Security intelligence continues to be of central importance to the contemporary world: individuals, organizations and states all seek timely and actionable intelligence in order to increase their sense of security. But what exactly is intelligence? Who seeks to develop it and to what ends? How can we ensure that intelligence is not abused? In this third edition of their classic text, Peter Gill and Mark Phythian set out a comprehensive framework for the study of intelligence, discussing how states organize the collection and analysis of information in order to produce intelligence, how it is acted upon, why it may fail and how the process should be governed in order to uphold democratic rights. Fully revised and updated throughout, the book covers recent developments, including the impact of the Snowden leaks on the role of intelligence agencies in Internet and social media surveillance and in defensive and offensive cyber operations, and the legal and political arrangements for democratic control. The role of intelligence as part of 'hybrid' warfare in the case of Russia and Ukraine is also explored, and the problems facing intelligence in the realm of counterterrorism is considered in the context of the recent wave of attacks in Western Europe. Intelligence in an Insecure World is an authoritative and accessible guide to a rapidly expanding area of inquiry - one that everyone has an interest in understanding.

'The best book on codebreaking I have read', SIR DERMOT TURING 'Brings back the joy I felt when I first read about these things as a kid', PHIL ZIMMERMANN 'This is at last the single book on codebreaking that you must have. If you are not yet addicted to cryptography, this book will get you addicted. Read, enjoy, and test yourself on history's great still-unbroken messages!' JARED DIAMOND is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel; Collapse; and other international bestsellers 'This is THE book about codebreaking. Very concise, very inclusive and easy to read', ED SCHEIDT 'Riveting', MIKE GODWIN 'Approachable and compelling', GLEN MIRANKER This practical guide to breaking codes and solving cryptograms by two world experts, Elonka Dunin and Klaus Schmeh, describes the most common encryption techniques along with methods to detect and break them. It fills a gap left by outdated or very basic-level books. This guide also covers many unsolved messages. The Zodiac Killer sent four encrypted messages to the police. One was solved; the other three were not. Beatrix Potter's diary and the Voynich Manuscript were both encrypted - to date, only one of the two has been deciphered. The breaking of the so-called Zimmerman Telegram during the First World War changed the course of history. Several encrypted wartime military messages remain unsolved to this day. Tens of thousands of other encrypted messages, ranging from simple notes created by children to encrypted postcards and diaries in people's attics, are known to exist. Breaking these cryptograms fascinates people all over the world, and often gives people insight into the lives of their ancestors. Geocachers, computer gamers and puzzle fans also require codebreaking skills. This is a book both for the growing number of enthusiasts obsessed with real-world mysteries, and also fans of more challenging puzzle books. Many people are obsessed with trying to solve famous crypto mysteries, including members of the Kryptos community (led by Elonka Dunin) trying to solve a decades-old cryptogram on a sculpture at the centre of CIA Headquarters; readers of the novels of Dan Brown as well as Elonka Dunin's The Mammoth Book of Secret Code Puzzles (UK)/The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms (US); historians who regularly encounter encrypted documents; perplexed family members who discover an encrypted postcard or diary in an ancestor's effects; law-enforcement agents who are confronted by encrypted messages, which also happens more often than might be supposed; members of the American Cryptogram Association (ACA); geocachers (many caches involve a crypto puzzle); puzzle fans; and computer gamers (many games feature encryption puzzles). The book's focus is very much on breaking pencil-and-paper, or manual, encryption methods. Its focus is also largely on historical encryption. Although manual encryption has lost much of its importance due to computer technology, many people are still interested in deciphering messages of this kind.

The success of the Allied codebreakers at Bletchley Park was one of the iconic intelligence achievements of World War II, immortalised in films such as The Imitation Game and Enigma. But cracking Enigma was only half of the story. Across the Channel, German intelligence agencies were hard at work breaking British and Allied codes. Now updated in paperback, The Third Reich is Listening is a gripping blend of modern history and science, and describes the successes and failures of Germany's codebreaking and signals intelligence operations from 1935 to 1945. The first mainstream book to take an in-depth look at German cryptanalysis in World War II, it tells how the Third Reich broke the ciphers of Allied and neutral countries, including Great Britain, France, Russia and Switzerland. This book offers a dramatic new perspective on one of the biggest stories of World War II, using declassified archive material and colourful personal accounts from the Germans at the heart of the story, including a former astronomer who worked out the British order of battle in 1940, a U-Boat commander on the front line of the Battle of the Atlantic, and the German cryptanalyst who broke into and read crucial codes of the British Royal Navy.

