'I cannot think of a better biography of a spy chief' Richard Davenport-Hines, The Spectator Sir Maurice Oldfield was one of the most important British spies of the Cold War era. A farmer's son from a provincial grammar school who found himself accidentally plunged into the world of espionage, Sir Maurice was the first Chief of MI6 who didn't come to the role via the traditional public school and Oxbridge route. Oldfield was the voice of British Intelligence in Washington at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassination of JFK, and was largely responsible for keeping the UK out of the Vietnam War. Working his way to the top of the secret service, he took on the job of rebuilding confidence in the British Secret Service in the wake of the Philby, Burgess and Maclean spy scandals. This is the fascinating life story, told in detail for the first time, of a complex, likable character as well as a formidable intelligence chief.

How were agents recruited for secret operations in World War II? How did they fare once dropped behind enemy lines? How effective were resistance movements? And how brutal were the reprisals? Ranging from the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the German Abwehr to resistance movements across Europe, Secret Operations of World War II is a fascinating account of the major special ops organisations and underground cells in the conflict. Examining recruitment, training, equipment and deployment of operatives, the book not only reveals the ingenious steps taken to select suitable agents, disguise weapons and gather intelligence, but also follows the fortunes of particular agents after their operations were launched. From such well known cases as the SOE and Norwegian agents sabotaging Norwegian hydroelectric plants to the less explored territory of Soviet partisans, from the Abwehr's rescue of Mussolini to the French Maquis, from the Polish Home Army to OSS operations in the Pacific, the book explores a wide range of secret organisations and their intelligence gathering, sabotage and reconnaissance missions. Illustrated with 120 black-&-white and colour photographs, artworks and maps, Secret Operations of World War II is an authoritative and novel perspective on some of the most outlandish episodes of the conflict.

Defiance against Chinese oppression has been a defining characteristic of Tibetan life for more than four decades, symbolized most visibly by the much revered Dalai Lama. But the story of Tibetan resistance weaves a far richer tapestry than anyone might have imagined.
Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison reveal how America's Central Intelligence Agency encouraged Tibet's revolt against China-and eventually came to control its fledgling resistance movement. While the CIA's presence in Tibet has been alluded to in other works, the authors provide the first comprehensive, as well as most compelling account of this little known agency enterprise.

The CIA's Secret War in Tibet takes readers from training camps in the Colorado Rockies to the scene of clandestine operations in the Himalayas, chronicling the agency's help in securing the Dalai Lama's safe passage to India and subsequent initiation of one of the most remote covert campaigns of the Cold War. Establishing a rebel army in the northern Nepali kingdom of Mustang and a para-commando force in India designed to operate behind Chinese lines, Conboy and Morrison provide previously unreported details about secret missions undertaken in extraordinarily harsh conditions. Their book greatly expands on previous memoirs by CIA officials by putting virtually every major agency participant on record with details of clandestine operations. It also calls as witnesses the people who managed and fought in the program-including Tibetan and Nepalese agents, Indian intelligence officers, and even mission aircrews.

Conboy and Morrison take pains to tell the story from all perspectives, particularly that of the former Tibetan guerrillas, many of whom have gone on record here for the first time. The authors also tell how Tibet led America and India to become secret partners over the course of several presidential administrations and cite dozens of Indian and Tibetan intelligence documents directly related to these covert operations. Ultimately, they are persuasive that the Himalayan operations were far more successful as a proving ground for CIA agents who were later reassigned to southeast Asia than as a staging ground for armed rebellion.

As the movement for Tibetan liberation continues to attract international support, Tibet's status remains a contentious issue in both Washington and Beijing. This book takes readers inside a covert war fought with Tibetan blood and U. S. sponsorship and allows us to better understand the true nature of that controversy.

Originally published in 1998 and a best seller in its hardcover and paperback publications, Blind Man's Bulff is a dramatic, and riveting history. Over the course of five years, investigative reporters Sherry Sontag and Chris Drew interviewed hundreds of men who had never spoken about their underwater lives,not even to their wives and children. They uncovered a wealth of classified information: the tapping of undersea Soviet telephone cables, the stealing of Soviet weapons, the tragic collisions of enemy submarines. They tell of medals awarded in secret and deaths disguised with disinformation. Blind Man's Bluff is a critical work of history that reads with all the excitement of a Tom Clancy novel and all the tragedy of Das Boot.

