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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > International relations > Espionage & secret services
The Hidden Hand is a succinct accessible and up-to-date survey of the Central Intelligence Agency s history from its inception in 1947 to the present. * Covers both aspects of the CIA s mission the collection and analysis of intelligence and the execution of foreign policy through covert, paramilitary operations * De-mythologizes the CIA s role in America s global affairs while addressing its place within American political and popular culture * Written by an esteemed scholar and high-ranking officer in the intelligence community, drawing on the latest research * Assesses the agency s successes and failures, with an eye to the complex and controversial nature of the subject
Terrorist acts, most notably 9/11 and the Bali bombings, transformed attitudes to the secretive world of intelligence, surveillance and security. In this book a prominent group of writers including Michael Mori, Ben Saul, Anne Aly and Peter Leahy lay bare the facts about spying and security in post-9/11 Australia. Their compelling book cuts through panic and fear-mongering to ask hard questions: Is ASIO unaccountable? Is the money spent on security worth it? Is cyber-terrorism an urgent threat? Are Australia's spies up to the job? Is WikiLeaks good for human rights? Are Australians trading their privacy for a false sense of security? Spooked untangles the half-truths, conspiracy theories and controversies about the 'war on terror', and is a welcome antidote to misinformation and alarm.
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.
In The Greatest Spy Stories Ever Told, our editor has pulled together some of the finest writings about spies that capture readers imaginations. The one thing the heroes in this collection have in common is the ability to seamlessly shift identities. Each of the men and women in these stories had the courage to meet and study their enemies, gather critical intelligence, and then relay those secrets at risk of being exposed-to do what they had to because that was their duty and the lives of others meant more to them than their own. Chosen from hundreds of accounts of singular devotion to duty, the stories in Greatest Spy Stories stand out for their jaw-dropping tales of bravery. They are the best. No small feat.
With an experienced CIA officer as your teacher, you'll gain the knowledge and necessary tools to protect yourself and the ones you love. No matter where we go, we leave tracks and clues of our existence without even knowing. Our electronic footprint becomes our invisible trail. In this day in age where the world seems to be at our fingertips and social media plays a huge role in our daily lives, it's hard not to leave part of our digital selves for others to find. Whether you're fascinated by the idea of disappearing, want to erase your digital footprint, or simply concerned about your safety and privacy, knowing how to become invisible is a survival skill that will come in handy. Through the easy-to-follow instructions, tips, tricks, and professional anecdotes in How to Disappear and Live off the Grid: A CIA Insider's Guide, you'll learn to vanish without a trace from John Kiriakou, a former CIA counterterrorism officer and senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee responsible for the capture of Abu Zubaydah.
The global history of oil politics, from World War I to the present, can teach us much about world politics, climate change, and international order in the twenty-first century. When and why does international order change? The largest peaceful transfer of wealth across borders in all of human history began with the oil crisis of 1973. OPEC countries turned the tables on the most powerful businesses on the planet, quadrupling the price of oil and shifting the global distribution of profits. It represented a huge shift in international order. Yet, the textbook explanation for how world politics works-that the most powerful country sets up and sustains the rules of international order after winning a major war-doesn't fit these events, or plenty of others. Instead of thinking of "the" international order as a single thing, Jeff Colgan explains how it operates in parts, and often changes in peacetime. Partial Hegemony offers lessons for leaders and analysts seeking to design new international governing arrangements to manage an array of pressing concerns ranging from US-China rivalry to climate change, and from nuclear proliferation to peacekeeping. A major contribution to international relations theory, this book promises to reshape our understanding of the forces driving change in world politics.
In Challenges in Intelligence Analysis, Timothy Walton offers concrete, reality-based ways to improve intelligence analysis. After a brief introduction to the main concepts of analysis, he provides more than forty historical and contemporary examples that demonstrate what has, and what has not, been effective when grappling with difficult problems. The examples cover a wide span of time, going back 3,000 years. They are also global in scope and deal with a variety of political, military, economic, and social issues. Walton emphasizes the importance of critical and creative thinking and how such thinking can be enhanced. His 2010 book provides a detailed and balanced idea of intelligence work and will be of particular interest to students who are contemplating a career in intelligence analysis.
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.
