I am reading this book, which was hailed by everybody who is anybody, and am trying to figure out whether it is written to elucidate or to obfuscate things.
Yes, the book is a catalog of strategic and tactical failures of CIA. May be so. But the unintended (or, worse, intended) consequence is that it excuses our "deciders" for their failures. My personal feeling (and I admit it is cynical) is that one academic (the author of the book -Dr. Zegart) is exonerating another - Dr. Rice, who was the National Security advisor to President Bush during his first 233 days in the office.
Despite the book's catalog of CIA's inadequacies and "missed opportunities", it seems to me the CIA actually delivered a rather striking warning by way of a report on 8/6/2001 to President Bush in Texas under the rubric "Bin Laden Determined to Strike In the United States".
This CIA Report, which was part of President Bush's Daily Brief, referred to the World Trade Center, to the FBI conducting 70 filed investigations of Al Qaeda cells within the US and "pattern of suspicious activity in the US consistent with preparation for hijackings"
Dr. Zegart, like Dr. Rice seems to be affronted by a presumption of a threat so vaguely worded and improperly presented. The centerpiece of the book is actually a critique of this CIA report and its multiple "sins of omissions" (page 109). Likewise Dr. Rice, seemed affronted by a member of 9/11 Commission who questioned her why so little attention was paid to CIA briefing paper. Dr. Rice's answer was "That was not a warning" because " it was not specific as to time, nor place, nor manner of attack."
Behind the dialect of government acronym and techno-babble of the book, pages devoted to how outmoded FBI computers couldn't talk to CIA computers and "omissions" of CIA briefs and inadequacies in the "structure" of country's intelligence are buried very specific and very human causes and effects of failings of our very human leaders.

Amy Zegart's first book, Flawed by Design, explained why the intelligence community was incapable of doing its job during the Cold War. Spying Blind shows how it was even less capable of dealing with the post-Cold-War world. No conspiracy theory is needed to explain why the FBI and the CIA, which between them had all of the pieces of the 9/11 puzzle in their hands by the summer of 2001, filed to put the puzzle together until the planes hit the World Trade Center: all you need to know is the bureaucratic incentives that put a priority on "need-to-know" over "need-to-share." But the important message isn't about the past but about the future. The agencies that failed to find the 9/11 plot are ready to fail again tomorrow. Only if the new President and the Congress are willing to take on a massive political-bureaucratic battle is there any prospect of reform.

There have been a number of 9/11 postmortems, many focused on the catastrophic intelligence failure it represented. Nothing written to date by journalists or retired intelligence personnel rises to the level of analytical precision exhibited by Professor Zegart. The fundamental problem was information sharing - as the world knows (or should know) from the 9/11 Commission Report and subsequent disclosures by the government, various agencies of the US intelligence community possessed useful information on key individuals associated with al-Qaeda's September 11 plot, and could have apprehended two or three of them well before 9/11, which would probably have caused the entire plot to unravel. The barriers to information sharing and collaboration across agency boundaries were well known long before 9/11, highlighted in the recommendations of a depressing number of high-level intelligence reform commissions during the 1990s which all said, essentially, the same thing. Yet the institutional culture of the intelligence agencies (CIA in particular) and the FBI proved impervious to reform. Even now, approaching seven years after the disaster of 9/11, a truly collaborative approach to counterterrorism is still in its infancy. Among the many gems to be found in her exhaustive deconstruction of the pre-9/11 intelligence problem, Prof. Zebart thoroughly explodes the notion that the recently-declassified Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) of August 6, 2001 was a "smoking gun" that should have alerted the President and Condoleezza Rice that a major al-Qaeda attack was imminent. In actuality it was anything but a smoking gun, with little to say of any value or relevance to policymakers. Even those of us on the opposite end of the political spectrum from the Current Incumbent must give him a pass with regard to this particular "warning."

Spying Blind is an exceptional work of public policy analysis, and deserves the widest readership.

With more than a few years in the intelligence community, I would be inclined to just pass on this work as canonization of the obvious. On the other hand, it would be unfair to lessen the due-diligence that the author put into her work as a sociologist; defiining the very elements that cause the good work of many to be thwarted by the few. Joined by "Enemies of Intelligence" will help many understand the struggle to conduct effective intelligence operations by this country.
I've often suggested that truly understanding the intelligence community is like trying to explain all the sensations of those twelve-step programs to people not so committed.

