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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > International relations > Espionage & secret services
At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the United States government unleashed covert operations intended to weaken the Soviet Union. As part of these efforts, the CIA committed to supporting Russian exiles, populations uprooted either during World War Two or by the Russian Revolution decades before. No one seemed better prepared to fight in the American secret war against communism than the uprooted Russians, whom the CIA directed to carry out propaganda, espionage, and subversion operations from their home base in West Germany. Yet the American engagement of Russian exiles had unpredictable outcomes. Drawing on recently declassified and previously untapped sources, Cold War Exiles and the CIA examines how the CIA's Russian operations became entangled with the internal struggles of Russia abroad and also the espionage wars of the superpowers in divided Germany. What resulted was a transnational political sphere involving different groups of Russian exiles, American and German anti-communists, and spies operating on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Inadvertently, CIA's patronage of Russian exiles forged a complex sub-front in the wider Cold War, demonstrating the ways in which the hostilities of the Cold War played out in ancillary conflicts involving proxies and non-state actors.
Silver was the codename for the only quintuple spy of the Second World War, spying for the Italians, Germans, Japanese, Soviets and the British. The Germans awarded him the Iron Cross, Germany s highest military decoration, and paid him 2.5 million in today s money. In reality Silver deceived the Nazis on behalf of the Soviets and the British. In 1942 the Russians decided to share Silver with the British, the only time during the war that the Soviets agreed to such an arrangement. This brought him under the control of Peter Fleming who acted as his spy master. Germans also gave Silver a transmitter which broadcast misleading military information directly to Abwehr headquarters in Berlin. Silver was one of many codenames for a man whose real name was Bhagat Ram Talwar, a Hindu Pathan from the North West Frontier province of then British India. Between 1941 and 1945 Silver made twelve trips from Peshawar to Kabul to supply false information to the Germans, always making the near-200-mile journey on foot over mountain passes and hostile tribal territory.Once when an Afghan nearly rumbled him, he invited him to a curry meal in which he had mixed deadly tiger s whiskers killing the Afghan. "
It would be easy for the modern reader to conclude that women had no place in the world of early modern espionage, with a few seventeenth-century women spies identified and then relegated to the footnotes of history. If even the espionage carried out by Susan Hyde, sister of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, during the turbulent decades of civil strife in Britain can escape the historiographer's gaze, then how many more like her lurk in the archives? Nadine Akkerman's search for an answer to this question has led to the writing of Invisible Agents, the very first study to analyse the role of early modern women spies, demonstrating that the allegedly-male world of the spy was more than merely infiltrated by women. This compelling and ground-breaking contribution to the history of espionage details a series of case studies in which women — from playwright to postmistress, from lady-in-waiting to laundry woman — acted as spies, sourcing and passing on confidential information on account of political and religious convictions or to obtain money or power. The struggle of the She-Intelligencers to construct credibility in their own time is mirrored in their invisibility in modern historiography. Akkerman has immersed herself in archives, libraries, and private collections, transcribing hundreds of letters, breaking cipher codes and their keys, studying invisible inks, and interpreting riddles, acting as a modern-day Spymistress to unearth plots and conspiracies that have long remained hidden by history.
Australia was born with its eyes wide open. Although politicians spoke publicly of loyalty to Britain and the empire, in secret they immediately set about protecting Australia's interests from the Germans, the Japanese - and from Britain itself. As an experienced intelligence officer, John Fahey knows how the security services disguise their activities within government files. He has combed the archives to compile the first account of Australia's intelligence operations in the years from Federation to World War II. He tells the stories of dedicated patriots who undertook dangerous operations to protect their new nation, despite a lack of training and support. He shows how the early adoption of advanced radio technology by Australia contributed to the war effort in Europe. He also exposes the bureaucratic mismanagement in World War II that cost many lives, and the leaks that compromised Australia's standing with its wartime allies so badly that Australia was nearly expelled from the Anglo-Saxon intelligence network. Australia's First Spies shows Australia always has been a far savvier operator in international affairs than much of the historical record suggests, and it offers a glimpse into the secret history of the nation.