The United States' national security depends on a secure, reliable and resilient cyberspace. The inclusion of digital systems into every aspect of US national security has been underway since World War II and has increased with the proliferation of Internet enabled devices. There is an increasing need to develop a robust deterrence framework within which the US and its allies can dissuade would be adversaries from engaging in various cyber activities. Yet despite a desire to deter adversaries, the problems associated with dissuasion remain complex, multifaceted, poorly understood and imprecisely specified. Challenges including, credibility, attribution, escalation and conflict management to name but a few remain ever present and challenge the US in its efforts to foster security in cyberspace. These challenges need to be addressed in a deliberate and multidisciplinary approach that combines political and technical realities to provide a robust set of policy options to decision makers. The Cyber Deterrence Problem brings together a multi-disciplinary team of scholars from multiple institutions with expertise in computer science, deterrence theory, cognitive psychology, intelligence studies, and conflict management to analyze and develop a robust assessment of the necessary requirements and attributes for achieving deterrence in cyberspace. Beyond simply addressing the base challenges associated with deterrence many of the chapters also propose strategies and tactics to enhance deterrence in cyberspace and emphasize conceptualizing how the US deters adversaries.
An urgent new warning from two bestselling security experts - and a gripping inside look at how governments, firms, and ordinary citizens can confront and contain the tyrants, hackers, and criminals bent on turning the digital realm into a war zone.
At 18 years of age, Theodore Hall was the youngest physicist on the Manhattan Project, hired as a junior at Harvard and put to work at Los Alamos in 1944. Assigned the job of testing and refining the complex implosion system for the plutonium bomb, Hall was described as “amazingly brilliant” by his superiors on the project, many of whom were Nobel Prize winners. But what Hall’s colleagues didn’t know was that the teenaged Hall was also the youngest spy taken on by the Soviet Union in search of secrets to the atomic bomb. Spy With No Country tells the gripping story of a brilliant scientist whose information about the plutonium bomb, including detailed drawings and measurements, proved to be integral to the Soviet’s development of nuclear capabilities. In the dying days of World War II, defeat of the Third Reich became a matter of when, not if. Tensions between wartime allies America and the Soviet Union began to rise, and things only got hotter when the United States refused to share information on its nuclear program. This groundbreaking book paints a nuanced picture of a young man acting on what he thought was best for the world. Neither a Communist nor a Soviet sympathizer, Hall worked to ensure that America did not monopolize the science behind the atomic bomb, which he felt may have apocalyptic consequences. Instead, by providing the Soviets with the secrets of the bomb, and thereby initiating “mutual assured destruction,” Hall may have actually saved the world as we know it. But his contributions to the Soviets certainly did not go unnoticed. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover opened an investigation into Hall, which was escalated when it was discovered that Hall’s brother Edward was a rising star of the Air Force, leading the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Featuring in-depth research from recently declassified FBI documents, first-hand journals, and personal interviews, investigative journalist Dave Lindorff uncovers the story of the atomic spy who gave secrets away, and got away with it, too.
"The history of Civil War espionage is usually mentioned only in passing in general accounts of the war. Lying under a cloud of romanticism, its details have had to be ferreted out in specialized sources. For his complete account of the subject, Markle draws upon just about all the available material and summarizes it with judgment, balance, clarity, and occasional wit. Among the subtopics are technology (photography for mapmaking and Confederate use of a forerunner of microfilm), the value of women spies (less subject to suspicion, they could move with greater freedom than male spies), and the roles of blacks as spies. A good case could be made that this volume is the single most valuable contribution to general Civil War literature so far this year. "--Booklist
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.
A history of the elaborate and brilliantly sustained World War II
intelligence operation by which Hitler s generals were tricked into
giving away vital Nazi secrets
Aisin Gioro Xianyu (1907-1948) was the fourteenth daughter of a Manchu prince and a legendary figure in China's bloody struggle with Japan. After the fall of the Manchu dynasty in 1912, Xianyu's father gave his daughter to a Japanese friend who was sympathetic to his efforts to reclaim power. This man raised Xianyu, now known as Kawashima Yoshiko, to restore the Manchus to their former glory. Her fearsome dedication to this cause ultimately got her killed. Yoshiko had a fiery personality and loved the limelight. She shocked Japanese society by dressing in men's clothes and rose to prominence as Commander Jin, touted in Japan's media as a new Joan of Arc. Boasting a short, handsome haircut and a genuine military uniform, Commander Jin was credited with many daring exploits, among them riding horseback as leader of her own army during the Japanese occupation of China. While trying to promote the Manchus, Yoshiko supported the puppet Manchu state established by the Japanese in 1932-one reason she was executed for treason after Japan's 1945 defeat. The truth of Yoshiko's life is still a source of contention between China and Japan: some believe she was exploited by powerful men, others claim she relished her role as political provocateur. China holds her responsible for unspeakable crimes, while Japan has forgiven her transgressions. This biography presents the richest and most accurate portrait to date of the controversial princess spy, recognizing her truly novel role in conflicts that transformed East Asia.
