At the same time the Vietnam War was being broadcast into the living rooms of Americans across the country the CIA was conducting a large-scale secret war in northeastern Laos that few heard about. Agency case officer Jim Parker's five years of combat and immersion in Southeast Asian culture had a lasting influence on him and his family. His dramatic, provocative reminiscence of those years is the first account by a participant to portray America's involvement in Laos.

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.

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.

Traces our country's long history of covert and special operations, focusing on the similarities and differences in the practice from the Revolutionary War to the present. Long before the creation of the CIA, the American government utilized special intelligence strategies with varying degrees of success. Even though critics throughout time have questioned the effectiveness and legitimacy of these tactics, presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama have employed secret operations to benefit the nation's best interest. This book follows America's history of intelligence gathering, undercover operations, and irregular warfare. Through chronologically organized chapters, the author examines secret military maneuvers, highlighting the elements common to covert and special operations across historical eras, and concluding with a chapter on national security since the attacks of September 11, 2001.

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?

The stories that follow are of real people and real investigations. The stories are true, with just a little embellishment to make them more readable to the public, but not by much. Names have been changed, but the persons behind them are very much a part of this history.

Vice Adm. William H. McRaven helped to devise the strategy for how to bring down Osama bin Laden, and commanded the courageous U.S. military unit that carried it out on May 1, 2011, ending one of the greatest manhunts in history. In Spec Ops, a well-organized and deeply researched study, McRaven analyzes eight classic special operations. Six are from WWII: the German commando raid on the Belgian fort Eben Emael (1940); the Italian torpedo attack on the Alexandria harbor (1941); the British commando raid on Nazaire, France (1942); the German glider rescue of Benito Mussolini (1943); the British midget-submarine attack on the Tirpitz (1943); and the U.S. Ranger rescue mission at the Cabanatuan POW camp in the Philippines (1945). The two post-WWII examples are the U.S. Army raid on the Son Tay POW camp in North Vietnam (1970) and the Israeli rescue of the skyjacked hostages in Entebbe, Uganda (1976). McRaven—who commands a U.S. Navy SEAL team—pinpoints six essential principles of “spec ops” success: simplicity, security, repetition, surprise, speed and purpose. For each of the case studies, he provides political and military context, a meticulous reconstruction of the mission itself and an analysis of the operation in relation to his six principles. McRaven deems the Son Tay raid “the best modern example of a successful spec op [which] should be considered textbook material for future missions.” His own book is an instructive textbook that will be closely studied by students of the military arts. Maps, photos.

In The Greatest Stories Never Told: Covert Ops, attorney and author Larry Yadon has written some of the greatest tales about covert operations, which are military operations that conceal the identity of the sponsor of the operation. These are not twice- or thrice-told tales, but the ones you haven’t heard before. It is an unforgettable collection, and includes stories of legendary operations from early in the history of covert operations up through present-day Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere in the world.

Surveillance Zone gives you an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look into a mysterious world that very few people know exists. It's the world of private-sector espionage, surveillance detection and covert protective operations that take place right here at home, under most people's noses. In these pages, you'll discover: How corporate sector surveillance and surveillance detection work. What real-world special operations are like How covert operators blend into different environments. What type of people get into this industry Why this industry exists. Get a first-person account of actual covert operations the author has participated in. Learn the secrets of the trade, and discover a hidden world that's all around you.

From the start of the Cold War to the fall of Saigon, from the Congo to Tibet, from the Bay of Pigs to North Vietnam and Nicaragua, here is a comprehensive overview of U.S. air-supported covert operations against the Soviet bloc. Twilight Warriors brings a sense of continuity to the shifting, shadowy battlefronts of the Cold War, spanning the postwar decades with one fascinating account after another. The known and not-so well known are woven together to provide the big picture: failed early attempts to set up spy cells behind the Iron Curtain (confounded by the agent Kim Philby), the actual CIA plane that secretly appeared in the James Bond film "Thunderball," Operation Mongoose, clandestine "airlines," and the gutsy breed who took to the skies as airborne spies. This is a sweeping, globe-trotting account of covert ops in the post-war era that reads like an epic secret history.