The Man Who Rode the Tiger is the dramatic story of the biggest investigation of political corruption in American municipal history. The "Seabury Investigation" became a model for federal, state, and city investigations of major officeholders and minor rascals. Samuel Seabury was a patrician New Yorker who was called upon to ride the Tammany Tiger, longtime symbol of crooked politics and influence-peddling. Seabury and his staff of tough young lawyers toppled Mayor Jimmy Walker - the popular Beau James; struck a near-death blow to Tammany Hall; were directly responsible for selecting and electing Fiorello H. LaGuardia as the most popular Mayor in New York history; and helped Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt in his campaign for the presidency of the United States. The final confrontation between Judge Seabury and Jimmy Walker was before Governor Roosevelt in Albany. FDR surprised those who thought he was a lightweight - and Tammany instrument - by handling himself beautifully, disengaging himself from Tammany's grip, and gaining national attention.
Truth to Power, the first-ever history of the U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC), is told through the reflections of its eight Chairs in the period from the end of the Cold War until 2017. Co-editors Robert Hutchings and Gregory Treverton add a substantial introduction placing the NIC in its historical context going all the way back to the Board of National Estimates in the 1940s, as well as a concluding chapter that highlights key themes and judgments. This historic mission of this remarkable but little-known organization, now almost forty years old, is strategic intelligence assessment in service of senior American foreign policymakers. Its signature inside products, National Intelligence Estimates, are now accompanied by the NIC's every-four-years Global Trends. Unclassified, Global Trends has become a noted NIC brand, its release awaited by officials, academics and private sector managers around the world. Each chapter places its particular period of the NIC's history in context (the global situation, the administration, the intelligence community) and assesses the most important issues with which the NIC grappled during the period, acknowledging failures as well as claiming successes. For example, Hutchings' chapter examines the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the fallout from the ill-fated Iraqi WMD estimate, the debate over intelligence community reform, and the year-long National Intelligence Council 2020 project. With the creation of the Director of National Intelligence in 2005, the NIC's mission mushroomed to include direct intelligence support to the two main policymaking committees in the government: the Principals Committee (cabinet secretaries in the foreign affairs departments) and the Deputies Committee (their deputies or number threes). The mission shift took the NIC directly into the thick of the action but at some cost to its abilities to do strategic thinking: of some 700 NIC papers in 2016, more than half were responses to questions from the National Security Adviser or her deputies, most, though hardly all, of which were current and tactical, not longer-term and strategic.
During the Second World War hundreds of Hollywood filmmakers under the command of the legendary director John Ford enlisted in the OSS to produce training, reconnaissance and propaganda films. This wartime bond continued into the post-war period, when a number of studios produced films advocating the creation of a permanent peacetime successor to the OSS: what became the Central Intelligence Agency. By the 1960s however, Hollywood's increasingly irreverent attitude towards the CIA reflected a growing public anxiety about excessive US government secrecy. In Secrecy's Shadow provides the first comprehensive history of the birth and development of Hollywood's relationship with American intelligence. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, synthesizing literatures and methodologies from diplomatic history, film studies and cultural theory, and it presents new perspectives on a number of major filmmakers including Darryl F. Zanuck, Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford. Based on research conducted in over 20 archival repositories across the United States and UK, In Secrecy's Shadow explores the revolution in the relationship between Hollywood and the secret state, from unwavering trust and cooperation to extreme scepticism and paranoia, and demonstrates the debilitating effects of secrecy upon public trust in government and the stability of national memory.
