8-6-95. NYPaper Book Review: "Spies Unlike Us: A history of French intelligence reveals a far more brutal approach than this country's." The aftermath of 1945 imposed an additional heavy burden on the French secret services. Political allegiances were exacerbated by the presence of a potential huge Communist fifth column in France. The rough lessons of the war led to a premium on "service action" operations of sabotage and assassination before which Britain's M.I.6 would have quailed. Mr. Porch sees the French secret services of today as still not having recovered from their politicization during World War II. During the gulf war, the humiliating realization was forced on the French Army that for intelligence it was totally dependent on American high technology. SAL_mai "The Code War: How United States intelligence outsmarted Japan in World War II." He rightly sees the role of intelligence in the Pacific war not simply as a story of code-breaking successes. Rather, he writes, "the true achievements of intelligence in the Pacific war lie in the day-to-day accumulation of a fund of knowledge.... Cryptography, traffic analysis, aerial photography, prisoner interrogation, document capture and translation, and technical intelligence ... became pillars of an overall effort greater than the sum of its parts." He explains and describes this winning synergy of intelligence elements as well as, or better than, any previous author. PIL_sal Jak/Ari: JAC_kio