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Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed
By Leo Janos, Ben R. Rich. 1994
From the development of the U-2 to the Stealth fighter, the never-before-told story behind America's high-stakes quest to dominate the…
skies Skunk Works is the true story of America's most secret and successful aerospace operation. As recounted by Ben Rich, the operation's brilliant boss for nearly two decades, the chronicle of Lockheed's legendary Skunk Works is a drama of cold war confrontations and Gulf War air combat, of extraordinary feats of engineering and human achievement against fantastic odds. Here are up-close portraits of the maverick band of scientists and engineers who made the Skunk Works so renowned. Filled with telling personal anecdotes and high adventure, with narratives from the CIA and from Air Force pilots who flew the many classified, risky missions, this book is a riveting portrait of the most spectacular aviation triumphs of the twentieth century.They Dared Return: The True Story of Jewish Spies Behind the Lines in Nazi Germany
By O'Donnell, Patrick K.. 2009
At the height of World War II, with the Third Reich’s final solution in full operation, a small group of…
Jews who had barely escaped the Nazis did the unthinkable: They went back. Spies now, these men took on a dangerous mission behind enemy lines. They Dared Return is their storya tale of adventure, espionage, love, and revenge.6 Nightmares: Real Threats in a Dangerous World and How America Can Meet Them
By Anthony Lake. 2000
Part important warning, part riveting memoir, former National Security Advisor Anthony Lake paints six terrifying scenarios that threaten our country's…
safety & shows how the government is prepared to face them - & how it is not. Though we live in a time of peace, serious threats to our national security lie just beyond the horizon. In Six Nightmares, former National Security Advisor Anthony Lake examines six major threats to America's safety that could arise from global terrorism, the proliferation of nuclear weapons & other serious risks. Weaving in firsth& views of key recent decisions, he shows how these threats could become real, how the government is prepared to face them & the alarming ways in which it is not.Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State
By Dana Priest, William M. Arkin. 2012
The top-secret world that the government created in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks has become so enormous, so unwieldy,…
and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs or exactly how many agencies duplicate work being done elsewhere. The result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe may be putting us in greater danger. In TOP SECRET AMERICA, award-winning reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin uncover the enormous size, shape, mission, and consequences of this invisible universe of over 1,300 government facilities in every state in America; nearly 2,000 outside companies used as contractors; and more than 850,000 people granted "Top Secret" security clearance. A landmark exposé of a new, secret "Fourth Branch" of American government, TOP SECRET AMERICA is a tour de force of investigative reporting-and a book sure to spark national and international alarm.A Cool and Lonely Courage: The Untold Story of Sister Spies in Occupied France
By Susan Ottaway. 2013
The incredible true story of British special agents Eileen and Jacqueline Nearne, sisters who risked everything to fight for freedom…
during the Second World War. When elderly recluse Eileen Nearne died, few suspected that the quiet little old lady was a decorated WWII war hero. Volunteering to serve for British intelligence at age 21, Eileen was posted to Nazi-occupied France to send encoded messages of crucial importance for the Allies, until her capture by the Gestapo.Eileen was not the only agent in her family---her sister Jacqueline was a courier for the French resistance. While Jacqueline narrowly avoided arrest, Eileen was tortured by the Nazis, then sent to the infamous Ravensbrück women's concentration camp. Astonishingly, this resourceful young woman eventually escaped her captors and found her way to the advancing American army.In this amazing true story of triumph and tragedy, Susan Ottaway unveils the secret lives of two sisters who sacrificed themselves to defend their country.**Includes a Reading Group Guide exclusive to this edition.**They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy
By Robert Scheer, Sara Beladi. 2015
They Know Everything About You is a groundbreaking exposé of how government agencies and tech corporations monitor virtually every aspect…