Although I thought this book a good effort, it did not really live up to my hopes. Broadly, the guts of the book do not, in themselves, justify a whole book - rather, this is a lot more like an academic paper (Masters, not PhD) where there thesis has been spun out and various points have been repeated ad nauseam to spin it out to (barely) book length.

Where I think the author fell down was in the narrowness of her scope (focussing too much on organization and too little on the mission). Also, Zegart manages to completely ignore other potential causes of the failures which he ascribes to failure of organization and adaption - political correctness / sensitivity being the most obvious. Furthermore, there is throughout the book a sort of bias in favor of the accretion of power by the Director of the CIA (the "DCI") - and a lament that this accretion does not happen as the author and various studies she cites believe that it should. This, however, points out one of the big blind spots in the analysis, which is the lack of will and sense of mission on the part of the various DCIs (but George Tenet in particular). This lack is clearly reflected in the book, but is never addressed, and it raises the question of whether a George Tenet really in charge of the whole US intelligence apparatus would really have been any more effective than was the genuine article? Nothing that Zegart writes about Tenet convinces me that would have been the case - in fact rather the opposite. Tenet makes big pronouncements "we are at war with Al Queada", and not only does nobody listen to him, but I am left feeling that he doesn't even know what the word "war" means - I think he thinks it means having better policy papers and more seamless database integration, and while those are unarguably good things, war means killing people and breaking things, and Tenet (and perhaps Zegart) never grasps that. Now maybe that analysis is outside the scope of the author's ambit and/or her expertise, but its omission leaves a big hole in the analysis.

Finally, Zegart laments the fact that after 9/11, the Pentagon began to arrogate to itself even more of CIA's traditional roles (clandestine warfare and intelligence gathering) and to reorganize its various intelligence arms into a more coherent whole, essentially creating the nucleus of an alternate CIA. From my perspective this seems like nothing more than a logical response, and a positive development, since nature abhores a vacum. While duplication and waste in government is always to be lamented (though expected), it seems to me that if the CIA does not want to make the changes necessary to allow it to perform the mission assigned to it (and Zegart does make this case pretty convincingly) then it seems odd for the CIA (and Zegart) to cry foul when another agency is willing to step up and get the job done. Of course, this anti-Pentagon fear-mongering in consistent with various other anti-Pentagon themes in the book, and Zegart's blithe (and wholly unsubstantiated) dismissals of Pentagon concerns about the potential lack of access to intelligence products necessary for battlefield support under proposed intelligence reform proposals.

Overall, this book is at best part of a larger book that still needs to be written. It is also hamstrung by the author's biases against in the Department of Defense.

Hopefully Dr. Zegart will be at the National Book Festival in DC on Saturday, September 29, 2007, so we can start a career-long conversation on her work . . . but in case she isn't . . . Here's one complaint, from a mostly satisfied reader:

It has proven very difficult for the political science community to understand the organization theory community. Graham Allison tried in 1971, by contrasting the rational actor hyper-rational "Model I" (this porridge is too cold, Papa Bear), with the counterrational complex organizational processes "Model II" (this porridge is too hot, Mama Bear), before retreating to the safety of "pulling-and-hauling" of the political scientists in the bureaucratic politics "Model III" (this porridge is just right, Baby Bear). Even with Philip Zelikow's help in the 1999 second edition, the complex organizational processes chapter didn't progress very far.

Meanwhile, though, in business schools around the world, Model II has been off to the races: Herbert Simon, James March, and Karl Weick lead a revolution that has gone so far into the science fiction future that Dr. Zegart's colleague at UCLA, Bill McKelvey, has become the Yoda of complexity theory in complex organizations. (Amy, Bill; Bill, Amy -- geez, why didn't you guys talk before this?) Dr. Zegart recognizes that businesses are under pressure to be high-performing systems, or they die; she recognizes that political systems are not under the same pressures; but she does not then draw the obvious conclusion that organization theorists in business schools know more about organization theory than political scientists in schools of government will ever be able to capture.

I remember spending a long afternoon at a UC-Riverside classroom in summer of 2004 transcribing Dr. Zegart's testimony to the 9/11 Commission -- it was elegant, simple, but 15 years behind U.S. business schools' understanding of organization theories.

