All-powerful, brilliant, decisive, ruthlessly effective ... this is the image of the CIA as portrayed in countless films and novels. It is wrong. This shocking book, based on thousands of declassified documents and interviews with agents at all levels, shows the reality behind the glamorous myth: a blundering, chaotic and dangerously incompetent organization, so ineffective it was nicknamed 'Can't Identify Anything' by Nato forces. In a story of botched coups, missed targets, lost operatives and fatal errors, Tim Weiner shows how the CIA now poses a threat not only to the security of the US, but the world.

Most discussions on electronic media and intellectual forums about the effects of globalization on national security focus on violent threats. Notwithstanding the plethora of books, journals and research papers on national and international security, there is an iota research work on issue of interconnectedness. The interconnectedness of violent threats and their mounting effect pose grave dangers to the aptitude of a state to professionally secure its territorial integrity. Technological evolution and aggrandized interlinkage of our world in general, and specifically information technology, has affected people and society in different ways. Daily life of every man and woman has become influenced by these challenges. The twenty first century appeared with different class of National Security threats. After the first decade, world leaders, research scholars, journalists, politicians, and security experts grasped that the world has become the most dangerous place. The avoidance of war was the primary objective of superpowers, but with the end of the Cold War, emergence of Takfiri Jihadism, extremism, and terrorism prompted many unmatched challenges. Home-grown extremism and radicalization continues to expose a significant threat to the National Security of the EU and Britain. The risks from state-based threats have both grown and diversified. The unmethodical and impulsive use of a military-grade nerve agent on British soil is the worse unlawful act of bioterrorists.

This is the first detailed study of Britain's open source intelligence (OSINT) operations during the Second World War, showing how accurate and influential OSINT could be and ultimately how those who analysed this intelligence would shape British post-war policy towards the Soviet Union. Following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the enemy and neutral press covering the German occupation of the Baltic states offered the British government a vital stream of OSINT covering the entire German East. OSINT was the only form of intelligence available to the British from the Nazi-occupied Soviet Union, due to the Foreign Office suspension of all covert intelligence gathering inside the Soviet Union. The risk of jeopardising the fragile Anglo-Soviet alliance was considered too great to continue covert intelligence operations. In this book, Wheatley primarily examines OSINT acquired by the Stockholm Press Reading Bureau (SPRB) in Sweden and analysed and despatched to the British government by the Foreign Research and Press Service (FRPS) Baltic States Section and its successor, the Foreign Office Research Department (FORD). Shedding light on a neglected area of Second World War intelligence and employing useful case studies of the FRPS/FORD Baltic States Section's Intelligence, British Intelligence and Hitler's Empire in the Soviet Union, 1941-1945 makes a new and important argument which will be of great value to students and scholars of British intelligence history and the Second World War.

Grounded in extensive research and reporting, Spy Schools reveals that globalisation - the influx of foreign students and professors and the outflow of Americans for study, teaching, and conferences abroad - has transformed U.S. higher education into a front line for international spying. In labs, classrooms, and auditoriums, intelligence services from countries like China, Russia, and Cuba seek insights into U.S. policy, recruits for clandestine operations, and access to sensitive military and civilian research. The FBI and CIA reciprocate, tapping international students and faculty as informants. Universities ignore or even condone this interference, despite the tension between their professed global values and the nationalistic culture of espionage. Golden uncovers shocking campus activity - from the CIA placing agents undercover in Harvard Kennedy School classes and staging academic conferences to persuade Iranian nuclear scientists to defect, to a Chinese graduate student at Duke University stealing research for an invisibility cloak, and a tiny liberal arts college in Marietta, Ohio, exchanging faculty with China's most notorious spy school - to show how relentlessly and ruthlessly both U.S. and foreign intelligence services are penetrating the ivory tower. Golden, the acclaimed author of The Price of Admission, unmasks this secret culture of espionage and its consequences at home and abroad.

The explosive story of the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and the new spy war between the West and Russia, based on hours of exclusive interviews Skripal gave before his near-death with number one bestselling author Mark Urban, diplomatic and defence editor for BBC Newsnight.

'With regard to traitors, they will kick the bucket on their own, I assure you . . . Whatever thirty pieces of silver those people may have gotten, they will stick in their throat.' Vladimir Putin, 2010

4 March 2018, Salisbury, England.

Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were enjoying a rare and peaceful Sunday spent together, completely unaware that they had been poisoned with the deadly nerve agent Novichok. Hours later both were found slumped on a park bench close to death.

Following their attempted murders on British soil, Russia was publicly accused by the West of carrying out the attack, marking a new low for international relations between the two since the end of the Cold War.

The Skripal Files is the definitive account of how Skripal’s story fits into the wider context of the new spy war between Russia and the West. The book explores the time Skripal spent as a spy in the Russian military intelligence, how he was turned to work as an agent by MI6, his imprisonment in Russia and his eventual release as part of a spy-swap that would bring him to Salisbury where, on that fateful day, he and his daughter found themselves fighting for their lives.

