Joe Rochefort’s War: The Odyssey of the Codebreaker Who Outwitted Yamamoto at Midway by Elliot Carlson

On December 9, 2011, in Biographies & Memoirs, Book Reviews, History, Nonfiction, by Wilfried F. Voss

Elliot Carlson’s biography of Capt. Joe Rochefort is the first to be written of the officer who headed the U.S. Navy s decrypt unit at Pearl Harbor and broke the Japanese Navy s code before the Battle of Midway. The book brings Rochefort to life as the irreverent, fiercely independent, and consequential officer that he was.

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Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence, 3d Edition by Abram N. Shulsky and Gary J. Schmitt

On June 20, 2011, in Book Reviews, Nonfiction, by Wilfried F. Voss

Shulsky, who points out that government intelligence is becoming a recognized area of academic study, here offers the first introductory textbook in the field, a codification that will be appreciated by serious students. The author assesses the three means by which raw intelligence data are gathered–from human sources, by technical means and open-source collection–and describes missions, methods of analysis and practical applications of the “product.”

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Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory

On April 8, 2011, in Book Reviews, by Wilfried F. Voss

Early in 1943, Allied forces were massing along the coast of North Africa, preparing to make a push toward strategically important Sicily, but they needed to convince the Germans that they were aiming somewhere else. The result was the very odd, very successful deception that historian Ben MacIntyre describes in Operation Mincemeat, in which the dead body of a Welsh laborer who had died from eating rat poison was equipped with false papers, and dropped where the Germans would find it. If that sounds like something out of a spy thriller, it may be because the idea came originally from Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, in his early days as an assistant to the head of British Naval Intelligence.

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Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage

On February 12, 2011, in Book Reviews, by Wilfried F. Voss

He was one of America’s most exciting and secretive generals—the man Franklin Roosevelt made his top spy in World War II. A mythic figure whose legacy is still intensely debated, “Wild Bill” Donovan was director of the Office of Strategic Services (the country’s first national intelligence agency) and the father of today’s CIA. Donovan introduced the nation to the dark arts of covert warfare on a scale it had never seen before. Now, veteran journalist Douglas Waller has mined government and private archives throughout the United States and England, drawn on thousands of pages of recently declassified documents, and interviewed scores of Donovan’s relatives, friends, and associates to produce a riveting biography of one of the most powerful men in modern espionage.

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Fallout: The True Story of the CIA's Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking

On January 7, 2011, in Book Reviews, by Wilfried F. Voss

FOR MORE THAN A QUARTER OF A CENTURY, while the Central Intelligence Agency turned a dismissive eye, a globe-straddling network run by Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan sold the equipment and expertise to make nuclear weapons to a rogues’ gallery of nations. Among its known customers were Iran, Libya, and North Korea. When the United States finally took action to stop the network in late 2003, President George W. Bush declared the end of the global enterprise to be a major intelligence victory that had made the world safer.

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The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives by Ted Gup

On December 26, 2010, in Book Reviews, by Wilfried F. Voss

Inscribed on a wall at Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, is a quote from the Bible: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). On the other side of the lobby, five rows of stars are etched into the white marble wall, each representing a CIA officer killed in the line of duty. Below the stars is a case containing the “Book of Honor”–”a tome as sacred to the Agency as if it held a splinter of the true cross,” writes Ted Gup–and in it are the names of the men and women who gave their lives serving the CIA.

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Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan — and the Path to Victory

On December 15, 2010, in Book Reviews, by Wilfried F. Voss

A nonfiction book that frequently reads like an adventure novel, this account of the author’s intelligence operations in post-9/11 Afghanistan should definitely strike a chord with readers. Shaffer was an intelligence operative from an early age, joining army counterintelligence in the early 1980s at the age of 19. By 1991, he was running HUMINT, the army’s clandestine human-intelligence program.

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A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial by Steve Hendricks

On November 13, 2010, in Book Reviews, by Wilfried F. Voss

As propulsively readable as the best “true crime,” A Kidnapping in Milan is a potent reckoning with the realities of counterterrorism. In a mesmerizing page-turner, Steve Hendricks gives us a ground-level view of the birth and growth of international Islamist terrorist networks and of counterterrorism in action in Europe. He also provides an eloquent, eagle’s-eye perspective on the big questions of justice and the rule of law.

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Scientific Study: Conservatives Have Lower IQ

On March 1, 2010, in Neurotica, by Wilfried F. Voss

The more intelligent people are, the more they are willing to engage into something new. Conservatives and religious people, in turn, do have a lower intelligence quotient. Psychologists believe, the phenomena can be explained through an evolution-biological view.

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