In Dr. Zegart's defense, though, she is pulling a very heavy load in trying to get her political science brothers and sisters to invest more energy in organization theory and organization research. She feels that she is -- as she titles Chapter 2 of her book -- in "No Man's Land." Note to Dr. Zegart -- you are alone in No Man's Land because you assume that all knowledge about the U.S. national security community resides in political science journals.

Here's where the battle line might be drawn in the Project for National Security [Management] Reform: Do we call the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs the "national security adviser" (e.g. Kissinger, Brzezinski, Rice) or the "national security manager" (e.g. Bundy, Scowcroft, Powell)? If we see the APNSA position as a mere stepping-stone to the way-cooler Thomas-Jefferson-like Secretary of State position, then the political scientists get to continue to "own" the topic of intelligence. If we see the APNSA position as the alter ego of the President who is able to knock the heads of SecDef and SecState together to force them to create complex solutions to complex problems, then the political scientists must yield the topic of intelligence to a larger group of academics and practitioners -- that might include business school professors in the Simon-March-Weick tradition.

So, despite my wish that the book had been coauthored with a solid organization theorist (Bill Starbuck would have been perfect), I think Dr. Zegart's book will hold a solid position in my doctoral seminars on high reliability organizations for years to come: Cuban Missile Crisis, Three Mile Island Nuclear Incident, Tenerife Air Disaster, Mann Gulch Forest Fire, Bhopal Chemical Accident, Challenger Explosion, Black Hawk Shootdown over Iraq in 1994, Columbia Disintegration, West Nile Virus, and now -- in place of honor today -- "Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11."

Hopefully Dr. Zegart has already started writing her third book -- with much more input from her organization theorist friends this time -- on the intelligence community's inability to influence the national security decision-making apparatus to make a better decision about what to do with Iraq in 2003.

I was thrilled when this book arrived today, put everything aside, and spent the last two hours with the book.

It is useful, but it could have been much better.

The useful part is the academic model, the timelines of CIA and FBI missed opportunities, and in general, taking the kinds of recommendations that I and others have made, and putting them into polite terms that the la-di-dah crowd and the pontificators can accept. Adapt or die is a homage to Bob Gates, who excells at adapting politically, not professionally. When he and I spoke together at the War & Peace Conference in Paris, I went first, he got up, said "I'm not even going to touch that," and launched into status quo speak. I am sure he shared Sandra Kruzman's view in the 1990's that my publication of "E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution & Intelligence: An Alternative Paradigm for NATIONAL Intelligence" (Whole Earth Review, Fall 1992, easily findable on the web), "confirms Steele's place on the lunatic fringe." To the extent that this "safe" author and "safe" book nudge the young and mid-grade professionals to peek oput of their cubbies, it is helpful. Unfortunately, most case officers and analysts do not read widely and most have no idea of what world-class commercial intelligence practices and processes are--as John Perry Barlow said in Forbes some time back, "if you want to see the last vestiges of the Soviet era, go to CIA."

Missing from this book, which could have been a barn-burner, are three things:

Equal coverage of White House, State, and Defense appointee failures

An appendix integrating all 500+ recommendations, most not implemented, with a structure that could have been of extraordinary value to the Director of National Intelligence.

A solid methodologically-grounded trade-off analysis of how best to spend $60 billion a year on national intelligence, including full consideration of both our rotten educational system that General Mike Hayden has ably lamented in two major speeches; and multinational information sharing.

The author's first book was an instant classic. The core point from the first book, that intelligence needs to be fixed big with the full weight of the President, or not at all because marginal fixes are not worth the political capital, remains extant. The DNI has not been empowered to "fix big" nor does he have the deep bench of iconoclasts needed to do anything other than a 500 day plan that is well-intentioned but still on the margins in the larger scheme of governance and intelligence reform.

This book is not as good, largely because is stays within the box and does not offer new substance, only organizes old stuff covered in many other books including my own (which are noteworthy for their absence from the bibliography--that is either contrived, or poor scholarship, take your pick).

Minus one star.

This is a fine book for the non-professional, the innocent bystander that wants something more substantive than Gertz, less polemical than Steele, less original than Allen, Hiam, or a host of others--I list a few below, more are in my lists.

If I were the publisher of this book, I would not reprint it until the author provided a consolidated actionable integrated appendix of all the recommendations structured so as to be immediately useful to Congress, the media, the public, and of course, the DNI whom we all support as best we can.