Loyalty and Liberty offers the first comprehensive account of the politics of countersubversion in the United States prior to the McCarthy era. Beginning with the loyalty politics of World War I, Alex Goodall traces the course of American countersubversion as it ebbed and flowed throughout the first half of the twentieth century, culminating in the rise of McCarthyism and the Cold War. This sweeping study explores how antisubversive fervor was dampened in the 1920s in response to the excesses of World War I, transformed by the politics of antifascism in the Depression era, and rekindled in opposition to Roosevelt's ambitious New Deal policies in the later 1930s and 1940s. Identifying varied interest groups such as business tycoons, Christian denominations, and Southern Democrats, Goodall demonstrates how countersubversive politics was far from unified: groups often pursued clashing aims while struggling to balance the competing pulls of loyalty to the nation and liberty of thought, speech, and action. Meanwhile, the federal government pursued its own course, which alternately converged with and diverged from the paths followed by private organizations. By the end of World War II, alliances on the left and right had largely consolidated into the form they would keep during the Cold War. Anticommunists on the right worked to rein in the supposedly dictatorial ambitions of the Roosevelt administration, while New Deal liberals divided into several camps: the Popular Front, civil liberties activists, and embryonic Cold Warriors who struggled with how to respond to communist espionage in Washington and communist influence in politics more broadly. Rigorous in its scholarship yet accessible to a wide audience, Goodall's masterful study shows how opposition to radicalism became a defining ideological question of American life.
Cybersecurity expert Theresa Payton tells battlefront stories from the global war being conducted through clicks, swipes, internet access, technical backdoors and massive espionage schemes. She investigates the cyberwarriors who are planning tomorrow’s attacks, weaving a fascinating yet bone-chilling tale of Artificial Intelligent mutations carrying out attacks without human intervention, “deepfake†videos that look real to the naked eye, and chatbots that beget other chatbots. Finally, Payton offers readers telltale signs that their most fundamental beliefs are being meddled with and actions they can take or demand that corporations and elected officials must take before it is too late.Â
The world of international politics has recently been rocked by a seemingly endless series of scandals involving auditory surveillance: the NSA's warrantless wiretapping is merely the most sensational example of what appears to be a universal practice today. What is the source of this generalized principle of eavesdropping? All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage traces the long history of moles from the Bible, through Jeremy Bentham's "panacoustic" project, all the way to the intelligence-gathering network called "Echelon." Together with this archeology of auditory surveillance, Szendy offers an engaging account of spycraft's representations in literature (Sophocles, Shakespeare, Joyce, Kafka, Borges), opera (Monteverdi, Mozart, Berg), and film (Lang, Hitchcock, Coppola, De Palma). Following in the footsteps of Orpheus, the book proposes a new concept of "overhearing" that connects the act of spying to an excessive intensification of listening. At the heart of listening Szendy locates the ear of the Other that manifests itself as the originary division of a "split-hearing" that turns the drive for mastery and surveillance into the death drive.
Moura Budberg: spy, adventurer, charismatic seductress and mistress of two of the century's greatest writers, the Russian aristocrat Baroness Moura Budberg was born in 1892 to indulgence, pleasure and selfishness. But after she met the British diplomat and secret agent Robert Bruce Lockhart, she sacrificed everything for love, only to be betrayed. When Lockhart arrived in Revolutionary Russia in 1918, his official mission was Britain's envoy to the new Bolshevik government, yet his real assignment was to create a network of agents and plot the downfall of Lenin. Lockhart soon got to know Moura and they began a passionate affair, even though Moura was spying on him for the Bolsheviks. But when Lockhart's plot unravelled, she would forsake everything in an attempt to protect him from Lenin's secret police. Fleeing to a life of exile in England and taking a string of new lovers, including Maxim Gorky and H. G. Wells, Moura later spied for Stalin and for Britain amidst the web of scandal surrounding the Cambridge spies. Through all this she clung to the hope that Lockhart would finally return to her. Grippingly narrated, this is the first biography of Moura Budberg to use the full range of previously unexamined letters, diaries and documents. An incredible true story of passion, espionage and double crossing that encircled the globe, A Very Dangerous Woman brings her extraordinary world vividly to life with dramatic resonances to rival the most sensational novel.
