Club member's new book traces growth of US intelligence agencies from WWII

National Press Club member Nicholas Reynolds has a new non-fiction book out, “Need to Know: World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence,” that was included on the “Best Books of 2022 So Far” list published in late October in The New Yorker.

"Need to Know" looks at a broad spectrum of American intelligence operations, from code-breaking to spying and guerrilla warfare during World War II. The reader is invited to watch the various disciplines grow from isolated cottage industries into collaborative enterprises; the narrative unfolds through the eyes of members of the Greatest Generation as they come together to defeat the evil empire of their day, fighting from Pearl Harbor to Midway, and North Africa to Normandy. Both readable and scholarly, the book renders authoritative judgments about who accomplished what and how the leaders positioned their outfits for the uneasy peace that followed the war. 

The analysis in The New Yorker list says this: "How did we end up with the C.I.A., which marks its seventy-fifth anniversary this year? This account of the rise of American intelligence shows that the agency’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, was only one element in a dramatic expansion of operations at the start of the Second World War. As Reynolds recounts, it was Army and Navy cryptography and reconnaissance units that handled most of the actual code-breaking and spying. The problem became the volume of raw intelligence, which gave rise to a need for an entity that could make sense of it and turn it into something that policymakers could use. Various intelligence agencies took up this responsibility during and after the war, and Reynolds, by engaging fully with the various contenders, manages to avoid retrofitting the history of U.S. intelligence around the assumption that the C.I.A. would inevitably emerge as the lead postwar organization."