In this riveting real-life thriller, Philippe Sands offers a unique account of the daily life of senior Nazi SS Brigadeführer Otto Freiherr von Wächter and his wife, Charlotte. Drawing on a remarkable archive of family letters and diaries, he unveils a fascinating insight into life before and during the war, as a fugitive on the run in the Alps and then in Rome, and into the Cold War. Eventually the door is unlocked to a mystery that haunts Wächter's youngest son, who continues to believe his father was a good man - what happened to Otto Wächter while he was preparing to travel to Argentina on the 'ratline', assisted by a Vatican bishop, and what was the explanation for his sudden and unexpected death?

A groundbreaking book, this unprecedented study is the authoritative account of the best-known intelligence organisation in the world. Essential reading for anyone interested in the history of espionage, the two world wars, modern British government and the conduct of international relations in the first half of the twentieth century, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949 is a uniquely important examination of the role and significance of intelligence in the modern world.

This book is the first account of the personal lives of the nearly 1,000 long-term political prisoners arrested under various sedition laws for their opposition to World War I, their trade union activities, or their unpopular political or religious beliefs. Based on the author's exclusive access to the uncensored prison files of many of these prisoners, and information obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act, Kohn relays the powerful prison experiences of some of America's most famous and colorful labor, socialist, and peace leaders. With over ten years of research, and access to tens of thousands of pages of never-before released U.S. Department of Justice records, Stephen Kohn has been able to recreate the actual prison experiences of these political prisoners.

In this riveting undercover spy drama, Bradley Steyn tells the story of his journey from a boy caught in the middle of the Strijdom Square massacre, to acting out his PTSD working for the apartheid security branch. Finally he ends up being recruited by MK and used to infiltrate the crazed right-wing whose mission is to destabilise a South Africa on the brink of peace.

With these forces pushing the nation towards a bloody race war, will his time run out before they discover he is working for Mandela's spies?

This astonishing true-life thriller reveals for the first time some of the dirty secrets of a dirty war.

In literature and film the spy chief is an all-knowing, all-powerful figure who masterfully moves spies into action like pieces on a chessboard. How close to reality is that depiction, and what does it really take to be an effective leader in the world of intelligence? This first volume of Spy Chiefs broadens and deepens our understanding of the role of intelligence leaders in foreign affairs and national security in the United States and United Kingdom from the early 1940s to the present. The figures profiled range from famous spy chiefs such as William Donovan, Richard Helms, and Stewart Menzies to little-known figures such as John Grombach, who ran an intelligence organization so secret that not even President Truman knew of it. The volume tries to answer six questions arising from the spy-chief profiles: how do intelligence leaders operate in different national, institutional, and historical contexts? What role have they played in the conduct of international relations and the making of national security policy? How much power do they possess? What qualities make an effective intelligence leader? How secretive and accountable to the public have they been? Finally, does popular culture (including the media) distort or improve our understanding of them? Many of those profiled in the book served at times of turbulent change, were faced with foreign penetrations of their intelligence service, and wrestled with matters of transparency, accountability to democratically elected overseers, and adherence to the rule of law. This book will appeal to both intelligence specialists and general readers with an interest in the intelligence history of the United States and United Kingdom.

The Mossad is widely recognized today as the best intelligence service in the world. It is also the most enigmatic, shrouded in secrecy. Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service unveils the defi ning and most dangerous operations that have shaped Israel and the world at large from the agency's more than sixty-year history, among them: the capture of Adolf Eichmann, the eradication of Black September, the destruction of the Syrian nuclear facility, and the elimination of key Iranian nuclear scientists.

Through intensive research and exclusive interviews with Israeli leaders and Mossad agents, authors Michael Bar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal re-create these missions in riveting detail, vividly bringing to life the heroic operatives who risked everything in the face of unimaginable danger. In the words of Shimon Peres, president of Israel, this gripping, white-knuckle read "tells what should have been known and isn't--that Israel's hidden force is as formidable as its recognized physical strength."

