"The entire vast, modern American intelligence system--the amalgam of three-letter spy services of many stripes--can be traced back to the dire straits the world faced at the dawn of World War II. Prior to 1940, the United States had no organization to recruit spies and steal secrets or launch covert campaigns against enemies overseas and just a few codebreakers, isolated in windowless vaults. It was only through Winston Churchill's determination...

Tells of Joliffe's clandestine 1994 journey across the Indonesian archipelago pursued by the Suharto dictatorship's notorious secret police to interview East Timorese guerrilla commander Nino Konis Santana. Part memoir, part adventure story, it is written from the diaries of the journey and interwoven with those of intrepid nineteenth-century traveller Anna Forbes, who also narrowly escaped death in the East Timor mountains.

Ultra, the name given to information gained from the deciphering of messages passed by the enemy in code during the Second World War, was certainly an invaluable asset to the Allies; but its application gave rise to other problems. If the information gained was used too freely, the enemy would soon suspect that their radio traffic was being intercepted and read, and would take the necessary counter-measures. Fortunately for the Americans in the Pacific,...

The fascinating, untold story of how British intelligence secretly used homing pigeons as part of a clandestine espionage operation to gather information, communicate, and coordinate with members of the Resistance to defeat the Nazis in occupied Europe during World War II. Between 1941 and 1944, British intelligence dropped sixteen thousand homing pigeons in an arc across Nazi-occupied Europe, from Bordeaux, France to Copenhagen, Denmark, as part...

The "author and his colleagues at the investigative website, The Intercept, expose stunning new details about America's secret assassination policy."--NoveList. When the US government discusses drone strikes publicly, it offers assurances that such operations are a more precise alternative to troops on the ground, but the implicit message from the administration has been trust, but don't verify. The online magazine The Intercept obtained a cache...

Documents the story of a covert submarine espionage operation against the Soviet Union during the Cold War as experienced by a commanding officer of the U.S.S. Blackfin, a submarine that faced high risks in the Soviet-controlled waters north of the Arctic Circle.