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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > International relations > Espionage & secret services
In the towering mountains of northern India, a chilling chapter was written in the history of international espionage. After the Chinese detonated their first nuclear test in 1964, America and India, which had just fought a border war with its northern neighbor, were both justifiably concerned. The CIA knew it needed more information on China's growing nuclear capability but had few ways of peeking behind the Bamboo Curtain. Because of the extreme remoteness of Chinese testing grounds, conventional surveillance in this pre-satellite era was next to impossible. The solution to this intelligence dilemma was a joint
American-Indian effort to plant a nuclear-powered sensing device on
a high Himalayan peak in order to listen into China and monitor its
missile launches. It was not a job that could be carried out by
career spies, requiring instead the special skills possessed only
by accomplished "Spies in the Himalayas" chronicles for the first time the details of these death-defying expeditions sanctioned by U.S. and Indian intelligence, telling the story of clandestine climbs and hair-raising exploits. Led by legendary Indian mountaineer Mohan S. Kohli, conqueror of Everest, the mission was beset by hazardous climbs, weather delays, aborted attempts, and even missing radioactive materials that may or may not still pose a contamination threat to Indian rivers. Kept under wraps for over a decade, these operations came to light in 1978 and have been long rumored among mountaineers, but here are finally given book-length treatment. Spies in the Himalayas provides an inside look at a CIA mission from participants who weren't agency employees, drawing on diaries from several of the climbers to offer impressions not usually recorded in covert operations. A host of photos and maps puts readers on the slopes as the team attempts repeatedly to plant the sensor on a Himalayan summit. An adventure story as well as a new chapter in the history of
espionage, this book should appeal to readers who enjoyed Jon
Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" and to anyone who enjoys a great spy
story.
Michael Herman (1929 2021) was the world's leading intelligence practitioner academic. Among his senior roles during a thirty-five year career in Her Majesty's Civil Service, he was Secretary of the Joint Intelligence Committee from 1972 75, and Head of several GCHQ Divisions in the 1970s 80s. After his professional retirement, he was a Gwilym Gibbon Research Fellow at Nuffield College Oxford and founding director of the Oxford Intelligence Group.This volume draws on Herman's professional experience and personal recollections to examine the past and present British intelligence. In twenty-one chapters he offers an insider's perspective on the Cold War intelligence contest against the Soviet Union and its continuing legacy today. This includes proposals for intelligence ethics and reform in the twenty-first century, and the declassified copy of his evidence to the 2004 Butler Review. Herman also discusses the role of personalities in the British intelligence community, producing sketches of Cold War contemporaries on the JIC and several Directors of GCHQ. The combination of operational experience and academic reflection makes this volume a unique contribution to intelligence scholarship.
This is both a history of the service attache, beginning with the Napoleonic era, and a discussion of his changing role, past and present. Professor Vagts shows the military adviser temporarily joined to the diplomatic corps as a person often divided in his loyalties to diplomatic officials and to military leaders. Affected by increasing bureaucratic specialization, he sometimes became a "twilight" figure engaged in political activity and even espionage. Professor Vagts' numerous works on the history of militarism and the military, in both German and English, and his research in the chancelleries of Europe have given him perspective for this book. Originally published in 1967. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
John Birch is a totemic figure in American life. The society named after him is one of the famous far-right organizations in American history. It was also a paradigmatic example of anti-communist hysteria during the Cold War, and its influence on the American far right to this day remains significant. Yet despite his posthumous fame, Birch himself remains an obscure figure. Terry Lautz, a longtime scholar of US-China relations, has spoken with all of Birch's remaining relatives, found shoeboxes filled with letters from one of his former lovers, and visited the various sites in China where he worked. The result is the first authoritative biography of this fascinating figure, who continues to haunt the political fringes of American life. Birch grew up in the rapidly growing Bible culture of the post-World War I period, and then became a missionary in China in the tumultuous period of its war against the Japanese and the escalating conflict between nationalists and communists. He fought with Claire Chennault's famed Flying Tigers and had a number of romantic relationships with women along the way. After the war ended, he committed himself to resuming his missionary activities in China, but was killed by communist guerrillas in an altercation a couple of weeks after the war ended in September 1945. A few years after his death, when China fell to the communists, anti-communists in Congress latched onto his life and promoted him as a martyr. Within a few years, Robert Welch, a candy manufacturer in New England, formed the John Birch Society, an extreme right-wing organization whose influence is still visible in the Tea Party movement. Lautz covers Birch's life and his afterlife, and also places him not merely in the context of the American far right, but in the revolutionary war that consumed China in the 1930s and 1940s. In this critical study of a figure who has reached near-legendary status, Lautz cuts through the mythology to expose John Birch-both the man and the political phenomenon.