Aged nineteen, Alison McKelvie was a self-confessed romantic, immersed in books and poetry, and dreaming of beauty, truth and love. In 1940, whilst working as a secretary at MI6, Alison met Alexander Wilson. Thirty years her senior, Alexander was worldly and charismatic. An intense affair quickly led to marriage and two children. But the Wilsons' lives then spiralled into the depths of poverty. Alexander was sacked, imprisoned twice, and then declared bankrupt. His lack of reliability was a hefty emotional burden for Alison to bear. Nevertheless, she loved her husband unreservedly and stuck by him through thick and thin. In 1963, Alexander died suddenly of a heart attack. Alison's world imploded when she discovered that their life together had been built upon layer after layer of deception. Who was Alexander Wilson? How well had Alison really known him? Slowly the lies were unravelled: Alexander had been a novelist, spy and, devastatingly, a bigamist. Alison was the third of four wives, her children two of seven. The inspiration for critically-acclaimed drama Mrs Wilson, Before & After is the powerful and poignant memoir of Alison Wilson. 'Before' peels back the complex layers of a marriage steeped in lies, and the shattering heartbreak which followed. 'After' tells of an intensely-felt redemption through religion. Before & After is, first and foremost, a love story, but it is also an account of one extraordinarily strong woman's deep, unwavering faith.

Alongside the open conflict of World War II there were other, hidden wars - the wars of communication, in which success depended on a flow of concealed and closely-guarded information. Smuggled written messages, secretly transmitted wireless signals, or months of eavesdropping on radio traffic meant operatives could discover in advance what the enemy intended to do. This information was passed on to those who commanded the armies, the fleets and the bomber formations, as well as to the other secret agents throughout the world who were desperately trying to infiltrate enemy lines. Vital information that turned the tide of battle in North African desert and on the Pacific Ocean proved to have been obtained by the time-consuming and unglamorous work of cryptanalysts who deciphered the enemy's coded messages, and coded those for the Allies. From the stuffy huts of Bletchley Park to the battles in the Mediterranean, the French and Dutch Resistance movements and the unkempt radio operatives in Burma, the rarely-seen, outstanding stories collected here reveal the true extent of the 'secret war'. The ongoing need for secrecy for decades after the war meant that the outstanding achievements of wartime cryptanalysts could not be properly recognised. With vivid first-hand accounts and illuminating historical research, VOICES OF THE CODEBREAKERS reveals and finally celebrates the extraordinary accomplishments of these ordinary men and women.

Sometime in the late fall/early winter of 1962, a document began circulating among members of the Communist Party USA based in the Chicago area, titled "Whither the Party of Lenin." It was signed "The Ad Hoc Committee for Scientific Socialist Line." This was not the work of factionally inclined CP comrades, but rather something springing from the counter-intelligence imagination of the FBI. A Threat of the First Magnitude tells the story of the FBI's fake Maoist organization and the informants they used to penetrate the highest levels of the Communist Party USA, the Black Panther Party, the Revolutionary Union and other groups labelled threats to the internal security of the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. As once again the FBI is thrust into the spotlight of US politics, A Threat of a First Magnitude offers a view of the historic inner-workings of the Bureau's counterintelligence operations - from generating "fake news" and the utilization of "sensitive intelligence methods" to the handling of "reliable sources" - that matches or exceeds the sophistication of any contenders.

The role of intelligence in US government operations has changed dramatically and is now more critical than ever to domestic security and foreign policy. This authoritative and highly researched book written by Jeffrey T. Richelson provides a detailed overview of America's vast intelligence empire, from its organizations and operations to its management structure. Drawing from a multitude of sources, including hundreds of official documents, The US Intelligence Community allows students to understand the full scope of intelligence organizations and activities, and gives valuable support to policymakers and military operations. The seventh edition has been fully revised to include a new chapter on the major issues confronting the intelligence community, including secrecy and leaks, domestic spying, and congressional oversight, as well as revamped chapters on signals intelligence and cyber collection, geospatial intelligence, and open sources. The inclusion of more maps, tables and photos, as well as electronic briefing books on the book's Web site, makes The US Intelligence Community an even more valuable and engaging resource for students.

