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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > International relations > Espionage & secret services
When Johan Booysen hears that the new Provincial Police Chief takes backhanders from a Durban businessman, he decides to give her the benefit of the doubt. But the evidence becomes impossible to ignore and he soon gets dragged down the corridors of power and politics into a web of intrigue, deceit and betrayal that, at times, he has trouble making sense of. Only when he is arrested, handcuffed and tossed into a cell does Booysen realise just how ruthless those opposed to him are – an opposition he comes to call the ‘cabal’ – and whom he believes have more blood on their hands than the so-called Cato Manor Death Squad with which he is closely associated. Blood On Their Hands traces Johan Booysen’s life and career – from patrolling the streets of Amanzimtoti in the 1970s to his rise in 2010 to major general and head of KZN’s Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation unit, the Hawks. But his tenure is short-lived. When Booysen decides to take on those so determined to be rid of him, each legal battle he wins is met by hostility and further efforts to shut him out of the of the criminal justice system. But capitulating is not in his DNA…
South Africa's Bomb kept the world guessing for years. Six-and-a- half nuclear bombs had been secretly built and destroyed, former South African President F.W. de Klerk announced in 1993. No other country has ever voluntarily destroyed its nuclear arsenal. From 1975 Nic von Wielligh was involved in the production of nuclear weapons material, the dismantling of the nuclear weapons and the provision of evidence of South Africa's bona fides to the international community. The International Atomic Energy Agency declared South Africa's Initial Report to be the most comprehensive and professional that they had ever received. In this book the nuclear physicist and his daughter Lydia von Wielligh-Steyn tell the gripping story of the splitting of the atom and the power it releases. It is an account of ground-breaking research and the scientists responsible; it deals with uranium enrichment, the arms race and South Africa's secret programme. The Bomb: South Africa's Nuclear Programme is a story of nuclear explosions, espionage, smuggling of nuclear materials and swords that became ploughshares.
The ethics of changemaking and peacebuilding may appear straightforward: advance dignity, promote well-being, minimize suffering. Sounds simple, right? Actually acting ethically when it really matters is rarely straightforward. If someone engaged in change-oriented work sets out to "do good," how should we prioritize and evaluate whose good counts? And, how ought we act once we have decided whose good counts? Practitioners frequently confront dilemmas where dire situations may demand some form of response, but each of the options may have undesirable consequences of one form or another. Dilemmas are not merely ordinary problems, they are wicked problems: that is to say, they are defined by circumstances that only allow for suboptimal outcomes and are based on profound and sometimes troubling trade-offs. Wicked Problems argues that the field of peacebuilding and conflict transformation needs a stronger and more practical sense of its ethical obligations. For example, it argues against posing false binaries between domestic and international issues and against viewing violence and conflict as equivalents. It holds strategic nonviolence up to critical scrutiny and shows that "do no harm" approaches may in fact do harm. The contributors include scholars, scholar practitioners in the field, and activists on the streets, and the chapters cover the role of violence in conflict; conflict and violence prevention and resolution; humanitarianism; community organizing and racial justice; social movements; human rights advocacy; transitional justice; political reconciliation; and peace education and pedagogy, among other topics. Drawing on the lived experiences and expertise of activists, educators, and researchers, Wicked Problems equips readers to ask-and answer-difficult questions about social change work.
A wide-ranging rethinking of the many factors that comprise the making of American Grand Strategy. What is grand strategy? What does it aim to achieve? And what differentiates it from normal strategic thought-what, in other words, makes it "grand"? In answering these questions, most scholars have focused on diplomacy and warfare, so much so that "grand strategy" has become almost an equivalent of "military history." The traditional attention paid to military affairs is understandable, but in today's world it leaves out much else that could be considered political, and therefore strategic. It is in fact possible to consider, and even reach, a more capacious understanding of grand strategy, one that still includes the battlefield and the negotiating table while expanding beyond them. Just as contemporary world politics is driven by a wide range of non-military issues, the most thorough considerations of grand strategy must consider the bases of peace and security-including gender, race, the environment, and a wide range of cultural, social, political, and economic issues. Rethinking American Grand Strategy assembles a roster of leading historians to examine America's place in the world. Its innovative chapters re-examine familiar figures, such as John Quincy Adams, George Kennan, and Henry Kissinger, while also revealing the forgotten episodes and hidden voices of American grand strategy. They expand the scope of diplomatic and military history by placing the grand strategies of public health, race, gender, humanitarianism, and the law alongside military and diplomatic affairs to reveal hidden strategists as well as strategies.
