Intelligence History

Daniel Levin was at his office when he got a call from an acquaintance with an urgent, cryptic request to meet in Paris. A young man had gone missing in Syria. No government, embassy, or intelligence agency would help. Could he? Would he? So begins a suspenseful, shocking, and at times brutal true story of one man’s search to find a missing person in Syria over twenty tense days.

The South’s James Bulloch, charming and devious, was to acquire a cutting-edge clandestine fleet intended to break President Lincoln’s blockade of Confederate ports, sink Northern merchant vessels, and drown the U.S. Navy’s mightiest ships at sea. The profits from gunrunning and smuggling cotton—Dixie’s notorious “white gold”—would finance the scheme. Opposing him was Thomas Dudley, a resolute Quaker lawyer and abolitionist. He was determined to stop Bulloch by any means necessary in a spy-versus-spy game of move and countermove, gambit and sacrifice, intrigue and betrayal.

Things in life tend to fall apart. Cars break down. Buildings fall into disrepair. Yet today's researchers are exploiting newly understood properties of matter to program materials that physically sense, adapt, and fall together instead of apart. These materials open new directions for industrial innovation and challenge us to rethink the way we build and collaborate with our environment. Things Fall Together is a provocative guide to this emerging, often mind-bending reality, presenting a bold vision for harnessing the intelligence embedded in the material world.

One of the few journalists to penetrate the new counter terror initiative, Matthew Brzezinski offers an insider’s look at the new technology, laws, tactics, and persistent vulnerabilities of the post-9/11 era. The result is this startling, sometimes controversial look at what it will take to achieve genuine homeland security and what it may be like to live inside Fortress America.

Ever since 9/11 America has fought an endless war on terror, seeking enemies everywhere and never promising peace. In Pay Any Price, James Risen reveals an extraordinary litany of the hidden costs of that war: from squandered and stolen dollars, to outrageous abuses of power, to wars on normalcy, decency, and truth. In the name of fighting terrorism, our government has done things every bit as shameful as its historic wartime abuses - and until this audiobook, it has worked very hard to cover them up.

What's wrong with preferring domestic assistants with feminine personalities? We like our assistants to conform to gender stereotypes - so what? For one thing, Strengers and Kennedy remind us, the design of gendered devices reinscribes outdated and unfounded stereotypes. Strengers and Kennedy offer a Smart Wife "manifesta", proposing a rebooted Smart Wife that would promote a revaluing of femininity in society in all her glorious diversity.

Sir Maurice Oldfield was one of the most important British spies of the Cold War era. A farmer's son from a provincial grammar school, Sir Maurice was the first Chief of MI6 who didn't come to the role via the traditional route. Oldfield was the voice of British Intelligence in Washington at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and was largely responsible for keeping the UK out of the Vietnam War. Working his way to the top, he took on the job of rebuilding confidence in the British Secret Service in the wake of the Cambridge spies scandal.

AIs are everywhere, and they're changing everything. AI Explained: Facts, Fiction, and Future from best-selling author Nigel Poulton is your fast-track easy-to-understand guide to the exciting new world of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Edward Ashford Lee explores the ways that engineers use models and abstraction to build inventive artificial worlds and to give us things that we never dreamed of - for example, the ability to carry in our pockets everything humans have ever published. But he also attempts to counter the runaway enthusiasm of some technology boosters who claim everything in the physical world is a computation - that even such complex phenomena as human cognition are software operating on digital data.

In the early months of 1970, Lt. Thomas Medici, NILO Ha Tien, enters Cambodia on US Naval Intelligence missions and negotiates a secret weapons agreement with the Cambodian Navy, then thwarts the destruction of of the Port of Sihanoukville - for which he is tried at a Naval Board of Inquiry.

From the cunning, calculating, government-trained warriors to the psychopathic, homegrown freelancers, you can find them all in Assassinations: The Plots, Politics, and Powers Behind History-Changing Murders. Exposed are the hidden agendas as well as the open warfare. The cynical preparations and devastating aftermaths are laid bare. You will quickly find yourself immersed in a world that is filled with killings made to seem like suicides, murders that were designed to look like heart attacks or overdoses, and accidents that, in reality, were carefully orchestrated deaths.

Students and enthusiasts of American history are familiar with the Revolutionary War spies Nathan Hale and Benedict Arnold, but few studies have closely examined the wider intelligence efforts that enabled the colonies to gain their independence. Spies, Patriots, and Traitors provides readers with a fascinating, well-documented, and highly readable account of American intelligence activities during the era of the Revolutionary War, from 1765 to 1783.

From the end of the Second World War to the present day, the world has changed immeasurably. The art of spying has changed too, as spies have reacted to changing threats. Here you will find the fascinating stories of real-life spies, both famous and obscure, from either side of the Iron Curtain, along with previously secret details of War on Terror operations.Detailed stories of individual spies are set in the context of the development of the major espionage agencies, interspersed with anecdotes of gadgets, trickery, honeytraps and assassinations worthy of any fictional spy.

Strategy, Evolution, and War is a cautionary preview of how artificial intelligence (AI) will revolutionize strategy more than any development in the last 3,000 years of military history. Kenneth Payne describes strategy as an evolved package of conscious and unconscious behaviors with roots in our primate ancestry. Our minds were shaped by the need to think about warfare, a constant threat for early humans. As a result, we developed a sophisticated and strategic intelligence.

With relentless media coverage, breathtaking events, and extraordinary congressional and independent investigations, it is hard to believe that we still might not know some of the most significant facts about the presidency of George W. Bush. Yet beneath the surface events of the Bush presidency lies a secret history, a series of hidden events that makes a mockery of current debate.

In 1949, a newly minted branch of the CIA (the precursor of today’s National Clandestine Service), flush with money and burning with determination to roll back the Iron Curtain, embarked on the first paramilitary operation in the history of the agency. They hatched an elaborate plan, coordinated with the British Secret Intelligence Service, to foment popular rebellion and detach Albania, the weakest of the Soviet satellites in Europe, from Moscow’s orbit. The operation resulted in dismal failure and was shut down by 1954.

In the whirlwind of accusations and recriminations that has attended the post 9/11 world, one man's vital testimony has been conspicuously absent. Candid and compelling, At the Center of the Storm is George Tenet's memoir of his life at the CIA - a revelatory look at the inner workings of America's top intelligence agency and its dealings with national leaders at home and abroad.

After an elderly man jumped from New York's Pulitzer Building, in 1911, his death made the front page of the New York Times: "WorldDome Suicide a Famous War Spy". By then Pryce Lewis had slipped entirely offstage; but, as Gavin Mortimer reveals, the headline did him justice, speaking to the dramatic, vitally important, and until now untold role he had played in the Civil War.

From living in a tin-roofed shack north of Dar es Salaam to becoming Baroness Park of Monmouth, Daphne Park led a most unusual life - one that consisted of a lifelong love affair with the world of Britain's secret services. In the 1970s, she was appointed to Secret Intelligence Service's most senior operational rank as one of its seven area controllers - an extraordinary achievement for a woman working within this most male-dominated and secretive of organizations.

In Jawbreaker Gary Berntsen, until recently one of the CIA’s most decorated officers, comes out from under cover for the first time to describe his no-holds-barred pursuit of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.