In this ambitious work a leading scholar undertakes a full-scale reconceptualization of international relations. Turbulence in World Politics is an entirely new formulation that accounts for the persistent turmoil of today's world, even as it also probes the impact of the microelectronic revolution, the postindustrial order, and the many other fundamental political, economic, and social changes under way since World War II. To develop this formulation, James N. Rosenau digs deep into the workings of communities and the orientations of individuals that culminate in collective action on the world stage. His concern is less with questions of epistemology and methodology and more with the development of a comprehensive theoryone that is different from other paradigms in the field by virtue of its focus on the tumult in contemporary international relations. The book depicts a bifurcation of global politics in which an autonomous multi-centric world has emerged as a competitor of the long established state-centric world. A central theme is that the analytic skills of people everywhere are expanding and thereby altering the context in which international processes unfold. Rosenau shows how the macro structures of global politics have undergone transformations linked to those at the micro level: long-standing structures of authority weaken, collectivities fragment, subgroups become more powerful at the expense of states and governments, national loyalties are redirected, and new issues crowd onto the global agenda. These turbulent dynamics foster the simultaneous centralizing and decentralizing tendencies that are now bifurcating global structures. "Rosenau's new work is an imaginative leap into world politics in the twenty-first century. There is much here to challenge traditional thought of every persuasion." --Michael Brecher, McGill University
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.
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.
This political analysis exposes the fanciful logic that the United States can use nuclear weapons to vanquish nuclear adversaries or influence them when employing various coercive tactics. During the Cold War, American policymakers sought nuclear advantages to offset an alleged Soviet edge. Policymakers hoped that US nuclear capabilities would safeguard deterrence, when backed perhaps by a set of coercive tactics. But policymakers also hedged their bets with plans to fight a nuclear war to their advantage should deterrence fail. In The False Promise of Superiority, James H. Lebovic argues that the US approach was fraught with peril and remains so today. He contends that the United States can neither simply impose its will on nuclear adversaries nor safeguard deterrence using these same coercive tactics without risking severe, counterproductive effects. As Lebovic shows, the current faith in US nuclear superiority could produce the disastrous consequences that US weapons and tactics are meant to avoid. This book concludes that US interests are best served when policymakers resist the temptation to use, or prepare to use, nuclear weapons first or to brandish nuclear weapons for coercive effect.
As John le Carre's fictional intelligence men admit, it was the case histories - constructed narratives serving shifting agendas - that shaped the British intelligence machine, rather than their personal experience of secret operations. Secret History demonstrates that a critical scrutiny of internal "after action" assessments of intelligence prepared by British officials provides an invaluable and original perspective on the emergence of British intelligence culture over a period stretching from the First World War to the early Cold War. The historical record reflects personal value judgments about what qualified as effective techniques and organization, and even who could rightfully be called an intelligence officer. The history of intelligence thus became a powerful form of self-reinforcing cultural capital. Shining an intense light on the history of Britain's intelligence organizations, Secret History excavates how contemporary myths, misperceptions, and misunderstandings were captured and how they affected the development of British intelligence and the state.
First World War espionage was a fascinating and dangerous affair, spawning widespread paranoia in its clandestine wake. The hysteria of the age, stoked by those within the British establishment who sought to manipulate popular panic, meant there was no shortage of suspects. Exaggerated claims were rife: some 80,000 Germans were supposedly hidden all over Britain, just waiting for an impending (and imagined) invasion. No one could be trusted - Against this backdrop, as head of Scotland Yard's Criminal Investigation Department, it was Basil Thomson's responsibility to hunt, arrest and interrogate the potential German spies identifi ed by the nascent British intelligence services. Thomson's story is an extraordinary compendium of sleuthing and secrets from a real-life Sherlock Holmes, following the trails of the many specimens he tracked, including the famous dancer, courtesan and spy, Mata Hari. Yet his activities gained him enemies, as did his criticism of British intelligence, his ambition to control MI5 and his efforts to root out left-wing revolutionaries - which would ultimately prove to be the undoing of his career. Odd People is the insightful and wittily observed account of Thomson's incomparably exciting job, offering us a rare glimpse into the dizzying world of spies and the mind of the detective charged with foiling their elaborate plots. The Dialogue Espionage Classics series began in 2010 with the purpose of bringing back classic out-of-print spy stories that should never be forgotten. From the Great War to the Cold War, from the French Resistance to the Cambridge Five, from Special Operations to Bletchley Park, this fascinating spy history series includes some of the best military, espionage and adventure stories ever told.