This volume discusses the challenges the future holds for different aspects of the intelligence process and for organisations working in the field. The main focus of Western intelligence services is no longer on the intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union and its allies. Instead, at present, there is a plethora of threats and problems that deserve attention. Some of these problems are short-term and potentially acute, such as terrorism. Others, such as the exhaustion of natural resources, are longer-term and by nature often more difficult to foresee in their implications. This book analyses the different activities that make up the intelligence process, or the 'intelligence cycle', with a focus on changes brought about by external developments in the international arena, such as technology and security threats. Drawing together a range of key thinkers in the field, The Future of Intelligence examines possible scenarios for future developments, including estimations about their plausibility, and the possible consequences for the functioning of intelligence and security services. This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, strategic studies, foreign policy, security studies and IR in general.

This book critically analyses the concept of the intelligence cycle, highlighting the nature and extent of its limitations and proposing alternative ways of conceptualising the intelligence process. The concept of the intelligence cycle has been central to the study of intelligence. As Intelligence Studies has established itself as a distinctive branch of Political Science, it has generated its own foundational literature, within which the intelligence cycle has constituted a vital thread - one running through all social-science approaches to the study of intelligence and constituting a staple of professional training courses. However, there is a growing acceptance that the concept neither accurately reflects the intelligence process nor accommodates important elements of it, such as covert action, counter-intelligence and oversight. Bringing together key authors in the field, the book considers these questions across a number of contexts: in relation to intelligence as a general concept, military intelligence, corporate/private sector intelligence and policing and criminal intelligence. A number of the contributions also go beyond discussion of the limitations of the cycle concept to propose alternative conceptualisations of the intelligence process. What emerges is a plurality of approaches that seek to advance the debate and, as a consequence, Intelligence Studies itself. This book will be of great interest to students of intelligence studies, strategic studies, criminology and policing, security studies and IR in general, as well as to practitioners in the field.

The conflict in Iraq is characterized by three faces of war: interstate conflict, civil war, and insurgency. The Coalition’s invasion of Iraq in March 2003 began as an interstate war. No sooner had Saddam Hussein been successfully deposed, however, than U.S.-led forces faced a lethal insurgency. After Sunni al Qaeda in Iraq bombed the Shia al-Askari Shrine in 2006, the burgeoning conflict took on the additional element of civil war with sectarian violence between the Sunni and the Shia. The most effective strategies in a war as complicated as the three-level conflict in Iraq are intertwined and complementary, according to the editors of this volume. For example, the “surge” in U.S. troops in 2007 went beyond an increase in manpower; the mission had changed, giving priority to public security. This new direction also simultaneously addressed the insurgency as well as the civil war by forging new, trusting relationships between Americans and Iraqis and between Sunni and Shia. This book has broad implications for future decisions about war and peace in the twenty-first century.

This book discusses the application of hypothesis testing to the practice of intelligence analysis. By drawing on longstanding procedures of scientific method, particularly hypothesis testing, this book strongly critiques standard intelligence analytic practices. It shows these practices to be inadequate, as they are illogical in terms of what formal philosophy says any intelligence analysts can realistically be expected to know, and for the future when analysts will face pressures to adapt to digital age modeling techniques. The methodology focuses on identifying and remedying analytic errors caused by analyst cognitive biases and by foreign denial and deception. To demonstrate that it is a practical tool, it walks analysts through a case study, step by step, to show how its hypothesis testing can be implemented. It also invites a comparative test in the real world with any other intelligence methodologies to assess its strengths and weaknesses in predicting the outcome of an actual "live" intelligence issue. This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, public policy and national security, as well as practitioners.