John Lodwick (1916-1959) was one of the great novelists of the early twentieth century. Yet his novels, and indeed his own extraordinary life story, have been virtually lost to the mists of time. Geoffrey Elliott here, for the first time, pieces together Lodwick's eventful life, from his youth in Ireland, to his wartime experiences in the SOE and Special Boat Service, his subsequent literary career and his untimely death in a car crash in Spain at the age of just 43. Initially acclaimed by Somerset Maugham and Anthony Burgess, soon after his death Lodwick's novels fell out of fashion and they have largely remained out-of-print since. Elliott makes the case for a revival in the fortunes of this singular English novelist, in a biography which sheds new light on the early twentieth century literary scene, the surrealist art world and the real-life experiences of World War II.

The first book to tell the full story of American isolationism, from the founding era through the Trump presidency. In his Farewell Address of 1796, President George Washington admonished the young nation "to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world." Isolationism thereafter became one of the most influential political trends in American history. From the founding era until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States shunned strategic commitments abroad, making only brief detours during the Spanish-American War and World War I. Amid World War II and the Cold War, Americans abandoned isolationism; they tried to run the world rather than run away from it. But isolationism is making a comeback as Americans tire of foreign entanglement. In this definitive and magisterial analysis-the first book to tell the fascinating story of isolationism across the arc of American history-Charles Kupchan explores the enduring connection between the isolationist impulse and the American experience. He also refurbishes isolationism's reputation, arguing that it constituted dangerous delusion during the 1930s, but afforded the nation clear strategic advantages during its ascent. Kupchan traces isolationism's staying power to the ideology of American exceptionalism. Strategic detachment from the outside world was to protect the nation's unique experiment in liberty, which America would then share with others through the power of example. Since 1941, the United States has taken a much more interventionist approach to changing the world. But it has overreached, prompting Americans to rediscover the allure of nonentanglement and an America First foreign policy. The United States is hardly destined to return to isolationism, yet a strategic pullback is inevitable. Americans now need to find the middle ground between doing too much and doing too little.

Gus Martin's Understanding Homeland Security provides students with a comprehensive introduction to U.S. homeland security in the modern world, with a focus on the post-September 11, 2001 era. This insightful resource examines the theories, agency missions, laws, and regulations governing the homeland security enterprise through the lens of threat scenarios and countermeasures related to terrorism, natural disasters, emergency management, cyber security, and much more. The Third Edition keeps readers on the forefront of homeland security with coverage of cutting-edge topics, such as the role of FEMA and preparedness planning; the role of civil liberty and countering extremism through reform; and hackings during the 2016 and 2018 U.S. elections. Readers will gain much-needed insight into the complex nature of issues surrounding today's homeland security and learn to think critically to analyze and respond to various threat environments.

Can you keep a secret? Maybe you can, but the United States government cannot. Since the birth of the country, nations large and small, from Russia and China to Ghana and Ecuador, have stolen the most precious secrets of the United States. Written by Michael Sulick, former director of CIA's clandestine service, Spying in America presents a history of more than thirty espionage cases inside the United States. These cases include Americans who spied against their country, spies from both the Union and Confederacy during the Civil War, and foreign agents who ran operations on American soil. Some of the stories are familiar, such as those of Benedict Arnold and Julius Rosenberg, while others, though less well known, are equally fascinating. From the American Revolution, through the Civil War and two World Wars, to the atomic age of the Manhattan Project, Sulick details the lives of those who have betrayed America's secrets. In each case he focuses on the motivations that drove these individuals to spy, their access and the secrets they betrayed, their tradecraft or techniques for concealing their espionage, their exposure and punishment, and the damage they ultimately inflicted on America's national security. Spying in America serves as the perfect introduction to the early history of espionage in America. Sulick's unique experience as a senior intelligence officer is evident as he skillfully guides the reader through these cases of intrigue, deftly illustrating the evolution of American awareness about espionage and the fitful development of American counterespionage leading up to the Cold War.