of our lives, and a fierce defense of privacy and democracy. The revelation that the government has access to a vast trove of personal online data demonstrates that we already live in a surveillance society. But the erosion of privacy rights extends far beyond big government. Intelligence agencies such as the NSA and CIA are using Silicon Valley corporate partners as their data spies. Seemingly progressive tech companies are joining forces with snooping government agencies to create a brave new world of wired tyranny. Life in the digital age poses an unprecedented challenge to our constitutional liberties, which guarantee a wall of privacy between the individual and the government. The basic assumption of democracy requires the ability of the individual to experiment with ideas and associations within a protected zone, as secured by the Constitution. The unobserved moment embodies the most basic of human rights, yet it is being squandered in the name of national security and consumer convenience. Robert Scheer argues that the information revolution, while a source of public enlightenment, contains the seeds of freedom’s destruction in the form of a surveillance state that exceeds the wildest dream of the most ingenious dictator. The technology of surveillance, unless vigorously resisted, represents an existential threat to the liberation of the human spirit.Find, Fix, Finish: Inside the Counterterrorism Campaigns that Killed bin Laden and Devastated Al Qaeda
By Aki Peritz, Eric Rosenbach. 2012
A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel: Murder, Money, and an Epic Power Struggle in China
By Wenguang Huang, Pin Ho. 2013
The downfall of Bo Xilai in China was more than a darkly thrilling mystery. It revealed a cataclysmic internal power…
struggle between Communist Party factions, one that reached all the way to China's new president Xi Jinping.The scandalous story of the corruption of the Bo Xilai family-the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood; Bo's secret lovers; the secret maneuverings of Bo's supporters; the hasty trial and sentencing of Gu Kailai, Bo's wife-was just the first rumble of a seismic power struggle that continues to rock the very foundation of China's all-powerful Communist Party. By the time it is over, the machinations in Beijing and throughout the country that began with Bo's fall could affect China's economic development and disrupt the world's political and economic order.Pin Ho and Wenguang Huang have pieced together the details of this fascinating political drama from firsthand reporting and an unrivaled array of sources, some very high in the Chinese government. This was the first scandal in China to play out in the international media-details were leaked, sometimes invented, to non-Chinese news outlets as part of the power plays that rippled through the government. The attempt to manipulate the Western media, especially, was a fundamental dimension to the story, and one that affected some of the early reporting. A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel returns to the scene of the crime and shows not only what happened in Room 1605 but how the threat of the story was every bit as important in the life and death struggle for power that followed. It touched celebrities and billionaires and redrew the cast of the new leadership of the Communist Party. The ghost of Neil Heywood haunts China to this day.The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From al Qa'ida to ISIS
By Bill Harlow, Michael Morell. 2015
New York Times Bestseller Like See No Evil and At the Center of the Storm, this is a vivid and…
gripping account of the Central Intelligence Agency, a life of secrets, and a war in the shadows. Called the "Bob Gates of his generation" by Politico, Michael Morell was a top CIA officer who played a critical role in the most important counterterrorism events of the past two decades. Morell was by President Bush's side on 9/11/01 when terrorists struck America and in the White House Situation Room advising President Obama on 5/1/11 when America struck back-killing Usama bin Ladin. From the subway bombings in London to the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Morell always seemed to find himself on the cusp of history. A superb intelligence analyst and briefer, Morell now presents THE GREAT WAR OF OUR TIME, where he uses his talents to offer an unblinking and insightful assessment of CIA's counterterrorism successes and failures of the past twenty years and, perhaps most important, shows readers that the threat of terrorism did not die with Bin Ladin in Abbottabad. Morell illuminates new, growing threats from terrorist groups that, if unaddressed, could leave the country vulnerable to attacks that would dwarf 9/11 in magnitude. He writes of secret, back-channel negotiations he conducted with foreign spymasters and regime leaders in a desperate attempt to secure a peaceful outcome to unrest launched during the "Arab Spring." Morell describes how efforts to throw off the shackles of oppression have too often resulted in broken nation states unable or unwilling to join the fight against terrorism. Along the way Morell provides intimate portraits of the leadership styles of figures ranging from Presidents Bush and Obama, CIA directors Tenet, Goss, Hayden, Petraeus, Panetta, and Brennan, and a host of others.Agent M: The Lives and Spies of MI5's Maxwell Knight
By Henry Hemming. 2017
Spying is the art of knowing who to trust-and who to betrayMaxwell Knight was perhaps the greatest spymaster in history,…
rumored to be the real-life inspiration for the James Bond character "M." He did more than anyone in his era to combat the rising threat of fascism in Britain during World War II, in spite of his own history inside this movement. He was also truly eccentric--a thrice-married jazz aficionado who kept a menagerie of exotic pets--and almost totally unqualified for espionage.Yet he had a gift for turning practically anyone into a fearless secret agent. Knight's work revolutionized British intelligence, pioneering the use of female agents, among other accomplishments. In telling Knight's remarkable story, Agent M also reveals for the first time in print the names and stories of some of the men and women recruited by Knight, on behalf of MI5, who were asked to infiltrate the country's most dangerous political organizations.Drawing on a vast array of original sources, Agent M reveals not only the story of one of the world's greatest intelligence operators, but the sacrifices and courage required to confront fascism during a nation's darkest time.Destination Casablanca: Exile, Espionage, and the Battle for North Africa in World War II