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane F.R.S. (1892-1964) was one of the leading scientists of the twentieth century, renowned for helping, through statistical wizardry, to reconcile Darwin's theory of natural selection with Mendel's discovery of genes. The product of a distinguished family of scientists and public figures, "JBS" trained and influenced a swathe of students and colleagues at Oxford, Cambridge, and University College London, many of whom, such as the evolutionary theorist John Maynard Smith, went on to distinction in their own right. As a widely known left-wing "public intellectual," Haldane gained fame as a popularizer of science and commentator on public affairs, broadcasting often on the BBC and publishing extensively in newspapers and magazines. His collections of popular scientific essays influenced a generation of upcoming scientists and remain in print today. On his death in 1964, he was accorded the rare tribute of a televised self-obituary on the BBC. Celebrated for his ability to connect seemingly disparate subjects, during the Second World War Haldane was extensively involved in scientific research to aid the British war effort. Using evidence gathered from VENONA Signals Intelligence intercepts, MI5 files, and the Haldane papers, this book reveals that Haldane was also a Soviet spy-a member of the "X Group," an espionage ring that was run out of the Soviet Embassy in London. His interlocking associations with other spies, such as Ivor Montagu and Hans Kahle; his role as a hardline Stalinist propagandist through the onset of the Cold War; his betrayal of his colleague and friend, the Soviet geneticist Nikolai Vavilov; his long-standing support for the charlatan Soviet "scientist" Trofim D. Lysenko; and his concealed stalemate with the Communist Party of Great Britain once his ability to finesse Lysenko was extinguished, are unraveled here for the first time.
This is the story of one of the most enduring conspiracy theories in British politics, an intrigue that still has resonance almost a century later: the Zinoviev Letter of 1924. Almost certainly a forgery, no original has ever been traced, and even if genuine it was probably Soviet 'fake news'. Despite this, the Letter still haunts British politics nearly a century after it was written; it was the subject of major Whitehall investigations in the 1960s and 1990s, and cropped up in the media as recently as during the Referendum campaign and the 2017 general election. The Letter, encouraging the British proletariat to greater revolutionary fervour, was apparently sent by Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Bolshevik propaganda organization, to the British Communist Party in September 1924. Sent to London through British Secret Intelligence Service channels, it arrived during the general election campaign and was leaked to the press. The Letter's publication by the Daily Mail on 25 October 1924 just before the General Election humiliated the first ever British Labour government, headed by Ramsay MacDonald, when its political opponents used it to create a 'Red Scare' in the media. Labour blamed the Letter for its defeat, insisting there had been a right-wing Establishment conspiracy, and many in the Labour Party have never forgotten it. The Zinoviev Letter has long been a symbol of political dirty tricks and what we would now call 'fake news'. But it is also a gripping historical detective story of spies and secrets, fraud and forgery, international subversion and the nascent global conflict between communism and capitalism.
During the spring and summer of 1918, with World War I still undecided, British, French and American agents in Russia developed a breathtakingly audacious plan. Led by Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart, a dashing, cynical, urbane 30-year-old Scot, they conspired to overthrow Lenin's newly established Bolshevik regime, and to install one that would continue the war against Germany on the Eastern Front. Lockhart's confidante and chief support, with whom he engaged in a passionate love affair, was the mysterious, alluring Moura von Benkendorff, wife of a former aide-de-camp to the Tsar. The plotters' chief opponent was 'Iron Felix' Dzerzhinsky. He led the Cheka, 'Sword and Shield' of the Russian Revolution and forerunner of the KGB. Dzerzhinsky loved humanity - in the abstract. He believed socialism represented humanity's best hope. To preserve and protect it he would unleash unbounded terror. Revolutionary Russia provided the setting for the ensuing contest. In the back streets of Petrograd and Moscow, in rough gypsy cabarets, in glittering nightclubs, in cells beneath the Cheka's Lubianka prison, the protagonists engaged in a deadly game of wits for the highest possible stakes - not merely life and death, but the outcome of a world war and the nature of Russia's post-war regime. Confident of success, the conspirators set the date for an uprising, September 8, 1918, but the Cheka had penetrated their organization and pounced just beforehand. The Lockhart Plot was a turning point in world history, except it failed to turn. At a time when Russian meddling in British and American politics now sounds warning bells, however, we may sense its reverberations and realize that it is still relevant. |
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