Intelligence History

The Angels (CIA Area 51 Chronicles – Book 1) By TD Barnes The birth of CIA aerial reconnaissance. The race to build the U-2. The hidden history of Area 51. In this explosive first installment of The CIA Area 51 Chronicles, step into the shadowy world of Cold War espionage, where the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) battles for supremacy against the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps in a high-stakes struggle to control America’s aerial intelligence operations. At the height of Cold War paranoia, President Truman entrusts the CIA with an unprecedented mission—to ...

Major Richard J. "Dick" Meadows is renowned in military circles as a key figure in the development of the U.S. Army Special Operations. A highly decorated war veteran of the engagements in Korea and Vietnam, Meadows was instrumental in the founding of the U.S. Delta Force and hostage rescue force. Although he officially retired in 1977, Meadows could never leave the army behind, and he went undercover in the clandestine operations to free American hostages from Iran in 1980.

In the wake of World War II, four agents were critical in helping build a new organization that we now know as the CIA. Adelaide Hawkins, Mary Hutchison, Eloise Page, and Elizabeth Sudmeier, called the “wise gals” by their male colleagues because of their sharp sense of humor and even quicker intelligence, were not the stereotypical femme fatale of spy novels.

Independent filmmaker Mary Haverstick thought she’d stumbled onto the project of a lifetime—a biopic of aviation pioneer Jerrie Cobb, the key figure in a group of extraordinary women who in 1960 passed the same tests as the legendary male astronauts of the Mercury 7 but never went to space. Just as casting was set to begin, Haverstick received a mysterious warning from a government agent; soon she began to suspect that there was more to Jerrie’s story than what met the eye. As she dug deeper, she discovered that Jerrie’s life shadowed that of a mysterious CIA agent named June Cobb.

On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants stormed the American embassy in Tehran and captured dozens of American hostages, sparking a 444-day ordeal and a quake in global politics still reverberating today. But there's a little-known footnote to the crisis: six Americans escaped. And a midlevel agent named Antonio Mendez devised an ingenious yet incredibly risky plan to rescue them. Armed with foreign film visas, Mendez and an unlikely team of CIA agents and Hollywood insiders traveled to Tehran....

Sometimes, getting what you want is the worst thing that can happen. Dell Eckhart lives on the wrong side of the portal. The side where the ruin and devastation left behind by the war makes everyday life harder than it’s ever been. More than anything, he wants to win a ticket for passage through the portal. He’s running out of chances, but he’s not going to let that stop him. He needs that ticket. It’s the only way to save the one person he truly cares about. There’s just one problem. That person is actually an android. And androids aren’t allowed through the portal. Doesn’t ...

Penguin Audio presents Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark, read by Rob Shapiro. We stand at the beginning of a new era. What was once science fiction is fast becoming reality, as AI transforms war, crime, justice, jobs and society - and even our very sense of what it means to be human. More than any other technology, AI has the potential to revolutionise our collective future - and there's nobody better situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor and cofounder of the Future of Life Institute, whose work has helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial.

In 1946, genius linguist and codebreaker Meredith Gardner discovered that the KGB was running an extensive network of strategically placed spies inside the United States, whose goal was to infiltrate American intelligence and steal the nation's military and atomic secrets. Over the course of the next decade, he and young FBI supervisor Bob Lamphere worked together on Venona, a top-secret mission to uncover the Soviet agents and protect the Holy Grail of Cold War espionage - the atomic bomb.

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.

The Convenient Terrorist is the definitive inside account of the capture, torture, and detention of Abu Zubaydah, the first “high-value target” captured by the CIA after 9/11. But was Abu Zubaydah, who is still being indefinitely held by the United States under shadowy circumstances, the blue-ribbon capture that the Bush White House claimed he was?

In the dark days immediately after 9/11, the CIA turned to Dr. James Mitchell to help craft an interrogation program designed to elicit intelligence from just-captured top al-Qa'ida leaders and terror suspects. A civilian contractor who had spent years training US military members to resist interrogation should they be captured, Mitchell, aware of the urgent need to prevent impending catastrophic attacks, worked with the CIA to implement "enhanced interrogation techniques" - which included waterboarding.

Commander Tony Romella takes a small team on what is expected to be a routine one month trip to Casablanca, Morocco. Their mission is simply to provide a temporary Top Secret special intelligence communications center to support U.S. members of a high level Allied war planning meeting. An easy mission quickly goes awry. Only two months after the Allied assault and occupation of Casablanca (Operation TORCH), the city remains a hotbed of Vichy and German sympathizers and spies. One unexpected event leads to another. Things get dicey, with life threatening situations, shots fired and dead bodies.

This audiobook will help you get ready for the changes coming in the years ahead. Listen now. Packed with expert insights, the book addresses critical questions: How will AI alter employment, education, and global geopolitics? What ethical dilemmas will arise as humans interlace with AI through cyborgs and synthetic biology? Can we prepare for superintelligence and its utopian—or dystopian—outcomes?

The British Secret Service has been cloaked in secrecy and shrouded in myth since it was created 100 years ago. Our understanding of what it is to be a spy has been largely defined by the fictional worlds of James Bond and John le Carre. MI6 provides a unique and unprecedented insight into this secret world and the reality that lies behind the fiction.

In the whirlwind of accusations and recriminations that has attended the post 9/11 world, one man's vital testimony has been conspicuously absent. Candid and compelling, At the Center of the Storm is George Tenet's memoir of his life at the CIA - a revelatory look at the inner workings of America's top intelligence agency and its dealings with national leaders at home and abroad.

What if the greatest equation ever written was not one that explained the universe, but one that questioned existence itself? Elias Voltaire was a man who believed that everything could be calculated—every force, every motion, even human thought itself. But in his final moments, as he crossed the threshold of life and death, he found himself in a realm that defied all mathematical logic. Instead of nothingness, he encountered an infinite field of information, a vast and ever-changing ocean where knowledge flowed endlessly—yet he himself was dissolving into it. With no body, no form, and...

In chronicling the adventurous life of legendary CIA operative Edward Lansdale, The Road Not Taken definitively reframes our understanding of the Vietnam War. In this epic biography of Edward Lansdale (1908-1987) best-selling historian Max Boot demonstrates how Lansdale pioneered a "hearts and mind" diplomacy, first in the Philippines, then in Vietnam. It was a visionary policy that, as Boot reveals, was ultimately crushed by America's giant military bureaucracy.

The Mission has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

No country in history has been more deeply penetrated by spies than divided Germany after the Second World War. Fighting for the eastern corner were the 'first class comrades' of the Stasi—the East German Ministry for State Security. Rising from the ruins of a defeated country, and guided by its KGB masters, the early Cold War saw the Stasi establish itself as one of the world's most notorious spy and secret police agencies.

In 1912, 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 US 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.