Intelligence History

In this riveting feat of reporting, Kashmir Hill uncovers the secret history of Clearview AI, a mysterious start-up selling an app that can identify you using just a blurry photo of your face. The app can find your name, your social media profiles, your friends and family – even your home address. Launched by computer engineer Hoan Ton-That and politician Richard Schwartz, and assisted by a cast of controversial characters with connections to the alt-right, this app would have society-altering potential.

The Skripal Files is a remarkable and definitive account of Sergei Skripal’s story, which lays bare the new spy war between Russia and the West. Mark Urban, the diplomatic and defense editor for the BBC, met with Skripal in the months before his poisoning, learning about his career in Russian military intelligence, how he became a British agent, his imprisonment in Russia, and the events that led to his release. Skripal’s first-hand accounts and experiences reveal the high stakes of a new spy game that harks back to the chilliest days of the Cold War.

Two of the biggest design problems in Artificial Intelligence are how to build robots that behave in line with human values and how to stop them ever going rogue. One under-explored solution to these alignment and control problems might be to examine how these are already addressed in the design of humans. Robot Souls looks at developments in AI and reviews the emergence of ideas of consciousness and the soul. It places our 'junk code' in this context and argues that it is time to foreground that code, and to use it to look again at how we are programming AI.

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.

Cambridge spy Guy Burgess was a supreme networker. He also set a gold standard for conflicts of interest, working variously for the BBC, MI5, MI6, the War Office, the Ministry of Information and the KGB. Yet Burgess was never challenged by Britain's spy catchers: his superiors were convinced he was too much of a liability to have been recruited by Moscow. Now, with a major new release of hundreds of files into the National Archives, Purvis and Hulbert reveal just how this charming establishment insider was able to fool everyone for so long.

Since the inception of the Secret Service Bureau back in 1909, women have worked at the very heart of British secret intelligence - yet their contributions have been all but written out of history. Now, drawing on private and previously-classified documents, leading historian Claire Hubbard-Hall brings their gripping true stories to life.

Unveil the hidden forces that have shaped history. The Secret Societies of All Ages and Countries is a groundbreaking two-volume work that explores the clandestine organizations that have operated behind the scenes for centuries. Charles William Heckethorn presents an exhaustive account of secret brotherhoods, political conspiracies, and occult traditions that have influenced governments, revolutions, and ideologies across the globe.

In 1917, a band of communist revolutionaries stormed the Winter Palace of Tsar Nicholas II - a dramatic and explosive act marking that Vladimir Lenin’s communist revolution was now underway. But Lenin would not be satisfied with overthrowing the Tsar. His goal was a global revolt that would topple all Western capitalist regimes - starting with the British Empire. Russian Roulette tells the spectacular and harrowing story of the British spies in revolutionary Russia and their mission to stop Lenin’s red tide from washing across the free world.

The South’s James Bulloch, charming and devious, was to acquire a cutting-edge clandestine fleet intended to break President Lincoln’s blockade of Confederate ports, sink Northern merchant vessels, and drown the U.S. Navy’s mightiest ships at sea. The profits from gunrunning and smuggling cotton—Dixie’s notorious “white gold”—would finance the scheme. Opposing him was Thomas Dudley, a resolute Quaker lawyer and abolitionist. He was determined to stop Bulloch by any means necessary in a spy-versus-spy game of move and countermove, gambit and sacrifice, intrigue and betrayal.

A brilliant, invigorating account of the great writers on both sides of the Iron Curtain who played the dangerous games of espionage, dissidence, and subversion that changed the course of the Cold War.

In The Secret Sentry, Aid provides the first-ever full history of Americas largest security apparatus, the National Security Agency.This comprehensive account traces the growth of the agency from 1945 to the present through critical moments in its history, from the cold war up to its ongoing involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In The Crash of Flight 3804, Investigative Journalist Charlotte Dennett digs into her father’s counterintelligence work, which pitted him against America’s wartime allies - the British, the French, and the Russians - in a covert battle for geopolitical and economic influence in the Middle East. Through vivid storytelling, extensive research, and deep analysis of region-defining maps, she reveals how feverish competition among intelligence networks, military, and Big Oil interests have fueled indiscriminate attacks and targeted killings that continue to this day.

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. 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.

This audiobook explains why AI is unique, what legal and ethical problems it could cause, and how we can address them. It argues that AI is unlike any other previous technology, owing to its ability to take decisions independently and unpredictably. This gives rise to three issues: responsibility - who is liable if AI causes harm; rights - the disputed moral and pragmatic grounds for granting AI legal personality; and the ethics surrounding the decision-making of AI.

With relentless media coverage, breathtaking events, and extraordinary congressional and independent investigations, it is hard to believe that we still might not know some of the most significant facts about the presidency of George W. Bush. Yet beneath the surface events of the Bush presidency lies a secret history, a series of hidden events that makes a mockery of current debate.

In Twilight Warriors, award-winning foreign correspondent James Kitfield introduces us to the tight-knit brotherhood that strives to keep the United States safe from the dimly understood threats it now faces. Together these men have broken down the boundaries between their respective agencies to engineer a network-centric way of fighting using a seamless web of intelligence analysts, information networks, FBI forensics experts, and Special Forces units to take the fight to America's enemies as never before.

On May 1, 1960, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union just weeks before a peace summit between the two nations. The CIA concocted a cover story for President Eisenhower to deliver, assuring him that no one could have survived a fall from that altitude. But against all odds, pilot Francis Gary Powers emerged from the wreckage and was seized by the KGB. Award-winning journalist Monte Reel reveals how the U-2 spy program, principally devised by four men working in secret, upended the Cold War and carved a new mission for the CIA.

Can you keep a secret? Maybe you can, but the United States government cannot. Since the birth of our country, nations large and small, from Russia and China to Ghana and Ecuador, have stolen the most precious secrets of the United States. Written by Michael Sulick, former director of CIA's clandestine service, Spying in America presents a history of more than 30 espionage cases inside the United States.

As far as the public knew, Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) did not exist. After the defeat of the French Army and Britain's retreat from the Continent in June 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill created the top-secret espionage operation to "set Europe ablaze". Of the many brave men and women conscripted, two Anglo-American recruits, the Starr brothers, stood out to become legendary figures to the guerillas, assassins, and saboteurs they led.

In August 1944, the most successful POW escape of the Second World War took place—106 Allied prisoners were freed from a camp in Maribor, in present-day Slovenia. The escape was organized not by officers, but by two ordinary soldiers: Australian Ralph Churches (a bank clerk before the war) and Londoner Les Laws (a jazz pianist by profession), with the help of intelligence officer Franklin Lindsay. The American was on a mission to work with the partisans who moved like ghosts through the Alps, ambushing and evading Nazi forces.