This eye-opening account reveals that covert intelligence operations in the U.S. date much farther back than most people realize--back to the Founding Fathers. Detailing clandestine, unscrupulous operations that took place under such presidents as Washington, Jefferson, Polk, and Lincoln, Knott reveals that presidents have rarely consulted Congress before engaging in such operations.

Following the tragedies of September 11, 2001, contemporary artists such as Ahmed Basiony, Thomas Demand, Harun Farocki, Jenny Holzer, Trevor Paglen and Taryn Simon urgently pursued the complicated intersection of freedom, security, secrecy, power and violence. Covert Operations: Investigating the Known Unknowns features 13 international artists who have collected and revealed unreported information on subjects ranging from classified military sites and reconnaissance satellites to border and immigration surveillance, terrorist profiling, narcotics and human trafficking, illegal extradition flights and nuclear weapons. Among the other contributing artists are Anne-Marie Schleiner, Luis Hernandez Galvan, David Taylor and Kerry Tribe.

O'Rourke's book offers a onestop shop for understanding foreignimposed regime change. Covert Regime Change is an impressive book and required reading for anyone interested in understanding hidden power in world politics.― Political Science Quarterly States seldom resort to war to overthrow their adversaries. They are more likely to attempt to covertly change the opposing regime, by assassinating a foreign leader, sponsoring a coup d'état, meddling in a democratic election, or secretly aiding foreign dissident groups. In Covert Regime Change, Lindsey A. O'Rourke shows us how states really act when trying to overthrow another state. She argues that conventional focus on overt cases misses the basic causes of regime change. O'Rourke provides substantive evidence of types of security interests that drive states to intervene. Offensive operations aim to overthrow a current military rival or break up a rival alliance. Preventive operations seek to stop a state from taking certain actions, such as joining a rival alliance, that may make them a future security threat. Hegemonic operations try to maintain a hierarchical relationship between the intervening state and the target government. Despite the prevalence of covert attempts at regime change, most operations fail to remain covert and spark blowback in unanticipated ways. Covert Regime Change assembles an original dataset of all American regime change operations during the Cold War. This fund of information shows the United States was ten times more likely to try covert rather than overt regime change during the Cold War. Her dataset allows O'Rourke to address three foundational questions: What motivates states to attempt foreign regime change? Why do states prefer to conduct these operations covertly rather than overtly? How successful are such missions in achieving their foreign policy goals?

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book In Covert Operations, Karma Lochrie brings the categories and cultural meanings of secrecy in the Middle Ages out into the open. Isolating five broad areas—confession, women's gossip, medieval science and medicine, marriage and the law, and sodomitic discourse—Lochrie examines various types of secrecy and the literary texts in which they are played out. She reads texts as central to Middle English studies as the "Parson's Tale," the "Miller's Tale," the Secretum Secretorum, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as well as a broad range of less familiar works, including a gynecological treatise and a little-known fifteenth-century parody in which gossip and confession become one. As she does so she reveals a great deal about the medieval past—and perhaps just as much about the early development of the concealments that shape the present day.

Throughout the 1980s, the CIA and Israel's equivalent, the Mossad, worked hand-in-hand on some of the most sophisticated and delicate intelligence operations ever conceived. Now readers are taken deep undercover behind the scenes of some of this era's most astonishing cloak-and-dagger actions.

March 1968: three miles below the stormy surface of the North Pacific, a Soviet submarine lay silent as a tomb-its crew dead, its payload of nuclear missiles, once directed toward strategic targets in Hawaii, inoperable. No longer a real threat, the sub still presented an alluring target and it was not long before the CIA answered its siren call—even at the risk of igniting World War III. Project AZORIAN—the monumentally audacious six-year mission to recover the sub and learn its secrets—has been celebrated within the CIA as its greatest covert operation and hailed by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers as the twentieth century's greatest marine engineering feat. While previous accounts have offered beguiling glimpses, none have had significant access to CIA personnel or documents. Now David Sharp, the mission's Director of Recovery Systems, draws upon his own recollections and personal records, ship's logs, declassified documents, and conversations with team members to shine a bright light on this remarkable but still little understood enterprise. Sharp reveals how the CIA conceived, organized, and conducted AZORIAN, including recruiting the legendary Howard Hughes to provide the "ocean mining" cover story. He takes readers onto and beneath the high seas to show the problems faced by the crew during the operation, including potential Soviet intervention and tense moments when the recovery ship itself was in danger of breaking up. He also puts a human face on key players like Carl Duckett, the head of the CIA's Science and Technology Directorate; John Parangosky, AZORIAN's program manager; John Graham, designer of the Hughes Glomar Explorer; Curtis Crooke of Global Marine Development, co-creator of the "grunt lift" recovery concept; and Oscar "Ott" Schick, manager of the Lockheed-built capture vehicle and submersible barge. A mammoth undertaking worthy of the most dramatic and spell-binding espionage fiction, Project AZORIAN harnessed American imagination and ingenuity at their highest levels. Featuring dozens of previously classified photos, Sharp's chronicle of that amazing operation plunges readers deep into the darkest shadows of the Cold War to produce the definitive account of an amazing mission.

