Intelligence History

A new field of collective intelligence has emerged in the last few years, prompted by a wave of digital technologies that make it possible for organizations and societies to think at large scale. This "bigger mind" - human and machine capabilities working together - has the potential to solve the great challenges of our time. So why do smart technologies not automatically lead to smart results?

Students and enthusiasts of American history are familiar with the Revolutionary War spies Nathan Hale and Benedict Arnold, but few studies have closely examined the wider intelligence efforts that enabled the colonies to gain their independence. Spies, Patriots, and Traitors provides readers with a fascinating, well-documented, and highly readable account of American intelligence activities during the era of the Revolutionary War, from 1765 to 1783.

This historic mission of this remarkable but little-known organization, the US National Intelligence Council (NIC), now 40 years old, is strategic intelligence assessment in service of senior American foreign policymakers. Its signature inside products, National Intelligence Estimates, are now accompanied by the NIC's every-four-years Global Trends. Unclassified, Global Trends has become a noted NIC brand, its release awaited by officials, academics, and private sector managers around the world.

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.

John A. Gentry and Joseph S. Gordon update our understanding of strategic warning intelligence analysis for the 21st century. Strategic warning - the process of long-range analysis to alert senior leaders to trending threats and opportunities that require action - is a critical intelligence function. It also is frequently misunderstood and underappreciated. The authors examine historical case studies, including postmortems of warning failures, to provide examples of the analytic points they make.

Ghosts in the Sky explores how drones — once science fiction — have become the defining instruments of 21st-century power. From silent killers in remote war zones to consumer quadcopters, agricultural sprayers, delivery bots, and underwater sentinels, drones are reshaping the battlefield, the economy, and everyday life. Written by Thornton D. Barnes — former CIA Special Projects engineer and Area 51 insider — this groundbreaking nonfiction work traces the hidden evolution of unmanned systems. With rare insight into classified programs, wartime deployments, industrial adoption, and ...

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 ...

Ben Macintyre’s Agent Zigzag was hailed as “rollicking, spellbinding” (New York Times), “wildly improbable but entirely true” (Entertainment Weekly), and, quite simply, “the best book ever written” (Boston Globe). In his new book, Operation Mincemeat, he tells an extraordinary story that will delight his legions of fans. In 1943, from a windowless basement office in London, two brilliant intelligence officers conceived a plan that was both simple and complicated - Operation Mincemeat.

Whilst putting this handbook together, I have tried hard not to embed the narrative with my own thoughts and feelings. Those that I do have, are consolidated here in this forward. It has been difficult not to descend into my own projections where we, the human race will be, moving forward into the future. When we look back in time however, it is easier to understand how we have arrived at this moment in our history. We have over the course of the past eighty years or so, developed a technology, which I firmly believe is about to become our nemesis. For the first time in the history of our ...

It was supposed to be a moment of great optimism, a cause for jubilation. The Congo was at last being set free from Belgium—one of seventeen countries to gain independence in 1960 from ruling European powers. At the helm as prime minister was charismatic nationalist Patrice Lumumba. Just days after the handover, however, the Congo’s new army mutinied, Belgian forces intervened, and Lumumba turned to the United Nations for help in saving his newborn nation from what the press was already calling “the Congo crisis.”

Operation Condor: The History of the Notorious Intelligence Operations Supported by the United States to Combat Communists Across South America looks at the various intelligence operations and the winding chain of events that brought about conflicts in the region.

A classic of investigative reporting, Spooks is a treasure trove of who-shot-who research on the metastasis of the United States intelligence community, whose practices and personnel have engulfed the larger society. Teeming with tales of wiremen, hitmen, and mobsters; crooked politicians and corrupt cops going about their business of regime-change, union-busting, wiretapping, money laundering, and industrial espionage, learn about: Richard Nixon's "Mission Impossible" war on Aristotle Onassis; not-so-deep-fake porno films starring the CIA's enemies; and much more.

On a warm July evening in 1985, a middle-aged man stood on the pavement of a busy avenue in the heart of Moscow, holding a plastic carrier bag. In his grey suit and tie, he looked like any other Soviet citizen. The bag alone was mildly conspicuous, printed with the red logo of Safeway, the British supermarket.

On June 6, 1944, 150,000 Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy and suffered an astonishingly low rate of casualties. A stunning military achievement, it was also a masterpiece of trickery. Operation Fortitude, which protected and enabled the invasion, and the Double Cross system, which specialized in turning German spies into double agents, tricked the Nazis into believing that the Allied attacks would come in Calais and Norway rather than Normandy.

A gripping true-life story about an extraordinary destiny of a young man, forced to make the choice of life: sell his soul to serve the devil, or preserve his dignity by taking a new path to a new world. The book chronicles the remarkable adventure of a foreign student who finds himself at the center of an action-packed spy thriller while studying in Moscow. Being eyewitnesses to the events, relying on solid documentary research and historical facts, the Grigorov Brothers authentically recreate the life of foreigners in the Soviet capital at the height of the Cold War, while masterfully ...

This book is the first to examine the history of imaginative thinking about intelligent machines. As real Artificial Intelligence (AI) begins to touch on all aspects of our lives, this long narrative history shapes how the technology is developed, deployed, and regulated. It is therefore a crucial social and ethical issue. Part I of this book provides a historical overview from ancient Greece to the start of modernity. Part II focuses on the 20th and 21st centuries in which a greater density of narratives emerge alongside rapid developments in AI technology.

From the award-winning and acclaimed author of The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, From Warsaw with Love tells the epic story of how Polish intelligence officers forged an alliance with the CIA in the twilight of the Cold War. In 1990, soon after the Polish people voted in their first democratic election since the 1930s, the young Polish government sent a veteran spy, who’d battled the West for decades, to rescue six American officers trapped in Baghdad.

A shocking expos of the covert CIA program of widespread torture, rape, and murder of civilians during America’s war in Vietnam, with a new introduction by the author. In the darkest days of the Vietnam War, America’s Central Intelligence Agency secretly initiated a sweeping program of kidnap, torture, and assassination devised to destabilize the infrastructure of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam, commonly known as the “Viet Cong.”

In 1958, the US Air Force nuked the moon as a show of military force. In 1967, the CIA sent live cats to spy on the Soviet government. In 1942, the British built a torpedo-proof aircraft carrier out of an iceberg. Of course, none of these things ever actually happened. But in Nuking the Moon, intelligence historian Vince Houghton proves that abandoned plans can be just as illuminating - and every bit as entertaining - as the ones that made it.

In November 2022, a webpage was posted online with a simple text box. It was ChatGPT, and was unlike any app people had used before. It was more human than a customer service agent, more convenient than a Google search. Behind the scenes, battles for control and prestige between the world’s two leading AI firms, OpenAI and DeepMind, who now steers Google's AI efforts, has remained elusive—until now.