Nearly forty female agents were sent out by the French section of Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. The youngest was 19 and the oldest 53. Most were trained in paramilitary warfare, fieldcraft, the use of weapons and explosives, sabotage, silent killing, parachuting, codes and cyphers, wireless transmission and receiving, and general spycraft. These women - as well as others from clandestine Allied organisations - were flown out and parachuted or landed into France on vital and highly dangerous missions: their task, to work with resistance movements both before and after D-Day. Bernard O'Connor uses recently declassified government documents, personnel files, mission reports and memoirs to assess the successes and failures of the 38 women including Odette Sansom, Denise Colin, and Cecile Pichard. Of the twelve who were captured, only two survived; the others were executed, some after being tortured by the sadistic officers of the Gestapo. This is their story.

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.

'A thrilling account' Daily Mail 'Thrilling and inspiring' Daily Mirror 'Extraordinary bravery... made this woman one of WWII's most remarkable spies. That she survived the war was almost miraculous' Time The year is 1942, and World War II is in full swing. Odette Sansom decides to follow in her war hero father's footsteps by becoming an SOE agent to aid Britain and her beloved homeland, France. Five failed attempts and one plane crash later, she finally lands in occupied France to begin her mission. It is here that she meets her commanding officer Captain Peter Churchill. As they successfully complete mission after mission, Peter and Odette fall in love. All the while, they are being hunted by the cunning German secret police sergeant, Hugo Bleicher, who finally succeeds in capturing them. They are sent to Paris's Fresnes prison, and on to concentration camps in Germany, where they are starved, beaten, and tortured. But in the face of despair, they never give up hope, their love for each other, or the whereabouts of their colleagues. This is a portrait of true courage, patriotism and love amidst unimaginable horrors and degradation.

Democracy Declassified tackles an enduring question of particular current importance: How do democratic governments balance the need for foreign policy secrecy with accountability to the public? Democracies keep secrets both from potential enemies and their publics. This simple fact challenges the surprisingly prevalent assumption that foreign policy successes and failures can be attributed to public transparency and accountability. In fact, the ability to keep secrets has aided democratic victories from the European and Pacific theatres in World War II to the global competition of the Cold War. At the same time, executive discretion over the capacity to classify information created the opportunity for abuse that contributed to Watergate, as well as domestic spying and repression in France, Norway and Canada over the last 40 years. Therefore, democracies face a secrecy dilemma. Secrecy is useful, but once a group or person has the ability to decide what information is concealed from an international competitor, citizens can no longer monitor that information. How then can the public be assured that national security policies are not promoting hidden corruption or incompetence? As Democracy Declassified shows, it is indeed possible for democracies to keep secrets while also maintaining national security oversight institutions that can deter abuse and reassure the public, including freedom of information laws, legislative committee powers, and press freedom. Understanding secrecy and oversight in democracies helps us explain not only why the Maginot Line rose and the French Republic fell, or how the US stumbled but eventually won the Cold War, but more generally how democracies can benefit from both public consent and necessary national security secrets. At a time when the issue of institutional accountability and transparency has reached fever pitch, Democracy Declassified provides a grounded and important view on the connection between the role of secrecy in democratic governance and foreign policy-making.

China's Security State describes the creation, evolution, and development of Chinese security and intelligence agencies as well as their role in influencing Chinese Communist Party politics throughout the party's history. Xuezhi Guo investigates patterns of leadership politics from the vantage point of security and intelligence organization and operation by providing new evidence and offering alternative interpretations of major events throughout Chinese Communist Party history. This analysis promotes a better understanding of the CCP's mechanisms for control over both Party members and the general population. This study specifies some of the broader implications for theory and research that can help clarify the nature of Chinese politics and potential future developments in the country's security and intelligence services.

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.

Since the end of the Cold War, the operations of secret police informers have come under the media spotlight and it is now common knowledge that vast internal networks of spies in the Soviet Union and East Germany were directed by the Communist Party. By contrast, very little historical information has been available on the covert operations of the security services in Mao Zedong's China. However, as Michael Schoenhals reveals in this intriguing and sometimes sinister account, public security was a top priority for the founders of the People's Republic and agents were recruited from all levels of society to ferret out 'counter-revolutionaries'. On the basis of hitherto classified archival records, the book tells the story of a vast surveillance and control apparatus through a detailed examination of the cultivation and recruitment of agents, their training and their operational activities across a twenty-year period from 1949 to 1967.

