David Wise, former Washington bureau chief of the New Tork Herald Tribune and author of nine books on intelligence, including The Spy Who Got Away (Random House, 1988):

James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America's Most Secret Agency (Penguin, 1983). "It was a breakthrough in writing about communications intelligence. This book stands as a monument; it hasn't been challenged. It pulled aside the curtain of secrecy about an agency even more secret than the CIA. Nobody really knew very much about what the Walter Laqueur, chairman of the International Research Council at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and author of World of Secrets: The Uses and Limits of Intelligence (Basic, 1985):

David M. Glantz, Soviet Military Deception in the Second World War (Frank Cass & Co., 1989). "It's a highly technical history, covering 1941 through 1944, but it's very thorough and is based on a wide range of everything published, including lots of stuff which is not easily accessible. It's not sensationalist."

Thomas Powers, author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (Random House; 1979):

Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior--James Jesus Angleton: The CIA's Master Spy Hunter (Simon & Schuster, 1991). "A book about James Angleton, the former head of counterintelligence at the CIA, one of the leading figures in American intelligence and an extremely divisive one. He had been intellectually seduced by a Russian defector named Anatoliy Golitsyn, and Mangold presents a wealth of material showing how, as a result, he believed that the Soviets were penetrating our counterintelligence right and left." Mangold, says Powers, paints a strong and frightening picture of spies so reliant upon, and so misled by, one another, that they never connect with any "reality checks." "Golitsyn and Angleton together," he adds, "were a dangerous combination of a passionate nature."

David P. Calleo, Dean Acheson Professor and Director of European Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and author of Beyond American Hegemony: The Future of the Western Alliance (Basic, 1987):

Richard H. Ullman, Securing Europe (Princeton, 1991). "A book that tries to raise the issue of what sort of security system should Europe have in the long run, of whether NATO is eternal, of what it should be in the long run. Ullman has been around for a while and he is very thoughtfull."

Roy Godson, professor of government at Georgetown University and coordinator of the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence:

A. N. Shulsky and Gary J. Schmitt, Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence (Pergamon-Brasseys, 1991). The book, says Godson, is the first comprehensive survey of intelligence to incorporate "the great revelations of the 1970s" emanating from several countries, particularly England and the United States. "A plethora of information came out that now allows us to put intelligence studies on the same level in the academy as politics and government, information that gave us a basis for comparison and generalization." The book, which Godson believes will soon become the standard introduction to the field, outlines the "four elements of intelligence--collection, analysis, counterintelligence, and covert action. Shulsky also discusses a particularly American aspect of the field--the relationship between secret intelligence and a democracy, how to address that incompatibility. He also addresses an important theoretical issue: the difference between information and intelligence. Most people think intelligence is simply information, but he points out that it is actually secret information, and that the point of intelligence is getting, protecting, and using secret information to promote government activities."

Are there any great books you think we missed? Let us know.