By Meredith Hindley. 2017
In November 1942, as a part of Operation Torch, 33,000 American soldiers sailed undetected across the Atlantic and stormed the…
beaches of French Morocco. Seventy-four hours later, the Americans controlled the country and one of the most valuable wartime ports: Casablanca.In the years preceding, Casablanca had evolved from an exotic travel destination to a key military target after France's surrender to Germany. Jewish refugees from Europe poured in, hoping to obtain visas and passage to the United States and beyond. Nazi agents and collaborators infiltrated the city in search of power and loyalty. The resistance was not far behind, as shopkeepers, celebrities, former French Foreign Legionnaires, and disgruntled bureaucrats formed a network of Allied spies. But once in American hands, Casablanca became a crucial logistical hub in the fight against Germany--and the site of Roosevelt and Churchill's demand for "unconditional surrender."Rife with rogue soldiers, power grabs, and diplomatic intrigue, Destination Casablanca is the riveting and untold story of this glamorous city--memorialized in the classic film that was rush-released in 1942 to capitalize on the drama that was unfolding in North Africa at the heart of World War II.Power Wars: The Relentless Rise of Presidential Authority and Secrecy
By Charlie Savage. 2015
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage's penetrating investigation of the Obama presidency and the national security stateBarack Obama campaigned on a…
promise of change from George W. Bush's "global war on terror." Yet from indefinite detention and drone strikes to surveillance and military tribunals, Obama ended up continuing-and in some cases expanding-many policies he inherited. What happened? In Power Wars, Charlie Savage looks inside the Obama administration's national security legal and policy team in a way that no one has before. Based on exclusive interviews with more than 150 current and former officials and access to previously unreported documents, he lays bare their internal deliberations, including emotional debates over the fates of detainees held on torture-tainted evidence and acts of war that lacked congressional authorization. He tells the inside stories of how Obama came to order the killing of an American citizen, preside over an unprecedented crackdown on leaks, and keep a then-secret National Security Agency program that collected records of every American's phone calls.Savage also pieces together the first comprehensive history of how American surveillance secretly developed over the past thirty-five years, synthesizing recent revelations and filling in gaps with new reporting. And he provides lucid explanations of legal dilemmas in a way that non-lawyers can understand. Highlighted by new information about the pivotal aftermath to the failed Christmas underwear bombing and the planning for the Osama bin Laden raid, Savage's own eyewitness reporting at Guantánamo, and detailed accounts of closed-door meetings at the highest levels of government, Power Wars equips readers to understand the legacy of Obama's presidency.Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down The White House
By John O'Connor, Mark Felt. 2006
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE starring Liam Neeson.The covert Watergate whistleblower tells the story of the dramatic showdown between the…
FBI and the Nixon White HouseIn the 1970s, Mark Felt was given the code name "Deep Throat" and shared intelligence on the Watergate break-in with a young reporter from the Washington Post named Bob Woodward. Thus began the greatest political scandal in the twentieth century, which would besmirch an entire administration and bring down a presidency.A patriotic man, Felt only revealed his role in our national history as he neared the end of his life. Based on his personal recollections, Mark Felt chronicles his FBI career, from the end of the great American crime wave and World War II to the culture wars of the 1960s and his penetration of the Weather Underground; provides rich historical and personal context for his role in the Watergate scandal; and depicts how he came to feel that the FBI needed a "Lone Ranger" to protect it from White House corruption.Harpoon: Inside the Covert War Against Terrorism's Money Masters
By Samuel M. Katz, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner. 2017
A revelatory account of the cloak-and-dagger Israeli campaign to target the finances fueling terror organizations--an effort that became the blueprint…
