Michael Herman and Gwilym Hughes, eds., Intelligence in the Cold War: What Difference Did It Make? New York: Routledge, 2013. 150 pp. $145.00

Although covert actions are the sexier part of the role of intelligence in the Cold War, perhaps more important and certainly less studied is the impact of intelligence gathering and assessment. John Lewis Gaddis and Richard Immerman have argued that the impact was remarkably slight (see Gaddis, “Intelligence, Espionage, and Cold War Origins,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 13, No. 1, January 1980, pp. 1–23, and Immerman, “Intelligence and Strategy: Historicizing Psychology, Policy, and Politics,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 32, No. 1, January 2008, pp. 1–23). Although at first glance this seems counterintuitive, or at a minimum raises the question of why the United States is wasting so much money, most accounts of policymaking indicate that leaders generally have strong views about other states and the way the world works and absent the rare piece of compelling evidence are unlikely to change their minds. But this hardly exhausts the subject, and...