The World War II codebreaking station at Bletchley is well-known and its activities documented in detail. Its decryption capabilities were vital to the war effort, significantly aiding Allied victory. But where did the messages being deciphered come from in the first place? This is the extraordinary untold story of the Y-Service, a secret even more closely guarded than Bletchley Park. The Y-Service was the code for the chain of wireless intercept stations around Britain and all over the world. A few hundreds of wireless operators, many of them who were civilians, listened to German, Italian and Japanese radio networks and meticulously logged everything they heard. Some messages were then used tactically but most were sent on to Station X - Bletchley Park - where they were deciphered, translated and consolidated to build a comprehensive overview of the enemy's movements and intentions. Peter Hore delves into the fascinating history of the Y-service, with particular reference to the girls of the Women's Royal Naval Service: Wrens who escaped from Singapore to Colombo as the war raged, only to be torpedoed in the Atlantic on their way back to Britain; the woman who had a devastatingly true premonition that disaster would strike on her way to Gibraltar; the Australian who went from being captain of the English Women's Cricket team to a WWII Wren to the head of Abbotleigh girls school in Sydney; how the Y-service helped to hunt the German battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic, and how it helped to torpedo a Japanese cruiser in the Indian Ocean. Together, these incredible stories build a picture of World War II as it has never been viewed before.

In this biography of Edward Lansdale (1908-1987), the man said to be the model for Greene's The Quiet American, Max Boot demonstrates how Lansdale pioneered a 'hearts and minds' diplomacy, first in the Philippines, then in Vietnam. It was a visionary policy that, as Boot reveals, was ultimately crushed by America's giant military bureaucracy, steered by elitist generals who favoured napalm bombs over winning the trust of the people.

Through dozens of interviews and access to never-before-seen documents, Boot recasts this cautionary American story, tracing the bold rise and the crashing fall of Lansdale from the battle of Dien Bien Phu to the humiliating American evaculation in 1975. Boot rescues Lansdale from historical ignominy and suggests that Vietnam could have been different had we only listened.

With reverberations that continue to resonate, this is a biography of profound historical consequence.

'The most comprehensive narrative of intelligence compiled ... unrivalled' Max Hastings, Sunday Times 'Captivating, insightful and masterly' Edward Lucas, The Times The history of espionage is far older than any of today's intelligence agencies, yet the long history of intelligence operations has been largely forgotten. The first mention of espionage in world literature is in the Book of Exodus.'God sent out spies into the land of Canaan'. From there, Christopher Andrew traces the shift in the ancient world from divination to what we would recognize as attempts to gather real intelligence in the conduct of military operations, and considers how far ahead of the West - at that time - China and India were. He charts the development of intelligence and security operations and capacity through, amongst others, Renaissance Venice, Elizabethan England, Revolutionary America, Napoleonic France, right up to sophisticated modern activities of which he is the world's best-informed interpreter. What difference have security and intelligence operations made to course of history? Why have they so often forgotten by later practitioners? This fascinating book provides the answers.

It is, of course, no secret that undercover Special Forces and intelligence agencies operated in Northern Ireland and the Republic throughout the 'troubles', from 1969 to 2001 and beyond. What is less well known is how these units were recruited, how they operated, what their mandate was and what they actually did. This is the first account to reveal much of this hitherto unpublished information, providing a truly unique record of surveillance, reconnaissance, intelligence gathering, collusion and undercover combat. An astonishing number of agencies were active to combat the IRA murder squads ('the Provos'), among others the Military Reaction Force (MRF) and the Special Reconnaissance Unit, also known as the 14 Field Security and Intelligence Company ('The Det'), as well as MI5, Special Branch, the RUC, the UDR and the Force Research Unit (FRU), later the Joint Support Group (JSG)). It deals with still contentious and challenging issues as shoot-to-kill, murder squads, the Disappeared, and collusion with loyalists. It examines the findings of the Stevens, Cassel and De Silva reports and looks at operations Loughgall, Andersonstown, Gibraltar and others.

Cyberspace is one of the major bases of the economic development of industrialized societies and developing. The dependence of modern society in this technological area is also one of its vulnerabilities. Cyberspace allows new power policy and strategy, broadens the scope of the actors of the conflict by offering to both state and non-state new weapons, new ways of offensive and defensive operations. This book deals with the concept of "information war", covering its development over the last two decades and seeks to answer the following questions: is the control of the information space really possible remains or she a utopia? What power would confer such control, what are the benefits?

