Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs and Operations in the 9/11 World

From ""Able Condor,"" a 2001 U.K. army signal command post exercise, to ""Zodiac Beauchamp,"" a suborbital rocket launch program begun in 1990 and run from Barking Sands, Hawaii, the heart of this book is a 300-page compendium of global military operations and their code names-many of them classified. Arkin, a former NBC news military analyst and co-author of the Reagan-era Nuclear Battlefields (which disclosed the locations of secret nuclear installations worldwide), justifies his collecting and publishing of often covert operations and codenames as necessary to democracy, arguing that much of the secrecy protects not the U.S., but other countries-countries that offer the U.S. access to intelligence or bases, but require that the world (and their own populations) not know about it. In a passionate and lucidly composed introduction, Arkin lays out his version of patriotism, explains what ""special access programs"" (SAPs) are, the differing levels of information security generate and how they get their names. Four sections follow: a ""cast of characters,"" describing U.S. and foreign agencies, commands and other organizations involved in sensitive operations; a list of their ""activities by country""; the ""code names dictionary"" mentioned above; and a glossary of acronyms (""MIO: maritime interdiction operation"") and other terms. Taken together, they offer a prismatic array of activities that come under the aegis of the war on terror, and provide a concrete means for further research and debate.