Brent Durbin’s fine book should help bridge the long-standing gap between academic political science and intelligence studies. Durbin’s goal is to explain the politics of U.S. intelligence reform, especially the many efforts to reform the Central Intelligence Agency, in theoretical terms standard in academic political science. He thereby adds another voice to the few well-established academic political scientists, such as Richard Betts and Robert Jervis, who recognize that because international relations are largely determined by foreign policy decisions and intelligence is designed primarily to help leaders make better decisions, the study of intelligence is critical to an understanding of international relations (pp. 24–25).

Durbin seeks to explain why external reformers of U.S. intelligence succeed or fail in their reform attempts, positing that two factors account for this performance: the degree of “foreign policy consensus” in the United States and the degree to which intelligence agencies control information about their activities (p. 4). Foreign policy consensus and breakdowns in agencies’ control of information facilitate reform, while a lack of consensus and tight intelligence agency control of information about their activities inhibit reform. The author tests his theory by discussing aspects of intelligence reform in four periods of appreciable change: 1) the years immediately after the creation of the CIA in 1947, when the young CIA matured as an institution and most Americans came to view the Soviet Union as a major threat; 2) the breakdown of this “Cold War consensus” in the mid-1970s, which was aided by release of previously secret information about perceived intelligence abuses; 3) the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union ended old intelligence tasks and new threats and new intelligence missions emerged; and 4) the post-September 2001 period, when counterterrorism-related intelligence became more important. Unsurprisingly, he finds that his case studies, which comprise most of the book, generally confirm his theory. However, he does not address whether reform efforts were well considered or whether they actually could or did improve the performance of intelligence.

The theoretical discussion in Chapter 2 is methodologically sound but not particularly useful. Rather than posit the power of “foreign policy consensus,” Durbin might as well have argued that reforms occur when executive branch and congressional leaders agree to make them—not a helpful insight. And he defines “reform” extremely broadly as any change in the structure, activities, and processes of intelligence—a definition that includes the continuous, evolutionary, often mundane changes that intelligence services make internally to reflect policymakers’ evolving intelligence needs, changing international situations, and new collection technologies (pp. 14–17). Happily, his case study analyses are persuasive, and his concluding chapter focuses on “findings” that reflect his insightful analysis of the many causes of the troubled history of reform efforts more than the theory he presents early in the book. For example, Durbin analyzes the dynamic interaction between the Ford administration and Congress in 1975 after release of information about earlier CIA improprieties, which contributed to the creation of the congressional intelligence oversight committees in 1976–77 and the first executive orders restricting CIA activities. His theoretical discussion is helpful, however, in discussing the limitations and some errors of Amy Zegart’s 1999 Flawed by Design, which is among the most prominent discussions of intelligence in academic political science (pp. 42-43, 76, 79–80). For example, Durbin refutes Zegart’s claim that the CIA was built primarily to serve parochial bureaucratic, not national, interests (p. 43); he finds instead that reformers constructed the CIA as a direct response to perceived national intelligence needs.

Durbin’s understanding of CIA history is generally good. He demonstrates considerable command of the scholarly literature on bureaucratic organizations and legislative reform of intelligence. But nearly absent are references to the three best journals on intelligence issues: the CIA’s Studies in Intelligence, first published in 1955, and the more scholarly Intelligence and National Security and International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, which date from the 1980s. These high-quality journals have markedly improved the literature on intelligence in recent years. Each has published much material relevant to Durbin’s questions, as well as articles on many other aspects of intelligence.

While his knowledge of the subject is good, Durbin makes a few questionable judgments and mistakes. For example, he attributes the demise in 1973 of the CIA’s Office of National Estimates, which drafted national intelligence estimates (NIEs), to the fraying Cold War consensus of the time (p. 130); most students of CIA history believe instead that it reflected mounting unhappiness with the judgmental errors contained in NIEs in the 1960s and early 1970s, which were due largely to the declining abilities of estimators over the years as the CIA’s leaders assigned lesser analysts to the Office. He attributes the writing of NIE 11-3/8-75 on Soviet strategic programs, which triggered the infamous Team A/Team B “competitive analysis” of Soviet strategic military capabilities and intentions of 1976, to the CIA (p. 130). In fact, by this time NIEs were coordinated assessments of the intelligence community as a whole. And he incorrectly reports current House intelligence committee chairman Devin Nunes’s name to be David Nunes (p. 251). But given the complexity of the issues he discusses and the many subtle changes that occurred in intelligence institutions over time, Durbin’s command of CIA history is impressive.

The book’s last chapter outlines an important and realistic research agenda. Persuasively warning that “[s]tudents and practitioners of international relations ignore intelligence at their peril” (p. 267), Durbin argues that intelligence is a variable in international relations, not a constant, and that its importance can be demonstrated in case studies. (The specialist intelligence literature has done some such work.) He notes that the study of intelligence reform is a useful adjunct to the study of bureaucratic processes in general (pp. 270–71), and he accurately observes that his book lightly treats the goals and interests of intelligence services themselves (p. 267). To Durbin’s research agenda might be added a consideration of why intelligence reform proposals so often reflect retread, failed ideas that have little or no chance of improving intelligence performance, and why reformers seem unable to craft reform proposals that generate institutional incentives that make intelligence professionals want to implement them. And the stunning, unprecedented public display since 2016 of partisanship by current and former intelligence officers, most prominently demonstrated by former director of the CIA John Brennan’s verbal attacks on President Donald Trump, suggests new questions about the partisanship of the intelligence bureaucracy, the possibility of new varieties of politicization within U.S. intelligence agencies, and the evolving nature of the CIA’s organizational interests.

For intelligence practitioners, Durbin offers one of the best academic treatments of intelligence agencies’ dealings with reformers in intelligence oversight roles. The CIA and the Politics of US Intelligence Reform effectively presents the ways in which many academics and congressional reformers of intelligence, especially, see the business—important knowledge for intelligence professionals as well as a wide scholarly audience increasingly interested in these issues.