Ron Evans was probably the most notorious Soviet spy of British nationality working out of Scandinavia in the post-War era. Here, for the first time, the full story of the Ron Evans spy case is told in all its drama and excitement as it occurred in the mid-1960s. Whilst on the one hand Ron Evans was a leading radio engineer with a brilliant intellect, working on sensitive defence contracts; on the other, he was a determined and deft conspirator, manipulating a wide circle of oddly assorted people to achieve his illicit ends. KGB and MI6 agents play a prominent part in this account of seething conflict, an assassination attempt, and death; and only now, in deference to the spirit of the Thirty Year rule and its equivalent application on the international scale, is it possible to reveal the true facts behind this Cold War drama. Many nationalities and colourful individuals, including diplomats and an eccentric Finnish aristocrat, were involved in the complex intrigue surrounding Ron Evans' underhand activities. The author, who unwittingly found himself in conflict with the Soviet agent, was by a curious set of circumstances led into the role of spy-hunter, which eventually led to the arrest and conviction of Ron Evans. But that was not the end of the story. Worse was to follow. Due to an unfortunate set of events, an MI6 agent who was implicated in a counter-plot, found that his cover was blown, and following his capture and arrest by the authorities of a neutral power, Britain's entire Scandinavian intelligence network came crashing down. Despite the seriousness of the subject matter the author's observations are often filled with ironic comedy and ridicule.

In the Great Terror of 1937 38 more than a million Soviet citizens were arrested or killed for political crimes they didn't commit. What kind of people carried out this violent purge, and what motivated them? This book opens up the world of the Soviet perpetrator for the first time. Focusing on Kuntsevo, the Moscow suburb where Stalin had a dacha, Alexander Vatlin shows how Stalinism rewarded local officials for inventing enemies. Agents of Terror reveals stunning, detailed evidence from archives available for a limited time in the 1990s. Going beyond the central figures of the terror, Vatlin takes readers into the offices and interrogation rooms of secret police at the district level. Spurred at times by ambition, and at times by fear for their own lives, agents rushed to fulfill quotas for arresting ""enemies of the people"" even when it meant fabricating the evidence. Vatlin pulls back the curtain on a Kafkaesque system, forcing readers to reassess notions of historical agency and moral responsibility in Stalin-era crimes.

Leading intelligence experts Mark M. Lowenthal and Robert M. Clark bring together an all new, groundbreaking title. The Five Disciplines of Intelligence Collection describes, in non-technical terms, the definition, history, process, management, and future trends of each intelligence collection source (INT). Authoritative and non-polemical, this book is the perfect teaching tool for classes addressing various types of collection. Chapter authors are past or current senior practitioners of the INT they discuss, providing expert assessment of ways particular types of collection fit within the larger context of the U.S. Intelligence Community. This volume shows all-source analysts a full picture of how to better task and collaborate with their collection partners, and gives intelligence collectors an appreciation of what happens beyond their "stovepipes," as well as a clear assessment of the capabilities and limitations of INT collection.

The extraordinary untold story of Ernest Hemingway's dangerous secret life in espionage A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A finalist for the William E. Colby Military Writers' Award "IMPORTANT" (Wall Street Journal) * "FASCINATING" (New York Review of Books) * "CAPTIVATING" (Missourian) A riveting international cloak-and-dagger epic ranging from the Spanish Civil War to the liberation of Western Europe, wartime China, the Red Scare of Cold War America, and the Cuban Revolution, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy reveals for the first time Ernest Hemingway's secret adventures in espionage and intelligence during the 1930s and 1940s (including his role as a Soviet agent code-named "Argo"), a hidden chapter that fueled both his art and his undoing. While he was the historian at the esteemed CIA Museum, Nicholas Reynolds, a longtime American intelligence officer, former U.S. Marine colonel, and Oxford-trained historian, began to uncover clues suggesting Nobel Prize-winning novelist Ernest Hemingway was deeply involved in mid-twentieth-century spycraft -- a mysterious and shocking relationship that was far more complex, sustained, and fraught with risks than has ever been previously supposed. Now Reynolds's meticulously researched and captivating narrative "looks among the shadows and finds a Hemingway not seen before" (London Review of Books), revealing for the first time the whole story of this hidden side of Hemingway's life: his troubling recruitment by Soviet spies to work with the NKVD, the forerunner to the KGB, followed in short order by a complex set of secret relationships with American agencies. Starting with Hemingway's sympathy to antifascist forces during the 1930s, Reynolds illuminates Hemingway's immersion in the life-and-death world of the revolutionary left, from his passionate commitment to the Spanish Republic; his successful pursuit by Soviet NKVD agents, who valued Hemingway's influence, access, and mobility; his wartime meeting in East Asia with communist leader Chou En-Lai, the future premier of the People's Republic of China; and finally to his undercover involvement with Cuban rebels in the late 1950s and his sympathy for Fidel Castro. Reynolds equally explores Hemingway's participation in various roles as an agent for the United States government, including hunting Nazi submarines with ONI-supplied munitions in the Caribbean on his boat, Pilar; his command of an informant ring in Cuba called the "Crook Factory" that reported to the American embassy in Havana; and his on-the-ground role in Europe, where he helped OSS gain key tactical intelligence for the liberation of Paris and fought alongside the U.S. infantry in the bloody endgame of World War II. As he examines the links between Hemingway's work as an operative and as an author, Reynolds reveals how Hemingway's secret adventures influenced his literary output and contributed to the writer's block and mental decline (including paranoia) that plagued him during the postwar years -- a period marked by the Red Scare and McCarthy hearings. Reynolds also illuminates how those same experiences played a role in some of Hemingway's greatest works, including For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea, while also adding to the burden that he carried at the end of his life and perhaps contributing to his suicide. A literary biography with the soul of an espionage thriller, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy is an essential contribution to our understanding of the life, work, and fate of one of America's most legendary authors.