The U.S. Intelligence Community is uniquely comprehensive in its description of dozens of federal agencies, bureaus and systems presently engaging in this line of work. It is especially valuable for its sketches of lesser-known units like the National Reconnaissance Office, the Foreign Agriculture Service, and the Nuclear Detonation Detection System, as well as cooperative arrangements between the United States and its allies. Richelson has compiled a similar study on the U.S.S.R., Sword and Shield: Soviet Intelligence and Security Apparatus. This may be the best scholarly treatment available, but perhaps not surprisingly, it is less detailed and more speculative than his volume on the U.S. It’s also much drier than the defectors’ accounts that have provided much of what is known about the Soviet agencies.