Based on recently declassified documents, this book provides the first examination of the Truman Administration’s decision to employ covert operations in the Cold War. Although covert operations were an integral part of America’s arsenal during the late 1940s and early 1950s, the majority of these operations were ill conceived, unrealistic and ultimately doomed to failure. In this volume, the author looks at three central questions: Why were these types of operations adopted? Why were they conducted in such a haphazard manner? And, why, once it became clear that they were not working, did the administration fail to abandon them? The book argues that the Truman Administration was unable to reconcile policy, strategy and operations successfully, and to agree on a consistent course of action for waging the Cold War. This ensured that they wasted time and effort, money and manpower on covert operations designed to challenge Soviet hegemony, which had little or no real chance of success. US Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy will be of great interest to students of US foreign policy, Cold War history, intelligence and international history in general.

Today the vast archipelago of Southeast Asia islands known as Indonesia is in the headlines because of political instability, religious tension, and violence in the streets. Forty years ago similar conditions led the Central Intelligence Agency to mount a top-secret covert action campaign designed to hold that nation's left-leaning President Sukarno's feet to the fire and prevent a strategic crossroad from falling into the communist camp. The Agency supported rebels with weapons, planes, and a memorable cast of bigger-than-life American agents. In a fast-paced, engrossing narrative evoking the novels of John LeCarré and Graham Greene, the authors provide the first unclassified, detailed case study of an operation that has escaped public scrutiny for decades. Their work adds significantly to our understanding of the CIA and American involvement in Asia. Drawing on declassified documents and an extraordinary number of interviews with CIA and Indonesian participants, Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison reconstruct the delicate, dangerous game played by American intelligence agents across the Indonesian archipelago. This is a story of ideologues and soldiers of fortune--historic CIA legends like Allen Dulles and Franklin Wisner, and notorious special operators like Tony "Poe" Poshepny, whose reputation reached mythic proportions later in Laos, and Allen Pope, an indefatigable B-26 pilot who was captured and sentenced to die. But it also includes the transfixing exploits of Montana smokejumpers, Polish aircrews, Muslim anti-communist guerrillas, U.S. Navy submarine crews, and Filipino mercenary pilots flying P-51 Mustangs. With the problems in today's Indonesia far from solved and the complex U.S.-Indonesian relationship coming under close scrutiny, this fascinating account of an American covert operation gone bad will play a significant role in shedding new light on the CIA's efforts in Southeast Asia.

This powerful study makes a compelling case about the key U.S. role in state terrorism in Latin America during the Cold War. Long hidden from public view, Operation Condor was a military network created in the 1970s to eliminate political opponents of Latin American regimes. Its key members were the anticommunist dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil, later joined by Peru and Ecuador, with covert support from the U.S. government. Drawing on a wealth of testimonies, declassified files, and Latin American primary sources, J. Patrice McSherry examines Operation Condor from numerous vantage points: its secret structures, intelligence networks, covert operations against dissidents, political assassinations worldwide, commanders and operatives, links to the Pentagon and the CIA, and extension to Central America in the 1980s. The author convincingly shows how, using extralegal and terrorist methods, Operation Condor hunted down, seized, and executed political opponents across borders. McSherry argues that Condor functioned within, or parallel to, the structures of the larger inter-American military system led by the United States, and that declassified U.S. documents make clear that U.S. security officers saw Condor as a legitimate and useful 'counterterror' organization. Revealing new details of Condor operations and fresh evidence of links to the U.S. security establishment, this controversial work offers an original analysis of the use of secret, parallel armies in Western counterinsurgency strategies. It will be a clarion call to all readers to consider the long-term consequences of clandestine operations in the name of 'democracy.'

I am grateful to those of my colleagues in this first generation of American "spymasters" who were willing to share their experiences with me even after I retired to my unclassified farm . I am indebted to Howard Roman , who worked with Allen Dulles on his intelligence writings , for his assistance in the preparation of the early chapters, and to Nancy Kelly, my editor at Reader's Digest Press , for the sharp edge of her pruning shears .