Intelligence History

In Spies, Lies, and Algorithms, Amy Zegart separates fact from fiction as she offers an engaging and enlightening account of the past, present, and future of American espionage as it faces a revolution driven by digital technology. Drawing on decades of research and hundreds of interviews with intelligence officials, Zegart provides a history of US espionage, gives an overview of intelligence basics and life inside America's intelligence agencies, and explores the vexed issues of traitors, covert action, and congressional oversight.

On the surface, a British poet, an UberEats courier in Pittsburgh, an Indian doctor, and a Chinese activist in exile have nothing in common. But they are in fact linked by a profound common experience—unexpected encounters with artificial intelligence. In Code Dependent, Murgia shows how automated systems are reshaping our lives all over the world, from technology that marks children as future criminals, to an app that is helping to give diagnoses to a remote tribal community.

A shocking expos of the covert CIA program of widespread torture, rape, and murder of civilians during America’s war in Vietnam, with a new introduction by the author. In the darkest days of the Vietnam War, America’s Central Intelligence Agency secretly initiated a sweeping program of kidnap, torture, and assassination devised to destabilize the infrastructure of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam, commonly known as the “Viet Cong.”

After the fall of France in the mid-1940s, Adolf Hitler faced a British Empire that refused to negotiate for peace. With total war looming, he ordered the Abwehr, Germany's defense and intelligence organization, to carry out Operation Lena - a program to place information-gathering spies within Britain. Quickly, a network of secret agents spread within the United Kingdom and across the British Empire. The stunning truth, though, was that every last one of these German spies had been captured and turned by the British.

Leading futurist and OneShared.World founder Jamie Metzl explores how genome sequencing, gene editing, artificial intelligence, and other technologies are not only changing our lives, but catalyzing each other in radical and accelerating ways. These technologies have the potential to improve our health, feed billions of people, supercharge our economies, and store essential information for millions of years, but can also—if we are not careful—do immeasurable harm.

Under the aegis of machine learning in our data-driven machine age, computers are programming themselves and learning about - and solving - an extraordinary range of problems, from the mundane to the most daunting. Today it is machine learning programs that enable Amazon and Netflix to predict what users will like, Apple to power Siri's ability to understand voices, and Google to pilot cars.

Futurists insist that AI will soon eclipse the capacities of the most gifted human mind. What hope do we have against superintelligent machines? But we aren't really on the path to developing intelligent machines. In fact, we don't even know where that path might be. Erik Larson takes us on a tour of the landscape of AI to show how far we are from superintelligence and what it would take to get there.

In this book, Amy Webb reveals the pervasive, invisible ways in which the foundations of AI - the people working on the system, their motivations, the technology itself - is broken. Within our lifetimes, AI will, by design, begin to behave unpredictably, thinking and acting in ways which defy human logic. The big nine corporations may be inadvertently building and enabling vast arrays of intelligent systems that don't share our motivations, desires, or hopes for the future of humanity.

Keith Jeffery’s fascinating and revealing account draws on a wealth of archival materials never before seen by any outsider to unveil the inner workings of the world’s first spy agency. Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service—or MI6—was born a century ago amid rising fears of foreign military powers, especially Germany. The next 40 years saw MI6 taking an increasingly important—and, until now, largely hidden—role in shaping the history of Europe and the world.

Science is how we understand the world. Yet failures in peer review and mistakes in statistics have rendered a shocking number of scientific studies useless—or, worse, badly misleading. Such errors have distorted our knowledge in fields as wide-ranging as medicine, physics, nutrition, education, genetics, economics, and the search for extraterrestrial life. As Science Fictions makes clear, the current system of research funding and publication not only fails to safeguard us from blunders but actively encourages bad science—with sometimes deadly consequences.

In Den of Spies, Unger reveals the definitive story of the October Surprise, going inside his three-decade reporting odyssey, along with Parry’s never-before-seen archives, and sharing startling truths about what really happened in 1980. The result is a real-life political thriller filled with double agents, CIA operatives, slippery politicians, KGB documents, wealthy Republicans, and dogged journalists.

As World War II raged into its second year, Britain sought a powerful ally to join its cause - but the American public was sharply divided on the subject. The Canadian-born MI6 officer William Stephenson, with his knowledge and influence in North America, was chosen to change their minds by any means necessary.

In Operation Whisper, Barnes Carr tells the true story of the most effective Soviet spy couple in America, a pair who vanished under the FBI's nose only to turn up posing as rare book dealers in London, where they continued their atomic spying. The Cohens were talented, dedicated, worldly spies - an urbane, jet-set couple loyal to their service and their friends. Most people they met seemed to think they represented the best of America. The Soviets certainly thought so.

A landmark collaboration between a thirty-year veteran of the CIA and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, The Main Enemy is the inside story of the CIA-KGB spy wars, told through the actions of the men who fought them. Based on hundreds of interviews with operatives from both sides, The Main Enemy puts us inside the heads of CIA officers as they dodge surveillance and walk into violent ambushes in Moscow. This is the story of the generation of spies who came of age in the shadow of the Cuban missile crisis and rose to run the CIA and KGB in the last days of the Cold War.

When the Detroit Red Wings were rebooting their franchise after more than two decades of relative futility, they knew the best place to find world-class players who could turn things around more quickly were conscripted servants behind the Iron Curtain. All they had to do to get them was make history by drafting them and then figure out how to get them out of the Soviet Union.

In the early hours of February 25, 1968, a Russian submarine armed with three nuclear ballistic missiles set sail from its base in Siberia on a routine combat patrol to Hawaii. Then it vanished. As the Soviet navy searched in vain for the lost vessel, a small, highly classified American operation using sophisticated deep-sea spy equipment found it - wrecked on the sea floor at a depth of 16,800 feet, far beyond the capabilities of any salvage that existed.

From the best-selling author of Public Enemies and The Big Rich, an explosive account of the decade-long battle between the FBI and the homegrown revolutionary movements of the 1970s. The FBI combated these groups and others as nodes in a single revolutionary underground, dedicated to the violent overthrow of the American government. The FBI’s response to the leftist revolutionary counterculture has not been treated kindly by history, and in hindsight many of its efforts seem almost comically ineffectual, if not criminal in themselves.

The Unexpected Spy is the riveting story of Walder's tenure in the CIA and, later, the FBI. In high-security, steel-walled rooms in Virginia, Walder watched al-Qaeda members with drones as President Bush looked over her shoulder and CIA Director George Tenet brought her donuts. She tracked chemical terrorists and searched the world for Weapons of Mass Destruction. She created a chemical terror chart that someone in the White House altered to convey information she did not have or believe, leading to the Iraq invasion.

AI expert Yorick Wilks takes a journey through the history of artificial intelligence up to the present day, examining its origins, controversies, and achievements, as well as looking into just how it works. He also considers the future, assessing whether these technologies could menace our way of life and how we are all likely to benefit from AI applications in the years to come.

In 1992 Vasili Mitrokhin defected to England and brought along an extensive archive of military intelligence from the Soviet Union. A career KGB officer who served as chief archivist for its foreign operations, Vasili Mitrokhin became disillusioned with the Soviet system and its constant repression of dissidents at home and abroad. Determined to preserve the truth, he secretly compiled a detailed record of the agency's worldwide espionage network...