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 He claimed a "legal license to murder"-and inhabited a world of mass executions and beheadings, as previously unpublished photographs in the book document.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 . . .

The Personnel Security Clearance System-the process by which the federal government incorporates individuals into secret national-security work-is flawed. After twenty-three years of federal service, Martha Louise Deutscher explores the current system and the amount of power afforded to the state in contrast to that afforded to those who serve it. Deutscher's timely examination of the U.S. screening system shows how security clearance practices, including everything from background checks and fingerprinting to urinalysis and the polygraph, shape and transform those individuals who are subject to them. By bringing participants' testimonies to light, Deutscher looks at the efficacy of various practices while extracting revealing cultural insights into the way we think about privacy, national security, patriotism, and the state. In addition to exposing the stark realities of a system that is in critical need of rethinking, Screening the System provides recommendations for a more effective method that will be of interest to military and government professionals as well as policymakers and planners who work in support of U.S. national security.

D.B. Hardeman Prize From its inception more than half a century ago and for decades afterward, the Central Intelligence Agency was deeply shrouded in secrecy, with little or no real oversight by Congress-or so many Americans believe. David M. Barrett reveals, however, that during the agency's first fifteen years, Congress often monitored the CIA's actions and plans, sometimes aggressively. Drawing on a wealth of newly declassified documents, research at some two dozen archives, and interviews with former officials, Barrett provides an unprecedented and often colorful account of relations between American spymasters and Capitol Hill. He chronicles the CIA's dealings with senior legislators who were haunted by memories of our intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor and yet riddled with fears that such an organization might morph into an American Gestapo. He focuses in particular on the efforts of Congress to monitor, finance, and control the agency's activities from the creation of the national security state in 1947 through the planning for the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Along the way, Barrett highlights how Congress criticized the agency for failing to predict the first Soviet atomic test, the startling appearance of Sputnik over American air space, and the overthrow of Iraq's pro-American government in 1958. He also explores how Congress viewed the CIA's handling of Senator McCarthy's charges of communist infiltration, the crisis created by the downing of a U-2 spy plane, and President Eisenhower's complaint that Congress meddled too much in CIA matters. Ironically, as Barrett shows, Congress itself often pushed the agency to expand its covert operations against other nations. The CIA and Congress provides a much-needed historical perspective for current debates in Congress and beyond concerning the agency's recent failures and ultimate fate. In our post-9/11 era, it shows that anxieties over the challenges to democracy posed by our intelligence communities have been with us from the very beginning.

The end of the Cold War presented a paradoxical dilemma for the Intelligence Community (IC). The demise of the Soviet Union brought about a significant downsizing of the nation's intelligence apparatus while concurrently necessitating a major reallocation of intelligence resources to cover a more complex array of trans-national threats such as counter-proliferation, terrorism, organized crime, drug trafficking, and ethnopolitical conflict. The combination of shrinking budgets and expanding analytical requirements placed enormous demands on the Community. Among the most pressing challenges was the need for an on-demand, surged intelligence capability for coverage over a diverse range of operational requirements. A key recommendation of a 1996 House Permanent Select Committee investigation of the nation's intelligence capabilities called for the creation of a dynamic surge capacity for crisis response. The Committee concluded that such resources "need not be self-contained within the IC," but must be quickly marshaled "without undue concerns about who owns the assets." Several other independent reform studies at the time proposed initiatives to satisfy surged collection demands by leveraging nongovernmental resources. Despite these recommendations, during the 1990s there was little effort to create such a surge capacity. Bureaucratic inertia and lack of clear consensus on an intelligence reform agenda made major initiatives impossible. With the enormous intelligence demands of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) the issue of surge capacity has reemerged as a critical issue for community leaders. Collection management, remote sensing, linguistic support, document exploitation, interrogation, and technical analysis are just some intelligence support functions currently being performed by private contractors. This ad hoc response to meet the intelligence requirements of GWOT operations has produced mixed results. One report strongly recommended the permanent integration of commercial imagery products into the conventional collection management cycle for operational commanders. Conversely, a key fi nding of the Army Inspector General's report on OIF detainee operations in Iraq clearly identifi ed poor training and misuse of contract interrogators as a contributing factor in detainee abuse. These examples speak to both the promise and the liability of utilizing commercial augmentation for intelligence surge capacity. Given the current mismatch between operational requirements and intelligence force structure, there will be continuing reliance on commercial augmentation. As critical intelligence requirements are increasingly resourced through commercial augmentation, IC leaders must determine the appropriate roles for private sector firms and provide effective plans for legal oversight, operational integration, and management of contracted support. To date, few studies have adequately considered the policy implications of integrating non-governmental providers into the operational intelligence cycle. GWOT operations have required significant reliance on private sector resources for intelligence collection and analysis but have done so without sufficient measures for effective acquisition, management and accountability over commercial providers. This study assesses the value of current commercial activities used within DoD elements of the Intelligence Community, particularly dealing with operational functions such as analysis, collection management, document exploitation, interrogation, production, and linguistic support. These functions were selected due to the extensive use of commercial augmentation in these areas during recent GWOT operations.