Military Intelligence History

John (Jack) Downey, Jr., was a new Yale graduate in the post-World War II years who, like other Yale grads, was recruited by the young CIA. He joined the Agency and was sent to Japan in 1952, during the Korean War. In a violation of protocol, he took part in an air drop that failed and was captured over China. His sources on the ground had been compromised, and his identity was known. Although he first tried to deny who he was, he eventually admitted the truth. But government policy forbade ever acknowledging the identity of spies, no matter the consequences.

In 1943, as the war against Nazi Germany raged abroad, President Franklin Roosevelt had a critical goal: a face-to-face sit-down with his allies Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill. This first-ever meeting of the Big Three in Tehran, Iran, would decide some of the most crucial strategic details of the war. Yet when the Nazis found out about the meeting, their own secret plan took shape—an assassination plot that would’ve changed history.

In Jawbreaker, Gary Berntsen, until recently one of the CIA's most decorated officers, comes out from under cover for the first time to describe his no-holds-barred pursuit of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

In 2017, the Defense Intelligence Agency began to produce a series of unclassifed Defense Intelligence overviews of major foreign military challenges we face. This volume provides details on China’s defense and military goals, strategy, plans, and intentions; the organization, structure, and capability of its military supporting those goals; and the enabling infrastructure and industrial base. This product and other reports in the series are intended to inform our public, our leaders, the national security community, and partner nations.

After Hamas’s brutal massacre against Israel in October 2023, the Mossad goes after the terrorist group’s leaders wherever they are. When one of Israel’s targeted killings occurs on Turkey’s soil, that country’s president promises severe retaliation. Now, Nir Tavor’s team is in a race against time, alliances, and deadly threats to stop this attack from the skies that could annihilate Israel’s gas fields and destroy their economy.

Its code name was “Operation Gold”, a wildly audacious CIA plan to construct a clandestine tunnel into East Berlin to tap into critical KGB and Soviet military telecommunication lines. The tunnel, crossing the border between the American and Soviet sectors, would have to be 1,500 feet (the length of the Empire State Building) with state-of-the-art equipment, built and operated literally under the feet of their Cold War adversaries.

Who were the three men the American and Soviet superpowers exchanged at Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge and Checkpoint Charlie in the first prisoner exchange of the nuclear age? Bridge of Spies vividly traces their paths to that electrifying moment on February 10, 1962, when their fates helped to define the conflicts and lethal undercurrents of the most dangerous years of the cold war.

At the outbreak of World War II, MI6 spymaster Thomas Kendrick arrived at the Tower of London to set up a top secret operation: German prisoners' cells were to be bugged and listeners installed behind the walls to record and transcribe their private conversations. This mission proved so effective that it would go on to be set up at three further sites - and provide the Allies with crucial insight into new technology being developed by the Nazis. In this astonishing history, Helen Fry uncovers the inner workings of the bugging operation.

In 1953, a top-secret manual teaching agents sleight-of-hand and other deception techniques was written for the CIA by America’s then most famous magician. All copies were believed destroyed by the CIA’s purge of the infamous MKULTRA documents in 1973, and there was no proof of the manual’s existence . . . until a copy was discovered among the CIA’s recently declassified archives. The manual in this work is thought to represent the only surviving copy of magician John Mulholland’s instructions.

In December 2009, a group of the CIA’s top terrorist hunters gathered at a secret base in Khost, Afghanistan, to greet a rising superspy: Humam Khalil al-Balawi, a Jordanian double-agent who infiltrated the upper ranks of al-Qaeda. For months, he had sent shocking revelations from inside the terrorist network and now promised to help the CIA assassinate Osama bin Laden’s top deputy. Instead, as he stepped from his car, he detonated a 30-pound bomb strapped to his chest, instantly killing seven CIA operatives....

The Illegals captures the untold history of Russia's deep cover spy programme, following its evolution from the talented "great Illegals" of the 1920s and '30s up to the 21st century, when agents maintained their fake identities and loyalties even after the fall of the Soviet Union. Through hundreds of interviews and access to never-before- seen archives, Shaun Walker exposes the colourful history of the KGB's most secretive espionage project.

Based on interviews with more than 40 survivors, knowledgeable political insiders, and Soviet archives of the period, investigative writer Joan Mellen presents evidence suggesting complicity between US and Israeli intelligence in the attack on Liberty and the more than 50-year long cover-up. What were the underlying motives? Was this a false flag operation conducted in the midst of the Six-Day War? Was it conceivable that Israel would have initiated such an operation without a green light from the United States?

In 1984, Michael Vickers took charge of the CIA’s secret war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. After inheriting a strategy aimed at imposing costs on the Soviets for their invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, Vickers transformed the covert campaign into an all-out effort to help the Afghan resistance win their war. More than any other American, he was responsible for the outcome in Afghanistan that led to the end of the Cold War. In By All Means Available, Vickers recounts his remarkable career.

In 1942, the Allies were losing, Germany seemed unstoppable, and every able man in England was on the front lines. To "set Europe ablaze," in the words of Winston Churchill, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), whose spies were trained in everything from demolition to sharpshooting, was forced to do something unprecedented: recruit women. Thirty-nine answered the call, leaving their lives and families to become saboteurs in France.

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.

Stalking the Red Bear, for the first time ever, describes the action principally from the perspective of a commanding officer of a nuclear submarine during the Cold War - the one man aboard a sub who makes the critical decisions - taking us closer to the Soviet target than any work on submarine espionage has ever done before. This is the untold story of a covert submarine espionage operation against the Soviet Union during the Cold War as experienced by the commanding officer of an active submarine.

END OF EXISTENCE, the second instalment of the Kirkland Finn military thriller series, tells the story of a female environmentalist who has grown tired of humankind. Written in a cinematic style with relentless action from Hereford in the UK to the wastelands of Russia, Forrest of Finland and Lapland of Sweden, Andy Munro’s END OF EXISTENCE is action-packed fiction from start to end. Follow the adventures of SAS Captain Kirkland Finn and his squad of highly skilled covert operative soldiers as they fight to eliminate a terrorist biological warfare threat with the potential to wipe out ...

Karen Abbott illuminates one of the most fascinating yet little-known aspects of the Civil War: The stories of four courageous women - a socialite, a farmgirl, an abolitionist, and a widow - who were spies. After shooting a Union soldier in her front hall with a pocket pistol, Belle Boyd became a courier and spy for the Confederate army, using her charms to seduce men on both sides. Emma Edmonds cut off her hair and assumed the identity of a man to enlist as a Union private, witnessing the bloodiest battles of the Civil War.

In a world of renewed great power competition, the challenges facing the United States in managing its relations with China and Russia are daunting. But with "A New Cold War Global Strategy," you can get ahead of the curve in understanding this complex conflict. This comprehensive analysis of the relationships among these three global powers draws on insights from history, economics, law, and philosophy to provide a strategic roadmap for the United States. From the resource dependence and demographic constraints of dictatorship to the isolationism and withdrawal of democracy, the book ...

The Free World War III - The Sealed Globe continues the story of a struggle to end the ceaseless and crippling arms races between opposing ideologies, and of a war to finally liberate humanity from the madness of perpetual conflict. As with the first two books in the series, our own tragic history is depicted from the viewpoint of a peaceful utopia that uses simulations generated with the aid of the limitless computing power and artificial intelligence of the future. Conversely, the main storyline in which General George S. Patton survived his car accident, continues to describe the events ...