Wippl Publishes Article Evaluating Spydom’s Chiefs
Joseph Wippl, Professor of the Practice of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published a recent review of Spy Chiefs: Intelligence Leaders in the United States and United Kingdom and Spy Chiefs: Intelligence Leaders in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia (Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, 2018) by Christopher Moran, Mark Stout, Ioanna Iordanou, and Paul Maddrell.
Wippl’s article, entitled “Spydom’s Chiefs Evaluated,” was published in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence.
From the abstract of the article:
This two-volume work by several well-respected scholars on intelligence examines the performance of numerous leaders of intelligence agencies, most of whom headed intelligence bodies of government. Volume 1 focuses on the intelligence agencies of the United States and the United Kingdom. The two countries have a great deal in common, beginning with their respective histories. Their special relationship, certain similar themes, interests, and personalities give this volume significantly more coherence than Volume 2, whose contents are not only separated geographically and culturally, but also by governmental structures: democracy, totalitarian, dictatorship, and post-colonial nation building.
Both volumes focus on leadership within different governments at different times and under different circumstances. Leadership is the only common thread running through both volumes. Other than the first volume being Anglo-American and the other not, the advantage to the organization of this two-volume work is that every chapter is in and of itself factual, well researched, interesting, and well written. The chapters, while reviewed here sequentially, need not be read in sequence. All are in themselves worthwhile. From a personal standpoint, as a former Chief of the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Europe Division, I regretted the absence of a chapter on France and its multiple very professional services, as well as on the medium-to-smaller European countries, many of which do very well in the areas of intelligence collection and analysis.
Wippl is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer. He spent a 30 year career as an operations officer in the National Clandestine Service (NCS). Wippl has served overseas as an operations officer and operations manager in Bonn, West Germany; Guatemala City; Luxembourg; Madrid, Spain; Mexico City; Vienna, Austria; and Berlin, Germany.