Spy Slyly, Carry a Big Gun

By LANCE MORROW

The American military hasn't the imperial tradition to produce a Lawrence of Arabia type--a cross-cultural swashbuckling chameleon who, speaking perfect Arabic, might infiltrate the recruiting grounds of al-Qaeda or bazaars of Tikrit and send home the inside dope. It is a weakness in the war against terrorism. In Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to al-Qaeda (Alfred A. Knopf; 387 pages), the military historian John Keegan half playfully suggests that Western spy shops might study the model of Kipling's culturally ambidextrous Kim.

But the merits of firepower vs. brainpower--of outward force vs. inside knowledge--are debatable. In Keegan's commonsense (and somewhat unfashionable) view, "War is ultimately about doing, not thinking." Despite periodic triumphs of espionage and applied intellect--those of Bletchley Park's decrypters against the German Enigma codes of World War II, for example--the value of intelligence in war, Keegan thinks, may be limited or illusory. "Knowledge, the conventional wisdom has it, is power; but knowledge cannot destroy or deflect or damage or even defy an offensive initiative by an enemy unless the possession of knowledge is also allied to objective force," Keegan writes.

War plays itself out in subtle if violent variety; however, generals who get dogmatic about it will win on paper and lose on the battlefield. Keegan's case studies are too discriminating to be doctrinaire. He begins with Nelson's long, blundering search for Napoleon's invasion fleet in 1798. Nelson, short on reconnoitering frigates, his knowledge running only as far as the horizon, could not even be sure where Napoleon's aggression was headed. Nelson followed Napoleon's fleet through a cloud of unknowing and finally crushed the French in Aboukir Bay.

Keegan also studies Stonewall Jackson's brilliant use of local knowledge to lead the Union armies a frustrated chase up and down the Shenandoah Valley in 1862. There are chapters on the British disaster on Crete in 1941 ("Foreknowledge No Help"), on the Americans' immense triumph at Midway a year later (a world-historical victory that owed as much to luck, Keegan ingeniously argues, as to intelligence) and the struggle of British intelligence to locate and destroy Hitler's U-boat offensive against England.

For the present, Keegan offers friendly advice to the CIA. It is a bad mistake, he says, for a spy organization serving a democracy to be in the business of both intelligence gathering and subversion. Subversion, Keegan argues, "is a weak way of fighting." And it has an untidy way of becoming a political issue in the next election. --By Lance Morrow