for U.S. efforts to combat threats like ISIS and drug cartels. ISIS boasted $2.4 billion of revenue in 2015, yet for too long the global war on terror overlooked financial warfare as an offensive strategy. "Harpoon," the creation of Mossad legend Meir Dagan, directed spies, soldiers, and attorneys to disrupt and destroy money pipelines and financial institutions that paid for the bloodshed perpetrated by Hamas, Hezbollah, and other groups. Written by an attorney who worked with Harpoon and a bestselling journalist, Harpoon offers a gripping story of the Israeli-led effort, now joined by the Americans, to choke off the terrorists' oxygen supply, money, via unconventional warfare.AN EXPLOSIVE , REVELATORY ASSESSMENT OF THE GREATEST BETRAYAL IN AMERICAN HISTORYWhen former FBI Director Robert Mueller III was assigned…
to the Special Counsel investigation looking into the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 US election, many Americans felt relieved. But when the report was delivered in April 2019, it was clear that the case was far from closed-and pinning Trump down on conspiracy charges was going to be a lot more difficult than it had first seemed. In The Plot to Betray America, Malcolm Nance, New York Times bestselling author and renowned intelligence expert, reveals exactly how Trump and his inner circle conspired, coordinated, communicated, and eventually strategized to commit the greatest act of treachery in the history of the United States: compromising the presidential oath of office in exchange for power and personal enrichment. Seduced by the promises of riches dangled in front of them by Vladimir Putin, the Trump administration eagerly decided to reap the rewards of the plan to put a Kremlin-friendly crony in the Oval Office. And instead of interfering, the Republican Party's faithful William Barr, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, Mitch McConnell, Roger Stone, George Papadopoulos, and Jeff Sessions among others did everything they could to facilitate Trump's damage to national security to fill his own pockets. Through in-depth research and interviews with intelligence experts and insiders, Nance charts Trump's deep financial ties to Russia through his family's investments, including those of Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner, and the corrupt behavior of his other double-crossing pro-Moscow associates. Only by untangling the spider web of personal and financial relationships linking the White House to the Kremlin can we start to free ourselves from the constricting clutches of our foreign adversaries and work to rebuild our fractured nation. In this geopolitical page-turner, The Plot to Betray America ultimately sketches the tracks and blueprint of the Trump administration's conspiracy against our country-and how we can still fight to defend democracy, protect our national security, and save the Constitution. A New York Times BestsellerSpies in the Congo: America's Atomic Mission in World War II
By Susan Williams. 2016
In the 1940s, the brightest minds of the United States and Nazi Germany raced to West Africa with a single…
mission: to secure the essential ingredient of the atomic bomb-and to make sure nobody saw them doing itAlbert Einstein told President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 that the world's only supply of uniquely high-quality uranium ore-the key ingredient for bomb- could be found in the Katanga province of the Belgian Congo at the Shinkolobwe Mine. Once the US Manhattan Project was committed to developing atomic weapons for the war against Germany and Japan, the rush to procure this uranium became a top priority-one deemed "vital to the welfare of the United States.”But covertly exporting it from Africa posed a major risk: the ore had to travel via a spy-infested Angolan port or 1,500 miles by rail through the Congo, and then be shipped by boats or Pan Am Clippers to safety in the United States. It could be poached or smuggled at any point on the orders of Nazi Germany. To combat that threat, the US Office of Strategic Services sent in a team of intrepid spies, led by Wilbur Owings "Dock” Hogue, to be America's eyes and ears and to protect its most precious and destructive cargo. Packed with newly discovered details from American and British archives, this is the gripping, true story of the unsung heroism of a handful of good men-and one woman-in colonial Africa who risked their lives in the fight against fascism and helped deny Hitler his atomic bomb.Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump
By David Corn, Michael Isikoff. 2018
The incredible, harrowing account of how American democracy was hacked by Moscow as part of a covert operation to influence…
the U.S. election and help Donald Trump gain the presidency. RUSSIAN ROULETTE is a story of political skullduggery unprecedented in American history. It weaves together tales of international intrigue, cyber espionage, and superpower rivalry. After U.S.-Russia relations soured, as Vladimir Putin moved to reassert Russian strength on the global stage, Moscow trained its best hackers and trolls on U.S. political targets and exploited WikiLeaks to disseminate information that could affect the 2016 election. The Russians were wildly successful and the great break-in of 2016 was no "third-rate burglary." It was far more sophisticated and sinister -- a brazen act of political espionage designed to interfere with American democracy. At the end of the day, Trump, the candidate who pursued business deals in Russia, won. And millions of Americans were left wondering, what the hell happened? This story of high-tech spying and multiple political feuds is told against the backdrop of Trump's strange relationship with Putin and the curious ties between members of his inner circle -- including Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn -- and Russia. RUSSIAN ROULETTE chronicles and explores this bizarre scandal, explains the stakes, and answers one of the biggest questions in American politics: How and why did a foreign government infiltrate the country's political process and gain influence in Washington? A New York Times BestsellerBest of Enemies: The Last Great Spy Story of the Cold War
