Social Intelligence Science

Why did the US intelligence services fail so spectacularly to know about the Soviet Union's nuclear capabilities following World War II? As Vince Houghton, historian and curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, shows us, that disastrous failure came just a few years after the Manhattan Project's intelligence team had penetrated the Third Reich and knew every detail of the Nazi's plan for an atomic bomb. What changed and what went wrong?

Forty years ago, a majority of Americans were highly engaged in issues of war and peace. Whether to go to war or keep out of conflicts was a vital question at the heart of the country's vibrant, if fractious, democracy. But American political consciousness has drifted. In the last decade, America has gone to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, while pursuing a new kind of warfare in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Pakistan.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author Ron Suskind takes you deep inside America's real battles with violent, unrelenting terrorists, a game of kill-or-be-killed, from the Oval Office to the streets of Karachi.

Bob Muglia helps us understand how innovation in data and information technology have led us to AI—and how this technology must shape our future. The long-time Microsoft executive, former CEO of Snowflake, and current tech investor maps the evolution of the modern data stack and how it has helped build today's economy and society. And he explains how humanity must create a new social contract for the artificial general intelligence (AGI)—autonomous machines intelligent as people-that he expects to arrive in less than a decade.

Before Edward Snowden's infamous data breach, the largest theft of government secrets was committed by an ingenious traitor whose intricate espionage scheme and complex system of coded messages were made even more baffling by his dyslexia. His name is Brian Regan, but he came to be known as the Spy Who Couldn't Spell.

Eyes in the Sky is the authoritative account of how the Pentagon secretly developed a godlike surveillance system for monitoring America's enemies overseas, and how it is now being used to watch us in our own backyards. Whereas a regular aerial camera can only capture a small patch of ground at any given time, this system - and its most powerful iteration, Gorgon Stare - allow operators to track thousands of moving targets at once, both forwards and backwards in time, across whole city-sized areas.

It seems that just about every new technology that we bring to bear on improving our lives brings with it some downside, side effect, or unintended consequence. These issues can pose very real and growing ethical problems for all of us. For example, automated facial recognition can make life easier and safer for us—but it also poses huge issues with regard to privacy, ownership of data, and even identity theft. Technology Is Not Neutral addresses one of today’s most pressing problems: How to create and use tools and technologies to maximize benefits and minimize harms.

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.

One day in the spring of 2013, a box appeared outside a fourth-floor apartment door in Brooklyn. The recipient, who didn't know the sender, only knew she was supposed to bring this box to a friend, who would ferry it to another friend. Thus the biggest national security leak of the digital era was launched via the US Postal Service. This is just one of the odd, ironic details that emerges from the story of how Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge, two experienced journalists but security novices got drawn into the Edward Snowden story as behind-the-scenes players.

An unprecedented high-level master narrative of America's intelligence wars from the only person ever to helm both the CIA and NSA, at a time of heinous new threats and wrenching change. For General Michael Hayden, playing to the edge means playing so close to the line that you get chalk dust on your cleats. Otherwise, by playing back, you may protect yourself, but you will be less successful in protecting America.

Mark Felt's role in history was secured when he decided to share his views on the Watergate break-in with a young reporter on the Washington Post named Bob Woodward. He made sure that the greatest political scandal in the twentieth century, which would besmirch an entire administration and bring down a presidency, was revealed in an unchallengeable way.

In the World War II era, Geoffrey Pyke was described as one of the world's great minds - to rank alongside Einstein. Pyke was an inventor, adventurer, polymath, and unlikely hero of both world wars. He earned a fortune on the stock market, founded an influential pre-school, wrote a bestseller, and came up with the idea for the US and Canadian Special Forces. Henry Hemming is the first reporter to sift through this extraordinary new information and finally tell Pyke's astonishing story in full: his brilliance, his flaws, and his life of adventures, ideas, and secrets.

The Great War of Our Time offers an unprecedented assessment of the CIA while at the forefront of our nation's war against al-Qa'ida and during the most remarkable period in the history of the agency. Called the "Bob Gates of his generation", Michael Morell is a top CIA officer who saw it all - the only person with President Bush on 9/11/01 and with President Obama on 5/1/11, when Usama Bin Laden was brought to justice.

This essential, pause-resister narrative on the history of drone warfare by the acclaimed author of Rumsfeld explores how this practice emerged, who made it happen, and the real consequences of targeted killing.

In June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a couple with two young sons, were led separately from their prison cells on Death Row and electrocuted moments apart. Both had been convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union, despite the fact that the US government was aware that the evidence against Ethel was shaky at best and based on the perjury of her own brother. This book is the first to focus on one half of that couple for more than 30 years, and much new evidence has surfaced since then.

In the late 1990s, when Keefe was a graduate student in England, he heard stories about an eavesdropping network led by the United States that spanned the planet. The system, known as Echelon, allowed America and its allies to intercept the private phone calls and e-mails of civilians and governments around the world.

Since 1945, the US has justified numerous wars, interventions, and military build-ups based on the pretext of the Russian Red Menace, even after the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991 and Russia stopped being Red. In fact, the two biggest post-war American conflicts, the Korean and Vietnam wars, were not, as has been frequently claimed, about stopping Soviet aggression or even influence. And now the specter of a Russian Menace has been raised again in the wake of Donald Trump's victory.

Originally published in 1987, Thwarting Enemies at Home and Abroad is a unique primer that teaches the principles, strategy, and tradecraft of counterintelligence (CI). CI is often misunderstood and narrowly equated with security and catching spies, which are only part of the picture. As William R. Johnson explains, CI is the art of actively protecting secrets but also aggressively thwarting, penetrating, and deceiving hostile intelligence organizations to neutralize or even manipulate their operations.

From the award-winning and acclaimed author of The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, From Warsaw with Love tells the epic story of how Polish intelligence officers forged an alliance with the CIA in the twilight of the Cold War. In 1990, soon after the Polish people voted in their first democratic election since the 1930s, the young Polish government sent a veteran spy, who’d battled the West for decades, to rescue six American officers trapped in Baghdad.

L'Opération Oiseau bleu ou la "Force K" fut mise en œuvre par le SDECE (services secrets français) en 1956, deuxième année de la guerre d'indépendance de l'Algérie. Le projet, élaboré semble-t-il à la fin 1955 au niveau du Gouvernement Général de l'Algérie, envisage de détacher de la rébellion du FLN plusieurs centaines de Kabyles puis de les transformer en commandos clandestins, opérant avec des tenues et des armes analogues à celles de l'ALN, le bras armé du FLN, et chargés de mettre en œuvre un véritable "contre-maquis" en Kabylie baptisé "Oiseau bleu" ou "Force K" comme "Kabyle".