This account of the life of Jacques Vaillant de Guelis follows him from his birth in Cardiff, through school and University and French Military Service. Newly married he was recalled to France in 1939 and was assigned to a company of British engineers as liaison officer until reportedly captured. He escaped via Dunkirk, only to return to France a few days later. He retreated south, escaped over the Pyrenees only to be caught again and flung into the Miranda del Ebro Concentration camp. On his release he returned to England where he was recruited by the fledgling SOE, after an interview with Churchill. He became a familiar figure in Baker Street as a recruiting and conducting officer until he was sent to France on a fact- finding mission in 1941. A stay in Algiers in 1942-3 followed when he took part in the liberation of Corsica before returning to London and leading his 2nd mission to France in 1944. In 1945 he joined SAARF and led his last mission to Germany which culminated in collision with another vehicle when he was badly injured. He died later as a result
The gripping real story of the ordinary American man who found himself at the centre of a deadly terrorist organisation - and working for both MI5 and the FBI. A bored trucker from New York took a holiday to Ireland with his new girlfriend and brought down the IRA. Just a quick Google search reveals the level of interest across Britain, Ireland and the US into exactly how this ordinary blue-collar worker found himself at the centre of an espionage ring. David Rupert, a complete outsider with no connection to Ireland, rose to the very top of the Real IRA, all while working for the FBI and British intelligence. But the story is really about just how a bored, frustrated New York trucking manager becomes one of Britain's most valued spies, brings down the entire IRA structure and makes $10 million dollars in the process. Along the way he finds himself in the most extraordinary and terrifying situations - he is involved in major terrorist operations, sets up an Iraqi sting operation and organises US arms shipments with a man being trained to kill the then British prime minister, Tony Blair.
Presenting a thorough examination of intelligence activities in international law, Sophie Duroy provides theoretical and empirical justifications to support the cutting-edge claim that states’ compliance with international law in intelligence matters serves their national security interests. This book theorises the regulation of intelligence activities under international law, identifying three layers of regulation: a clear legal framework governing intelligence activities (legality); a capacity to enforce state responsibility (accountability); and the integration of legality and accountability into responsive regulation by the international legal order (compliance). The empirical relevance of these three layers of regulation is demonstrated through in-depth case studies of state responsibility in the CIA-led war on terror and an analysis of the accountability of Djibouti, the Gambia, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States for conduct in the CIA-led war on terror. Overall, the author shows that the most reliable path to long-term national security is the effective regulation of intelligence activities under international law. Making an original contribution to existing theories of compliance and regulation, as well as the law of state responsibility and its enforcement, this book will be essential for students and scholars of public international law, human rights, intelligence and security studies, and international relations. It will also be a valuable resource for practitioners of international law with an interest in intelligence, state responsibility, and terrorism and security law.
Based on previously classified documents and on interviews with former secret police officers and ordinary citizens, The Firm is the first comprehensive history of East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, at the grassroots level. Focusing on Gransee and Perleberg, two East German districts located north of Berlin, Gary Bruce reveals how the Stasi monitored small-town East Germany. He paints an eminently human portrait of those involved with this repressive arm of the government, featuring interviews with former officers that uncover a wide array of personalities, from devoted ideologues to reluctant opportunists, most of whom talked frankly about East Germany's obsession with surveillance. Their paths after the collapse of Communism are gripping stories of resurrection and despair, of renewal and demise, of remorse and continued adherence to the movement. The book also sheds much light on the role of the informant, the Stasi's most important tool in these out-of-the-way areas. Providing on-the-ground empirical evidence of how the Stasi operated on a day-to-day basis with ordinary people, this remarkable volume offers an unparalleled picture of life in a totalitarian state.
While the careers of secret agents have inspired many genres of popular culture, relatively little research has been carried out until now on spying as a profession. Through the lens of personnel management, the authors offer a unique and compelling analysis of secret service employee biographies and autobiographies, giving the reader an improved understanding of people management in all organisations. Personnel Management in Secret Service Organizations pinpoints key events in an agent’s career, focusing on how they enter their profession, how they perform espionage work; how they are trained and managed and what the circumstances of promotion and demotion might be, up to the point of exit from the profession (through retirement, capture, or death). Within this framework, it illustrates the ways that secret service organizations play a crucial role in contemporary societies. Drawing comparisons with personnel management in standard organizations, Personnel Management in Secret Service Organizations will be a valuable resource for researchers and students of management and organization. The use of narratology-inspired methods will appeal to younger scholars with an interest in organizational studies too.
