This fascinating account of how two young Americans turned traitor during the Cold War is an "absolutely smashing real-life spy story" (The New York Times Book Review). At the height of the Cold War, some of the nation's most precious secrets passed through a CIA contractor in Southern California. Only a handful of employees were cleared to handle the intelligence that came through the Black Vault. One of them was Christopher John Boyce, a hard-partying genius with a sky-high IQ, a passion for falconry, and little love for his country. Security at the Vault was so lax, Boyce couldn't help but be tempted. And when he gave in, the fate of the free world would hang in the balance. With the help of his best friend, Andrew Daulton Lee, a drug dealer with connections south of the border, Boyce began stealing classified documents and selling them to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. It was an audacious act of treason, committed by two spoiled young men who were nearly always drunk, stoned, or both--and were about to find themselves caught in the middle of a fight between the CIA and the KGB. This Edgar Award-winning book was the inspiration for the critically acclaimed film starring Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn--a true story as thrilling as any dreamed up by Ian Fleming or John le Carre. Before Edward Snowden, there were Boyce and Lee, two of the most unlikely spies in the history of the Cold War.

A compelling new narrative about how two Great Powers of the early twentieth century did battle, both openly and in the shadows Decades before the Berlin Wall went up, a Cold War had already begun raging. But for Bolshevik Russia, Great Britain - not America - was the enemy. Now, for the first time, Victor Madeira tells a story that has been hidden away for nearly a century. Drawing on over sixty Russian, British and French archival collections, Britannia and the Bear offers a compelling new narrative about how two great powers of the time did battle, both openly and in theshadows. By exploring British and Russian mind-sets of the time this book traces the links between wartime social unrest, growing trade unionism in the police and the military, and Moscow's subsequent infiltration of Whitehall. As early as 1920, Cabinet ministers were told that Bolshevik intelligence wanted to recruit university students from prominent families destined for government, professional and intellectual circles. Yet despite these early warnings, men such as the Cambridge Five slipped the security net fifteen years after the alarm was first raised. Britannia and the Bear tells the story of Russian espionage in Britain in these critical interwar years and reveals how British Government identified crucial lessons but failed to learn many of them. The book underscores the importance of the first Cold War in understanding the second, as well as the need for historical perspective ininterpreting the mind-sets of rival powers. Victor Madeira has a decade's experience in international security affairs, and his work has appeared in leading publications such as Intelligence and National Securityand The Historical Journal. He completed his doctorate in Modern International History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

In King of Spies, prize-winning journalist and bestselling author of Escape From Camp 14, Blaine Harden, reveals one of the most astonishing -- and previously untold -- spy stories of the twentieth century. Donald Nichols was "a one man war", according to his US Air Force commanding general. He won the Distinguished Service Cross, along with a chest full of medals for valor and initiative in the Korean War. His commanders described Nichols as the bravest, most resourceful and effective spymaster of that forgotten war. But there is far more to Donald Nichols' story than first meets the eye . . . Based on long-classified government records, unsealed court records, and interviews in Korea and the U.S., King of Spies tells the story of the reign of an intelligence commander who lost touch with morality, legality, and even sanity, if military psychiatrists are to be believed. Donald Nichols was America's Kurtz. A seventh-grade dropout, he created his own black-ops empire, commanding a small army of hand-selected spies, deploying his own makeshift navy, and ruling over it as a clandestine king, with absolute power over life and death. He claimed a "legal license to murder"-and inhabited a world of mass executions and beheadings, as previously unpublished photographs in the book document. Finally, after 11 years, the U.S. military decided to end Nichols's reign. He was secretly sacked and forced to endure months of electroshock in a military hospital in Florida. Nichols told relatives the American government was trying to destroy his memory. King of Spies looks to answer the question of how an uneducated, non-trained, non-experienced man could end up as the number-one US spymaster in South Korea and why his US commanders let him get away with it for so long . . .

How people notice and make sense of phenomena are core issues in assessing intelligence successes and failures. Members of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) became adept at responding to certain sets of phenomena and "analyzing" their significance (not always correctly) during the Cold War. The paradigm was one of "hard, formalized and centralized processes, involving planned searches, scrupulously sticking with a cycle of gathering, analyzing, estimating and disseminating supposed enriched information." The paradigm did not stop within the IC, either. As Pierre Baumard notes, it was also imported, unchanged, by corporations. However, the range of phenomena noticed by intelligence professionals has broadened from a focus on largely static issues to encompass highly dynamic topics over the two decades since the end of the Cold War. Intelligence professionals are challenged to stay abreast. A growing professional literature by intelligence practitioners discusses these trends and their implications for advising and warning policymakers. Th e literature by practitioners embodies a trust that national intelligence producers can overcome the "inherent" enemies of intelligence to prevent strategic intelligence failure. Th e disparity between this approach and accepting the inevitability of intelligence failure has grown sharp enough to warrant the identification of separate camps or schools of "skeptics" and "meliorists." As a leading skeptic, Richard Betts charitably plants the hopeful note that in ambiguous situations, "the intelligence officer may perform most usefully by not offering the answer sought by authorities but by forcing questions on them, acting as a Socratic agnostic." However, he completes this thought by declaring, fatalistically, that most leaders will neither appreciate nor accept this approach. Robert Jervis resurrects a colorful quote from former President Lyndon Johnson, who epitomized the skeptical policymaker: Let me tell you about these intelligence guys. When I was growing up in Texas we had a cow named Bessie. I'd go out early and milk her. I'd get her in the stanchion, seat myself and squeeze out a pail of fresh milk. One day I'd worked hard and gotten a full pail of milk, but I wasn't paying attention, and old Bessie swung her shit smeared tail through the bucket of milk. Now, you know that's what these intelligence guys do. You work hard and get a good program or policy going, and they swing a shit-smeared tail through it. Jervis asserts that policymakers and decision makers "need confidence and political support, and honest intelligence unfortunately oft en diminishes rather than increases these goods by pointing to ambiguities, uncertainties, and the costs and risks of policies." The antagonism is exacerbated when policy is revealed to be fl awed and to have ignored intelligence knowledge. For example, in the case of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq War, intelligence challenges to policy were seen as "being disloyal and furthering its own agenda." Jervis adds that the Bush administration is only the most recent one to exhibit such behavior. He finds that the administrations of Presidents Clinton, Johnson, Kennedy, and Eisenhower also browbeat and ignored intelligence.