A rallying cry to link the food justice movement to broader social justice debates The United States is a nation of foodies and food activists, many of them progressives, and yet their overwhelming concern for what they consume often hinders their engagement with social justice more broadly. Food Justice Now! charts a path from food activism to social justice activism that integrates the two. It calls on the food-focused to broaden and deepen their commitment to the struggle against structural inequalities both within and beyond the food system. In an engrossing, historically grounded, and ethnographically rich narrative, Joshua Sbicca argues that food justice is more than just a myopic focus on food, allowing scholars and activists alike to investigate the causes behind inequities and evaluate and implement political strategies to overcome them. Focusing on carceral, labor, and immigration crises, Sbicca tells the stories of three California-based food movement organizations, showing that when activists use food to confront neoliberal capitalism and institutional racism, they can creatively expand how to practice and achieve food justice. Sbicca sets his central argument in opposition to apolitical and individual solutions, discussing national food movement campaigns and the need for economically and racially just food policies-a matter of vital public concern with deep implications for building collective power across a diversity of interests.
Since the turn of the century much has happened in politics, governments, spying, technology, global business, mobile communications, and global competition on national and corporate levels. These sweeping changes have nearly annihilated privacy anywhere in the world and have also affected how global information warfare is waged and what must be done to counter its attacks. In light of increased attacks since 2002, Global Information Warfare: The New Digital Battlefield, Second Edition provides a critical update on the nature and approaches to global information warfare. It focuses on threats, vulnerabilities, attacks, and defenses from the perspectives of various players such as governments, corporations, terrorists, and private citizens. Upgrades to the Second Edition Include: Revised discussions of changes and impacts of global information warfare since 2002 Updated analyses of the capabilities of several nation-states as well as nonstate actors A comprehensive list of incidents that have occurred in the past year to show the scope of the problem of GIW Discussions of post-9/11 governmental changes and shifting priorities with clearer hindsight than was possible in the first edition The book underscores how hostile countries, business competitors, terrorists, and others are waging information warfare against adversaries, even from across the globe. It describes attacks on information systems through theft, Internet espionage, deception, and sabotage, and illustrates countermeasures used to defeat these threats. The second edition of Global Information Warfare contains a wealth of information and detailed analyses of capabilities of contemporary information technology and the capabilities of the individuals and groups who employ it in their respective digital wars. It is a crucial source for gaining the best understanding of the current state of information warfare and the most effective ways to counter it.
In 1945, both the U.S. State Department and U.S. Intelligence saw Czechoslovakia as the master key to the balance of power in Europe and as a chessboard for the power-game between East and West. Washington believed that the political scene in Prague was the best available indicator of whether the United States would be able to coexist with Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. In this book, Igor Lukes illuminates the end of World War II and the early stages of the Cold War in Prague, showing why the United States failed to prevent Czechoslovakia from being absorbed into the Soviet bloc. He draws on documents from archives in the United States and the Czech Republic, on the testimonies of high ranking officers who served in the U.S. Embassy from 1945 to 1948, and on unpublished manuscripts, diaries, and memoirs. Exploiting this wealth of evidence, Lukes paints a critical portrait of Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt. He shows that Steinhardt's groundless optimism caused Washington to ignore clear signs that democracy in Czechoslovakia was in trouble. Although U.S. Intelligence officials who served in Prague were committed to the mission of gathering information and protecting democracy, they were defeated by the Czech and Soviet clandestine services that proved to be more shrewd, innovative, and eager to win. Indeed, Lukes reveals that a key American officer may have been turned by the Russians. For all these reasons, when the Communists moved to impose their dictatorship, the U.S. Embassy and its CIA section were unprepared and powerless. The fall of Czechoslovakia in 1948 helped deepen Cold War tensions for decades to come. Vividly written and filled with colorful portraits of the key participants, On the Edge of the Cold War offers an authoritative account of this key foreign policy debacle.