In the wake of World War II, the United States and its allies developed a new type of security arrangement in which a state could maintain a long-term, peacetime military presence on the territory of another equally sovereign state that, unlike earlier practice, was not tied to occupational regimes or colonial rule. The impact of this development on international politics is hard to overstate, and it has become a constitutive feature of contemporary security dynamics. Despite its significance, the origins of this basing practice have remained largely understudied and unexplained. In Armed Guests, Sebastian Schmidt develops a theory to explain the emergence of this phenomenon, which he calls "sovereign basing," and in doing so, shows how its development fundamentally transformed state sovereignty and the very nature of security politics. He applies concepts derived from pragmatist thought to a historical study of the relations between the United States and its wartime allies to explain how sovereign basing originated through the efforts of policymakers to come to grips with the unique security environment of the postwar era. As he argues, the tools offered by pragmatism provide needed analytical leverage over the emergence of novelty and offer valuable insight into the dynamics of stability and change. Armed Guests is a wide-ranging account of the development of sovereign basing practices in the years before and after World War II. It is a book with significant implications for our understanding of contemporary security politics and the future of basing strategies as well as for broader issues in IR, including the sociological foundations of security strategies, the nature of norms, and the practice of sovereignty.
Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research is slowly yet steadily revolutionizing traditional education. However, multidisciplinary research can and will also improve the extent to which a country can protect its critical and vital assets. Applying Methods of Scientific Inquiry Into Intelligence, Security, and Counterterrorism is an essential scholarly publication that provides personnel directly working in the fields of intelligence, law enforcement, and science with the opportunity to understand the multidisciplinary nature of intelligence and science in order to improve current intelligence activities and contribute to the protection of the nation. Each chapter of the book discusses various components of science that should be applied to the intelligence arena. Featuring coverage on a range of topics including cybersecurity, economics, and political strategy, this book is ideal for law enforcement, intelligence and security practitioners, students, educators, and researchers.
This book tells a true detective story set mainly in Elizabethan London during the years of cold war just before the Armada of 1588. The mystery is the identity of a spy working in a foreign embassy to frustrate Catholic conspiracy and propaganda aimed at the overthrow of Queen Elizabeth and her government. The suspects in the case are the inmates of the house, an old building in the warren of streets and gardens between Fleet Street and the Thames. These include the ambassador, a civilized Frenchman, his wife, his daughter, his secretary, his clerk and his priest, the tutor, the chef, the butler, and the concierge. They also include a runaway friar, the Neapolitan philosopher, poet, and comedian Giordano Bruno, who wrote masterpieces of Italian literature, who was later burned in Rome for his anti-papal opinions, and who has been revered in Italy for his honorable and heroic resistance to papal authority. Others in the cast are Queen Elizabeth, her formidable secretary of state Sir Francis Walsingham, and King Henry III of France; poets, courtiers, and scholars; statesmen, conspirators, go-betweens, and stool-pigeons. When not in London, the action takes place in Paris and Oxford; a good deal of it happens on the river Thames. The hero or villain, who calls himself Fagot, does his work most effectively, is not found out, and disappears. In the first part of the book these events are narrated. In the second the spy is identified and his story put together. John Bossy's brilliant research, backed by his forensic and literary skills, solves a centuries-old mystery. His book makes a major contribution to the political and intellectual history of the wars of religion in Europe and to the domestic history of Elizabethan England. Not least, it is compelling reading.
John Birch is a totemic figure in American life. The society named after him is one of the famous far-right organizations in American history. It was also a paradigmatic example of anti-communist hysteria during the Cold War, and its influence on the American far right to this day remains significant. Yet despite his posthumous fame, Birch himself remains an obscure figure. Terry Lautz, a longtime scholar of US-China relations, has spoken with all of Birch's remaining relatives, found shoeboxes filled with letters from one of his former lovers, and visited the various sites in China where he worked. The result is the first authoritative biography of this fascinating figure, who continues to haunt the political fringes of American life. Birch grew up in the rapidly growing Bible culture of the post-World War I period, and then became a missionary in China in the tumultuous period of its war against the Japanese and the escalating conflict between nationalists and communists. He fought with Claire Chennault's famed Flying Tigers and had a number of romantic relationships with women along the way. After the war ended, he committed himself to resuming his missionary activities in China, but was killed by communist guerrillas in an altercation a couple of weeks after the war ended in September 1945. A few years after his death, when China fell to the communists, anti-communists in Congress latched onto his life and promoted him as a martyr. Within a few years, Robert Welch, a candy manufacturer in New England, formed the John Birch Society, an extreme right-wing organization whose influence is still visible in the Tea Party movement. Lautz covers Birch's life and his afterlife, and also places him not merely in the context of the American far right, but in the revolutionary war that consumed China in the 1930s and 1940s. In this critical study of a figure who has reached near-legendary status, Lautz cuts through the mythology to expose John Birch-both the man and the political phenomenon.