In 1974, the British government admitted that its WWII secret intelligence organization had read Germany's ciphers on a massive scale. The intelligence from these decrypts influenced the Atlantic, the Eastern Front and Normandy. Why did the Germans never realize the Allies had so thoroughly penetrated their communications? As German intelligence experts conducted numerous internal investigations that all certified their ciphers' security, the Allies continued to break more ciphers and plugged their own communication leaks. How were the Allies able to so thoroughly exploit Germany's secret messages? How did they keep their tremendous success a secret? What flaws in Germany's organization allowed this counterintelligence failure and how can today's organizations learn to avoid similar disasters? This book, the first comparative study of WWII SIGINT (Signals Intelligence), analyzes the characteristics that allowed the Allies SIGINT success and that fostered the German blindness to Enigma's compromise.

Most books about espionage in the American Revolutionary War tend to focus solely on General George Washington, but as noted historian Donald E. Markle explores in this fascinating account, there was an entire system of intelligence communication autonomous from his direction. General Washington and General Charles Cornwallis were engaged in a constant battle to outmaneuver each other, and Cornwallis seemed to always be one step behind Washington and his intelligence departments. As the war progressed, the Americans and British slowly learned one another's tactics, allowing the hunt between the fox (Washington) and the hound (Cornwallis). THE FOX AND THE HOUND walks readers through the early stages of the war, when gathering and distributing intelligence was a challenge without a centralized government to organize a network. Markle tells us how and why Washington created multiple intelligence-gathering departments within the colonies, which included most of the East Coast from Georgia to New Hampshire and even parts of Canada--all operating under a command structure unique to their surrounding geography. This book explores the many depths of the intelligence networks from civilian men and women who dedicated their lives to the American cause, to the introduction of code ciphers and the first spy equipment such as David Bushnell's turtle submarine and Benjamin Franklin's jet boat. Without the dedication of Washington and his innovative loyal supporters, it's quite possible that the outcome of the war may have been different. Military and American history enthusiasts will find this a valuable resource for their collections.

Tony Brooks was unique. He was barely out of school when recruited in 1941 by the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the wartime secret service established by Churchill to 'set Europe ablaze'. After extensive training he was parachuted into France in July 1942 - being among the first (and youngest) British agents sent to support the nascent French Resistance. Brook's success was primarily due to his exceptional qualities as a secret agent, although he was aided by large and frequent slices of luck. Among much else, he survived brushes with a British traitor and a notorious double agent; the Gestapo's capture of his wireless operator and subsequent attempts to trap Brooks; brief incarceration in a Spanish concentration camp; injuries resulting from a parachute jump into France; and even capture and interrogation by the Gestapo - although his cover story held and he was released. In an age when we so often take our heroes from the worlds of sport, film, television, music, fashion, or just 'celebrity', it is perhaps salutary to be reminded of a young man who ended the war in command of a disparate force of some 10,000 armed resistance fighters, and decorated with two of this country's highest awards for gallantry, the DSO and MC. At the time, he was just twenty-three years old. This remarkable, detailed and intimate account of a clandestine agent's dangerous wartime career combines the historian's expert eye with the narrative colour of remembered events. As a study in courage, it has few, if any, equals.

Many Americans know something about the Navajo code talkers in World War II - but little else about the military service of Native Americans, who have served in our armed forces since the American Revolution, and still serve in larger numbers than any other ethnic group. But, as we learn in this splendid work of historical restitution, code talking originated in World War I among Native soldiers whose extraordinary service resulted, at long last, in U.S. citizenship for all Native Americans. The first full account of these forgotten soldiers in our nation's military history, The First Code Talkers covers all known Native American code talkers of World War I - members of the Choctaw, Oklahoma Cherokee, Comanche, Osage, and Sioux nations, as well as the Eastern Band of Cherokee and Ho-Chunk, whose veterans have yet to receive congressional recognition. William C. Meadows, the foremost expert on the subject, describes how Native languages, which were essentially unknown outside tribal contexts and thus could be as effective as formal encrypted codes, came to be used for wartime communication. While more than thirty tribal groups were eventually involved in World Wars I and II, this volume focuses on Native Americans in the American Expeditionary Forces during the First World War. Drawing on nearly thirty years of research - in U.S. military and Native American archives, surviving accounts from code talkers and their commanding officers, family records, newspaper accounts, and fieldwork in descendant communities - the author explores the origins, use, and legacy of the code talkers. In the process, he highlights such noted decorated veterans as Otis Leader, Joseph Oklahombi, and Calvin Atchavit and scrutinizes numerous misconceptions and popular myths about code talking and the secrecy surrounding the practice. With appendixes that include a timeline of pertinent events, biographies of known code talkers, and related World War I data, this book is the first comprehensive work ever published on Native American code talkers in the Great War and their critical place in American military history.