As I completed my review and spent another half hour with my notes, and especially noting that the books below (and many others) were not considered by this author, it hit me. She's drunk the kool-aid. This is a book by a person who so wants to please Condi Rice (her PhD mentor) and the extremist Republicans, that she was willing to sacrifice more than I expected to stay in the safe lane with safe authorities.

Minus a second star.

Moves the book into the pedestrian category, and that is a real shame, because had she kept her balance and used all the sources and intellect of which she is demonstrably capable, this book could have been most helpful. I am very disappointed. I recommend that the book be completely re-developed, or that an appendix of the integrated recommendations be offered free at the book's home page on Amazon; if that were done the book would be worthy of four stars, in my opinion, and I would change the rating, something Amazon now allows us to do.

A handful of the more obvious omissions:
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
Strategic Intelligence & Statecraft: Selected Essays (Brassey's Intelligence and National Security Library)
Informing Statecraft
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
Denial and Deception: An Insider's View of the CIA
Secrecy: The American Experience (World Religions: Themes and Issues)
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'
Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11--How the Secret War between the FBI and CIA Has Endangered National Security
On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World
Secrecy and democracy: The CIA in transicion (Perennial library)

I was thrilled when this book arrived today, put everything aside, and spent the last two hours with the book.

It is useful, but it could have been much better.

The useful part is the academic model, the timelines of CIA and FBI missed opportunities, and in general, taking the kinds of recommendations that I and others have made, and putting them into polite terms that the la-di-dah crowd and the pontificators can accept. Adapt or die is a homage to Bob Gates, who excells at adapting politically, not professionally. Nothing new, but being "mainstream," this is progress.

Missing from this book, which could have been a barn-burner, are three things:

Equal coverage of White House, State, and Defense appointee failures

An appendix integrating all 500+ recommendations, most not implemented, with a structure that could have been of extraordinary value to the Director of National Intelligence.

A solid methodologically-grounded trade-off analysis of how best to spend $60 billion a year on national intelligence, including full consideration of both our rotten educational system that General Mike Hayden has ably lamented in two major speeches; and multinational information sharing.

The author's first book was an instant classic. The core point from the first book, that intelligence needs to be fixed big with the full weight of the President, or not at all because marginal fixes are not worth the political capital, remains extant. The DNI has not been empowered to "fix big" nor does he have the deep bench of iconoclasts needed to do anything other than a 500 day plan that is well-intentioned but still on the margins in the larger scheme of governance and intelligence reform.

This book is not as good, largely because is stays within the box and does not offer new substance, only organizes old stuff covered in many other books including my own (which are noteworthy for their absence from the bibliography--that is either contrived, or poor scholarship, take your pick).

Minus one star.

This is a fine book for the non-professional, the innocent bystander that wants something more substantive than Gertz, less polemical than Steele, less original than Allen, Hiam, or a host of others--I list a few below, more are in my lists.

If I were the publisher of this book, I would not reprint it until the author provided a consolidated actionable integrated appendix of all the recommendations structured so as to be immediately useful to Congress, the media, the public, and of course, the DNI whom we all support as best we can.

As I completed my review and spent another half hour with my notes, and especially noting that the books below (and many others) were not considered by this author, it hit me. She's drunk the kool-aid. This is a book by a person who so desperately wants to please Condi Rice (her PhD mentor) and the Republicans, that she was willing to sacrifice more than I expected to stay in the safe lane with safe authorities.

Minus a second star.

Moves the book into the pedestrian category, and that is a real shame, because had she kept her balance and used all the sources and intellect of which she is demonstrably capable, this book could have been most helpful. I am very disappointed. I do recommend that the book be completely re-developed, or that an appendix of the integrated recommendations be offered free at the book's home page on Amazon.

A handful of the more obvious omissions:
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
Strategic Intelligence & Statecraft: Selected Essays (Brassey's Intelligence and National Security Library)
Informing Statecraft
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
Denial and Deception: An Insider's View of the CIA
Secrecy: The American Experience (World Religions: Themes and Issues)
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'
Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11--How the Secret War between the FBI and CIA Has Endangered National Security
On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World
Secrecy and democracy: The CIA in transicion (Perennial library)

I was thrilled when this book arrived today, put everything aside, and spent the last two hours with the book.