This combination A-Z encyclopedia and primary document collection provides an authoritative and enlightening overview of U.S. anti- and counterterrorism politics, policies, attitudes, and actions related to both foreign and domestic threats, with a special emphasis on post-9/11 events. This book provides a compelling overview of U.S. laws, policies, programs, and actions in the realms of anti- and counterterrorism, as well as comprehensive coverage of the various domestic and foreign terrorist organizations threatening America, including their leaders, ideologies, and practices. These entries are supplemented with a carefully selected collection of primary sources that track the evolution of U.S. anti- and counterterrorism policies and political debate. These documents will not only illuminate major events and turning points in America's fight against terror-both foreign and homegrown-but also help readers understand debates about the effectiveness, morality, and constitutionality of controversial policies that have either been implemented or proposed, from waterboarding to targeted assassination to indefinite incarceration at Guantanamo Bay. In addition, this resource shows how political controversies over anti- and counterterrorism strategies are spilling over into other areas of American life, from debates about privacy rights, government surveillance, and anti-Muslim actions and beliefs to arguments about whether U.S. firearms policies are a boon to terrorists. Wide-ranging encyclopedia section featuring contributions from counterterrorism scholars Primary Document collection that provides additional illumination on major events, laws, policies, and trends Authoritative and evenhanded coverage of counterterrorism threats, issues, events, laws, policies, and organizations Reader's Guide to entries by subject category
The definitive history of the military's decades-long investigation into mental powers and phenomena, from the author of Pulitzer Prize finalist The Pentagon's Brain and international bestseller Area 51. This is a book about a team of scientists and psychics with top secret clearances. For more than forty years, the U.S. government has researched extrasensory perception, using it in attempts to locate hostages, fugitives, secret bases, and downed fighter jets, to divine other nations' secrets, and even to predict future threats to national security. The intelligence agencies and military services involved include CIA, DIA, NSA, DEA, the Navy, Air Force, and Army-and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Now, for the first time, New York Times bestselling author Annie Jacobsen tells the story of these radical, controversial programs, using never before seen declassified documents as well as exclusive interviews with, and unprecedented access to, more than fifty of the individuals involved. Speaking on the record, many for the first time, are former CIA and Defense Department scientists, analysts, and program managers, as well as the government psychics themselves. Who did the U.S. government hire for these top secret programs, and how do they explain their military and intelligence work? How do scientists approach such enigmatic subject matter? What interested the government in these supposed powers and does the research continue? Phenomena is a riveting investigation into how far governments will go in the name of national security.
A critical look at how the world is responding to China's rise, and what this means for America and the world. China is advancing its own interests with increasing aggression. From its Belt and Road Initiative linking Asia and Europe, to its "Made in China 2025" strategy to dominate high-tech industries, to its significant economic reach into Africa and Latin America, the regime is rapidly expanding its influence around the globe. Many fear that China's economic clout, tech innovations, and military power will allow it to remake the world in its own authoritarian image. But despite all these strengths, a future with China in charge is far from certain. Rich and poor, big and small, countries around the world are recognizing that engaging China produces new strategic vulnerabilities to their independence and competitiveness. How China Loses tells the story of China's struggles to overcome new risks and endure the global backlash against its assertive reach. Combining on-the-ground reportage with incisive analysis, Luke Patey argues that China's predatory economic agenda, headstrong diplomacy, and military expansion undermine its global ambitions to dominate the global economy and world affairs. In travels to Africa, Latin America, East Asia and Europe, his encounters with activists, business managers, diplomats, and thinkers reveal the challenges threatening to ground China's rising power. At a time when views are fixated on the strategic competition between China and the United States, Patey's work shows how the rest of the world will shape the twenty-first century in pushing back against China's overreach and domineering behavior. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries began to confront their political differences and economic and security challenges with China and realize the diversity and possibility for cooperation in the world today.
This absorbing account of Catholic and anti-Catholic plots and machinations at the English, French, and exiled Scottish courts in the latter part of the sixteenth century is a sequel to John Bossy's highly acclaimed Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair. It tells the story of an espionage operation in Elizabethan London that was designed to find out what side France would take in the hostilities between Protestant England and the Catholic powers of Europe. France was a Catholic country whose king was nonetheless hostile to Spanish and papal aggression, Bossy explains, but the king's sister-in-law, Mary Queen of Scots, in custody in England since 1568, was a magnet for Catholic activists, and the French ambassador in London, Michel de Castelnau, was of uncertain leanings. Bossy relates how Queen Elizabeth's Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, found a mole in Castelnau's household establishment, who passed information to someone in Walsingham's employ. Bossy discovers the identity of these persons, what items of intelligence were passed over, and what the English government decided to do with the information. He describes how individuals were arrested or fled, a political crisis occurred, an ambassador was expelled, deals were made. He concludes with a discussion of the authenticity of Elizabethan secret operations, arguing that they were not theatrical devices to prop up an unpopular regime but were a response to genuine threats of counter-revolution inspired by Catholic zeal. |
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