![]() |
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
||
|
Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > Defence strategy, planning & research > Military intelligence
At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. government enlisted the aid of a select group of psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists to blueprint enemy behavior. Not only did these academics bring sophisticated concepts to what became a project of demonizing communist societies, but they influenced decision-making in the map rooms, prison camps, and battlefields of the Korean War and in Vietnam. With verve and insight, Ron Robin tells the intriguing story of the rise of behavioral scientists in government and how their potentially dangerous, "American" assumptions about human behavior would shape U.S. views of domestic disturbances and insurgencies in Third World countries for decades to come. Based at government-funded think tanks, the experts devised provocative solutions for key Cold War dilemmas, including psychological warfare projects, negotiation strategies during the Korean armistice, and morale studies in the Vietnam era. Robin examines factors that shaped the scientists' thinking and explores their psycho-cultural and rational choice explanations for enemy behavior. He reveals how the academics' intolerance for complexity ultimately reduced the nation's adversaries to borderline psychotics, ignored revolutionary social shifts in post-World War II Asia, and promoted the notion of a maniacal threat facing the United States. Putting the issue of scientific validity aside, Robin presents the first extensive analysis of the intellectual underpinnings of Cold War behavioral sciences in a book that will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in the era and its legacy.
Cracking the enemy's radio code is a task so urgent and so difficult that it demands the military's best minds and most sophisticated technology. But when the coded messages are in a language as complex as Japanese, decoding problems multiply dramatically. It took the U.S. Army a full two years after the attack on Pearl Harbor to break the codes of the Japanese Imperial Army. But by 1944 the U.S. was decoding more than 20,000 messages a month filled with information about enemy movements, strategy, fortifications, troop strengths, and supply convoys. In "MacArthur's ULTRA," historian Edward Drea recounts the story behind the Army's painstaking decryption operation and its dramatic breakthrough. He demonstrates how ULTRA (intelligence from decrypted Japanese radio communications) shaped MacArthur's operations in New Guinea and the Philippines and its effect on the outcome of World War II. From sources on both sides of the Pacific and national security agency declassified records, Drea has compiled a detailed listing of the ULTRA intelligence available to MacArthur. By correlating the existing intelligence with MacArthur's operational decisions, Drea shows how MacArthur usedand misusedintelligence information. He tells for the first time the story behind MacArthur's bold leap to Hollandia in 1944 and shows how ULTRA revealed the massive Japanese mobilization for what might have been (had it occurred) the bloodiest and most protracted engagement of the entire war the Allied invasion of Japan. Drea also clarifies the role of ULTRA in Truman's decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, and concludes that ULTRA shortened the war by six to ten months.
In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA and its partners had been engaging in warrantless mass surveillance, using the internet and cellphone data, and driven by fear of terrorism under the sign of security . In this compelling account, surveillance expert David Lyon guides the reader through Snowden s ongoing disclosures: the technological shifts involved, the steady rise of invisible monitoring of innocent citizens, the collusion of government agencies and for-profit companies and the implications for how we conceive of privacy in a democratic society infused by the lure of big data. Lyon discusses the distinct global reactions to Snowden and shows why some basic issues must be faced: how we frame surveillance, and the place of the human in a digital world. Surveillance after Snowden is crucial reading for anyone interested in politics, technology and society.
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.
In this pathbreaking book, Amy Zegart provides the first scholarly examination of the intelligence failures that preceded September 11. Until now, those failures have been attributed largely to individual mistakes. But Zegart shows how and why the intelligence system itself left us vulnerable. Zegart argues that after the Cold War ended, the CIA and FBI failed to adapt to the rise of terrorism. She makes the case by conducting painstaking analysis of more than three hundred intelligence reform recommendations and tracing the history of CIA and FBI counterterrorism efforts from 1991 to 2001, drawing extensively from declassified government documents and interviews with more than seventy high-ranking government officials. She finds that political leaders were well aware of the emerging terrorist danger and the urgent need for intelligence reform, but failed to achieve the changes they sought. The same forces that have stymied intelligence reform for decades are to blame: resistance inside U.S. intelligence agencies, the rational interests of politicians and career bureaucrats, and core aspects of our democracy such as the fragmented structure of the federal government. Ultimately failures of adaptation led to failures of performance. Zegart reveals how longstanding organizational weaknesses left unaddressed during the 1990s prevented the CIA and FBI from capitalizing on twenty-three opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot. "Spying Blind" is a sobering account of why two of America's most important intelligence agencies failed to adjust to new threats after the Cold War, and why they are unlikely to adapt in the future.