Find the truth; risk everything. A gripping WWII spy novel full of intrigue and peril from a modern master.1942: A German spy comes ashore on a desolate stretch of Lincolnshire beach. But he is hunted down by a young detective, Richard Prince. The secret services have need of a man like him... In occupied Europe, Denmark is a hotbed of problems for British intelligence. Rumours of a war-ending weapon being developed by the Germans are rife. Sent to Copenhagen, Prince is soon caught in a deadly game of cat and mouse. Dodging Gestapo agents, SS muscle and the danger of betrayal, his survival - and the war effort - hangs in the balance. Gripping and intense, Prince of Spies is the first in a new espionage series that will delight fans of Alan Furst, Philip Kerr and John le Carre.
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.
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.
Why were white bourgeois gay male writers so interested in spies, espionage, and treason in the twentieth century? Erin G. Carlston believes such figures and themes were critical to exploring citizenship and its limits, requirements, and possibilities in the modern Western state. Through close readings of Marcel Proust's novels, W. H. Auden's poetry, and Tony Kushner's play "Angels in America," which all reference real-life espionaage cases involving Jews, homosexuals, or Communists, Carlston connects gay men's fascination with spying to larger debates about the making and contestation of social identity. Carlston argues that in the modern West, a distinctive position has been assigned to those perceived to be marginal to the nation because of non-visible religious, political, or sexual differences. Because these "invisible Others" existed somewhere between the wholly alien and the fully normative, they evoked acute anxieties about the security and cohesion of the nation-state. Incorporating readings of nonliterary cultural artifacts, such as trial transcripts, into her analysis, Carlston pinpoints moments in which national self-conceptions in France, England, and the United States grew unstable. Concentrating specifically on the Dreyfus affair in France, the defections of Communist spies in the U.K., and the Rosenberg case in the United States, Carlston directly links twentieth-century tensions around citizenship to the social and political concerns of three generations of influential writers.
Brings to light the long history of spies posing as journalists in Washington. Covert intelligence gathering, propaganda, fake news stories, dirty tricks--these tools of spy craft have been used for seven decades by agents hiding in plain sight in Washington's National Press Building. This revealing book tells the story of espionage conducted by both US and foreign intelligence operatives just blocks from the White House. Journalist Steven T. Usdin details how spies for Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, and the CIA have operated from the offices, corridors, and bars of this well-known press center to collect military, political, and commercial secrets. As the author's extensive research shows, efforts to influence American elections by foreign governments are nothing new, and WikiLeaks is not the first antisecrecy group to dump huge quantities of classified data into the public domain. Among other cases, the book documents the work of a journalist who created a secret intelligence organization that reported directly to President Franklin Roosevelt and two generations of Soviet spies who operated undercover as TASS reporters and ran circles around the FBI. The author also reveals the important roles played by journalists in the Cuban missile crisis, and presents information about a spy involved in the Watergate break-in who had earlier spied on Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater for then-President Lyndon Johnson. Based on interviews with retired CIA, NSA, FBI, and KGB officers, as well as declassified and leaked intelligence documents, this fascinating historical narrative shows how the worlds of journalism and intelligence sometimes overlap and highlights the ethical quandaries that espionage invariably creates.
Terrorism kills far fewer Americans annually than automobile accidents, firearms, or even lightning strikes. Given this minimal risk, why does the U.S. continue expending lives and treasure to fight the global war on terror? In Monsters to Destroy, Navin A. Bapat argues that the war on terror provides the U.S. a cover for its efforts to expand and preserve American control over global energy markets. To gain dominance over these markets, the U.S. offered protection to states critical in the extraction, sale, and transportation of energy from their "terrorist" internal and external enemies. However, since the U.S. was willing to protect these states in perpetuity, the leaders of these regimes had no incentive to disarm their terrorists. This inaction allowed terrorists to transition into more powerful and virulent insurgencies, leading the protected states to chart their own courses and ultimately break with U.S. foreign policy objectives. Bapat provides a sweeping look at show how the loss of influence over these states has accelerated the decline of U.S. economic and military power, locking it into a permanent war for its own economic security.
"We cannot discount the risk, in light of the lessons of our own history, that at some point in the future, high-level government officials will decide that this massive database of extraordinarily sensitive private information is there for the plucking. Americans must never make the mistake of wholly 'trusting' our public officials."--The NSA Report This is the official report that is helping shape the international debate about the unprecedented surveillance activities of the National Security Agency. Commissioned by President Obama following disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden, and written by a preeminent group of intelligence and legal experts, the report examines the extent of NSA programs and calls for dozens of urgent and practical reforms. The result is a blueprint showing how the government can reaffirm its commitment to privacy and civil liberties--without compromising national security. |
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