Intelligence and Espionage: Secrets and Spies provides a global introduction to the role of intelligence - a key, but sometimes controversial, aspect of ensuring national security. Separating fact from fiction, the book draws on past examples to explore the use and misuse of intelligence, examine why failures take place and address important ethical issues over its use. Divided into two parts, the book adopts a thematic approach to the topic, guiding the reader through the collection and analysis of information and its use by policymakers, before looking at intelligence sharing. Lomas and Murphy also explore the important associated activities of counterintelligence and the use of covert action, to influence foreign countries and individuals. Topics covered include human and signals intelligence, the Cuban Missile Crisis, intelligence and Stalin, Trump and the US intelligence community, and the Soviet Bloc. This analysis is supplemented by a comprehensive documents section, containing newly released documents, including material from Edward Snowden's leaks of classified material. Supported by images, a comprehensive chronology, glossary, and 'who's who' of key figures, Intelligence and Espionage is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the role of intelligence in policymaking, international relations and diplomacy, warfighting and politics to the present day.

The wickedly funny sequel to the MI5 and Me, described by Tatler as 'a stone cold comic classic', following the irrepressible Lottie's adventures in 1950s London

London in the 1950s. Lottie is a reluctant typist at MI5 and the even more reluctant daughter of the organisation's most illustrious spy. Now she has had the bad luck to fall in love with Harry, a handsome if frustrated young actor, who has also been press-ganged into the family business, acting as one of her father's undercover agents in the Communist hotbed of British theatre.

Together the two young lovers embark on a star-studded adventure through the glittering world of theatre - but, between missing files, disapproving parents, and their own burgeoning creative endeavours, life is about to become very complicated indeed...

Ethics of Spying: A Reader for the Intelligence Professional, Volume 2 picks up where the first book ended, but, with a twist. The book begins with an historical perspective of the expectations of moral and ethical conduct of personnel working in intelligence. In a previously classified memo from 1941 and a report from 1954, the reader gets a sense of both the history and perception of what was expected of professional conduct as viewed from government officials. The first half of this book seeks to define an intelligence professional, while the second half of the book seeks to utilize various theoretical and practical perspectives. The richness of this publication is aided by the international views of its authors, which hail from Israel, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and the United States, among others. These prominent scholars explore ethics through the intelligence cycle and how ethics is evolving and viewed in a post-9/11 world. The book concludes with a survey on ethical conduct by interrogators, a brief history of intelligence reform, and a bibliography on this subject. The history and international perspectives provided in this book lay the foundation for further study in this increasingly prominent field of interdisciplinary study.

In the decades following the Mexican Revolution, regional strongmen vied with powerful generals and popular rebels for control of Mexico's future. During this era of uprisings, government corruption, and political intrigue, Mexico took its first, faltering steps toward democracy. In the midst of the turmoil, plainclothes agents, traveling under multiple aliases and reporting in code to their superiors, served as "the eyes and ears" of the national government.

In "Spies, Politics, and Power: El Departamento Confidencial en Mexico, 1922-1946," Joseph A. Stout traces the development of Mexico's Departamento Confidencial (Confidential Department) from the years of its infancy to its later incarnation as a fully fledged international espionage agency on the order of the CIA, Russian KGB, and German Gestapo. Stout charts the department's evolution under the administration of several powerful presidents--and a handful of puppets--from the postrevolutionary period through World War II, when the agency turned its attention from monitoring internal threats to focus on matters of national security. Stout devotes special attention to the agency's wartime role in the investigation and containment of individuals whose Axis ties made them objects of government suspicion.

Offering a twist on conventional history, Stout takes us behind the political curtain to illuminate the crucial role played by an unlikely assortment of government bureaucrats, international spies, low-ranking agents, and office clerks within the drama of Mexican nationhood. In his comprehensive and thoroughly researched account, Stout offers a narrative propelled not by the back-and-forth of rebel violence and brutal reprisal--though there is no dearth of such material--but by a story driven by the power of information. For Stout, intelligence, as much as military might, is the key to political power and the engine of national formation.