As a British Intelligence Officer during World War II, Hugh Trevor-Roper was expressly forbidden from keeping a diary due to the sensitive and confidential nature of his work. However, he confided a record of his thoughts in a series of slender notebooks inscribed OHMS (On His Majesty's Service). The Wartime Journals reveal the voice and experiences of Trevor-Roper, a war-time 'backroom boy' who spent most of the war engaged in highly-confidential intelligence work in England - including breaking the cipher code of the German secret service, the Abwehr. He became an expert in German resistance plots and after the war interrogated many of Hitler's immediate circle, investigated Hitler's death in the Berlin bunker and personally retrieved Hitler's will from its secret hiding place. The posthumous discovery of Trevor-Roper's secret journals - unknown even to his family and closest confidants - is an exciting archival find and provides an unusual and privileged view of the Allied war effort against Nazi Germany. At the same time they offer an engaging - sometimes mischievous - and reflective study of both the human comedy and personal tragedy of wartime.

This book on intelligence analysis written by intelligence expert Dr. Stephen Marrin argues that scholarship can play a valuable role in improving intelligence analysis. Improving intelligence analysis requires bridging the gap between scholarship and practice. Compared to the more established academic disciplines of political science and international relations, intelligence studies scholarship is generally quite relevant to practice. Yet a substantial gap exists nonetheless. Even though there are many intelligence analysts, very few of them are aware of the various writings on intelligence analysis which could help them improve their own processes and products. If the gap between scholarship and practice were to be bridged, practitioners would be able to access and exploit the literature in order to acquire new ways to think about, frame, conceptualize, and improve the analytic process and the resulting product. This volume contributes to the broader discussion regarding mechanisms and methods for improving intelligence analysis processes and products. It synthesizes these articles into a coherent whole, linking them together through common themes, and emphasizes the broader vision of intelligence analysis in the introduction and conclusion chapters. The book will be of great interest to students of intelligence studies, strategic studies, US national security, US foreign policy, security studies and political science in general,as well as professional intelligence analysts and managers.

On 27 May 1942, SS General Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated by British-trained Czech agents who had parachuted into Czechoslovakia. He died of his wounds on 4 June 1942. Two days later, Gestapo Captain Horst Kopkow's department at Reich National Security HQ was given fresh directions. From 6 June 1942 until the end of the war, Kopkow was responsible for coordinating the fight against Soviet and British parachute agents dropped anywhere in Germany or German-occupied territories. This new direction for Kopkow made his name. Within months the "Rote Kapelle" Soviet espionage ring was uncovered in Belgium, who could be traced directly to Berlin and Paris. A new counter-espionage fight had begun, and any agents caught would pay with their lives. In France and Holland the Gestapo caught many Special Operations Executive agents trained in Britain. By spring 1944 almost 150 British agents had been caught and deported to German concentration camps, and almost all had been murdered without trial by the December. Kopkow was directly involved in these murders. Arrested by British forces after the war, Kopkow was extensively interrogated due to his counter-espionage experience. For the next 20 years, Kopkow was a consultant for Britain's Secret Intelligence Service.

An analysis of the insider information and insights that over eighty Soviet intelligence officer defectors revealed during the first half of the Soviet period Identifies 88 Soviet intelligence officer defectors for the period 1917 to 1954, representing a variety of specializations; the most comprehensive list of Soviet intelligence officer defectors compiled to date. Shows the evolution of Soviet threat perceptions and the development of the "main enemy" concept in the Soviet national security system. Shows fluctuations in the Soviet recruitment and vetting of personnel for sensitive national security positions, corresponding with fluctuations in the stability of the Soviet government. Compiles for the first time corroborative primary sources in English, Russian, French, German, Finnish, Japanese, Latvian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. When intelligence officers defect, they take with them privileged information and often communicate it to the receiving state. This book identifies a group of those defectors from the Soviet elite - intelligence officers - and provides an aggregate analysis of their information to uncover Stalin's strategic priorities and concerns, thus to open a window into Stalin's impenetrable national security decision making. This book uses their information to define Soviet threat perceptions and national security anxieties during Stalin's time as Soviet leader.