American Espionage and the Soviet Target

by Jeffrey T. Richelson

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0688067530
• ISBN13: 9780688067533
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Length: 383 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A Hard Target....

Jeffrey Richelson is a researcher of long-standing into the U.S. Intelligence Community. He is blessed with a remarkable ability to stitch together a coherent picture of that community's activities given the inevitably limited information available to the public. 1988" "American Espionage and the Soviet Target" is an excellent survey of American efforts from the end of World War II to understand its Soviet adversary. Richelson is able to document the increasing sophistication of that effort, beginning with reconnaissance overflights by bomber aircraft in the late 1940's, progressing through purpose-built and sophisticated spy aircraft such as the U-2, and ending with a series of highly capable man-made satellites. Richelson covers the efforts to gather information using agents, defectors, and other human sources. Richelson includes the network of listening posts that eventually circled the Soviet Union, allowing the United States to capture portions of Soviet communications. Noteworthy are more mundance projects such as Operation BEACHCOMBER, in which military personnel systematically searched beaches in Alaska for debris washed ashore from the Soviet Union. Richelson tends to focus on description of these various intelligence collection efforts. For the most part, he leaves to others any judgments on the effectiveness or legalities of various methods. His one judgment on the U.S. intelligence campaign against the Soviet Union is that a self-generated bias favored collection over analysis. U.S. technical prowess produced increasingly sophisticated collectors, but analysis of the data collected often lagged behind. The information in this book is now dated but still worthwhile as a survey for students of the intelligence community in a classroom environment requiring unclassified source material.