'Pulse-pounding' Sinclair McKay | 'Truly masterful' Damien Lewis | 'Who needs spy fiction, when fact can provide as thrilling a story as this?' Lindsey Hilsum The Spymaster of Baghdad is the gripping story of the top-secret Iraqi intelligence unit that infiltrated the Islamic State. More so than that of any foreign power, the information they gathered turned the tide against the insurgency, paving the way to the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019. Against the backdrop of the most brutal conflict of recent decades, we chart the spymaster's struggle to develop the unit from scratch in challenging circumstances after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, we follow the fraught relationship of two of his agents, the al-Sudani brothers - one undercover in ISIS for sixteen long months, the other his handler - and we track a disillusioned scientist as she turns bomb-maker, threatening the lives of thousands. With unprecedented access to characters on all sides, Pulitzer Prize-finalist Margaret Coker challenges the conventional view that Western coalition forces defeated ISIS and reveals a page-turning story of unlikely heroes, unbelievable courage and good old-fashioned spycraft. 'Moving, visceral, utterly revelatory. A stunning tour de force by an author who has lived every word of it on the ground' Damien Lewis, author of Zero Six Bravo 'This compelling account of how Iraqi agents infiltrated ISIS takes us deep beneath the lurid headlines and into a sharply focused world of courage, ingenuity, terror and love' Sinclair McKay, author of Dresden 'In Margaret Coker's deeply reported, unputdownable account, the previously unknown Iraqi heros of the war against the Islamic State turn out to be braver than Bond and as subtle as Smiley' Lindsey Hilsum, author of In Extremis 'We all owe a debt of gratitude to the Falcons Unit for their important role in the fight against the most lethal terrorist group of our time' Anne Speckhard, Director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism
Drawing on extensive interviews and archival research, this biography uncovers the motivations and ideals that informed Smiley's commitment to covert action and intelligence during the Second World War and early part of the Cold War, often among tribally based societies. With particular reference to operations in Albania, Oman and Yemen, it addresses the wider issues of accountability and control of clandestine operations.
Learning from history helps states to create foreign and security policy that builds upon successes and avoids past mistakes. Louise Kettle's insightful analysis - drawing on a wealth of previously unseen documents, sourced by Freedom of Information requests, together with interviews with government and intelligence agency officials - questions whether the British government actually learns from history. This is achieved through an extended commentary on military interventions in the Middle East since the 1950s, including a behind-the-scenes glimpse into Whitehall decision-making and a critical examination of the 2016 Iraq Inquiry report.
Strategy in the Missile Age first reviews the development of modern military strategy to World War II, giving the reader a reference point for the radical rethinking that follows, as Dr. Brodie considers the problems of the Strategic Air Command, of civil defense, of limited war, of counterforce or pre-emptive strategies, of city-busting, of missile bases in Europe, and so on. The book, unlike so many on modern military affairs, does not present a program or defend a policy, nor is it a brief for any one of the armed services. It is a balanced analysis of the requirements of strength for the 1960's, including especially the military posture necessary to prevent war. A unique feature is the discussion of the problem of the cost of preparedness in relation to the requirements of the national economy, so often neglected by other military thinkers. Originally published in 1959. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
In the winter of 1875, a young British officer set out across central Asia on a strictly unofficial mission to investigate the latest secret Russian moves in the Great Game. His goal was the mysterious caravan city of Khiva, his aim to discover whether this remote and dangerous oasis was about to be used as a springboard for an invasion of India. He rode for over a thousand miles across steppe and desert, struggling through blizzards and snowdrifts, to reach forbidden Khiva. Ordered home by an alarmed government, Burnaby immediately sat down and wrote this best-selling account of his adventures, which has become a Great Game classic.
