The Shadow Factory
By James Bamford Doubleday; 395 pages
In the annals of U.S. espionage, there are few groups more secretive than the National Security Agency (NSA), the covert Defense Department organization that illegally tapped the phones of U.S. citizens in the frenzied, fearful wake of Sept. 11, 2001. In his third book on the agency, Bamford, a former Navy analyst, catalogs the humiliating blunders that allowed the hijackers into the country and the subsequent failure to locate them--despite the fact that at one point, they were listed in the phone book. The 9/11 attacks, he argues, put enormous pressure on...