A work rich in primary sources, "Spies" integrates details culled from archived letters and agent reports into the broader framework of Mexican politics and society in the first half of the twentieth century. In his unconventional approach, Stout sheds new light on the means and motivations of some of the period's most influential figures.

Before the Second World War, Herbert Cukurs was a world-famous aviator and a hero in his hometown of Riga, Latvia. During the war he joined the SS, led a militia and was responsible for the genocide of 30,000 Latvian Jews. By the 1960s the man who became known as the Butcher of Riga was living in South America. And Mossad were coming for him. In 1965, a statute of limitations on Nazi war crimes threatened to expire and Germany was seeking to reintegrate concentration camp commanders, pogrom leaders and executioners. The global hunt for Nazi criminals was stepped up, and a target was painted on the back of Cukurs. Yaakov Meidad, the Mossad agent who had kidnapped Adolf Eichmann three years earlier, was called into action once more, leading to an astonishing undercover operation that saw Meidad travel to Brazil in an elaborate disguise before befriending Cukurs and earning his trust. Uncovering a little-known part of Holocaust history and telling the story of one of the most daring operations in the history of the Israeli intelligence community, The Good Assassin is a thrilling story of a forgotten monster and the twenty-year quest to bring him to justice, told by a master of narrative non-fiction.

Traditionally the military community held the intelligence profession in low esteem, spying was seen as dirty work and information was all to often ignored if it conflicted with a commander's own view. Handel examines the ways in which this situation has improved and argues that co-operation between the intelligence adviser and the military decision maker is vital.

Virginia Hall left her comfortable Baltimore roots of privilege in 1931 to follow a dream of becoming a Foreign Service Officer. After watching Hitler roll into Poland, then France, she decided to work for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret espionage and sabotage organization. She was soon deployed to France where the Gestapo imprisoned, beat, and tortured spies.
Against such an ominous backdrop, Hall managed to locate drop zones for money and weapons, helped escaped POWs and downed Allied airmen flee to England, and secured safe houses for agents. Soon, wanted posters appeared throughout France offering a reward for her capture. By winter of 1942 Hall had to flee France via the only route possible: a hike on foot through the frozen Pyrenees Mountains into neutral Spain.Upon her return to England, the OSS recruited her and sent her back to France disguised as an old peasant woman. While there, she was responsible for killing 150 German soldiers and capturing 500 others, sabotaging communications and transportation links, and directing resistance activities.
This is the true story of Virginia Hall, a remarkable woman ignored by history books for over fifty years.

Terrorism kills far fewer Americans annually than automobile accidents, firearms, or even lightning strikes. Given this minimal risk, why does the U.S. continue expending lives and treasure to fight the global war on terror? In Monsters to Destroy, Navin A. Bapat argues that the war on terror provides the U.S. a cover for its efforts to expand and preserve American control over global energy markets. To gain dominance over these markets, the U.S. offered protection to states critical in the extraction, sale, and transportation of energy from their "terrorist" internal and external enemies. However, since the U.S. was willing to protect these states in perpetuity, the leaders of these regimes had no incentive to disarm their terrorists. This inaction allowed terrorists to transition into more powerful and virulent insurgencies, leading the protected states to chart their own courses and ultimately break with U.S. foreign policy objectives. Bapat provides a sweeping look at show how the loss of influence over these states has accelerated the decline of U.S. economic and military power, locking it into a permanent war for its own economic security.

A stunning narrative account of the mysterious Jordanian who penetrated both the inner circle of al-Qaeda and the highest reaches of the CIA, with a devastating impact on the war on terror. Warrick goes deep inside the CIA's secret war against al-Qaeda.

In 1920s Shanghai, Zhou Enlai founded the first Chinese communist spy network, operating in the shadows against nationalists, Western powers and the Japanese. The story of Chinese spies has been a global one from the start. Unearthing previously unseen papers and interviewing countless insiders, Roger Faligot's astonishing account reveals nothing less than a century of world events shaped by Chinese spies. Working as scientists, journalists, diplomats, foreign students and businessmen, they've been everywhere, from Stalin's purges to 9/11. This murky world has swept up Ho Chi Minh, the Clintons and everyone in between, with the action moving from Cambodia to Cambridge, and from the Australian outback to the centres of Western power. This fascinating narrative exposes the sprawling tentacles of the world's largest intelligence service, from the very birth of communist China to Xi Jinping's absolute rule today.

