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Embracing the Fog of War: Assessment and Metrics in Counterinsurgency
By Ben Connable. 2012
The unpredictable counterinsurgency environment challenges centralized, quantitative campaign assessment. A comprehensive examination of the centralized, quantitative approach to assessment, as…
described inthe literature and doctrine and applied in two primary case studies (Vietnam and Afghanistan), reveals weaknesses and gaps and proposes an alternative process: contextual assessment.Alert and Ready: An Organizational Design Assessment of Marine Corps Intelligence
By Christopher Paul, Colin P. Clarke, Harry J. Thie, Stephanie Young, Katharine Watkins Webb. 2011
Over the past decade, especially, U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) intelligence has had to tailor its organization to meet the evolving…
demands of the operational environment. This has resulted in a number of ad hoc arrangements, practices, and organizations. A broad review of the organizational design of USMC intelligence examined how to align it efficiently and effectively with current and future missions and functions.Last of the Cold War Spies: The Life of Michael Straight
By Roland Perry. 2005
The Spy Who Couldn't Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI's Hunt for America's Stolen Secrets
By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee. 2016
The thrilling, true-life account of the FBI's hunt for the ingenious traitor Brian Regan--known as the Spy Who Couldn't Spell.…
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. In December of 2000, FBI Special Agent Steven Carr of the bureau's Washington, D.C., office received a package from FBI New York: a series of coded letters from an anonymous sender to the Libyan consulate, offering to sell classified United States intelligence. The offer, and the threat, were all too real. A self-proclaimed CIA analyst with top secret clearance had information about U.S. reconnaissance satellites, air defense systems, weapons depots, munitions factories, and underground bunkers throughout the Middle East. Rooting out the traitor would not be easy, but certain clues suggested a government agent with a military background, a family, and a dire need for money. Leading a diligent team of investigators and code breakers, Carr spent years hunting down a dangerous spy and his cache of stolen secrets. In this fast-paced true-life spy thriller, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee reveals how the FBI unraveled Regan's strange web of codes to build a case against a man who nearly collapsed America's military security.INCLUDES PHOTOGRAPHSJFK's Forgotten Crisis
By Bruce Riedel. 2015
Bruce Riedel provides new perspective and insights into Kennedy's forgotten crisis in the most dangerous days of the cold war.The…
Cuban Missile Crisis defined the presidency of John F. Kennedy. But during the same week that the world stood transfixed by the possibility of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, Kennedy was also consumed by a war that has escaped history's attention, yet still significantly reverberates today: the Sino-Indian conflict.As well-armed troops from the People's Republic of China surged into Indian-held territory in October 1962, Kennedy ordered an emergency airlift of supplies to the Indian army. He engaged in diplomatic talks that kept the neighboring Pakistanis out of the fighting. The conflict came to an end with a unilateral Chinese cease-fire, relieving Kennedy of a decision to intervene militarily in support of India.Bruce Riedel, a CIA and National Security Council veteran, provides the first full narrative of this crisis, which played out during the tense negotiations with Moscow over Cuba. He also describes another, nearly forgotten episode of U.S. espionage during the war between India and China: secret U.S. support of Tibetan opposition to Chinese occupation of Tibet. He details how the United States, beginning in 1957, trained and parachuted Tibetan guerrillas into Tibet to fight Chinese military forces. The United States did not abandon this covert support until relations were normalized with China in the 1970s.Riedel tells this story of war, diplomacy, and covert action with authority and perspective. He draws on newly declassified letters between Kennedy and Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru, along with the diaries and memoirs of key players and other sources, to make this the definitive account of JFK's forgotten crisis. This is, Riedel writes, Kennedy's finest hour as you have never read it before.The Pontecorvo Affair: A Cold War Defection and Nuclear Physics
By Simone Turchetti. 2012
In the fall of 1950, newspapers around the world reported that the Italian-born nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo and his family…
had mysteriously disappeared while returning to Britain from a holiday trip. Because Pontecorvo was known to be an expert working for the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment, this raised immediate concern for the safety of atomic secrets, especially when it became known in the following months that he had defected to the Soviet Union. Was Pontecorvo a spy? Did he know and pass sensitive information about the bomb to Soviet experts? At the time, nuclear scientists, security personnel, Western government officials, and journalists assessed the case, but their efforts were inconclusive and speculations quickly turned to silence. In the years since, some have downplayed Pontecorvo's knowledge of atomic weaponry, while others have claimed him as part of a spy ring that infiltrated the Manhattan Project. The Pontecorvo Affair draws from newly disclosed sources to challenge previous attempts to solve the case, offering a balanced and well-documented account of Pontecorvo, his activities, and his possible motivations for defecting. Along the way, Simone Turchetti reconsiders the place of nuclear physics and nuclear physicists in the twentieth century and reveals that as the discipline's promise of military and industrial uses came to the fore, so did the enforcement of new secrecy provisions on the few experts in the world specializing in its application.Spies: The Secret Agents Who Changed the Course of History