An in-depth analysis of why COVID-19 warnings failed and how to avert the next disaster Epidemiologists and national security agencies warned for years about the potential for a deadly pandemic, but in the end global surveillance and warning systems were not enough to avert the COVID-19 disaster. In The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure, Erik J. Dahl demonstrates that understanding how intelligence warnings work—and how they fail—shows why the years of predictions were not enough. In the first in-depth analysis of the topic, Dahl examines the roles that both traditional intelligence services and medical intelligence and surveillance systems play in providing advance warning against public health threats—and how these systems must be improved for the future. For intelligence to effectively mitigate threats, specific, tactical-level warnings must be collected and shared in real time with receptive decision makers who will take appropriate action. Dahl shows how a combination of late and insufficient warnings about COVID-19, the Trump administration’s political aversion to scientific advice, and decentralized public health systems all exacerbated the pandemic in the United States. Dahl’s analysis draws parallels to other warning failures that preceded major catastrophes from Pearl Harbor to 9/11, placing current events in context. The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure is a wake-up call for the United States and the international community to improve their national security, medical, and public health intelligence systems and capabilities.

In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA and its partners had been engaging in warrantless mass surveillance, using the internet and cellphone data, and driven by fear of terrorism under the sign of security . In this compelling account, surveillance expert David Lyon guides the reader through Snowden s ongoing disclosures: the technological shifts involved, the steady rise of invisible monitoring of innocent citizens, the collusion of government agencies and for-profit companies and the implications for how we conceive of privacy in a democratic society infused by the lure of big data. Lyon discusses the distinct global reactions to Snowden and shows why some basic issues must be faced: how we frame surveillance, and the place of the human in a digital world. Surveillance after Snowden is crucial reading for anyone interested in politics, technology and society.

1961. The height of the Cold War. Just hours before work begins on the Berlin Wall, a KGB assassin and his young wife flee for the West before the Iron Curtain comes down and traps them in the East forever. This gripping story of real-life espionage and intrigue began when the Soviets invented a special weapon that killed without leaving a trace and put it in the hands of Bogdan Stashinsky. It is a tale of exploding parcels, fake identities, forbidden love and a man who knew the truth about the USSR's most classified programme. By the time Stashinsky had his day in court, the whole world was watching.

After the Cold War, its history must be reassessed as the opening of Soviet archives allows a much fuller understanding of the Russian dimension. These essays on the classic period of the Cold War (1945-53) use Soviet and Western sources to shed new light on Stalin's aims, objectives and actions; on Moscow's relations with both the Soviet Bloc and the West European Communist Parties; and on the diplomatic relations of Britain, France and Italy with the USSR. The contributors are prominent European, Russian and American specialists.

_____________ THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER LONGLISTED FOR THE CWA ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION _____________ 'John le Carre demystified the intelligence services; Higgins has demystified intelligence gathering itself' - Financial Times 'Uplifting . . . Riveting . . . What will fire people through these pages, gripped, is the focused, and extraordinary investigations that Bellingcat runs . . . Each runs as if the concluding chapter of a Holmesian whodunit' - Telegraph 'We Are Bellingcat is Higgins's gripping account of how he reinvented reporting for the internet age . . . A manifesto for optimism in a dark age' - Luke Harding, Observer _____________ How did a collective of self-taught internet sleuths end up solving some of the biggest crimes of our time? Bellingcat, the home-grown investigative unit, is redefining the way we think about news, politics and the digital future. Here, their founder - a high-school dropout on a kitchen laptop - tells the story of how they created a whole new category of information-gathering, galvanising citizen journalists across the globe to expose war crimes and pick apart disinformation, using just their computers. From the downing of Malaysia Flight 17 over the Ukraine to the sourcing of weapons in the Syrian Civil War and the identification of the Salisbury poisoners, We Are Bellingcat digs deep into some of Bellingcat's most successful investigations. It explores the most cutting-edge tools for analysing data, from virtual-reality software that can build photorealistic 3D models of a crime scene, to apps that can identify exactly what time of day a photograph was taken. In our age of uncertain truths, Bellingcat is what the world needs right now - an intelligence agency by the people, for the people.

