Book Review: The Art of Intelligence: Lessons from a Life in the CIA’s Clandestine Service

Hank Crumpton reflects on a career in the CIA's Clandestine Service.
Hank Crumpton, the former CIA and State Department counterterrorism official and current security consultant who helped lead the war in Afghanistan, has written an illuminating and entertaining memoir on his CIA career.The book begins with an overview of Crumpton’s life and upbringing in rural Warren County, Georgia. As the book details, despite his humble beginnings, Crumpton always had larger dreams of traveling abroad. At the tender age of ten, he applied to the CIA. As a Master’s student, Crumpton enrolled in the prestigious Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, enjoying his time on academic sabbatical re-reading classics such as Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and Carl Von Clausewitz’s On War. Later, Crumpton finally began his career in the CIA’s clandestine service.In writing this book, Crumpton is constrained by typical rigid CIA rules regarding authorship and the disclosure of classified information. The book includes generalized statements such as “an African country” or “an Asian country” when he describes his deployments. Despite its adherence to agency regulations, the book does not read as a dry political narrative. Crumpton provides honest personal assessments of many important figures including Donald Rumsfeld, Cofer Black, Dick Cheney, and Afghan Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Masood. He also provides critical assessments of United States intelligence policy, and discusses previous counterterrorism failures and successes.In particular, Crumpton is scornful of the bureaucratic top-down approach used by government agencies and politicians to manage intelligence and national security issues. The Federal Bureau of Investigation receives especially heavy criticism for its practices and intelligence inefficiencies. Crumpton provides numerous critiques of rigid government rules and personnel management, honing in on Washington careerist bureaucrats concerned with protecting their own careers.Next, Crumpton focuses his attention on the importance and creation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), discussing the practice of outfitting Predator drones with CIA hellfire missiles to attack terrorists. Crumpton details bitter infighting between the CIA and Department of Defense over who should control the Predator program. As part of his discussion on new technologies for intelligence officials, he explains the importance of retaining human intelligence sources despite the rise of cyber intelligence, signals intelligence, and cryptology. As he notes, while these are important emerging tools, human intelligence must remain an important component as the CIA continues to develop sources in private companies, foreign governments, and foreign intelligence agencies.Perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of the book is Crumpton’s discussion of the CIA’s National Resources Division that operates within the United States. This program allows the CIA to work with private companies who generate intelligence information and connections for the CIA around the world. This is an important contribution the book makes to intelligence commentary: most Americans do not think of the CIA operating within the United States. When they think of domestic intelligence agencies, they often restrict themselves to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.Unfortunately, aside from criticism over political turf battles and bureaucratic government rules, Crumpton does not delve into the past mistakes of the CIA, nor does he explain in specific detail how to improve the operations of the CIA or the intelligence community. He notes that the intelligence premise for the War in Iraq was shaky, but he does not provide any analysis of events or context of how decision-making took place. Crumpton limits himself to restating that the CIA is Washington-led and bureaucratic, offering examples of how CIA officers on the ground are slowed down by this bureaucracy. While this may be true, he does not follow this with suggested reform measures in the text.Additionally, Crumpton’s title itself is somewhat misleading. The book reads more like a personal narrative than analytical commentary on lessons learned from a career in the CIA. Some lessons are provided; for example, it is his years in the CIA that taught him the importance of leveraging human intelligence sources rather than strictly relying on technology. Another weakness in the book is that while Hank Crumpton served as the Counterterrorism Coordinator with the rank of Ambassador at Large with the State Department, there is little information regarding the history, events, or lessons he learned in this role near the end of his government career. Crumpton also served as the Counterterrorism Coordinator during an important time in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet little is mentioned about how he worked to rebuild America’s international counterterrorism partnerships after the invasion of Iraq. Ultimately, this leads to a failure to cover or explain the last years of his honorable career.As a whole, the book is a great contribution to analysis of the CIA’s role during the War in Afghanistan after the attacks of 9/11. The lessons and information provided by Crumpton allow ordinary Americans to get a glimpse of the inner workings of an agency surrounded by mystique, intrigue, and misunderstanding. Scholars, students, and those aspiring to a career in the intelligence community will find the book useful and poignant.About the Book: Crumpton, Henry A. The Art of Intelligence: Lessons from a Life in the CIA’s Clandestine Service. (Penguin Press, New York) 352 pages.

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