It is useful, but it could have been much better.

The useful part is the academic model, the timelines of CIA and FBI missed opportunities, and in general, taking the kinds of recommendations that I and others have made, and putting them into polite terms that the la-di-dah crowd and the pontificators can accept. That's progress.

Missing from this book, which could have been a barn-burner, are three things:

Equal coverage of White House, State, and Defense appointee failures

An appendix integrating all 500+ recommendations, most not implemented, with a structure that could have been of extraordinary value to the Director of National Intelligence.

A solid methodologically-grounded trade-off analysis of how best to spend $60 billion a year on national intelligence, including full consideration of both our rotten educational system that General Mike Hayden has ably lamented in two major speeches; and multinational information sharing.

The author's first book was an instant classic. This book is not as good, largely because is stays within the box and does not offer new substance, only organizes old stuff covered in many other books including my own (which are noteworthy for their absence from the bibliography--that is either contrived, or poor scholarship, take your pick).

Minus one star.

This is a fine book for the non-professional, the innocent bystander that wants something more substantive than Gertz, less polemical than Steele, less original than Allen, Hiam, or a host of others--I list a few below, more are in my lists.

If I were the publisher of this book, I would not reprint it until the author provided a consolidated actionable integrated appendix of all the recommendations structured so as to be immediately useful to Congress, the media, the public, and of course, the DNI whom we all support as best we can.

As I completed my review and spent another half hour with my notes, and especially noting that the books below (and many others) were not considered by this author, it hit me. She's drunk the kool-aid. This is a book by a person who desperately wants to please Condi Rice and the Republicans, and was willing to sacrifice more than I expected to stay in the safe lane with safe authorities.

Minus a second star.

Moves the book into the pedestrian category, and that is a real shame, because had she kept her balance and used all the sources and intellect of which she is demonstrably capable, this book could have been most helpful. I am very disappointed. I do recommend that the book be completely re-developed, or that an appendix of the integrated recommendations be offered free at the book's home page on Amazon.

A handful of the more obvious omissions:
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
Strategic Intelligence & Statecraft: Selected Essays (Brassey's Intelligence and National Security Library)
Informing Statecraft
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
Denial and Deception: An Insider's View of the CIA
Secrecy: The American Experience (World Religions: Themes and Issues)
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'
Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11--How the Secret War between the FBI and CIA Has Endangered National Security
On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World
Secrecy and democracy: The CIA in transicion (Perennial library)

Sixty years after George Kennan wrote his seminal article in Foreign Affairs, and nearly 30 years after Kenneth Waltz published Theory of International Politics, a rising star from UCLA is poised to take her seat at the table of greatness. Southern California is home to one of political science's juggernauts -- Amy Zegart. Her latest entry, Spying Blind, is a brilliant piece of writing, and a wake up call for anyone who is serious about the White House.

The central premise of this remarkable book is that the intelligence failures that are associated with 9/11 and the failure of intelligence reform are both symptomatic of profound internal organizational flaws in CIA and the FBI (and by extension the other National Intelligence principals NSA, NGA, and DIA). The sub-premise is that both agencies were unable to adapt to the realities of a Post-Cold War world. This is a controversial premise because the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) generally denies that 9/11 was an intelligence failure and claims to have implemented major reforms. Zegart makes a persuasive argument that her premise is correct.

Social scientist that she is, Zegart constructs a model to guide her analysis of both institutions. This model is based on what she identifies as three organizational characteristics common to both CIA and the FBI: structural fragmentation; dysfunctional cultural norms; and perverse incentive systems. She applies this model to both the institutions failure to adapt to 21st Century challenges and their failure to provide warning of the dreadful attacks of 9/11. Indeed Zegart notes that based on this model the intelligence record of both agencies wasn't very good during the Cold War either.

In the course of developing her case Zegart provides the reader with a number of really useful concepts such as "change is not adaptation" and "rational boundaries." Although somewhat outside of the parameters of her model, Zegart also makes clear that the Defense Department and its allies in the congress also has contributed a good deal to failure of intelligence reform. Like her earlier book "Flawed by Design" Zegart has provided another perceptive and discouraging analysis of the U.S. national Security system.

