The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology

Dr. Richelson, who is a senior fellow at the National Security Archives, gives a highly recommendable interpretation of the Directorate of Science and Technology, at the CIA. His book is based mostly on declassified documents, making its stories highly believable and interesting.

This book was written with the cooperation of the CIA which greatly influenced it. It contains correct information on a limited number of projects mostly very old in time and technology. Even then portions of these projects are not discussed. It also details the shortcomings of people in the military and White House without describing the shortcomings of many CIA project leaders and managers. I personally know of one person praised in numerous chapters who later went into industry. He was the head of a high technology company. By the time that higher authority in the company became aware of his poor performance and booted him out, enough damage had been done that the company never recovered. It declined in technology level and size until it got absorbed by another company.

Readers seeking information on any aspect of the CIA must bear in mind that the available information is very limited. So many aspects of what goes on simply cannot be revealed. Keeping that in mind, "Wizards of Langley" offers an interesting history of the Agency and background for the DS & T. It does not go so much into details of the Directorate's everyday work as it goes into the history and politics. It does not come to life like a story of individual people, but is interesting nevertheless.

David Letterman once described his TV show as 'info-tainment without the "info" ... or the "tainment."' I'm tempted to describe this book as a technothriller without the 'thriller.' It definitely has the 'techno,' though.Let me say up front that I don't think this is entirely author Jeffrey Richelson's fault. He is one of America's top historians of the intelligence community, and this book is exhaustively researched and documented (the first chapter alone has 173 endnotes). I just found the subject of all this research much less exciting than I thought it would be. For all their sci-tech wizardry, the 'wizards of Langley' were, at the end of the day, still a bunch of bureaucrats. Their battlefields were as much institutional as geopolitical, and that makes Richelson's story bureaucratic and institutional too.Maybe I was spoiled by Bamford's 'Body of Secrets,' about the NSA, which combines technological detail with exciting stories of front-line espionage, but it seemed to me Richelson sometimes took too light a touch on interesting operational stories in order to get back to chronicling the CIA's changing organization chart. The attempted recovery of a sunken Soviet submarine, or the infamous BLUEBIRD-ARTICHOKE-MKDELTA experiments with mind-altering drugs, for example, were zipped over in just a couple of pages. It is true, though, that these topics are covered extensively in other books.In all, I can see how 'The Wizards of Langley' will be useful for people interested in the personalities and politics behind a key element of America's intelligence apparatus. Journalists or specialist historians, for example. But I'm afraid the general reader with an interest in intelligence operations may find this book rough, and even unrewarding, sledding. It's for that first group -- for whom this book could be an excellent resource -- that I'm giving it as high a rating as I am.

The CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology far out distanced the traditional "spooks" during the cold war by inventing truly incredible machines -- a variety of reconnaissance satellites, to take one example -- for so-called technical collection. It's triumphs were often extraordinary, yet the pervasive requirement for secrecy kept most of them in the dark. Now Jeffrey T. Richelson -- unquestionably the best in the world at what he does -- has finally given public recognition to men and women who could not do so for themselves. Their crucial role in winning wars, both hot and cold, has finally been told. All citizens of this country should read this book.