Spying on America: The FBI’s Domestic Counter-Intelligence Program by James Kirkpatrick Davis, and: North American Spies: New Revisionist Essays ed. by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Andrew Lownie (review)

236 Canadian Review of American Studies America, that their presence was large and worthy of consideration. The work iswell organized and clearly written, with substantial documentation and a strong bibliography . The volume assembles numerous impressive biographies which have not formerly gained serious consideration but will now give women their deserved place in cultural history. Karen J. Blair Central Washington University ++++++ James Kirkpatrick Davis.Spying onAmerica: The FBI's Domestic Counter-Intelligence Program. New York: Praeger, 1992. Pp. x + 182, notes and bibliography. Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones and Andrew l.ownie, eds. North American Spies: New Revisionist Essays. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas. Pp. ix+ 238, notes and annotated bibliography. Accounts of espionage make up a remarkable share of popular works about contemporary American history. This isnot true of academe. The scholarly literature on American intelligence since 1945 is limited in quantity and quality; neither of these books will redress that balance. North American Spies consists primarily of extended essays written by students of a one-year M.Sc. programme in American intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. By necessity of the genre, such dissertations rest on a restricted period of research, in an area where the documentary basis is often difficult to find. Not surprisingly, these essays are the weakest part of the collection. This is not the fault of their authors. These dissertations are acceptable as such but few merit publication. The subtitle to North American Spies, moreover, is rather misleading, since is implies that there is a literature to revise. Excepting a fewwell-trodden areas, trodden mostly byjournalists, this is far from the case, and few of the essays inNorthAmerican Spies merit the title "revisionist." Many of them are of marginal value. Those of Patrick Mescall, on the origins of the Defence Intelligence Agency, and Robert Spears, on the social background of the elite of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), suffer from the same problem. Their base of evidence is limited in the extreme and thus their analyses, though methodologically sound, are, in essence, speculation. They offer interesting assertions: they do not make convincing arguments. Nor does David Walker add anything to our understanding of the effect of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) on American BookReviews 237 policytoward Operation "Torch" and Admiral Darlan. In other cases, the research isgood but the conclusions are oflimited originality. Andrew Lownie's argument that TylerKent may-but, then again, may not-have been a Soviet spy islittle more that afootnote to John Costello's well researched, if sensationalist, Ten Days to Decision. Conversely, if Richard Laidlaw's account of OSS operations in the Burma theatre during the Second World War will interest only those concerned with that specific topic, the essay is tolerably well researched and intelligently conceived. One of the more promising pieces of analysis in the collection, despite its obvious limits, Karen Potter's study of "British McCarthyism" as a cultural-political phenomenon, will be of greater interest to students of Britain than of the United States. Nonetheless, several of the essays in North American Spies are good and do merit the title "revisionist." Graeme Mount provides a well researched and analyzed account of Spanish espionage and American counterintelligence in Canada during the Spanish-American War. This is a useful contribution to an area which has received little attention, intelligence during the century before 1914. Along with some recent work on American actions in Mexico during the nineteenth century, it reveals that there is a history behind the contemporary American practice of covert action abroad. A joint article by Danny D. Jansen and Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones studies, insome detail, the state of central American intelligence between the fall of the OSS and the rise of the CIA. This does much to demolish the general view-one emanating from the self-mythologization of old hands of the OSS and the CIA-about the allegedly deleterious effect of Harry Truman's administration on American intelligence. Katy Fletcher's account of American spyfiction willinterest anyone who enjoysthe topic or is concerned with genre studies. Above all, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones offers an excellent critical essay (with a solid annotated bibliography) about intelligence in the United States during the past century. This is one...