By Ernest Volkman. 1994
Volkman presents profiles of 45 of this century's most notable agents, assets, sleepers, spymasters, and moles. Includes the famous, infamous,…
and the all-but-forgotten, from "serious" spies like Ian Fleming and Kim Philby to Ernest Hemingway, W. Somerset Maugham, and Mata Hari.Improving Decisionmaking in a Turbulent World: Strategic Rethink
By Charles P. Ries. 2016
Every president needs a decisionmaking system that harnesses the full capabilities and accumulated wisdom of the U.S. government and the…
nation's many stakeholders. This Perspective analyzes a range of management challenges in the national security system and presents recommendations for strengthening U.S. decisionmaking and oversight of policy implementation.A Secret Life
By Benjamin Weiser. 2004
In August 1972, Ryszard Kuklinski, a highly respected colonel in the Polish Army, embarked on what would become one of…
the most extraordinary human intelligence operations of the Cold War. Despite the extreme risk to himself and his family, he contacted the American Embassy in Bonn, and arranged a secret meeting. From the very start, he made clear that he deplored the Soviet domination of Poland, and believed his country was on the wrong side of the Cold War. Over the next nine years, Kuklinski rose quickly in the Polish defense ministry, acting as a liaison to Moscow, and helping to prepare for a "hot war" with the West. But he also lived a life of subterfuge--of dead drops, messages written in invisible ink, miniature cameras, and secret transmitters. In 1981, he gave the CIA the secret plans to crush Solidarity. Then, about to be discovered, he made a dangerous escape with his family to the West. He still lives in hiding in America. Kuklinski's story is a harrowing personal drama about one man's decision to betray the Communist leadership in order to save the country he loves, and the intense debate it spurred over whether he was a traitor or a patriot. Through extensive interviews and access to the CIA's secret archive on the case, Benjamin Weiser offers an unprecedented and richly detailed look at this secret history of the Cold War.Hard Measures
By Bill Harlow, Jose A. Rodriguez. 2012
While the American public is aware of the CIA's use of highly controversial "enhanced interrogation techniques," few know the man…
who, in the wake of September 11, led all U.S. counterterrorism operations and oversaw the use of those procedures--procedures that obtained vital and timely intelligence and helped safeguard the nation from future attacks. Puerto Rican-born Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr., served the United States for twenty-five years as an undercover officer before bringing his wealth of field knowledge to the CIA's Counterterrorism Center; now, in this riveting account and fascinating life story, one of America's top undercover operatives reveals how hard measures have derailed terrorist activity targeting the U.S., and saved countless American lives. Fully disclosed here for the first time are the undercover operations and tactics implemented during the George W. Bush presidency--which were approved by the highest levels of the U.S. government, certified as legal by the Department of Justice, and supported by bipartisan leadership of congressional intelligence oversight committees. But as the shock of 9/11 faded, the support that the intelligence community enjoyed and deserved gave way to shortsighted and potentially dangerous political correctness. One by one, the tools needed to successfully fight terrorism were banished, and the men and women who volunteered to carry out our nation's orders in combating al-Qa'ida found themselves second-guessed, hamstrung, and investigated-- including Rodriguez himself. In effect, the United States has chosen to willfully and unilaterally disarm itself in the war on terror. In Hard Measures, Rodriguez convincingly argues for the techniques used, and uncompromisingly details when these techniques were necessary, why they worked, and how, ultimately, they contributed to the capture of the world's most-wanted terror operatives, including Usama bin Ladin. From law school student to CIA recruit to his role as America's top spy, Rodriguez's full story is one of utmost importance--a rare, insider's look at an issue that demands attention. Above all, it's a reasoned, imperative, and fully informed case for hard measures, and an explosive and gripping account of the real war on terror-- where it's been and where it's headed. *** Terrorism has always been one of the toughest targets on which to collect intelligence. The secrets you want to steal frequently don't reside in computer systems, which can be hacked, or safes, which can be broken into, but in the inner recesses of a handful of individuals' minds. The cliché about intelligence work is that it is like working on a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle but not having the box top to show you what the finished picture should look like. If only it were that easy. In fact, it is more like working on a million-piece puzzle with no box top, and having millions more random pieces that look like they might fit, but actually are from different puzzles altogether. It fell to us to make sense of the countless fragments of information and to take action on the chunks of the puzzle, which represented a real and growing threat to the United States and our allies. --from Hard MeasuresJoining the ranks of Hidden Figures and In the Garden of Beasts, the incredible true story of the greatest codebreaking…
