information, like this review, sent through cyberspace. (The recent revelation that the US government listened in on Osama bin Laden's cell phone conversations shortly before the 9-11 attacks came as no surprise to anyone who has read this book.) NSA may or may not be America's most super-secret spy agency any more (the National Reconnaissance Office competes for that title too, and who knows how many others we haven't even heard of?), but it is clearly still a huge player in US defense and foreign policy circles. It also receives boatloads of tax money. All that makes Bamford's exhaustive discussion of NSA's history and current activities a must-read for any American concerned about the world and our nation's role in it.
Rating:
Summary: Good Book Turned Okay
Review: Thank you to James Bamford for taking an interest in the NSA, which is seldom talked about, aka "No Such Agency". I found the book a good read in most places. However, the book gets banal with lengthy details of step-by-step attacks and lots of equipment descriptions. Honestly, the book is 600 pages (100 pages of biblography) the book should have been around 300 pages. Also, I think Bamford does an excellent job with the titles of the chapters, relating to the human body (brain, blood, etc). That certailny gives an over-view as to what the chapter will contain. Overall, I think it's a good book and worth it, if you skim over the less-intersting pages. Now I feel like i'm on the ground walking and the NSA is in a tall buidling, watching us like ants.
Rating:
Summary: What Citizens Should Know About Intelligence Gathering
Review: This book does an excellent job in explaining the role the National Security Agency in our government structure. The terrorist attacks to the World Trade Center and the Pentagon highlight the necessity of intelligence for the protection of our modern world. This book helped me understand how our tax dollars get invested.
Rating:
Summary: Real Time Revelations
Review: I am not going to repeat all the arguments given above on whether or not the Lemnitzer group was right or wrong or the other revelations in this book. I have my opinions but having spent my adult hood in the period since 1960 can remember the Red Scare when I was a child in the forties and fifties, I can see on both sides.
What I feel comfortable with is the increasing realization at Fort Meade that they must explain to the US taxpayers and the world just what they are up to and whether or not they should be doing it now that the Cold War at least is over and we have a new series of international problems. Can they help or not? And without violating the Constitution and the general public's sense of fairness. All this is addressed and is well set out. Finally there is alot of information on the complex and the field units and some of the past triumphs and failures which is of interest. Together with the author's previous book Puzzle Palace, this is about as much as we will get on our national SIGINT until 40 years on when today's activities can be revealed in detail.
Rating:
Summary: NSA
Review: Very Interesting and informative but like over reviewers have said- towards the end it becomes monotanus and Bamford goes into way to much detail. But I do recomend the first 9 or so chapters when Bamford talks about WW1, WW2 and Vietnam ect.
Rating: 
Summary: Body of Secrets in Need of a Good Editor
Review: The author presents many little known secrets of the inner workings of espionage, code-breaking, scheming and such in and around the National Security Agency. It is very informative and enlightening but the book could have used a good editing to tighten up and streamline the author's tendency to digress into minutae.
Rating: 
Summary: A Hard Read
Review: There is no question the author did a hugh amount of research. I enjoyed the first quarter of the book. After that it got tedious with too much information, much of it unimportant except to experts in the field, and a seemingly slanted view that our government and the people in codebreaking committed wrongdoing. Too many of his interviews were with people who had an axe to grind. I stopped reading it with a quarter of the book remaining.
Rating:
Summary: Allegations of High Crimes, Murder, and Fatal Negligence
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: I Hope It Isn't All True
Review: Bamford's book contains revelations about the NSA, the military, and our government in general that will keep some readers awake at night. And if that isn't enough, the details about the Israeli attack the USS Liberty add to the shock.
Rating:
Summary: Book right on target..
Review: Secrets was an excellent expose' on our Governments Agencies, the levels within the Departments of the Government. However, one thing the book failed to mention, is the intelligence gathering, they do while in Federal Prisons. One such Prison is Butner FCI, Butner, NC, where notorious prisoners have been, such as William Hinkley, Judge Wallacher, Johnathan Pollard-all whom have been investigated at this Prison-the biggest intelligence gathering Prison in the United States.
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