While the United States has had some kind of intelligence capability throughout its history, its intelligence apparatus is young, dating only to the period immediately after World War II. Yet, in that short a time, it has undergone enormous changes from the labor-intensive espionage and covert action establishment of the 1950s to a modern enterprise that relies heavily on electronic data, technology, satellites, airborne collection platforms, and unmanned aerial vehicles, to name a few. This second edition covers the history of United States intelligence, and includes several key features: .Chronology .Introductory essay .Appendixes .Bibliography .Over 600 cross-referenced entries on key events, issues, people, operations, laws, regulations This book is an excellent access point for members of the intelligence community; students, scholars, and historians; legal experts; and general readers wanting to know more about the history of U.S. intelligence."
Writing and briefing are fundamental to the intelligence profession. The ability to communicate clearly, concisely, and coherently is basic to all intelligence disciplines, even the most technical. Communicating with Intelligence, Third Edition is a handbook on writing and briefing intelligence based on the decades of practical experience of James S. Major. The book is designed primarily for faculty and students pursuing studies in intelligence, national security, and homeland security, who need to learn the art of preparing written products and intelligence briefings. But it also has considerable value for working professionals who simply wish to sharpen their communication skills. The third edition of Communicating with Intelligence provides the expediency, efficiency, and effectiveness instructors and members of the Intelligence Community require for a communication handbook.
Moscow in the late 1970s: one by one, CIA assets are disappearing. The perils of American arrogance, mixed with bureaucratic infighting, had left the country unspeakably vulnerable to ultra-sophisticated Russian electronic surveillance.. The Spy in Moscow Station tells of a time when―much like today―Russian spycraft was proving itself far ahead of the best technology the U.S. had to offer. This is the true story of unorthodox, underdog intelligence officers who fought an uphill battle against their government to prove that the KGB had pulled off the most devastating and breathtakingly thorough penetration of U.S. national security in history. Incorporating declassified internal CIA memos and diplomatic cables, this suspenseful narrative reads like a thriller―but real lives were at stake, and every twist is true as the US and USSR attempt to wrongfoot each other in eavesdropping technology and tradecraft. The book also carries a chilling warning for the present: like the State and CIA officers who were certain their "sweeps" could detect any threat in Moscow, we don't know what we don't know.
The astonishing, gripping and long-awaited inside story of an ordinary man who became an extraordinary spy. After years of living in semi-isolation, David Rupert speaks for the first time about how a trucker from New York ended up being recruited to the FBI and MI5 at one of the most crucial moments in British political history. Including shock revelations about Rupert's discoveries working within the Real IRA - such as sending plastic explosives and detonators, hidden inside toys, to a primary school in Donegal. Author Sean O'Driscoll tells the incredible story of David, 'The Big Yank', a 6ft7 American tourist who found himself at the centre of a chilling campaign of terror that targeted civilians, the forces and Prime Minister Tony Blair. Countless lives have been saved by David Rupert's decision to risk his neck working for years within one of the most brutal and ruthless terrorist organisations in the world - an organisation whose language of violence left women and children amongst the dead in the Omagh atrocity. An unprecedented bombing campaign was planned to destroy any hopes of a peace agreement. In a trial that rested entirely on the evidence of the 'Big Yank', those plans for ongoing bloodshed and an end to the Good Friday Agreement were brought to a halt.
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.