Examining the political foundations of American intelligence policy, this book develops a new theory of intelligence adaptation to explain the success or failure of major reform efforts since World War II. Durbin draws on careful case histories of the early Cold War, the Nixon and Ford administrations, the first decade after the Cold War, and the post-9/11 period, looking closely at the interactions among Congress, executive branch leaders, and intelligence officials. These cases demonstrate the significance of two factors in the success or failure of reform efforts: the level of foreign policy consensus in the system, and the ability of reformers to overcome the information advantages held by intelligence agencies. As these factors ebb and flow, windows of opportunity for reform open and close, and different actors and interests come to influence reform outcomes. Durbin concludes that the politics of US intelligence frequently inhibit effective adaptation, undermining America's security and the civil liberties of its citizens.

Agents of Subversion reconstructs the remarkable story of a botched mission into Manchuria, showing how it fit into a wider CIA campaign against Communist China and highlighting the intensity-and futility-of clandestine operations to overthrow Mao. In the winter of 1952, at the height of the Korean War, the CIA flew a covert mission into China to pick up an agent. Trained on a remote Pacific island, the agent belonged to an obscure anti-communist group known as the Third Force based out of Hong Kong. The exfiltration would fail disastrously, and one of the Americans on the mission, a recent Yale graduate named John T. Downey, ended up a prisoner of Mao Zedong's government for the next twenty years. Unraveling the truth behind decades of Cold War intrigue, John Delury documents the damage that this hidden foreign policy did to American political life. The US government kept the public in the dark about decades of covert activity directed against China, while Downey languished in a Beijing prison and his mother lobbied desperately for his release. Mining little-known Chinese sources, Delury sheds new light on Mao's campaigns to eliminate counterrevolutionaries and how the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party used captive spies in diplomacy with the West. Agents of Subversion is an innovative work of transnational history, and it demonstrates both how the Chinese Communist regime used the fear of special agents to tighten its grip on society and why intellectuals in Cold War America presciently worried that subversion abroad could lead to repression at home.

A career of nearly three decades with the CIA and the National Intelligence Council showed Paul R. Pillar that intelligence reforms, especially measures enacted since 9/11, can be deeply misguided. They often miss the sources that underwrite failed policy and misperceive our ability to read outside influences. They also misconceive the intelligence-policy relationship and promote changes that weaken intelligence-gathering operations. In this book, Pillar confronts the intelligence myths Americans have come to rely on to explain national tragedies, including the belief that intelligence drives major national security decisions and can be fixed to avoid future failures. Pillar believes these assumptions waste critical resources and create harmful policies, diverting attention away from smarter reform, and they keep Americans from recognizing the limits of obtainable knowledge. Pillar revisits U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War and highlights the small role intelligence played in those decisions, and he demonstrates the negligible effect that America's most notorious intelligence failures had on U.S. policy and interests. He then reviews in detail the events of 9/11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, condemning the 9/11 commission and the George W. Bush administration for their portrayals of the role of intelligence. Pillar offers an original approach to better informing U.S. policy, which involves insulating intelligence management from politicization and reducing the politically appointed layer in the executive branch to combat slanted perceptions of foreign threats. Pillar concludes with principles for adapting foreign policy to inevitable uncertainties.

