Three-quarters of Americans believe that a group of unelected government and military officials secretly manipulate or direct policy in the United States, and President Trump blames the "deep state" for his impeachment. David Rohde explores the "deep state" and asks whether it really exists. To conservatives, the "deep state" is a government bureaucracy that encroaches on the rights of Americans. Liberals fear a cabal of generals and defence contractors who they believe push the country into wars. Modern American presidents have engaged in power struggles with Congress, the CIA and the FBI. CIA and FBI directors suspect White House aides and members of Congress of leaking secrets. Citizens increasingly distrust the politicians, unelected officials and journalists who they believe set the country's political agenda. Now, in this time of heightened uncertainty, American democracy faces its biggest crisis of legitimacy in a half century. In Deep examines the CIA and FBI scandals of the past fifty years. It then investigates the claims and counterclaims of the Trump era. While Donald Trump says he is the victim of the "deep state", Democrats accuse the president and his allies of running a de facto "deep state" of their own. Now more urgently than ever, the debate over the "deep state" raises questions about the future of American democracy.

There has been a shift in the way that we understand the forces behind imperialism. In this book, Andrew Thomson re-evaluates the history of US imperialism, from the Cold War to today, by looking at the influence of paramilitary actors. Thomson reveals how these agents are central to US imperialism - from the Guatemalan coup to the Bay of Pigs, from Syrian rebel factions to the Soviet-Afghan War, bringing these narratives together to reveal the evolution of paramilitary insurgencies across the globe. Militias, mercenaries, and private companies (PMCs) have formed a central part of the strategies designed to influence political and economic conditions abroad, oriented towards the US's Empire. Drawing on declassified documents including US training manuals, CIA communiques and the National Security Archive, Outsourced Empire reveals new evidence that helps us understand these institutions and their collective role in maintaining global order.

Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy is the most thorough and detailed life of Marlowe since John Bakeless's in 1942. It has new material on Marlowe in relation to Canterbury, also on his home life, schooling, and six and a half years at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and includes fresh data on his reading, teachers, and early achievements, including a new letter with a new date for the famous 'putative portrait' of Marlowe at Cambridge. The biography uses for the first time the Latin writings of his friend Thomas Watson to illuminate Marlowe's life in London and his career as a spy (that is, as a courier and agent for the Elizabethan Privy Council). There are new accounts of him on the continent, particularly at Flushing or Vlissingen, where he was arrested. The book also more fully explains Marlowe's relations with his chief patron, Thomas Walsingham, than ever before. This is also the first biography to explore in detail Marlowe's relations with fellow playwrights such as Kyd and Shakespeare, and to show how Marlowe's relations with Shakespeare evolved from 1590 to 1593. With closer views of him in relation to the Elizabethan stage than have appeared in any biography, the book examines in detail his aims, mind, and techniques as exhibited in all of his plays, from Dido, the Tamburlaine dramas, and Doctor Faustus through to The Jew of Malta and Edward II. It offers new treatments of his evolving versions of 'The Passionate Shepherd', and displays circumstances, influences, and the bearings of Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis' in relation to Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander'. Throughout, there is a strong emphasis on Marlowe's friendships and so-called 'homosexuality'. Fresh information is brought to bear on his seductive use of blasphemy, his street fights, his methods of preparing himself for writing, and his atheism and religious interests. The book also explores his attraction to scientists and mathematicians such as Thomas Harriot and others in the Ralegh-Northumberland set of thinkers and experimenters. Finally, there is new data on spies and business agents such as Robert Poley, Nicholas Skeres, and Ingram Frizer, and a more exact account of the circumstances that led up to Marlowe's murder.

Andrew W. Neal argues that while 'security' was once an anti-political 'exception' in liberal democracies - a black box of secret intelligence and military decision-making at the dark heart of the state - it has now become normalised in professional political life. This represents a direct challenge to critical security studies debates and their core assumption that security is a kind of illiberal and undemocratic 'anti-politics'. Using archival research and interviews with politicians, Neal investigates security politics from the 1980s to the present day to show how its meaning and practice have changed over time. In doing so, he develops an original reassessment of the security/politics relationship.

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.

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.

Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy is the most thorough and detailed life of Marlowe since John Bakeless's in 1942. It has new material on Marlowe in relation to Canterbury, also on his home life, schooling, and six and a half years at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and includes fresh data on his reading, teachers, and early achievements, including a new letter with a new date for the famous 'putative portrait' of Marlowe at Cambridge. The biography uses for the first time the Latin writings of his friend Thomas Watson to illuminate Marlowe's life in London and his career as a spy (that is, as a courier and agent for the Elizabethan Privy Council). There are new accounts of him on the continent, particularly at Flushing or Vlissingen, where he was arrested. The book also more fully explains Marlowe's relations with his chief patron, Thomas Walsingham, than ever before. This is also the first biography to explore in detail Marlowe's relations with fellow playwrights such as Kyd and Shakespeare, and to show how Marlowe's relations with Shakespeare evolved from 1590 to 1593. With closer views of him in relation to the Elizabethan stage than have appeared in any biography, the book examines in detail his aims, mind, and techniques as exhibited in all of his plays, from Dido, the Tamburlaine dramas, and Doctor Faustus through to The Jew of Malta and Edward II. It offers new treatments of his evolving versions of 'The Passionate Shepherd', and displays circumstances, influences, and the bearings of Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis' in relation to Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander' Throughout, there is a strong emphasis on Marlowe's friendships and so-called 'homosexuality'. Fresh information is brought to bear on his seductive use of blasphemy, his street fights, his methods of preparing himself for writing, and his atheism and religious interests. The book also explores his attraction to scientists and mathematicians such as Thomas Harriot and others in the Ralegh-Northumberland set of thinkers and experimenters. Finally, there is new data on spies and business agents such as Robert Poley, Nicholas Skeres, and Ingram Frizer, and a more exact account of the circumstances that led up to Marlowe's murder.

'Lively...in giving us the daily details of their lives in the women's own voices Dunlop does them and us a fine service' New Statesman'Dunlop is engaging in her personal approach. Her obvious feminine empathy with the venerable ladies she spoke to gives her book an immediacy and intimacy.' Daily Mail'An in-depth picture of life in Britain's wartime intelligence centre...The result is fascinating, and is made all the more touching by the developing friendships between Dunlop and her interviewees.' Financial TimesThe Bletchley Girls weaves together the lives of fifteen women who were all selected to work in Britain's most secret organisation - Bletchley Park. It is their story, told in their voices; Tessa met and talked to 15 veterans, often visiting them several times. Firm friendships were made as their epic journey unfolded on paper.The scale of female involvement in Britain during the Second World War wasn't matched in any other country. From 8 million working women just over 7000 were hand-picked to work at Bletchley Park and its outstations. There had always been girls at the Park but soon they outnumbered the men three to one.A refugee from Belgium, a Scottish debutante, a Jewish 14-year-old, and a factory worker from Northamptonshire - the Bletchley Girls confound stereotypes. But they all have one common bond, the war and their highly confidential part in it. In the middle of the night, hunched over meaningless pieces of paper, tending mind-blowing machines, sitting listening for hours on end, theirs was invariably confusing, monotonous and meticulous work, about which they could not breathe a word.By meeting and talking to these fascinating female secret-keepers who are still alive today, Tessa Dunlop captures their extraordinary journeys into an adult world of war, secrecy, love and loss. Through the voices of the women themselves, this is a portrait of life at Bletchley Park beyond the celebrated code-breakers, it's the story of the girls behind Britain's ability to consistently out-smart the enemy, and an insight into the women they have become.

For more than half a century, Big Safari-modified aircraft have performed dangerous and essential missions to collect intelligence, conduct surveillance and reconnaissance, and engage in special operations missions around the globe in the interest of national security. These state-of-the-art aircraft have been flown, operated, and maintained by men and women whose dedication and commitment have made the world a safer place. In The History of Big Safari, author Colonel Bill Grimes, a retired US Air Force officer, presents a history of this program, which has been in existence for more than sixty years. Born as a special acquisition program in 1952, Big Safari has been in a unique position to save lives by rapidly fielding essential systems with a quick-reaction capability to ensure decision makers on the battlefield and at the Pentagon have timely intelligence to plan and execute operations. Grimes shows how, without a special acquisition program such as Big Safari, the nation's ability to react to evolving dangers and threats would be mired in bureaucracy when timely responses are critical. With detailed cutaway illustrations revealing aircraft modifications and mission equipment, The History of Big Safari also includes photographs, sidebars, and anecdotes. It goes behind the scenes with the men and women who participated in the challenging projects and daring missions. It shares the development of cutting-edge technology and special mission aircraft, as well as the global events that necessitated these once-classified programs. Finally, it provides insight into long-veiled projects, operations, and missions that comprise the world under the purview of Big Safari.

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.

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.

In the 21st century, more than any other time, US agencies have relied on contractors to conduct core intelligence functions. This book charts the swell of intelligence outsourcing in the context of American political culture and considers what this means for the relationship between the state, its national security apparatus and accountability within a liberal democracy. Through analysis of a series of case studies, recently declassified documents and exclusive interviews with national security experts in the public and private sectors, the book provides an in-depth and illuminating appraisal of the evolving accountability regime for intelligence contractors.

