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"Body of Secrets" has been reviewed by so many that another review may seem superfluous, but perhaps I have something to add. The book is well worth reading; it contains a lot of previously unpublished information, and on a few of those items that I can cross-check either from personal knowledge or from other sources, Bamford's statements of specific facts are correct. However, I have three criticisms of the book. First, although the book is asserted to be about NSA, much of what's in it has little to do with NSA. For example, the discussion of US efforts to unseat the Castro government of Cuba, including the Bay of Pigs episode, has very little to do with NSA, and a great deal to do with the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations and the CIA. And Bamford's account of it is so incomplete that it could easily mislead readers who haven't studied the topic. E.g. if one knows how skeptical Richard Helms of CIA was about Bay of Pigs, and that Allan Dulles chose to ignore Helms, and if one knows how many people knew and said that the change of landing site negated whatever chance Bissell's original plan might have had, it seems clear that nothing NSA might have known, said or done could have affected that operation or its result. Bamford seems to have included this material more because it was sensational than because it had much to do with NSA. Indeed, the entire book seems to have been written with James Bond-type adventure stories in mind. The vast majority of NSA's work is about as exciting as growing alfalfa; rewarding, and requiring experience and skill, but only exciting on rare occasions. So this book does not give a balanced picture of what NSA does or how it does it. Worst of all, Bamford fails to understand how much of what he writes about he doesn't know. Being able to realize what you don't know about something is a key difficulty in intelligence work (and in many other sorts of work); the mind plays tricks on one, composing a coherent picture from incomplete evidence. This difficulty applies equally to writing about intelligence work, but Bamford seems not to grasp this fundamental principle. For example, considering the Israeli attack on USS Liberty, I know that I do not know certain key facts, and I'm fairly sure that no other one person knows all the key facts either, and I doubt that anybody ever will. But Bamford writes about it as if he does know all the facts; because he does this, his account contains much interpretation that he seems, unless one reads very carefully, to be presenting as fact. That's why this part of the book has caused so much controversy. It's a serious failing throughout the book. I'll cite one very minor item of which I have knowledge to show why I react to Bamford's book as I do. On page 161, Bamford mentions discontent in 1957 at the operation in Asmara, Eritrea. I don't know whether his account is precisely correct in what it says; I do know it's incomplete. Athough I have never been in Asmara, I relayed Navy traffic from Asmara for almost three years, so I heard the Asmara crew's complaints. There was discontent in Asmara for at least five years before 1957, and the underlying cause was not arbitrary restrictions imposed by the command. Career people on remote outposts are expert at evading edicts from anybody anywhere; if they weren't, such "orphaned" stations couldn't operate at all. But although Asmara was said to be a pretty town with a nice climate, there was very little to do in Asmara (except work) that most of the guys wanted to do. To make it worse, when they could get leave the only place they could usually get to, as a practical matter, was Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where the climate was awful and there was even less to do than in Asmara. So a lot of the guys in Asmara wound up sort of climbing the walls. This, more than restrictions imposed by the command, explains the 1957 "strike" that Bamford writes about. And this is a good small example, first, of Bamford not noticing that he didn't have all the facts, and, second, that most intelligence work is not exciting, heroic or dangerous, even though it's important. In short, this book is a good read and worth reading, but should be read with attentive caution.