The true story of Sergeant Hiram Holt, USAF Retired. Pentagon demands 35 year Vow of Silence, now the truth is out! Every Veteran will embrace this book which speaks to their unique problems with retirement and benefits. Action, Intrigue, and Patriotism Covers Korea,Vietnam,and up to the War on Terror in response to The World Trade Center Attack. If you love America, read this book!

Winner, 2024 Book Award, Society for History in the Federal Government In 1974, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, ostensibly an advanced deep-sea mining vessel owned by reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, lowered a claw-like contraption to the floor of the Pacific Ocean. This high-tech venture was only a cover story for an even more improbable scheme: a CIA mission to retrieve a sunken Soviet submarine. Like a Jules Verne novel with an Ian Fleming twist, the saga of the Glomar Explorer features underwater espionage, impossible gadgetry, and high-stakes international drama. It also marks a key moment in the history of transparency—and not just for what became known as the Glomar response: “We can neither confirm nor deny. . . . ” M. Todd Bennett plumbs the depths of government secrecy in this new account of the Glomar mission and its consequences. Trawling through recently declassified documents, he explores the logistics, media fallout, and geopolitical significance of one of the most ambitious operations in intelligence history. Glomar, Bennett argues, played a pivotal but underappreciated role in helping the CIA ward off oversight amid a push for transparency and accountability. He reframes the operation’s history to offer an alternative perspective on the 1970s, a decade known for expansive openness, as well as the persistent tension between the demands of democracy and the need for secrecy in foreign policy. Combining keen historical analysis and gripping storytelling, Neither Confirm nor Deny brings to the surface fresh insights into the history of the security state, the politics of intelligence, and the CIA’s relationship with the media and the public.

An incredible true tale of espionage and engineering set at the height of the Cold War--a mix between The Hunt for Red October and Argo--about how the CIA, the U.S. Navy, and America's most eccentric mogul spent six years and nearly a billion dollars to steal the nuclear-armed Soviet submarine K-129 after it had sunk to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean; all while the Russians were watching. In the early hours of February 25, 1968, a Russian submarine armed with three nuclear ballistic missiles set sail from its base in Siberia on a routine combat patrol to Hawaii. Then it vanished. As the Soviet Navy searched in vain for the lost vessel, a small, highly classified American operation using sophisticated deep-sea spy equipment found it--wrecked on the sea floor at a depth of 16,800 feet, far beyond the capabilities of any salvage that existed. But the potential intelligence assets onboard the ship--the nuclear warheads, battle orders, and cryptological machines--justified going to extreme lengths to find a way to raise the submarine. So began Project Azorian, a top secret mission that took six years, cost an estimated $800 million, and would become the largest and most daring covert operation in CIA history. After the U.S. Navy declared retrieving the sub "impossible," the mission fell to the CIA's burgeoning Directorate of Science and Technology, the little-known division responsible for the legendary U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird spy planes. Working with Global Marine Systems, the country's foremost maker of exotic, deep-sea drilling vessels, the CIA commissioned the most expensive ship ever built and told the world that it belonged to the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, who would use the mammoth ship to mine rare minerals from the ocean floor. In reality, a complex network of spies, scientists, and politicians attempted a project even crazier than Hughes's reputation: raising the sub directly under the watchful eyes of the Russians.

When a U.S. nuclear submarine collided with a Japanese fishing vessel in the spring of 2001, the story made national headlines. Navy Commander Scott Waddle, former captain of the U.S.S. Greeneville, was at the center of the controversy. This is the first-hand, never-before-published account of that fatal moment and the heart-breaking avalanche of events that followed.

Wild Sky Night Sky Series # 2 Young Adult Paranormal with romantic elements First published 2015 Skylar, Calvin, Dana, and Milo are back, but now their unlikely Destiny-fighting team includes... Garrett Hathaway...? When Garrett’s friend Jilly goes missing, Coconut Key Academy’s most “popular” bully and all-around douche approaches Sky and Calvin to ask for help. From Garrett’s description of the missing girl’s telekinesis, it’s likely that Jilly is a Greater-Than like Sky and Dana—a girl with rare super-powers. And it’s highly likely that Jilly’s been kidnapped for her valuable blood—an essential ingredient in the dangerous, addictive street drug called Destiny, which makes users young, healthy, beautiful—and profoundly evil—before it kills them. When Skylar and her team finally track down Jilly, the girl oddly refuses to be rescued. In the struggle that ensues, Calvin—who’s been in a wheelchair since he was nine—is accidentally injected with Destiny. For the short-term, he can walk again, but the drug willeventually kill him. After it turns him evil... Unless Sky can find a way to save her best friend’s life... Wild Sky is the second book in a YA series set in the same dark future as Suzanne Brockmann’s Born to Darkness, the first installment in her Fighting Destiny paranormal romance series. The Night Sky YA series has the same mix of suspense, romance, humor, and the paranormal, and deals with many of the same themes, including society’s relentless exploitation and devaluation of females, and the empowerment that comes when women and girls recognize their strength and intellect, and stand up, fight back, and save the day. (119K words or 436 pages) Don’t miss... Night Sky Series # 1: Night Sky Night Sky Series # 0.5: Dangerous Destiny (When Skylar Met Calvin)

"In this book from award-winning poet Alan Shapiro, the poet, in many ways, is coming to terms not only with his own mortality but also with the finite nature inherent in all human existence. Like the universe, it is full of strange, dark matter in its unflinching look at the unmaking of the self facilitated by our growing reliance on dehumanizing technology, something to which we can all attest in our viral-inflected era of remote living and working, and with so much of our energies focused on screens and keyboards. So much of what we are is being dumped into databases, into collective technological, medical, religious, political, and commercial languages, yet the poet continues to remind us of what's behind all of these technologies: humanity in all its frailties and virtues. Shapiro continues to evolve formally as a poet, as evidenced by the wide variety of prose poems, traditional lyrics, and experimental forms in this book, and although his abiding themes--family, human connection, and relationships--seem to come under a kind of assault in Proceed to Check Out, yet he continues to find the worth and vitality of the human endeavor and the pursuit of art. He remains committed to facing the hypocrisies and denials we'd much prefer to hide, and to exploring the social and psychological ties that bind all of us together in fully lived experience"--

Two behind-the-scenes players in the edward snowden story reflect on the meaning of snowden’s revelations in our age of surveillance One day in the spring of 2013, a box appeared outside a fourth-floor apartment door in Brooklyn, New York. The recipient, who didn’t know the sender, only knew she was supposed to bring this box to a friend, who would ferry it to another friend. This was Edward Snowden’s box—materials proving that the U.S. government had built a massive surveillance apparatus and used it to spy on its own people--and the friend on the end of this chain was filmmaker Laura Poitras. Thus the biggest national security leak of the digital era was launched via a remarkably analog network, the US Postal Service. This is just one of the odd, ironic details that emerges from the story of how Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge, two experienced journalists but security novices (and the friends who received and ferried the box) got drawn into the Snowden story as behind-the-scenes players. Their initially stumbling, increasingly paranoid, and sometimes comic efforts to help bring Snowden’s leaks to light, and ultimately, to understand their significance, unfold in an engrossing narrative that includes emails and diary entries from Poitras. This is an illuminating story on the status of transparency, privacy, and trust in the age of surveillance. With an appendix suggesting what citizens and activists can do to protect privacy and democracy.

In the first academic analysis of the ‘spycops’ scandal, the author draws on extensive fieldwork and his first-hand experience of police infiltration in this exploration of covert policing practices.