duo that ever lived, an American woman and her husband who invented the modern science of cryptology together and used it to confront the evils of their time, solving puzzles that unmasked Nazi spies and helped win World War II.In 1916, at the height of World War I, brilliant Shakespeare expert Elizebeth Smith went to work for an eccentric tycoon on his estate outside Chicago. The tycoon had close ties to the U.S. government, and he soon asked Elizebeth to apply her language skills to an exciting new venture: code-breaking. There she met the man who would become her husband, groundbreaking cryptologist William Friedman. Though she and Friedman are in many ways the "Adam and Eve" of the NSA, Elizebeth’s story, incredibly, has never been told.In The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagone chronicles the life of this extraordinary woman, who played an integral role in our nation’s history for forty years. After World War I, Smith used her talents to catch gangsters and smugglers during Prohibition, then accepted a covert mission to discover and expose Nazi spy rings that were spreading like wildfire across South America, advancing ever closer to the United States. As World War II raged, Elizebeth fought a highly classified battle of wits against Hitler’s Reich, cracking multiple versions of the Enigma machine used by German spies. Meanwhile, inside an Army vault in Washington, William worked furiously to break Purple, the Japanese version of Enigma—and eventually succeeded, at a terrible cost to his personal life.Fagone unveils America’s code-breaking history through the prism of Smith’s life, bringing into focus the unforgettable events and colorful personalities that would help shape modern intelligence. Blending the lively pace and compelling detail that are the hallmarks of Erik Larson’s bestsellers with the atmosphere and intensity of The Imitation Game, The Woman Who Smashed Codes is page-turning popular history at its finest.Breakdown: How America's Intelligence Failures Led to September 11
By Bill Gertz. 2002
A gay man who created New York’s most notorious den of heterosexuality . . . an anxious, anything-but-hardboiled lawyer who…
became one of the most successful undercover mob informants in history. . . .In this hilarious and fascinating account, Michael Blutrich takes you inside star-studded 1990s New York, mafia sit-downs, and the witness protection program. Meet Michael D. Blutrich, founder of Scores, the hottest strip club in New York history. A resourceful lawyer at one of the city’s most respected firms, Blutrich fell into the skin trade almost by accident, but it was his legal savvy that made Scores the first club in Manhattan to feature lap dances and enabled him to neatly sidestep a law requiring dancers to wear pasties by instead covering their nipples with latex paint. Soon Scores, the club Howard Stern called "like being in a candy shop,” was a home away from home for everyone from sports superstars and Oscar-winning actors to pop singers and political notables alike.The catch? The club was smack dab in John Gotti’s territory, and the mafia wanted a piece of the action. The Gambino family doesn’t take no for an answer . . . and neither, as it turns out, does the FBI. In his memoir, Blutrich recounts in detail how his beloved club became a hub for the mafia, and how he found himself caught up in an FBI investigation, sorely struggling to juggle roles of business owner and undercover spy.As his life spiraled out of control, Blutrich would face the loss of almost everything dear to him. But whether marching a line of topless strippers as human exhibits into a trial to save the club’s liquor license or wearing wires to meetings with armed gangsters, he never lost his sense of humor or his nerve. In Scores, Blutrich finally tells all-from triumph to betrayal-in his own funny, self-deprecating voice.Never before has a journalist penetrated the wall of secrecy that surrounds the U.S. Secret Service, that elite corps of…
agents who pledge to take a bullet to protect the president and his family. After conducting exclusive interviews with more than one hundred current and former Secret Service agents, bestselling author and award-winning reporter Ronald Kessler reveals their secrets for the first time.Secret Service agents, acting as human surveillance cameras, observe everything that goes on behind the scenes in the president's inner circle. Kessler reveals what they have seen, providing startling, previously untold stories about the presidents, from John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as about their families, Cabinet officers, and White House aides. Kessler portrays the dangers that agents face and how they carry out their missions-from how they are trained to how they spot and assess potential threats. With fly-on-the-wall perspective, he captures the drama and tension that characterize agents' lives.In this headline-grabbing book, Kessler discloses assassination attempts that have never before been revealed. He shares inside accounts of past assaults that have put the Secret Service to the test, including a heroic gun battle that took down the would-be assassins of Harry S. Truman, the devastating day that John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas, and the swift actions that saved Ronald Reagan after he was shot.While Secret Service agents are brave and dedicated, Kessler exposes how Secret Service management in recent years has betrayed its mission by cutting corners, risking the assassination of President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and their families. Given the lax standards, "It's a miracle we have not had a successful assassination," a current agent says.Since an assassination jeopardizes democracy itself, few agencies are as important as the Secret Service-nor is any other subject as tantalizing as the inner sanctum of the White House. Only tight-lipped Secret Service agents know the real story, and Ronald Kessler is the only journalist to have won their trust.From the Hardcover edition.The SAGE Encyclopedia of Surveillance, Security, and Privacy