Acclaimed historian Michael Burleigh examines assassination as a special category of political violence and asks whether, like a contagious disease, it can be catching.

Focusing chiefly on the last century and a half, Burleigh takes readers from Europe, Russia, Israel and the United States to the Congo, India, Iran, Laos, Rwanda, South Africa and Vietnam. And, as we travel, we revisit notable assassinations, among them Leon Trotsky, Hendrik Verwoerd, Juvénal Habyarimana, Indira Gandhi, Yitzhak Rabin and Jamal Khashoggi.

Combining human drama, questions of political morality and the sheer randomness of events, Day of the Assassins is a riveting insight into the politics of violence.

A Guide to National Security offers an analysis of the threats and policy responses facing the UK, presented within the framework of the Government's National Security Strategy and the Strategic Defence and Security Review. It explores the processes and developments which have shaped the transformation of national security over the last three decades, and critically examines the processes of politicisation and securitisation that have delivered the new strategic vision.
Presented in three parts, the book has taken one of the key recommendations from the National Security Strategy - collaboration between police and national security agencies - and used this as both the viewpoint from which to assess the current state of play regarding the UK's national security, as well as the approach to identifying future threats and creating policies and tactics to deal with them. Part One: Threats sets the scene for the current status of national security in the UK and relates this to the rest of the world, before moving on to the myriad of possible threats facing governments and intelligence services, from organised crime and terrorism to cyber-threats and failed states. Part Two: Responses looks at the interaction between governments and other agencies in response to a threat, how that framework functions and is organized, as well as the action or response taken. Finally, Part Three: Strategies offers a range of considerations for the future, including making a case for military restructuring, discussing domestic policies regarding radicalisation and other internal security issues, and the building of partnerships with the EU and the rest of the world, as well as within current international organizations, such as the UN and NATO. Throughout, the book presents opinions from leading figures across the agencies, including the National Security Council and members of ACPO, as well as case studies and suggestions for further investigation.
This book provides a number of fascinating and critical points for those interested in the UK's own national security organization, from those working in intelligence, counter-terrorism and organised crime within the police, staff within the national intelligence agencies, and policy advisers and officials. However, the contemporary era of globalisation means that it also has resonances for anyone involved in such issues across the Western world and beyond.

During the Cold War, writers and artists were faced with a huge challenge. In the Soviet world, they were expected to turn out works that glorified militancy, struggle and relentless optimism. In the West, freedom of expression was vaunted as liberal democracy's most cherished possession. But such freedom could carry a cost. This book documents the extraordinary energy of a secret campaign in which some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West became instruments - whether they knew it or not, whether they liked it or not - of America's secret service.

A well-balanced and detailed look at the East German Ministry for State Security, the secret police force more commonly known as the Stasi. "This is an excellent book, full of careful, balanced judgements and a wealth of concisely-communicated knowledge. It is also well written. Indeed, it is the best book yet published on the MfS."-German History The Stasi stood for Stalinist oppression and all-encompassing surveillance. The "shield and sword of the party," it secured the rule of the Communist Party for more than forty years, and by the 1980s it had become the largest secret-police apparatus in the world, per capita. Jens Gieseke tells the story of the Stasi, a feared secret-police force and a highly professional intelligence service. He inquires into the mechanisms of dictatorship and the day-to-day effects of surveillance and suspicion. Masterful and thorough at once, he takes the reader through this dark chapter of German postwar history, supplying key information on perpetrators, informers, and victims. In an assessment of post-communist memory politics, he critically discusses the consequences of opening the files and the outcomes of the Stasi debate in reunified Germany. A major guide for research on communist secret-police forces, this book is considered the standard reference work on the Stasi.

