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Richard Samuels's Special Duty: A History of the Japanese Intelligence Community is an important and insightful contribution to the scholarly literature. Samuels presents a masterly and highly detailed narrative of modern Japanese intelligence from 1895 to today, leading from an analytic introduction into chronologically organized chapters that survey prewar Japanese intelligence before turning to the Cold War era, when the Japanese intelligence community was fragmented, timid, and constrained by its dependence on the United States. Noting occasional achievements and more frequent failures, the discussion then proceeds into the twilight period of the 1990s, when hesitant reforms devised by concerned politicians and bureaucrats failed to remedy the endemic fragmentation of the community. The book then focuses on the more sweeping reforms launched in the two decades after 9/11 under the auspices of conservative Liberal Democratic Party cabinets, especially those of Abe Shinzō. Finally, the conclusion assesses the future of the community against the background of a changing strategic environment, escalating security threats from China and North Korea, increasing (though still limited) Japanese diplomatic assertiveness, and the decline of the United States as a global power.

Admittedly, writing a reliable and descriptive account of intelligence organizations poses a significant challenge to historians, who must rely on released documents. The secretive nature of intelligence organizations and their activities often makes access to factual and authentic data difficult. For Samuels, a political scientist, such obstacles are even more formidable given his particular focus on postwar and recent history, sources on which are all the more closed off due to their proximity to the present. And yet his work incorporates scholarly studies, released American documents, press articles, and Japanese official reports to culminate in a rich and credible account. [End Page 165]

Importantly, Special Duty is not only a descriptive account of Japanese intelligence but also an in-depth analytical study. In the first chapter, Samuels documents the six "elements of intelligence" (collection, analysis, communication, protection, covert action, and oversight) and the three drivers of change (strategic environment, technology, and failure) that he uses to measure the performance of the Japanese intelligence community. From the outset, he argues, the prewar Japanese secret services suffered from significant maladies that distorted their performance and destabilized all six elements. Imperial Japanese intelligence developed as an ad hoc assembly of autodidactic officers, dubious adventurers, criminals, and narrow-minded China hands. This mixture of groups and individuals, which I have elsewhere named the "military-adventurous complex," was plagued by the factionalism prevalent throughout the prewar Japanese armed forces.¹ Methods of communication were extremely faulty, leading to errors, and the different services often obstructed each other's work and spied on one another as much as they did on the enemy. Worst of all, covert action, which involved interfering in enemy politics rather than studying it, stymied both collection and analysis. Protection was also unsatisfactory, as evidenced by the infiltration of spies such as Richard Sorge into the Japanese leadership, and civilian oversight was scarce. In contrast, the agencies specializing in signals intelligence (SIGINT) and open source analysis (OSINT) absorbed new technologies and improved faster than elsewhere in the community. Samuels argues that "the problems of the [prewar] Japanese intelligence community seem to have been more widespread and persistent" than those of parallel organizations in other countries (p. 242). He also criticizes Japanese political and military leaders who ignored actionable intelligence, preferring instead to absorb themselves in wishful thinking that resulted in disastrous consequences.

Emphasizing prewar and postwar continuities, Samuels goes on in chapter 2 to show how the maladies of imperial Japanese intelligence afflicted both its postwar successor organizations and the US occupiers. Here we see an interesting pattern characteristic of the first years of the Cold War. As relations between the Americans and the Soviets soured, US military officers discovered that they knew too little about their new adversaries and turned to intelligence veterans from Germany and Japan, their defeated rivals, for quick information and analysis. In...