The Vatican's silence in the face of Nazi atrocities remains one of the great controversies of our time. History has accused wartime pontiff Pius the Twelfth of complicity in the Holocaust and dubbed him Hitler's Pope." But a key part of the story has remained untold.Pope Pius in fact ran the world's largest church, smallest state, and oldest spy service. Saintly but secretive, he sent birthday cards to Hitler,while secretly plotting to kill him. He skimmed from church charities to pay covert couriers, and surreptitiously tape-recorded his meetings with top Nazis. Under his leadership the Vatican spy ring actively plotted against the Third Reich.Told with heart-pounding suspense and drawing on secret transcripts and unsealed files, Church of Spies throws open the Vatican's doors to reveal some of the most astonishing events in the history of the papacy. Riebling reveals here how the world's greatest moral institution met the greatest moral crisis in history.

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 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.

Based on hundreds of interviews with CIA officials, national security experts, and legislators, as well as a thorough culling of the archival record, America's Secret Power offers an illuminating and up-to-date picture of the CIA, stressing the difficult balance between the genuine needs of national security and the protection of individual liberties. Loch Johnson, who has studied the workings of the CIA at first hand as a legislative overseer, presents a comprehensive examination of the Agency and its relations with other American institutions, including Congress and the White House, and looks closely at how it pursues its three major missions--intelligence analysis, counterintelligence, and covert action.
At once fascinating and sobering, Johnson's book reveals how the best intelligence reports can be distorted or ignored; how covert actions can spin out of control despite extensive safeguards, as in the Iran-Contra scandal; and how the CIA has spied on American citizens in clear violation of its charter. Further, he provides a thorough review of legislative efforts to curb these abuses, and suggests several important ways to achieve the delicate balance between national security and democratic ideals.

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.

The world first heard of Klaus Fuchs, the head of theoretical physics at the British Research Establishment at Harwell in February 1950 when he appeared at the Old Bailey, accused of passing secrets to the Soviet Union. For over sixty years disinformation and lies surrounded the story of Klaus Fuchs as the Governments of Britain, the United States and Russia all tried to cover up the truth about his treachery. Piecing together the story from archives in Britain, the United States, Russia and Germany, The Spy Who Changed the World unravels the truth about Fuchs and reveals for the first time his long career of espionage. It proves that he played a pivotal role in Britain's bomb programme in the race to keep up with the United States in the atomic age, and that he revealed vital secrets about the atom bomb, as well as the immensely destructive hydrogen bomb to the Soviet Government. It is a dramatic tale of clandestine meetings, deadly secrets, family entanglements and illicit love affairs, all set against the tumultuous years from the rise of Hitler to the start of the Cold War.

From Ukraine to Afghanistan and beyond, occupations and exit dilemmas permeate contemporary geopolitics. However, the existing literature on territorial conflict rarely scrutinizes a pivotal, related question: what makes a state withdraw from an occupied territory, or entrench itself within it? In Understanding Territorial Withdrawal, Rob Geist Pinfold addresses this research gap. He focuses primarily on Israel, a unique but important milieu that offers pertinent lessons for other states facing similar policy problems. As Pinfold demonstrates, occupiers choose to either perpetuate or abandon an occupation because of three factors: their relations with the occupied, interactions with third parties, and the occupier's domestic politics. He argues that each withdrawal is the culmination of a gradual process of policy re-assessment. Critically, it is a combination of local violence and international pressure that causes popular and elite opinion within the occupier to endorse an exit, rather than perpetuate the status quo. To affirm this pattern, Pinfold constructs a generalizable framework for understanding territorial withdrawal. He then applies this framework to multiple case studies, which include: Israel's withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula between 1974-1982; its "unilateral" withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000; and its "unilateral disengagement" from the Gaza Strip in 2005, as well as Israel's non-withdrawals from the West Bank and Golan Heights. Overall, Understanding Territorial Withdrawal delineates commonalities that manifested in each exit yet were absent in the cases of occupation without exit. A powerful analysis of a central concern for the study of international security, territorial conflict, and the Arab-Israel conflict alike, this book provides a critical intervention that identifies why occupiers either retain, or leave, occupied territory.

This book profiles 12 militant leaders responsible for violence in Indian-administered Kashmir to identify effective deradicalization and counterterrorist interventions for global impact. Building off decades of research in cultural psychiatry, political psychology, social psychology, and South Asian Studies, multilingual cultural psychiatrist and psychological researcher Neil Krishan Aggarwal develops a method for analyzing militant leaders by examining their personality traits, motivations, skills and abilities, and significant life events to ask what propels them into violence. He presents person-centered psychological case studies based on primary sources in Arabic, Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu to illustrate how leaders frame violence in their own words to recruit others. By comparing and contrasting individual, group, and organizational factors of violence, this book proposes evidence-based deradicalization and counterterrorism interventions, bringing the study of political violence in Indian-administered Kashmir into conversation with research trends in Europe and North America. By developing a method for analyzing militant leadership through state-of-the-art scholarship, the book's insights can inform the development of case studies for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners across geographic regions and disciplines.