In the savage winter of 1876 Captain Frederick Burnaby rode 1,000 miles eastwards from Constantinople to see for himself what the Russians were up to in this remote corner of the Great Game battelfield. With wars between Turkey and Russia imminent, he wanted to discover, among other things, whether the Sultan's armies were capable of resisting a determined Tsarist thrust towards Constantinople. With his servant Radford, he spend five months riding across some of the cruellest winter landscape in the world before hastening home to write this best-seller.
How was Bletchley Park made as an organization? How was signals intelligence constructed as a field? What was Bletchley Park's culture and how was its work co-ordinated? Bletchley Park was not just the home of geniuses such as Alan Turing, it was also the workplace of thousands of other people, mostly women, and their organization was a key component in the cracking of Enigma. Challenging many popular perceptions, this book examines the hitherto unexamined complexities of how 10,000 people were brought together in complete secrecy during World War II to work on ciphers. Unlike most organizational studies, this book decodes, rather than encodes, the processes of organization and examines the structures, cultures and the work itself of Bletchley Park using archive and oral history sources. Organization theorists, intelligence historians and general readers alike will find in this book a challenge to their preconceptions of both Bletchley Park and organizational analysis.
Who knew the CIA needed librarians? More Stories from Langley contains the stories of the lesser-known operations of one of the most mysterious government agencies in the United States. Edward Mickolus is back with more stories to answer the question, "What does a career in the CIA look like?" Advice and anecdotes from both current and former CIA officers provide a look at the side of intelligence operations that's often left out of the movies. What was it like working for the CIA during 9/11? Do only spies get to travel? More Stories has physicists getting recruited to "The Agency" during the Cold War, foreign-language majors getting lucky chances, and quests to "learn by living" that turn into sweaty-palmed calls to the U.S. embassy after being detained by Russian intelligence officers while attempting to board a plane. The world only needs so many suave, gun-slinging super spies. More Stories from Langley shows how important those in academia, retired soldiers, and even bilingual nannies can be in preserving the security of our nation.
State sponsorship of terrorism is a complex and important topic in today's international affairs - and especially pertinent in the regional politics of the Middle East and South Asia, where Pakistan has long been a flashpoint of Islamist politics and terrorism. In Islamism and Intelligence in South Asia, Prem Mahadevan demonstrates how over several decades, radical Islamists, sometimes with the tacit support of parts of the military establishment, have weakened democratic governance in Pakistan and acquired progressively larger influence over policy-making. Mahadevan traces this history back to the anti-colonial Deobandi movement, which was born out of the post-partition political atmosphere and a rediscovery of the thinking of Ibn Taymiyyah, and partially ennobled the idea of `jihad' in South Asia as a righteous war against foreign oppression. Using Pakistani media and academic sources for the bulk of its raw data, and reinforcing this with scholarly analysis from Western commentators, the book tracks Pakistan's trajectory towards a `soft' Islamic revolution. Envisioned by the country's intelligence community as a solution to chronic governance failures, these narratives called for a re-orientation away from South Asia and towards the Middle East. In the process, Pakistan has become a sanctuary for Arab jihadist groups, such as Al-Qaeda, who had no previous ethnic or linguistic connection with South Asia. Most alarmingly, official discourse on terrorism has been partly silenced by the military-intelligence complex. The result is a slow drift towards extremism and possible legitimation of internationally proscribed terrorist organizations in Pakistan's electoral politics.
This is a true account of secret operations carried out by the British Army's most clandestine unit- the Force Research Unit. Through the author's own experiences, the story of an essential instrument in the fight against terrorism, that of covert intelligence gathering, is told.