This book examines the circumstances surrounding SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Karl Wolff's escape from prosecution for war crimes in 1945. Wolff avoided prosecution because of his role in 'Operation Sunrise', negotiations conducted by high-ranking American, Swiss and British officials - in violation of the Casablanca agreements with the Soviet Union - for the surrender of German forces in Italy that enabled the Anglo-American forces to take Trieste. After 1945, Allied officials, amongst them Allen Dulles, in a move that later helped him ascend to the head of the CIA, shielded Wolff from prosecution to maintain secrecy about the negotiations. 'Operation Sunrise' thus relates to the early origins of the Cold War in Europe and had wide-ranging implications, even in the field of justice: new evidence suggests that the Western Allies not only failed to ensure cooperation between their respective national war crimes prosecution organizations, but in certain cases even obstructed justice by withholding evidence from the prosecution.

In Spies We Trust reveals the full story of the Anglo-American intelligence relationship - ranging from the deceits of World War I to the mendacities of 9/11 - for the first time. Why did we ever start trusting spies? It all started a hundred years ago. First we put our faith in them to help win wars, then we turned against the bloodshed and expense, and asked our spies instead to deliver peace and security. By the end of World War II, Britain and America were cooperating effectively to that end. At its peak in the 1940s and 1950s, the 'special intelligence relationship' contributed to national and international security in what was an Anglo-American century. But from the 1960s this 'special relationship' went into decline. Britain weakened, American attitudes changed, and the fall of the Soviet Union dissolved the fear that bound London and Washington together. A series of intelligence scandals along the way further eroded public confidence. Yet even in these years, the US offered its old intelligence partner a vital gift: congressional attempts to oversee the CIA in the 1970s encouraged subsequent moves towards more open government in Britain and beyond. So which way do we look now? And what are the alternatives to the British-American intelligence relationship that held sway in the West for so much of the twentieth century? Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones shows that there are a number - the most promising of which, astonishingly, remain largely unknown to the Anglophone world.

A hard-hitting history of the Soviet security police in totalitarian Latvia - with Latvians as both oppressors and oppressed. Through the stories of people held as prisoners, never told before in English, Up Against the Wall details the methods of a brutal totalitarian regime and the bloody twists and turns of Latvia's long and complicated relationship with the Soviet security police. This is not for the squeamish. At the KGB headquarters in Riga - the Corner House, or St?raM?ja - suspects were questioned and executed during the 'Year of Terror' in 1940-41. When the Soviets returned in 1944 vast numbers of Latvians fled and a war of resistance fought from the forests by partisans lasted nearly a decade. The years of Soviet rule ended only in 1991. The author presents harrowing personal testimonies of those imprisoned, tortured and deported to Siberian gulags by the KGB, drawing from museum archives and interviews translated into English for this book as well as from declassified CIA files, KGB records and his own research in Latvia. He interviews human rights activists, partisans, KGB experts and those who led Latvia to independence in the 1990s and explores the role of Latvian KGB double agents in defeating anti-Soviet partisan groups and the West's Cold War spying missions. Ironically it was the feared Latvian Riflemen who helped crush the Bolsheviks' political rivals after the 1917 Revolution and defeat the British-backed White generals in the vicious Civil War of 1918-22, while Latvia itself became independent. Their reward was top jobs in the Soviet regime, including in the Cheka security police, the forerunner to the NKVD and KGB. But Stalin turned on the Latvians in the 1930s and mercilessly purged the old guard. When the Baltics were carved up by Hitler and Stalin, the Red Army killed or deported anyone opposing Soviet power in a period known as the 'Year of Terror'. Fifty years of occupation followed WWII as through the Cold War and into the late 1980s Latvian society was in the grip of the KGB. For 27 years after the collapse of the Soviet regime Latvian politicians argued over whether to publish the secret files of KGB agents. The book's final chapter deals with the decision in December 2018 for the 'Cheka Bags' to be opened, making Latvia's last KGB secrets public.

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.

In the mid-1970s, the CIA and KGB watched Karel Koecher closely-they were both convinced he was working for the enemy. And they were both right. Traveling with his wife, Hana, Koecher posed as a Czechoslovak asylum seeker and arrived in the US as a Communist sleeper agent. After parlaying a doctorate from Columbia into a job at the CIA, Koecher proceeded to operate as a double agent at the height of the Cold War. Shunning a low profile, the Koechers embraced Manhattan's high life-with cocaine, swinging, and parties emblematic of the times and their penchant for risk. Hana, who was no more than a shy teenager when she arrived, grew into a sophisticated international diamond dealer who relayed messages to Karel's handlers. Riding a wave of euphoria, the Koechers felt unstoppable. But it was too good to last. Using newly declassified documents, interrogation tapes, and extraordinary firsthand accounts from the Koechers themselves, Cunningham reconstructs their double lives and the fading Cold War, where a strange moral fog made it hard to know what truth was being fought for, and to what end.

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.

In 'Manhunt', Peter Bergen delivers a taut yet panoramic account of the pursuit and killing of Osama bin Laden. Here are riveting new details of bin Laden's flight after the crushing defeat of the Taliban to Tora Bora, where American forces came startlingly close to capturing him, and of the fugitive leader's attempts to find a secure hiding place.

