Social Intelligence Science

This candid and darkly witty memoir recounts an exhilarating life - and a few close brushes with death. With remarkable sangfroid and a humorist's eye for absurdity, H. K. Roy describes his many strange and risky exploits in his long career with the CIA. Whether he was pursuing Soviet and Cuban spies, running "denied area" operations in Eastern Europe, hunting Bosnian War criminals, or providing actionable intelligence to US government and coalition forces in Iraq, Roy usually found himself at the right place at the right time.

Jim Thompson landed in Thailand at the end of World War II, a former American society dilettante who became an Asian legend as a spy and silk magnate with access to Thai worlds outsiders never saw. As the Cold War reached Thailand, America had a choice: Should it, as Thompson believed, help other nations build democracies from their traditional cultures or, as his ex-OSS friend Willis Bird argued, remake the world through deception and self-serving alliances? This book explores a key Cold War epidsode.

In 1973, a gunman fired five shots into Colonel Joe Alon, a kind, unassuming Israeli Air Force pilot. As it turned out, Alon wasn't just a pilot and family man - he was a high-ranking Israeli military official and hero of the Israeli Air Force. The assassin was never found and the case was closed. As a counterterrorism special agent, Fred Burton reopened the case and pursued the killer.

In Life Finds a Way, biologist Andreas Wagner reveals the deep symmetry between innovation in biological evolution and human cultural creativity. Rarely is either a linear climb to perfection - instead, "progress" is typically marked by a sequence of peaks, plateaus, and pitfalls. For instance, in Picasso's 40-some iterations of Guernica, we see the same combination of small steps, incessant reshuffling, and large, almost reckless, leaps that characterize the way evolution transformed a dinosaur's grasping claw into a condor's soaring wing.

On his first day in alias, John Braddock encountered a car crash, possible surveillance and a source who threatened to kill his boss. Fortunately, he was trained for all that. He was trained to think through the risks. And to structure them. And to take the risks, when the time was right.You see through his eyes how to take risks when the stakes are high and lives are on the line. You see the impact of small choices and situational awareness. You see the structure of risks, the importance of understanding necessary conditions, and having fallbacks.

During the early and most dangerous years of the cold war, a handful of Americans, led by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, revolutionized spying and warfare. In great secrecy and beyond the prying eyes of Congress and the press, they built exotic new machines that opened up the Soviet Union to surveillance and protected the United States from surprise nuclear attack. Secret Empire is the dramatic story of these men and their inventions, told in full for the first time.

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.

No ordinary Washington memoir, Facing Down Evil is an unprecedented look behind the scenes of our nation's most powerful law-enforcement agency. As the FBI's premier hostage negotiator, Clint Van Zandt worked or consulted on some of recent U.S. history's most unsettling and high-profile conflicts, including the Waco, Oklahoma City, and Unabomber cases.

After details of American government surveillance were published in 2013, Edward Snowden, formerly a subcontracted IT analyst for the NSA, became the center of an international controversy: Was he a hero, traitor, whistle-blower, spy? Was his theft legitimized by the nature of the information he exposed? When is it necessary for governmental transparency to give way to subterfuge? Edward Jay Epstein brings a lifetime of journalistic and investigative acumen to bear on these and other questions.

If you are interested in deepening your emotional awareness and in developing your emotional intelligence in ways that enhance conscious cocreative living, then this book is for you.

Le Mossad, pour "Institut pour les renseignements et les affaires spéciales" en hébreu, est l'une des trois agences de renseignement d'Israël, avec le Shabak (plus connu sous le nom de "Shin Beth", qui est le service de sécurité intérieure) et l'Aman (chargé de la sécurité militaire). Contrairement au gouvernement, au parlement (Knesset), à l'Armée de défense d'Israël (Tsahal) et à l'agence de sécurité intérieure (Shin Bet), les objectifs, la structure et les pouvoirs du Mossad sont exemptés des lois constitutionnelles de l'État.

Raised in a lush suburb of 1920s Paris, Noor Inayat Khan was an introspective musician and writer, dedicated to her family and to her father’s spiritual values of harmony, beauty, and tolerance. She did not seem destined for wartime heroism. Yet, faced with the evils of Nazi violence and the German occupation of France, Noor joined the British Special Operations Executive and trained in espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance. For crucial months of the war, Noor was the only wireless operator in France sending critical information to London.

Behind the locked doors of three mansions in London's exclusive Kensington Palace Gardens neighborhood, the British Secret Service established a highly secret prison in 1940: the London Cage. Here recalcitrant German prisoners of war were subjected to "special intelligence treatment." The stakes were high: the war's outcome could hinge on obtaining information German prisoners were determined to withhold. After the war, high-ranking Nazi war criminals were housed in the Cage, revamped as an important center for investigating German war crimes.

Previous histories have focused on the KGB, leaving military intelligence and the special service - which specialized in codes and ciphers - lurking in the shadows. Drawing on previously neglected Russian sources, Haslam reveals how both were in fact crucial to the survival of the Soviet state. This was especially true after Stalin's death in 1953, as the Cold War heated up and dedicated Communist agents the regime had relied upon - Klaus Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, Donald Maclean - were betrayed.

A Human Algorithm: How Artificial Intelligence Is Redefining Who We Are examines the immense impact intelligent technology will have on humanity. These machines, while challenging our personal beliefs and our socio-economic world order, also have the potential to transform our health and well-being, alleviate poverty and suffering, and reveal the mysteries of intelligence and consciousness. International human rights attorney Flynn Coleman deftly argues that it is critical we instill values, ethics, and morals into our robots, algorithms, and other forms of AI.

The singularity is the emergence of artificial general intelligence (AGI), and the associated transformation of the human condition. Spoiler alert: That transformation will be profound. Despite the importance of the concept of the singularity, the subject receives nothing like the attention it deserves. This book seeks to dispel the confusion, to untangle the distortions, to highlight practical steps forward, and to attract much more serious attention to the singularity. The future of humanity is at stake.

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.

Valerie Wilson, the object of the "Plame" CIA leak case that resulted in the conviction of the vice-president's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, has spoken publicly only twice since she was outed in July 2003. Now she tells not only the real story behind the leak, but describes her life at the CIA and what happened when her cover was blown.

From 1941 to 1947, the United States planted a liaison mission in the headquarters of Chinese Communist forces behind the lines. Nicknamed the "Dixie Mission," for its location in "rebel" territory, it was an interagency delegation that included intelligence officers from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Mission to Mao is a social history of the OSS officers in the field that reveals the weakness of United States intelligence diplomacy in the 1940s.

In his groundbreaking follow-up to the bestselling The Road to Somewhere, David Goodhart divides society into people who work with their Heads (cognitive work), with their Hands (manual work), or with their Hearts (caring work), and considers each group’s changing status and influence. Today, the “best and the brightest” trump the “decent and hardworking.” Qualities like character, compassion, craft, and physical labor command far less respect in our workforce. This imbalance has led to the disaffection and alienation of millions of people.