In a bold and penetrating study, Gregory Treverton, former Vice Chair of the National Intelligence Council and Senate investigator, offers his insider's views on how intelligence gathering and analysis must change. Treverton suggests why intelligence needs to be contrarian and attentive to the longer term. Believing that it is important to tap expertise outside government to solve intelligence problems, he argues that involving colleagues in the academy, think tanks, and Wall Street befits the changed role of government from doer to convener, mediator, and coalition-builder. Hb ISBN (2001): 0-521-58096-X
The world of intelligence has been completely transformed by the end of the Cold War and the onset of an age of information. Prior to the 1990s, US government intelligence had one principal target, the Soviet Union; a narrow set of 'customers', the political and military officials of the US government; and a limited set of information from the sources they owned, spy satellites and spies. Today, world intelligence has many targets, numerous consumers - not all of whom are American or in the government - and too much information, most of which is not owned by the U.S. government and is of widely varying reliability. In this bold and penetrating study, Gregory Treverton, former Vice Chair of the National Intelligence Council and Senate investigator, offers his insider's views on how intelligence gathering and analysis must change. He suggests why intelligence needs to be both contrarian, leaning against the conventional wisdom, and attentive to the longer term, leaning against the growing shorter time horizons of Washington policy makers. He urges that the solving of intelligence puzzles tap expertise outside government - in the academy, think tanks, and Wall Street - to make these parties colleagues and co-consumers of intelligence, befitting the changed role of government from doer to convener, mediator, and coalition-builder.
The inside story of one of the most famous of all the 'back rooms' of the Second World War - and of the men and women who worked for it. Conceived by Winston Churchill to circumvent the delays, frustrations and inefficiencies of the service ministries, Department M.D.1. earned from its detractors the soubriquet 'Winston Churchill's Toyshop', yet from a tiny underground workshop housed in the cellars of the London offices of Radio Normandie in Portland Place, and subsequently from the 'stockbroker Tudor' of a millionaire's country mansion in Buckinghamshire, came an astonishing array of secret weapons ranging from the 'sticky bomb' and 'limpet mine' to giant bridge-carrying assault tanks, as well as the PIAT, a tank-destroying, hand-held mortar. Written by Colonel Stuart Macrae, who helped found M.D.1. and was its second-in-command throughout its life, the story is told of this relatively unknown establishment and the weapons it developed which helped destroy innumerable enemy tanks, aircraft and ships.
The intelligence community's flawed assessment of Iraq's weapons systems -- and the Bush administration's decision to go to war in part based on those assessments -- illustrates the political and policy challenges of combating the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In this comprehensive assessment, defense policy specialists Jason Ellis and Geoffrey Kiefer find disturbing trends in both the collection and analysis of intelligence and in its use in the development and implementation of security policy. Analyzing a broad range of recent case studies -- Pakistan's development of nuclear weapons, North Korea's defiance of U.N. watchdogs, Russia's transfer of nuclear and missile technology to Iran and China's to Pakistan, the Soviet biological warfare program, weapons inspections in Iraq, and others -- the authors find that intelligence collection and analysis relating to WMD proliferation are becoming more difficult, that policy toward rogue states and regional allies requires difficult tradeoffs, and that using military action to fight nuclear proliferation presents intractable operational challenges. Ellis and Kiefer reveal that decisions to use -- or overlook -- intelligence are often made for starkly political reasons. They document the Bush administration's policy shift from nonproliferation, which emphasizes diplomatic tools such as sanctions and demarches, to counterproliferation, which at times employs interventionist and preemptive actions. They conclude with cogent recommendations for intelligence services and policy makers.