By Bruce A. Arrigo. 2018
Although surveillance hit the headlines with revelations by Edward Snowden that the National Security Agency had been tracking phone calls…
worldwide, surveillance of citizens by their governments actually has been conducted for centuries. Only now, with the advent of modern technologies, it has exponentially evolved so that today you can barely step out your door without being watched or recorded in some way. In addition to the political and security surveillance unveiled by the Snowden revelations, think about corporate surveillance: each swipe of your ID card to enter your office is recorded, not to mention your Internet activity. Or economic surveillance: what you buy online or with a credit card is recorded and your trip to the supermarket is videotaped. Drive through a tollbooth, and your license plate is recorded. Simply walk down a street and your image is recorded again and again and again. Where does this begin and end? In all levels of social structure, from the personal to the political to the economic to the judicial, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Surveillance, Security, and Privacy uncovers and explains how surveillance has come to be an integral part of how our contemporary society operates worldwide and how it impacts our security and privacy Key features include: Approximately 450 signed entries from contributors around the globe Further readings and cross-references conclude each article to guide students further as they explore a topic A Reader's Guide organizes entries by broad thematic areasAmerican Jihad
By Steven Emerson. 2002
The United States government is actively monitoring terrorist cells affiliated with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network in eleven cities,…
from Florida to Boston to Denver to Houston. But al Qaeda is hardly our only threat. Hamas, formed in 1987, was run by top Palestinian officials in America from its earliest days, and has tentacles in Texas, California, New Jersey, Virginia, and Illinois. The University of South Florida was infiltrated by the infamous organization known as Palestinian Islamic Jihad -- one of its faculty members even left the country to take that group's top leadership role after his predecessor was assassinated. Hizballah has been tied to cells in North Carolina and Michigan, from which it drew funds and attempted to procure military equipment. In short, September 11, 2001, was hardly an isolated or unpredictable event. The United States has become home to hundreds and probably thousands of terrorists, and it has become a central node in their international networks. Steven Emerson, hailed as "the nation's leading expert on Islamist terrorism," has been working full-time since 1993 to track the spread of terrorist networks to our shores, even at great personal risk. In 1995, not long after the release of his PBS documentary "Jihad in America," he was informed by federal officials that a South African Islamist death squad had been dispatched after him, and told that he should leave his home immediately. Since then he has not maintained a home address, though he has continued to write and testify under his own name. With the help of a staff of researchers he has followed the terrorists' monetary sources, monitored their attacks and plans, exposed their ties to charitable foundations, and assisted a variety of government agencies in the battle against them. He has obtained videotaped evidence of terrorist training camps and conferences, and tracked the international connections of American operatives to over a dozen organizations. In American Jihad Emerson reveals the full story that only he knows. This is a frightening and crucial book for anyone who needs to understand the threat within our borders.Intelligence Collection
By Robert M. Clark. 2014
Intelligence Collection by Robert M Clark one of the foremost authorities in the field offers…
systematic and analytic coverage of the how and why of intelligence collection across its three major stages the front end planning collection and the back end processing exploitation and dissemination The book provides a fresh logical and easily understandable view of complex collection systems used worldwide Its ground-breaking organizational approach facilitates understanding and cross-INT collaboration highlighting the similarities and differences among the collection INTs Part one explains how the literal INTs such as communications intelligence and cyber collection work Part two focuses on nonliteral INTs including imagery electronic intelligence and MASINT All chapters use a common format based on systems analysis methodology detailing function process and structure of the collection disciplines Examples throughout the book highlight topics as diverse as battlespace situational awareness terrorism weapons proliferation criminal networks treaty monitoring and identity intelligenceThe Inspection House: An Impertinent Field Guide to Modern Surveillance (Exploded Views)
