The Threat on the Horizon An Inside Account of America's Search for Security after the Cold War

The Aspin-Brown Commission of 1995-1996, led by former U.S. Defense Secretaries Les Aspin and Harold Brown, was a landmark inquiry into the activities of America's secret agencies. Its purpose was to help the U.S. intelligence community adapt to the post-Cold War world. In The Threat on the Horizon , eminent national security scholar Loch Johnson, who served as Aspin's assistant, offers a comprehensive insider's account of this inquiry. Based on a close sifting of the record, interviews with participants, and his own eyewitness impressions, Johnson's thorough history offers a unique window onto why the terrorist attacks of 2001 caught the United States by surprise and why the intelligence community failed again in 2002 when it predicted that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The first published account by an insider of a presidential commission on intelligence, it will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in how the world's most powerful nation struggled to confront the new global threats that materialized after the collapse of the Soviet empire, and why Washington was unprepared for the calamities that would soon occur.

Loch K. Johnson is Regents Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia.