The history of secret intelligence, like secret intelligence itself, is fraught with difficulties surrounding both the reliability and completeness of the sources, and the motivations behind their release--which can be the product of ongoing propaganda efforts as well as competition among agencies. Indeed, these difficulties lead to the Scylla and Charybdis of overestimating the importance of secret intelligence for foreign policy and statecraft and also underestimating its importance in these same areas--problems that generally beset the actual use of secret intelligence in modern states....