In the wake of World War II, the United States and its allies developed a new type of security arrangement in which a state could maintain a long-term, peacetime military presence on the territory of another equally sovereign state that, unlike earlier practice, was not tied to occupational regimes or colonial rule. The impact of this development on international politics is hard to overstate, and it has become a constitutive feature of contemporary security dynamics. Despite its significance, the origins of this basing practice have remained largely understudied and unexplained. In Armed Guests, Sebastian Schmidt develops a theory to explain the emergence of this phenomenon, which he calls "sovereign basing," and in doing so, shows how its development fundamentally transformed state sovereignty and the very nature of security politics. He applies concepts derived from pragmatist thought to a historical study of the relations between the United States and its wartime allies to explain how sovereign basing originated through the efforts of policymakers to come to grips with the unique security environment of the postwar era. As he argues, the tools offered by pragmatism provide needed analytical leverage over the emergence of novelty and offer valuable insight into the dynamics of stability and change. Armed Guests is a wide-ranging account of the development of sovereign basing practices in the years before and after World War II. It is a book with significant implications for our understanding of contemporary security politics and the future of basing strategies as well as for broader issues in IR, including the sociological foundations of security strategies, the nature of norms, and the practice of sovereignty.
The cross-border sharing of intelligence is fundamental to the establishment and preservation of security and stability. The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 was based in part on flawed intelligence, and current efforts to defeat al Qaeda would not be possible without an exchange of information among Britain, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the United States. While critical to national security and political campaigns, intelligence sharing can also be a minefield of manipulation and maneuvering, especially when secrecy makes independent verification of sources impossible. In "The International Politics of Intelligence Sharing," James Igoe Walsh advances novel strategies for securing more reliable intelligence. His approach puts states that seek information in control of other states' intelligence efforts. According to this hierarchical framework, states regularly draw agreements in which one power directly monitors and acts on another power's information-gathering activities-a more streamlined approach that prevents the dissemination of false "secrets." In developing this strategy, Walsh draws on recent theories of international cooperation and evaluates both historical and contemporary case studies of intelligence sharing. Readers with an interest in intelligence matters cannot ignore this urgent, timely, and evidence-based book.
Andrew Thomson rethinks the history of US imperialism, from the Cold War to today, to reveal how paramilitaries, militias, mercenaries, private armies, and contractors have always been central to US-sponsored insurgencies and US counterinsurgent statecraft. Examining a broad range of events from the Bay of Pigs to the occupation of Iraq, and from the Soviet-Afghan war to the ongoing conflict in Syria, Thomson offers an analysis of the evolution of US support for various para-institutional actors or non-state armed forces. He demonstrates how and why militias, mercenaries, and private military companies have increasingly formed a central part of US imperial strategies designed to influence political and economic conditions abroad. Drawing on declassified documents including military training manuals, CIA communiqus, and national security documents, Outsourced Empire reveals new evidence that helps us understand these institutions and their collective role in maintaining global order.
Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) encompasses the various disciplines of wireless interception, cryptanalysis, communications intelligence, electronic intelligence, direction-finding, and traffic analysis. It has become the basis upon which all combat operations are undertaken. It is now widely recognized as an absolutely vital dimension to modern warfare and it has proved to be a vital component in the counter-intelligence war fought between the West and Soviet bloc intelligence agencies. The Historical Dictionary of Signals Intelligence covers the history of SIGINT through a chronology, an introductory essay, an appendix, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries on key personnel, SIGINT technology, intelligence operations, and agencies, as well as the tradecraft and jargon. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Signals Intelligence.
Pham Xuan An was a Communist agent whose espionage adventures - under the cover story of a celebrated war correspondent in the Western Media -- were as brilliant for Hanoi as they were shattering for Washington during the tumultuous days of the Vietnam War. He has been dubbed "the perfect spy" and affectionately referred to by some as "the spy who loved us". Not quite. Journalist and Southeast Asian specialist Luke Hunt prises this story open. He knew and interviewed An for many years, along with many friends and colleagues in journalism who knew him best in war, on the journalistic beat and amid the collapse of South Vietnam.
For over 100 years, the agents of MI5 have defended Britain against enemy subversion. Their work has remained shrouded in secrecy--until now. This first-ever authorized account reveals the British Security Service as never before: its inner workings, its clandestine operations, its failures and its triumphs.
