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  • Privileged and Confidential: The Secret History of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board by Kenneth Michael Absher, Michael C. Desch, and Roman Popadiuk
  • Steven Aftergood
Kenneth Michael Absher, Michael C. Desch, and Roman Popadiuk, Privileged and Confidential: The Secret History of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012. 515 pp. $39.95.

The President's Intelligence Advisory Board is a little-known, rarely studied appendage of the U.S. intelligence community. Although the board is a purely advisory body with no executive or operational function, and although its handful of members meet only intermittently, it has played a surprisingly influential role at crucial moments in the history of U.S. intelligence since it was established by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. [End Page 143]

Many fundamental developments in the structure of today's intelligence community are traceable, at least in part, to the advisory board's studies and recommendations. These include the creation of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency's directorate of science and technology, and the rise of the defense attaché system, among other building blocks of the intelligence bureaucracy. More generally, the board has been engaged in almost every intelligence policy issue of consequence over more than five decades, from defining the role of the Director of Central Intelligence, to evaluating the conduct of covert action, overhead reconnaissance, counterintelligence policy, and other activities.

The advisory board appears to have been most effective in its earlier years, when the structures of Cold War intelligence were at a formative stage. At that time, presidents were more frequently attentive to the board's advice, and the apparatus of congressional intelligence oversight was not yet in place. The board suffered a self-in flicted blow to its prestige from the 1976 Team B exercise, which produced a scathing review of intelligence on the Soviet threat that was perceived to be an intensely partisan rather than impartial product. In later years, the stature of the board was further diminished by the practice of using appointments to it as a reward for presidential campaign supporters and fundraisers who had no particular expertise in intelligence matters. When George W. Bush was president, appointees to the board included the owner of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team and the co-owner of the Cleveland Browns football team. Their contribution to U.S. intelligence policy, if any, is unknown.

The book under review is the first sustained treatment of the advisory board (better known through most of its duration as the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board or PFIAB), recounting its origins, development, and activities, as far as these can be known or discovered.

Even within the challenging domain of intelligence studies, the history of the PFIAB is a particularly daunting subject. Not only do many the board's records from the Cold War period remain classified, so do almost all of the relevant files since George H. W. Bush's presidency. Even records that might have been declassified often remain sequestered behind an independent claim of executive privilege.

The authors of Privileged and Confidential have scoured presidential libraries for every scrap of available information regarding the PFIAB and have filled in numerous gaps through dozens of interviews with former board members and staff. With abundant footnotes to archival sources as well as references to board products and other records that remain currently inaccessible, the authors have provided a useful and stimulating guide for future research. While unavoidably incomplete, the book is the most thorough account of the PFIAB we are likely to have for some years to come.

In some respects, the book is almost too thorough. The authors seem to have included every last bit of information they uncovered, no matter how ephemeral or slight its meaning. While the capsule biographies of all of the dozens of past PFIAB members may be useful, the discussion of candidates who were not actually named to the board is of less interest. The number of meetings between a president and the [End Page 144] board may be a measure of the board's activity and an indication of its access, but the potential significance of...

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