Strategic Intelligence can be read variously as: 1) a general introduction to intelligence work which, say, the director of almost any section of Central Intelligence might give a new recruit to read on his first day at the office; 2) a memorandum from an Old Hand at intelligence work who has thought it all over—like the bird in Peter and the Wolf, from a safe distance—and has a thing or two to tell those of his colleagues who have stayed on in Washington; and 3) an attempt by that same Old Hand to make sense—inter alia for himself—out of a greatly expanded United States government activity in which, as all who know it can testify, sense does not leap to the eye. Because the book is in part each of these three things, it is not perfectly satisfactory as any one of them. But it is evidently not offered as a learned treatise on any or all of them: indeed, the gap in the existing literature in the field is so great that one can hardly be surprised at Mr. Kent's failure to define his task with precision. The great merit of his book is that it provides a body of descriptive material which will enable serious public discussion to begin on the relation of intelligence to policy in a democratic system. Since it is American policy on which the future of the free world seems to depend, it is high time for the public debate to commence.