In an era of intensified international terror, universities have been increasingly drawn into an arena of locating, monitoring and preventing such threats, forcing them into often covert relationships with the security and intelligence agencies. With case studies from across the world, the Routledge International Handbook of Universities, Security and Intelligence Studies provides a comparative, in-depth analysis of the historical and contemporary relationships between global universities, national security and intelligence agencies. Written by leading international experts and from multidisciplinary perspectives, the Routledge International Handbook of Universities, Security and Intelligence Studies provides theoretical, methodological and empirical definition to academic, scholarly and research enquiry at the interface of higher education, security and intelligence studies. Divided into eight sections, the Handbook explores themes such as: the intellectual frame for our understanding of the university-security-intelligence network; historical, contemporary and future-looking interactions from across the globe; accounts of individuals who represent the broader landscape between universities and the security and intelligence agencies; the reciprocal interplay of personnel from universities to the security and intelligence agencies and vice versa; the practical goals of scholarship, research and teaching of security and intelligence both from within universities and the agencies themselves; terrorism research as an important dimension of security and intelligence within and beyond universities; the implication of security and intelligence in diplomacy, journalism and as an element of public policy; the extent to which security and intelligence practice, research and study far exceeds the traditional remit of commonly held notions of security and intelligence. Bringing together a unique blend of leading academic and practitioner authorities on security and intelligence, the Routledge International Handbook of Universities, Security and Intelligence Studies is an essential and authoritative guide for researchers and policymakers looking to understand the relationship between universities, the security services and the intelligence community.

WINNER OF THE NEAVE BOOK PRIZE 2022 LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING 2021 'One of the best books ever written about intelligence analysis and its long-term lessons' Christopher Andrew, author of The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 'An invaluable guide to avoiding self-deception and fake news' Melanie Phillips, The Times From the former director of GCHQ, Professor Sir David Omand, learn the methodology used by British intelligence agencies to reach judgements, establish the right level of confidence and act decisively. Full of revealing examples from a storied career, including key briefings with Prime Ministers and strategies used in conflicts from the Cold War to the present, in How Spies Think Professor Omand arms us with the tools to sort fact from fiction, and shows us how to use real intelligence every day.

A unique theory of what happens when leaders fear a revolution abroad will spread to their own country and how that affects international relations. When do leaders fear that a revolution elsewhere will spread to their own polities, and what are the international effects of this fear? In Revolutionary Contagion, Chad E. Nelson develops and tests a theory that explains how states react to ideological-driven revolutions that have occurred in other nations. To do this, he analyzes four key revolutionary movements over two centuries-liberalism, communism, fascism, and Islamism. He further explains that the key to understanding the response to revolutions lies in focusing on the extent to which leaders fear upheaval in their own countries. According to the theory, Nelson argues, fear of contagion is driven more by the characteristics of the host rather than the activities of the infecting agents. In other words, leaders will fear revolutionary contagion when they have significant revolutionary opposition movements that have an ideological affinity with the revolutionary state. A powerful theory of the profound effects revolutions have on international relations, this book shows why one simply cannot make sense of international politics-including patterns of alliances and wars-in certain situations without considering the fear of contagion.

We are living in an age of conspiracy theories, whether it's enduring, widely held beliefs such as government involvement in the Kennedy assassination or alien activity at Roswell, fears of a powerful infiltrating group such as the Illuminati, Jews, Catholics, or communists, or modern fringe movements of varying popularity such as birtherism and trutherism. What is it in American culture that makes conspiracy theories proliferate? Who is targeted, and why? Are we in the heyday of the conspiracy theory, or is it in decline?
Though there is significant scholarly literature on the topic in psychology, sociology, philosophy, and more, American Conspiracy Theories is the first to use broad, long-term empirical data to analyze this popular American tendency. Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent draw on three sources of original data: 120,000 letters to the editor of the New York Times and Chicago Tribune from between 1890 and 2010; a two-wave survey from before and after the 2012 presidential election; and discussions of conspiracy theories culled from online news sources, blogs, and other Web sites, also from before and after the election. Through these sources, they are able to address crucial questions, such as similarities and differences in the nature of conspiracy theories over time, the role of the Internet and communications technologies in spreading modern conspiracy theories, and whether politics, economics, media, war, or other factors are most important in popularizing conspiratorial beliefs. Ultimately, they conclude that power asymmetries, both foreign and domestic, are the main drivers behind conspiracy theories, and that those at the bottom of power hierarchies have a strategic interest in blaming those at the top-in other words, "conspiracy theories are for losers." But these "losers" can end up having tremendous influence on the course of history, and American Conspiracy Theories is an unprecedented examination of one of the defining features of American political life.