This book examines the full range of counterinsurgency intelligence during the Malayan Emergency. It explores the involvement of the Security Service, the Joint Intelligence Committee (Far East), the Malayan Security Service, Special Branch and wider police service, and military intelligence, to examine how British and Malayan authorities tackled the insurgent challenge posed by the Malayan Communist Party. This study assesses the nature of the intelligence apparatus prior to the declaration of emergency in 1948 and considers how officials attempted to reconstruct the intelligence structures in the Far East after the surrender of the Japanese in 1945. These plans were largely based upon the legacy of the Second World War but quickly ran into difficultly because of ill-defined remits and personality clashes. Nevertheless, officials did provide prescient warning of the existential threat posed by the Malayan Communist Party from the earliest days of British reoccupation of Malaya. Once a state of emergency had been declared, officials struggled to find the right combination of methods, strategy and management structures to eliminate the threat posed by the Communist insurgents. This book argues that the development of an effective counterinsurgency intelligence strategy involved many more organisations than just Special Branch. It was a multifaceted, dynamic effort that took far longer and was more problematic than previous accounts suggest. The Emergency remains central to counterinsurgency theory and thus this wide-ranging analysis sheds crucial light not only on the period, but on contemporary doctrine and security practices today.

Growing up in Germany, Freddy Mayer witnessed the Nazis' rise to power. When he was sixteen, his family made the decision to flee to the United States - they were among the last German Jews to escape, in 1938. In America, Freddy tried enlisting the day after Pearl Harbor, only to be rejected as an "enemy alien" because he was German. He was soon recruited to the OSS, the country's first spy outfit before the CIA. Freddy, joined by Dutch Jewish refugee Hans Wynberg and Nazi defector Franz Weber, parachuted into Austria as the leader of Operation Greenup, meant to deter Hitler's last stand. He posed as a Nazi officer and a French POW for months, dispatching reports to the OSS via Hans, holed up with a radio in a nearby attic. The reports contained a gold mine of information, provided key intelligence about the Battle of the Bulge, and allowed the Allies to bomb twenty Nazi trains. On the verge of the Allied victory, Freddy was captured by the Gestapo and tortured and waterboarded for days. Remarkably, he persuaded the region's Nazi commander to surrender, completing one of the most successful OSS missions of the war. Based on years of research and interviews with Mayer himself, whom the author was able to meet only months before his death at the age of ninety-four, Return to the Reich is an eye-opening, unforgettable narrative of World War II heroism.

The disciplines of strategic intelligence at the governmental level and competitive business intelligence constitute accepted methods of decision-supporting to prevent mistakes and strategic surprise. This research discovered that many researchers in the intelligence field feel that intelligence methodology in both contexts has reached a "glass ceiling." Thus far, research has focused separately on national intelligence and intelligence in business, without any attempt to benchmark from one field to the other. This book shows that it is possible to use experience gained in the business field to improve intelligence practices in national security, and vice versa through mutual learning. The book's main innovation is its proposition that mutual learning can be employed in the context of a model distinguishes between concentrated and diffused surprises to provide a breakthrough in the intelligence field, thereby facilitating better prediction of the surprise development. We Never Expected That: A Comparative Study of Failures in National and Business Intelligence focuses on a comparison between how states, through their intelligence organizations, cope with strategic surprises and how business organizations deal with unexpected movement in their field. Based on this comparison, the author proposes a new model which can better address the challenge of avoiding strategic surprises. This book can contribute significantly to the study of intelligence, which will become more influential in the coming years.