By Emily Horne, Tim Maly. 1965
In 1787, British philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham conceived of the panopticon, a ring of cells observed by a…
central watchtower, as a labor-saving device for those in authority. While Bentham's design was ostensibly for a prison, he believed that any number of places that require supervision--factories, poorhouses, hospitals, and schools--would benefit from such a design. The French philosopher Michel Foucault took Bentham at his word. In his groundbreaking 1975 study, Discipline and Punish, the panopticon became a metaphor to describe the creeping effects of personalized surveillance as a means for ever-finer mechanisms of control. Forty years later, the available tools of scrutiny, supervision, and discipline are far more capable and insidious than Foucault dreamed, and yet less effective than Bentham hoped. Shopping malls, container ports, terrorist holding cells, and social networks all bristle with cameras, sensors, and trackers. But, crucially, they are also rife with resistance and prime opportunities for revolution. The Inspection House is a tour through several of these sites--from Guantánamo Bay to the Occupy Oakland camp and the authors' own mobile devices--providing a stark, vivid portrait of our contemporary surveillance state and its opponents.A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial
By Steve Hendricks. 2010
A book so compelling it deserves to become one of the nonfiction classics of our time. As propulsively readable as…
the best "true crime," A Kidnapping in Milan is a potent reckoning with the realities of counterterrorism. In a mesmerizing page-turner, Steve Hendricks gives us a ground-level view of the birth and growth of international Islamist terrorist networks and of counterterrorism in action in Europe. He also provides an eloquent, eagle's-eye perspective on the big questions of justice and the rule of law. "In Milan a known fact is always explained by competing stories," Hendricks writes, but the stories that swirled around the February 2003 disappearance of the radical imam Abu Omar would soon point in one direction--to a covert action by the CIA. The police of Milan had been exploiting their wiretaps of Abu Omar for useful information before the taps went silent. The Americans were their allies in counterterrorism--would they have disrupted a fruitful investigation? In an extraordinary tale of detective versus spy, Italian investigators under the leadership of prosecutor Armando Spataro unraveled in embarrassing detail the "covert" action in which Abu Omar had been kidnapped and sent to be tortured in Egypt. Spataro--seasoned in prosecutions of the Mafia and the Red Brigades and a passionate believer in the rule of law--sought to try the kidnappers in absentia: the first-ever trial of CIA officers by a U.S. ally. An exemplary achievement in narrative nonfiction writing, A Kidnapping in Milan is at once a detective story, a history of the terrorist menace, and an indictment of the belief that man's savagery against man can be stilled with more savagery yet.The Watchers
By Shane Harris. 2010
Using exclusive access to key insiders, Shane Harris charts the rise of America's surveillance state over the past twenty-five years…
and highlights a dangerous paradox: Our government's strategy has made it harder to catch terrorists and easier to spy on the rest of us. Our surveillance state was born in the brain of Admiral John Poindexter in 1983. Poindexter, Reagan's National Security Advisor, realized that the United States might have prevented the terrorist massacre of 241 Marines in Beirut if only intelligence agencies had been able to analyze in real time data they had on the attackers. Poindexter poured government know-how and funds into his dream-a system that would sift reams of data for signs of terrorist activity. Decades later, that elusive dream still captivates Washington. After the 2001 attacks, Poindexter returned to government with a controversial program, called Total Information Awareness, to detect the next attack. Today it is a secretly funded operation that can gather personal information on every American and millions of others worldwide. But Poindexter's dream has also become America's nightmare. Despite billions of dollars spent on this digital quest since the Reagan era, we still can't discern future threats in the vast data cloud that surrounds us all. But the government can now spy on its citizens with an ease that was impossible-and illegal-just a few years ago. Drawing on unprecedented access to the people who pioneered this high-tech spycraft, Harris shows how it has shifted from the province of right- wing technocrats to a cornerstone of the Obama administration's war on terror. Harris puts us behind the scenes and in front of the screens where twenty-first-century spycraft was born. We witness Poindexter quietly working from the private sector to get government to buy in to his programs in the early nineties. We see an army major agonize as he carries out an order to delete the vast database he's gathered on possible terror cells-and on thousands of innocent Americans-months before 9/11. We follow General Mike Hayden as he persuades the Bush administration to secretly monitor Americans based on a flawed interpretation of the law. After Congress publicly bans the Total Information Awareness program in 2003, we watch as it is covertly shifted to a "black op," which protects it from public scrutiny. When the next crisis comes, our government will inevitably crack down on civil liberties, but it will be no better able to identify new dangers. This is the outcome of a dream first hatched almost three decades ago, and The Watchers is an engrossing, unnerving wake-up call.