NONFICTION - Dec. 17, 1995

INSIDE CIA’S SSR PRIVATE WORLD: Declassified Articles From the Agency’s Internal Journal, 1955-1992, selected and edited by H. Bradford Westerfield (Yale University Press: $35; 489 pp.). Darn. The CIA may now be willing to declassify many articles from its confidential in-house journal, “Studies in Intelligence,” but the really good stuff remains under wraps. Most of the articles collected in this book are procedural rather than substantive, dealing with techniques of information analysis and division of responsibilities, but there is gold amid the dross: for example, ways of surviving the third degree (“some persons can vomit at will, and it could be effective if the prisoner suddenly did so upon the interrogator”). So that’s what George Bush, former CIA director, was doing in Japan that time.