All democracies have had to contend with the challenge of tolerating hidden spy services within otherwise relatively transparent governments. Democracies pride themselves on privacy and liberty, but intelligence organizations have secret budgets, gather information surreptitiously around the world, and plan covert action against foreign regimes. Sometimes, they have even targeted the very citizens they were established to protect, as with the COINTELPRO operations in the 1960s and 1970s, carried out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) against civil rights and antiwar activists. In this sense, democracy and intelligence have always been a poor match. Yet Americans live in an uncertain and threatening world filled with nuclear warheads, chemical and biological weapons, and terrorists intent on destruction. Without an intelligence apparatus scanning the globe to alert the United States to these threats, the planet would be an even more perilous place. In Spy Watching, Loch K. Johnson explores the United States' travails in its efforts to maintain effective accountability over its spy services. Johnson explores the work of the famous Church Committee, a Senate panel that investigated America's espionage organizations in 1975 and established new protocol for supervising the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the nation's other sixteen secret services. Johnson explores why partisanship has crept into once-neutral intelligence operations, the effect of the 9/11 attacks on the expansion of spying, and the controversies related to CIA rendition and torture programs. He also discusses both the Edward Snowden case and the ongoing investigations into the Russian hack of the 2016 US election. Above all, Spy Watching seeks to find a sensible balance between the twin imperatives in a democracy of liberty and security. Johnson draws on scores of interviews with Directors of Central Intelligence and others in America's secret agencies, making this a uniquely authoritative account.
While much has been disclosed about the CIA's cloak-and-dagger activities during the Cold War, relatively little is known about the origins of this secret organization. David Rudgers, a twenty-two-year CIA veteran, has written the first complete account of its creation, revealing how the idea of a centralized intelligence developed within the government and debunking the myth that former OSS chief William J. Donovan was the prime mover behind the agency's founding. "Creating the Secret State" locates the CIA's origins in government-wide efforts to reorganize national security during the transition from World War II to the Cold War. Rudgers maintains that the creation of the CIA was not merely the brainchild of "Wild Bill" Donovan. Rather, it was the culmination of years of negotiation among numerous policy makers such as James Forrestal and Dean Acheson, each with strong opinions regarding the agency's mission and methods. He shows that Congress, the Departments of State and Justice, the Joint Chiefs, and even the Budget Bureau all had a hand in the establishment of this "secret state" that operates nearly invisibly outside the American political process. Based almost entirely on archival and other primary sources, Rudgers's book describes in detail how the CIA evolved from its original purpose-as a watchdog to guard against a "nuclear Pearl Harbor"-to the role of clandestine warriors countering Soviet subversion, eventually engaging in more forms of intelligence gathering and covert operations than any of its counterparts. It suggests how the agency became a different organization than it might have been without the Communist threat and also shows how it both overexaggerated the dangers of the Cold War and failed to predict its ending. Rudgers has written an accurate and balanced account that brings America's undercover army in from the cold and out from under the cult of personality. An indispensable resource for future studies of the CIA, Creating the Secret State tells the inside story of why and how the agency was called into existence as it stimulates thinking about the future relevance of the CIA in a rapidly changing world.
Discover the brand new instalment in Lizzie Lane's bestselling Tobacco Girls series! War is fleeting, but true love last forever...May 1944 Hope and excitement is in the air when news breaks of the allied forces landing in Normandy. D Day has arrived. However, the day-to-day struggles for the Tobacco Girls continue. Carole Thomas wants her old life back. She is burdened with the guilt of being a young single mother and considers having baby Paula adopted, but Maisie Miles will do anything to stop her. Phyllis Mason having found the love of her life is getting married in Malta to Mick Fairbrother, but will the dangerous legacies of war plague her happy day? Bridget O'Neill finds herself posted to one of the hospitals receiving the injured from the D-Day landing beaches. Her most fervent hope is that her husband, Lyndon, does not become one of them. Peace is on the horizon, but will their wishes and dreams win through and bring them a happy ever after? Praise for Lizzie Lane: 'A gripping saga and a storyline that will keep you hooked' Rosie Goodwin 'The Tobacco Girls is another heartwarming tale of love and friendship and a must-read for all saga fans.' Jean Fullerton 'Lizzie Lane opens the door to a past of factory girls, redolent with life-affirming friendship, drama, and choices that are as relevant today as they were then.' Catrin Collier 'If you want an exciting, authentic historical saga then look no further than Lizzie Lane.' Fenella J Miller
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. |
You may like...
The Central Intelligence Agency…
Athan G. Theoharis, Richard H. Immerman, …
Hardcover
R2,680
Discovery Miles 26 800
Political Decision-Making and Security…
Luisa Dall'acqua, Irene M. Gironacci
Hardcover
R5,286
Discovery Miles 52 860
|