Little is known of the true origins of the French adventurer Victor-Antoine-Claude Robert, Count de Parades (1752-86). He arrived in Paris in 1778, just as the Franco-American alliance, which guaranteed French military support to the United States against Great Britain, was being signed. Parades was determined to join the French Army, but lacking the connections to do so, offered his services as a spy. He travelled repeatedly to England, visiting ports and fortifications to gather confidential information. First published in 1791, this work provides a detailed account of Parades' adventures and misfortune. Written while he was jailed in the Bastille, the book denounces the corruption of ministers who wrongly accused him of state treason after the failure of the 1779 Franco-Spanish 'Armada' against Plymouth. A fascinating historical document, it sheds light on the political relations between France and England during the American War of Independence.

Counter-Terrorism Networks in the European Union: Maintaining Democratic Legitimacy after 9/11 presents a model of democratic legitimacy for within international counter-terrorism co-operation. Exploring the current practices of European Union (EU) counter-terrorism policing, developed after 9/11, it highlights the current significant challenges to democratic legitimacy and seeks to present tools and solutions which ensure 'democratic' counter-terrorism actions and the protection of human rights. Counter-terrorism policing is now a global concern, with co-operation between security authorities of different countries a crucial feature in the fight to prevent terrorism and extremism. Yet, given the emphasis on pre-emption, this type of policing tends to interfere to a far greater extent with the rights of the individual than traditional policing. This book scrutinises the current focus of enhanced communication between counter-terrorist associates at member-state and EU levels within Europe, alongside analysis of just how far the traditional, protective mechanisms of accountability and oversight are managing to keep up with this development. It proposes that current forms of counter-terrorism policing within the EU should be understood as networks - sets of expert institutional nodes or individual agents, from at least two countries - that are interconnected in order to authorize and provide security with regard to counter-terrorism, using the European Police Office (Europol) as a key example.

China's Security State describes the creation, evolution, and development of Chinese security and intelligence agencies as well as their role in influencing Chinese Communist Party politics throughout the party's history. Xuezhi Guo investigates patterns of leadership politics from the vantage point of security and intelligence organization and operation by providing new evidence and offering alternative interpretations of major events throughout Chinese Communist Party history. This analysis promotes a better understanding of the CCP's mechanisms for control over both Party members and the general population. This study specifies some of the broader implications for theory and research that can help clarify the nature of Chinese politics and potential future developments in the country's security and intelligence services.

The Soviet-German War of 1941-1945 was the most extensive intelligence/counterintelligence war in modern history, involving the capture, torture, deportation, execution, and "doubling" of tens of thousands of agents--most of them Soviet citizens. While Russian armies fought furiously to defeat the Wehrmacht, Stalin's security services waged an equally ruthless secret war against Hitler's spies, as well as against the Soviet population. For the first time, Robert Stephan now combines declassified U.S. intelligence documents, captured German records, and Russian sources, including a top-secret Soviet history of its intelligence and security services, to reveal the magnitude and scope of the brutal but sophisticated Soviet counterintelligence war against Nazi Germany.

Employing as many as 150,000 trained agents across a 2,400-mile front, the Soviets neutralized the majority of the more than 40,000 German agents deployed against them. As Stephan shows, their combination of Soviet military deception operations and State Security's defeat of the Abwehr's human intelligence effort had devastating consequences for the German Army in every major battle against the Red army, including Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, the Belorussian offensive, and the Vistula-Oder operation.

Simultaneously, Soviet State Security continued to penetrate the world's major intelligence services including those of its allies, terrorize its own citizens to prevent spying, desertion, and real or perceived opposition to the regime, and run millions of informants, making the USSR a vast prison covering one sixth of the world's surface.

Stephan discusses all facets of the Soviet counterintelligence effort, including the major Soviet "radio games" used to mislead the Germans--operations Monastery, Berezino, and those that defeated Himmler's Operation Zeppelin. He also gives the most comprehensive account to date of the Abwehr's infamous agent "Max," whose organization allegedly ran an entire network of agents inside the USSR, and reveals the reasons for Germany's catastrophic under-estimation of Soviet forces by more than one million men during their 1944 summer offensive in Belorussia.

Richly detailed and epic in scope, "Stalin's Secret War" opens up a previously hidden dimension of World War II.

