In this pathbreaking book, Amy Zegart provides the first scholarly examination of the intelligence failures that preceded September 11. Until now, those failures have been attributed largely to individual mistakes. But Zegart shows how and why the intelligence system itself left us vulnerable. Zegart argues that after the Cold War ended, the CIA and FBI failed to adapt to the rise of terrorism. She makes the case by conducting painstaking analysis of more than three hundred intelligence reform recommendations and tracing the history of CIA and FBI counterterrorism efforts from 1991 to 2001, drawing extensively from declassified government documents and interviews with more than seventy high-ranking government officials. She finds that political leaders were well aware of the emerging terrorist danger and the urgent need for intelligence reform, but failed to achieve the changes they sought. The same forces that have stymied intelligence reform for decades are to blame: resistance inside U.S. intelligence agencies, the rational interests of politicians and career bureaucrats, and core aspects of our democracy such as the fragmented structure of the federal government. Ultimately failures of adaptation led to failures of performance. Zegart reveals how longstanding organizational weaknesses left unaddressed during the 1990s prevented the CIA and FBI from capitalizing on twenty-three opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot. Spying Blind is a sobering account of why two of America's most important intelligence agencies failed to adjust to new threats after the Cold War, and why they are unlikely to adapt in the future.

A New York Times bestseller The secret history of America's submarine warfare is revealed for the first time in this "vividly told, impressively documented," (The New York Times) and fast-paced chronicle of adventure and intrigue during the Cold War. For decades, only a select and powerful few knew the truth about the submarines that silently roamed the ocean in danger and in stealth, seeking information and advantage. Based on six years of groundbreaking investigation into the “silent service,” Blind Man’s Bluff uncovers an epic story of adventure, courage, victory, and disaster beneath the surface. With an unforgettable array of characters from the Cold War to the twenty-first century, Sontag and Drew recount scenes of secrecy from Washington, DC, to the depths of the sea. A magnificent achievement in investigative reporting, Blind Man’s Bluff reads like a spy thriller with one important difference: everything is true.

Intelligence challenges in the digital age : Cloaks, daggers, and tweets -- The education crisis : How fictional spies are shaping public opinion and intelligence policy -- American intelligence history at a glance-from fake bakeries to armed drones -- Intelligence basics : Knowns and unknowns -- Why analysis is so hard : The seven deadly biases -- Counterintelligence : To catch a spy -- Covert action - "a hard business of agonizing choices" -- Congressional oversight : Eyes on spies -- Intelligence isn't just for governments anymore : Nuclear sleuthing in a Google earth world -- Decoding cyber threats.

Challenging the belief that national security agencies work well, this book asks what forces shaped the initial design of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Council in ways that meant they were handicapped from birth.

Intelligence is often the critical factor in a successful military campaign. This was certainly the case for Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, in the Peninsular War. In this book, author Huw J. Davies offers the first full account of the scope, complexity, and importance of Wellington’s intelligence department, describing a highly organized, multifaceted series of networks of agents and spies throughout Spain and Portugal—an organization that was at once a microcosm of British intelligence at the time and a sophisticated forebear to intelligence developments in the twentieth century. Spying for Wellington shows us an organization that was, in effect, two parallel networks: one made up of Foreign Office agents “run” by British ambassadors in Spain and Portugal, the other comprising military spies controlled by Wellington himself. The network of agents supplied strategic intelligence, giving the British army advance warning of the arrival, destinations, and likely intentions of French reinforcements. The military network supplied operational intelligence, which confirmed the accuracy of the strategic intelligence and provided greater detail on the strengths, arms, and morale of the French forces. Davies reveals how, by integrating these two forms of intelligence, Wellington was able to develop an extremely accurate and reliable estimate of French movements and intentions not only in his own theater of operations but also in other theaters across the Iberian Peninsula. The reliability and accuracy of this intelligence, as Davies demonstrates, was central to Wellington’s decision-making and, ultimately, to his overall success against the French. Correcting past, incomplete accounts, this is the definitive book on Wellington’s use of intelligence. As such, it contributes to a clearer, more comprehensive understanding of Wellington at war and of his place in the history of British military intelligence.

In the high-stakes world of spying, do the ends justify the means?

Amy Zegart examines the weaknesses of US intelligence oversight and why those deficiencies have persisted, despite the unprecedented importance of intelligence in today's environment. She argues that many of the biggest oversight problems lie with Congress—the institution, not the parties or personalities—showing how Congress has collectively and persistently tied its own hands in overseeing intelligence.

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The real-life cloak-and-dagger story of how East Germany’s notorious spy agency infiltrated churches here and abroad East Germany only existed for a short forty years, but in that time, the country’s secret police, the Stasi, developed a highly successful “church department” that—using persuasion rather than threats—managed to recruit an extraordinary stable of clergy spies. Pastors, professors, seminary students, and even bishops spied on colleagues, other Christians, and anyone else they could report about to their handlers in the Stasi. Thanks to its pastor spies, the Church Department (official name: Department XX/4) knew exactly what was happening and being planned in the country’s predominantly Lutheran churches. Yet ultimately it failed in its mission: despite knowing virtually everything about East German Christians, the Stasi couldn’t prevent the church-led protests that erupted in 1989 and brought down the Berlin Wall.

In See No Evil, one of the CIA’s top field officers of the past quarter century recounts his career running agents in the back alleys of the Middle East. In the process, Robert Baer paints a chilling picture of how terrorism works on the inside and provides compelling evidence about how Washington politics sabotaged the CIA’s efforts to root out the world’s deadliest terrorists. On the morning of September 11, 2001, the world witnessed the terrible result of that intelligence failure with the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the wake of those attacks, Americans were left wondering how such an obviously long-term, globally coordinated plot could have escaped detection by the CIA and taken the nation by surprise. Robert Baer was not surprised. A twenty-one-year veteran of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations who had left the agency in 1997, Baer observed firsthand how an increasingly bureaucratic CIA lost its way in the post–cold war world and refused to adequately acknowledge and neutralize the growing threat of Islamic fundamentalist terror in the Middle East and elsewhere. A throwback to the days when CIA operatives got results by getting their hands dirty and running covert operations, Baer spent his career chasing down leads on suspected terrorists in the world’s most volatile hot spots. As he and his agents risked their lives gathering intelligence, he watched as the CIA reduced drastically its operations overseas, failed to put in place people who knew local languages and customs, and rewarded workers who knew how to play the political games of the agency’s suburban Washington headquarters but not how to recruit agents on the ground. See No Evil is not only a candid memoir of the education and disillusionment of an intelligence operative but also an unprecedented look at the roots of modern terrorism. Baer reveals some of the disturbing details he uncovered in his work, including: * In 1996, Osama bin Laden established a strategic alliance with Iran to coordinate terrorist attacks against the United States. * In 1995, the National Security Council intentionally aborted a military coup d’etat against Saddam Hussein, forgoing the last opportunity to get rid of him. * In 1991, the CIA intentionally shut down its operations in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, and ignored fundamentalists operating there. When Baer left the agency in 1997 he received the Career Intelligence Medal, with a citation that says, “He repeatedly put himself in personal danger, working the hardest targets, in service to his country.” See No Evil is Baer’s frank assessment of an agency that forgot that “service to country” must transcend politics and is a forceful plea for the CIA to return to its original mission—the preservation of our national sovereignty and the American way of life.