A critical look at how the US military is weaponizing technology and data for new kinds of warfare-and why we must resist. War Virtually is the story of how scientists, programmers, and engineers are racing to develop data-driven technologies for fighting virtual wars, both at home and abroad. In this landmark book, Roberto J. Gonzalez gives us a lucid and gripping account of what lies behind the autonomous weapons, robotic systems, predictive modeling software, advanced surveillance programs, and psyops techniques that are transforming the nature of military conflict. Gonzalez, a cultural anthropologist, takes a critical approach to the techno-utopian view of these advancements and their dubious promise of a less deadly and more efficient warfare. With clear, accessible prose, this book exposes the high-tech underpinnings of contemporary military operations-and the cultural assumptions they're built on. Chapters cover automated battlefield robotics; social scientists' involvement in experimental defense research; the blurred line between political consulting and propaganda in the internet era; and the military's use of big data to craft new counterinsurgency methods based on predicting conflict. Gonzalez also lays bare the processes by which the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies have quietly joined forces with Big Tech, raising an alarming prospect: that someday Google, Amazon, and other Silicon Valley firms might merge with some of the world's biggest defense contractors. War Virtually takes an unflinching look at an algorithmic future-where new military technologies threaten democratic governance and human survival.
Combining his expertise as a national security correspondent and research academic, Paul Lashmar reveals how and why the media became more critical in its reporting of the Secret State. He explores a series of major case studies including Snowden, WikiLeaks, Spycatcher, rendition and torture, and MI5's vetting of the BBC - most of which he reported on as they happened. He discusses the issues that news coverage raises for democracy and gives you a deeper understanding of how intelligence and the media function, interact and fit into structures of power and knowledge.
This book explores the powers, activities, and accountability of MI5 from the end of the Second World War to 1964. It argues that MI5 acted with neither statutory authority nor statutory powers, and with no obvious forms of statutory accountability. It was established as a counter-espionage agency, yet was beset by espionage scandals on a frequency that suggested if not high levels of incompetence, then high levels of distraction and the squandering of resources. The book addresses the evolution of MI5's mandate after the Second World War which set out its role and functions, and to a limited extent the lines of accountability, the surveillance targets of MI5 and the surveillance methods that it used for this purpose, with a focus in two chapters on MPs and lawyers respectively; the purposes for which this information was used, principally to exclude people from certain forms of employment; and the accountability of MI5 or the lack thereof for the way in which it discharged its responsibilities under the mandate. As lawyers the authors' concern is to consider these questions within the context of the rule of law, one of the core principles of the British constitution, the values of which it was the duty of the Security Service to uphold. Based on extensive archival research, it suggests that MI5 operated without legal authority or exceeded the legal authority it did have.
The secret history of MI6 - from the Cold War to the present day. The British Secret Service has been cloaked in secrecy and shrouded in myth since it was created a hundred years ago. Our understanding of what it is to be a spy has been largely defined by the fictional worlds of James Bond and John le Carre. THE ART OF BETRAYAL provides a unique and unprecedented insight into this secret world and the reality that lies behind the fiction. It tells the story of how the secret service has changed since the end of World War II and by focusing on the people and the relationships that lie at the heart of espionage, revealing the danger, the drama, the intrigue, the moral ambiguities and the occasional comedy that comes with working for British intelligence. From the defining period of the early Cold War through to the modern day, MI6 has undergone a dramatic transformation from a gung-ho, amateurish organisation to its modern, no less controversial, incarnation. Gordon Corera reveals the triumphs and disasters along the way. The grand dramas of the Cold War and after - the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 11 September 2001 attacks and the Iraq war - are the backdrop for the human stories of the individual spies whose stories form the centrepiece of the narrative. But some of the individuals featured here, in turn, helped shape the course of those events. Corera draws on the first-hand accounts of those who have spied, lied and in some cases nearly died in service of the state. They range from the spymasters to the agents they ran to their sworn enemies. Many of these accounts are based on exclusive interviews and access. From Afghanistan to the Congo, from Moscow to the back streets of London, these are the voices of those who have worked on the front line of Britain's secret wars. And the truth is often more remarkable than the fiction. |
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