Based on previously classified documents and on interviews with former secret police officers and ordinary citizens, The Firm is the first comprehensive history of East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, at the grassroots level. Focusing on Gransee and Perleberg, two East German districts located north of Berlin, Gary Bruce reveals how the Stasi monitored small-town East Germany. He paints an eminently human portrait of those involved with this repressive arm of the government, featuring interviews with former officers that uncover a wide array of personalities, from devoted ideologues to reluctant opportunists, most of whom talked frankly about East Germany's obsession with surveillance. Their paths after the collapse of Communism are gripping stories of resurrection and despair, of renewal and demise, of remorse and continued adherence to the movement. The book also sheds much light on the role of the informant, the Stasi's most important tool in these out-of-the-way areas. Providing on-the-ground empirical evidence of how the Stasi operated on a day-to-day basis with ordinary people, this remarkable volume offers an unparalleled picture of life in a totalitarian state. "Brilliantly written and deeply researched, this is the best book in any language on East Germany's Stasi." -Robert Gellately, author of Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe "This is surely the most detailed micro-analysis of the East German security service.... In a rare step, Bruce actually interviews a number of former Stasi staff, weaving from his conversations telling portraits of 14 of them." -Foreign Affairs | "Brilliant, thoroughly researched, and highly readableenables readers to better understand how the Stasi operated in everyday life and how its inescapable presence affected citizens." -CHOICE "Bruce has done an admirable job of exploring the repressive nature of the East German state and the experience of normalcy in small towns where the watchers and watched lived side by side." -Oral History Review

After Dunkirk the British Army was broken, the country isolated and invasion imminent. German Military Intelligence was sat the task of recruiting collaborators from among Welsh nationalists to sabotage military and civilian installations ahead of the landing. Strategic deception was one of the few weapons left. To fool the Germans into believing Britain was ready and able to repel invaders when in fact it had only the weapons salvaged from Dunkirk, MI5 invented an imaginary cell of Welsh saboteurs led by a retired police inspector.

Shadow Warriorsis a fascinating look at the women of the UK and US secret service branches during the Second World War. These were women of enormous cunning and strength of will, and many of the Shadow Warriors' stories have remained untold until now. In a dramatically different tale of espionage and conspiracy in the Second World War, this book unveils the history of the courageous women who volunteered to work behind enemy lines in Nazi Occupied Europe. Sent by the United States' OSS and Britain's SOE into Occupied Europe, these brave women wove a web of resistance groups across the continent. So effective did the female agents become in their efforts that the Germans often placed a bounty of a million Francs on the heads of operatives disrupting their troops. Their extraordinary heroism, initiative and resourcefulness contributed to the Allied breakout of the Normandy beachheads and even infiltrated Nazi Germany at the height of the war, into the very heart of Hitler's citadel - Berlin. Young and daring, the female agents accepted that they could be captured, tortured or killed, even as others were always readied to take their place.

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.

In November 1998, Alexander Litvinenko, a former Lieutenant Colonel of the Russian security service or FSB, along with several former colleagues, publicly stated that their superiors had instigated an assassination attempt on a Russian tycoon and oligarch. Following his subsequent arrest and failed trials, Litvinenko fled to London where, having been granted asylum, he worked as a journalist and writer, as well as acting as a consultant for the British intelligence services. Eight years later, Litvinenko's past caught up with him when he was assassinated in London. It was on 1 November 2006 that Litvinenko was suddenly taken ill-so serious was his condition that he was hospitalised. He passed away twenty-two days later. Significant amounts of a rare and highly toxic element were subsequently found in his body. Before his death, Litvinenko had said: 'You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world, Mr Putin, will reverberate in your ears for the rest of your life.' In this examination of the events surrounding Litvinenko's murder, the author, Boris Volodarsky, who was consulted by the Metropolitan Police during the investigation and remains in close contact with Litvinenko's widow, details the events surrounding the assassination. He brings the story up to date, referring to the findings of the official British inquiry, on the release of which Prime Minister David Cameron condemned Putin for presiding over 'state sponsored murder'. The author proves that the Litvinenko's poisoning is just one of many. Some of these assassinations or attempted assassinations are already known; others are revealed by him for the first time.

How the West's greatest spy in Asia tried to stop the new American way of war—and the steep price he paid for failingJim Thompson landed in Thailand at the end of World War II, a former American society dilettante who became an Asian legend as a spy and silk magnate with access to Thai worlds outsiders never saw. As the Cold War reached Thailand, America had a choice: Should it, as Thompson believed, help other nations build democracies from their traditional cultures or, as his ex-OSS friend Willis Bird argued, remake the world through deception and self-serving alliances? In a story rich with insights and intrigue, this book explores a key Cold War episode that is still playing out today. Highlights a pivotal moment in Cold War history that set a course for American foreign policy that is still being followed today Explores the dynamics that put Thailand at the center of the Cold War and the fighting in neighboring Laos that escalated from sideshow to the largest covert operation America had ever engaged in Draws on personal recollections and includes atmospheric details that bring the people, events—and the Thailand of the time—to life Written by a journalist with extensive experience in Asian affairs who has spent years investigating every aspect of this story, including Thompson's tragic disappearance