So is this an accurate and fair book? Well Zegart is a very careful scholar who has done an excellent job documenting her findings. She also appears to have maintained her objectivity and adherence to scientific standards of proof in the course of her analysis.
And, for what it is worth, to this reviewer she seems to have correctly diagnosed a good part of what ails the U.S. Intelligence System.

As someone with nearly 20 years experience in the Intelligence Community (IC) as an analyst, I found Amy Zegart's book to be an outstanding read. So many, many things in it rang very true for me about the problems of the IC. I think the bottom line is that while individuals make mistakes, those individuals stand on the "shoulders" of organizational culture and bureaucratic politics. There are a number of things that Zegart explores that strike a painful chord with me:

1. The fact with a few honorable exceptions, the IC agencies routinely sacrifice strategic analysis to the gods of current intelligence. I have concluded that any analyst who wishes to work long-range analytical projects is well-advised to find himself or herself an office where such current intelligence requirements are not levied.

2. Fundamental reform of the IC is not going to take place unless leaders within it are committed to it and are helped from without by the Congress and the President.

3. Simply by virtue of its ninety year history as a law enforcement agency and its success in being one, the FBI is not going to be able to transform itself into an intelligence agency focused on preemption of terrorist attacks (as opposed to investigating them after the fact).

4. The bureaucratic culture of the IC still does not encourage collaboration and sharing between individual agencies (and sometimes, even within agencies).

I could go on, but I probably would wind up depressing myself. My only criticism of Zegart's book is that when lamenting the fact that the CIA was never able to penetrate the leadership of al-Qaeda, she doesn't seem to appreciate the consequences of the US having an agent who is a member of a terrorist organization. Terrorists don't tend to trust those who have not indisputably spilled blood of their enemies. Therefore, the US would have to give such an agent license to commit crimes that conceivably would result in the deaths of Americans. I do not think that the American public would understand, let alone tolerate the revelation that the Intelligence Community had such an agent.

Finally, I wish Zegart had written about the Iraq WMD failures. A lot of that is down to organizational culture and bureaucratic politics.

Bottom line: this is a very insightful book, and people who want to understand why intelligence failures happen would do well to read it and skip books that try to blame the President, the Congress, the media, or some other bogeyman. Books like those are polemics, written not to persuade but to make people with already set opinions feel righteous about their views. Zegart's book gets --as I said in the title-- to the heart of the matter.

As someone with nearly 20 years experience in the Intelligence Community (IC) as an analyst, I found Amy Zegart's book to be an outstanding read. So many, many things in it rang very true for me about the problems of the IC. I think the bottom line is that while individuals make mistakes, those individuals stand on the "shoulders" of organizational culture and bureaucratic politics. There are a number of things that Zegart explores that strike a painful chord with me:

1. The fact with a few honorable exceptions, the IC agencies routinely sacrifice strategic analysis to the gods of current intelligence. I have concluded that any analyst who wishes to work long-range analytical projects is well-advised to find himself or herself an office where such current intelligence requirements are not levied.

2. Fundamental reform of the IC is not going to take place unless leaders within it are committed to it and are helped from without by the Congress and the President.

3. Simply by virtue of its ninety year history as a law enforcement agency and its success in being one, the FBI is not going to be able to transform itself into an intelligence agency focused on preemption of terrorist attacks (as opposed to investigating them after the fact).

4. The bureaucratic culture of the IC still does not encourage collaboration and sharing between individual agencies (and sometimes, even within agencies).

I could go on, but I probably would wind up depressing myself. My only criticism of Zegart's book is that when lamenting the fact that the CIA was never able to penetrate the leadership of al-Qaeda, she doesn't seem to appreciate the consequences of the US having an agent who is a member of a terrorist organization. Terrorists don't tend to trust those who have not indisputably spilled blood of their enemies. Therefore, the US would have to give such an agent license to commit crimes that conceivably would result in the deaths of Americans. I do not think that the American public would understand, let alone tolerate the revelation that the Intelligence Community had such an agent.

Finally, I wish Zegart had written about the Iraq WMD failures. A lot of that is down to organizational culture and bureaucratic politics.

Bottom line: this is a very insightful book, and people who want to understand why intelligence failures happen would do well to read it and skip books that try to blame the President, the Congress, the media, or some other bogeyman. Books like those are polemics, written not to persuade but to make people with already set opinions feel righteous about their views. Zegart's book gets --as I said in the title-- to the heart of the matter.