Winner of the St Ermin's Intelligence Book of the Year Award. 'One of the great biographies of 2015.' The Times Fully updated edition including recently released information. A Guardian Book of the Year. The Times Best Biography of the Year. Mail on Sunday Biography of the Year. Daily Mail Biography of Year. Spectator Book of the Year. BBC History Book of the Year. 'A remarkable and definitive portrait ' Frederick Forsyth 'Andrew Lownie's biography of Guy Burgess, Stalin's Englishman ... shrewd, thorough, revelatory.' William Boyd 'In the sad and funny Stalin's Englishman, [Lownie] manages to convey the charm as well as the turpitude.' Craig Brown Guy Burgess was the most important, complex and fascinating of 'The Cambridge Spies' - Maclean, Philby, Blunt - all brilliant young men recruited in the 1930s to betray their country to the Soviet Union. An engaging and charming companion to many, an unappealing, utterly ruthless manipulator to others, Burgess rose through academia, the BBC, the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6, gaining access to thousands of highly sensitive secret documents which he passed to his Russian handlers. In this first full biography, Andrew Lownie shows us how even Burgess's chaotic personal life of drunken philandering did nothing to stop his penetration and betrayal of the British Intelligence Service. Even when he was under suspicion, the fabled charm which had enabled many close personal relationships with influential Establishment figures (including Winston Churchill) prevented his exposure as a spy for many years. Through interviews with more than a hundred people who knew Burgess personally, many of whom have never spoken about him before, and the discovery of hitherto secret files, Stalin's Englishman brilliantly unravels the many lives of Guy Burgess in all their intriguing, chilling, colourful, tragi-comic wonder.

National intelligence agencies have long adjusted to the opportunities and threats from new technologies. From spy planes and satellites to the internet, they have created structures, concepts, and practices to best apply these new capabilities. But recent technological developments are different in kind. Increasingly affordable to non-governmental actors, they are powerful enough to overwhelm and marginalize much of what agencies do. So far, the large intelligence agencies have been too slow to recognize the need for transformation. They believe they can work emerging technologies into the current paradigm just as they have with other advances. This book argues that only with a new paradigm can they take up this fundamentally new technological challenge. The book explores this fast-developing world for intelligence agencies and offers a path for maintaining their effectiveness and centrality. Along the way it analyzes the emerging technologies and explains how these will likely affect intelligence work. The Future of National Intelligence: How Emerging Technologies Reshape Intelligence Communities draws on a broad review of the academic literature, a deep familiarity with the relevant technologies, and extensive interviews and surveys with both intelligence practitioners and technology entrepreneurs. It lays out the principles for agency leaders to consider as they work on this essential transformation.

When Japanese signals were decoded at Bletchley Park, who translated them into English? When Japanese soldiers were taken as prisoners of war, who interrogated them? When Japanese maps and plans were captured on the battlefield, who deciphered them for Britain? When Great Britain found itself at war with Japan in December 1941, there was a linguistic battle to be fought--but Britain was hopelessly unprepared. Eavesdropping on the Emperor traces the men and women with a talent for languages who were put on crash courses in Japanese, and unfolds the history of their war. Some were sent with their new skills to India; others to Mauritius, where there was a secret radio intercept station; or to Australia, where they worked with Australian and American codebreakers. Translating the despatches of the Japanese ambassador in Berlin after his conversations with Hitler; retrieving filthy but valuable documents from the battlefield in Burma; monitoring Japanese airwaves to warn of air-raids--Britain depended on these forgotten 'war heroes'. The accuracy of their translations was a matter of life or death, and they rose to the challenge. Based on declassified archives and interviews with the few survivors, this fascinating, globe-trotting book tells their stories.

Security intelligence continues to be of central importance to the contemporary world: individuals, organizations and states all seek timely and actionable intelligence in order to increase their sense of security. But what exactly is intelligence? Who seeks to develop it and to what ends? How can we ensure that intelligence is not abused? In this third edition of their classic text, Peter Gill and Mark Phythian set out a comprehensive framework for the study of intelligence, discussing how states organize the collection and analysis of information in order to produce intelligence, how it is acted upon, why it may fail and how the process should be governed in order to uphold democratic rights. Fully revised and updated throughout, the book covers recent developments, including the impact of the Snowden leaks on the role of intelligence agencies in Internet and social media surveillance and in defensive and offensive cyber operations, and the legal and political arrangements for democratic control. The role of intelligence as part of 'hybrid' warfare in the case of Russia and Ukraine is also explored, and the problems facing intelligence in the realm of counterterrorism is considered in the context of the recent wave of attacks in Western Europe. Intelligence in an Insecure World is an authoritative and accessible guide to a rapidly expanding area of inquiry - one that everyone has an interest in understanding.