Book Review: The Puzzle Palace

Back in 1982, James Bamford published The Puzzle Palace, which opened the National Security Agency up to a previously unknown level of scrutiny. Bamford showed that the NSA had operated with virtually no public oversight since its inception, and that this led to predictable outcomes, including Operation Shamrock, which involved widespread monitoring of private communications between US citizens.

The Puzzle Palace is an interesting read, but I think that it is today of far more interest to specialists than to the general public. The historical information remains largely sound (although some new revelations have altered the assessment a bit). The picture Bamford paints of the day-to-day operations of the NSA, however, is hopelessly outdated. It’s kind of interesting to learn about the intelligence platforms used by the NSA in 1981, but not terribly so. Obviously, the targets of signals intelligence have also changed dramatically since 1982.

For the casual reader (and I am nothing if not a casual reader), I would recommend Bamford’s later book, Body of Secrets. That book includes a much more up-to-date description of the NSA, and also has excellent chapters on the USS Liberty incident, in which Israeli aircraft and patrol boats attacked a US spy ship, and of a series of domestic intelligence operations hatched in the Pentagon and designed to convince the American people of the threat of Cuban terrorism in the United States.

For the really casual reader who wants to know the bare bones of US intelligence gathering, I would recommend chapter 3 of the 9/11 Commission Report. I haven’t finished the entire book, but I agree with most commentators that it’s a remarkably readable and informative volume. The first chapter, on the attack itself, makes for a gripping read.