By Gus Russo. 2018
The thrilling story of two Cold War spies, CIA case officer Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko -- improbable…
friends at a time when they should have been anything but.In 1978, CIA maverick Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko were new arrivals on the Washington, DC intelligence scene, with Jack working out of the CIA's counterintelligence office and Gennady out of the Soviet Embassy. Both men, already notorious iconoclasts within their respective agencies, were assigned to seduce the other into betraying his country in the urgent final days of the Cold War, but instead the men ended up becoming the best of friends-blood brothers. Theirs is a friendship that never should have happened, and their story is chock full of treachery, darkly comic misunderstandings, bureaucratic inanity, the Russian Mafia, and landmark intelligence breakthroughs of the past half century.In BEST OF ENEMIES, two espionage cowboys reveal how they became key behind-the-scenes players in solving some of the most celebrated spy stories of the twentieth century, including the crucial discovery of the Soviet mole Robert Hanssen, the 2010 Spy Swap which freed Gennady from Soviet imprisonment, and how Robert De Niro played a real-life role in helping Gennady stay alive during his incarceration in Russia after being falsely accused of spying for the Americans. Through their eyes, we see the distinctions between the Russian and American methods of conducting espionage and the painful birth of the new Russia, whose leader, Vladimir Putin, dreams he can roll back to the ideals of the old USSR.The Moscow Rules: The Secret CIA Tactics That Helped America Win the Cold War
By Jonna Mendez, Antonio J. Mendez. 2019
From the spymaster and inspiration for the movie Argo: how a group of brilliant but under-supported CIA operatives developed breakthrough…
spy tactics that helped turn the tide of the Cold WarAntonio Mendez and his future wife Jonna were CIA operatives working to spy on Moscow in the late 1970s, at one of the most dangerous moments in the Cold War. Soviets kept files on all foreigners, studied their patterns, and tapped their phones. Intelligence work was effectively impossible. The Soviet threat loomed larger than ever.The Moscow Rules tells the story of the intelligence breakthroughs that turned the odds in America's favor. As experts in disguise, Antonio and Jonna were instrumental in developing a series of tactics--Hollywood-inspired identity swaps, ingenious evasion techniques, and an armory of James Bond-style gadgets--that allowed CIA officers to outmaneuver the KGB.As Russia again rises in opposition to America, this remarkable story is a tribute to those who risked everything for their country, and to the ingenuity that allowed them to succeed.The untold story of how Russia refined the art and science of targeted assassination abroad-while Western spies watched in horror…
as their governments failed to guard against the threat They thought they had found a safe haven in the green hills of England. They were wrong. One by one, the Russian oligarchs, dissidents, and gangsters who fled to Britain after Vladimir Putin came to power dropped dead in strange or suspicious circumstances. One by one, their British lawyers and fixers met similarly grisly ends. Yet, one by one, the British authorities shut down every investigation-and carried on courting the Kremlin.The spies in the riverside headquarters of MI6 looked on with horror as the scope of the Kremlin's global killing campaign became all too clear. And, across the Atlantic, American intelligence officials watched with mounting alarm as the bodies piled up, concerned that the tide of death could spread to the United States. Those fears intensified when a one-time Kremlin henchman was found bludgeoned to death in a Washington, D.C. penthouse. But it wasn't until Putin's assassins unleashed a deadly chemical weapon on the streets of Britain, endangering hundreds of members of the public in a failed attempt to slay the double agent Sergei Skripal, that Western governments were finally forced to admit that the killing had spun out of control.Unflinchingly documenting the growing web of death on British and American soil, Heidi Blake bravely exposes the Kremlin's assassination campaign as part of Putin's ruthless pursuit of global dominance-and reveals why Western governments have failed to stop the bloodshed. The unforgettable story that emerges whisks us from London's high-end night clubs to Miami's million-dollar hideouts, ultimately rendering a bone-chilling portrait of money, betrayal, and murder, written with the pace and propulsive power of a thriller.Based on a vast trove of unpublished documents, bags of discarded police evidence, and interviews with hundreds of insiders, this heart-stopping international investigation uncovers one of the most important- and terrifying-geopolitical stories of our time.