Enemies is the first definitive history of the FBI’s secret intelligence operations, from an author whose work on the Pentagon and the CIA won him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

We think of the FBI as America’s police force. But secret intelligence is the Bureau’s first and foremost mission. Enemies is the story of how presidents have used the FBI as the most formidable intelligence force in American history.

Here is the hidden history of America’s hundred-year war on terror. The FBI has fought against terrorists, spies, anyone it deemed subversive—and sometimes American presidents. The FBI’s secret intelligence and surveillance techniques have created a tug-of-war between protecting national security and infringing upon civil liberties. It is a tension that strains the very fabric of a free republic.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Tim Weiner

Tim Weiner has won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting and writing on secret intelligence and national security. As a correspondent for The New York Times, he covered the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington and terrorism in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Sudan, and other nations. Enemies is his fourth book. His Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA won the National Book Award and was acclaimed as one of the year’s best books by The New York Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, Time, and many other publications. The Wall Street Journal called Betrayal “the best book ever written on a case of espionage.” He is now working on a history of the American military.

Editorial Reviews

“Pulitzer-Prize–winning author Tim Weiner has written a riveting inside account of the FBI’s secret machinations that goes so deep into the Agency’s skullduggery, readers will feel they are tapping the phones along with J. Edgar Hoover. This is a book that every American who cares about civil liberties should read.”—Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side

“Enemies is a research masterpiece. Picking through seventy thousand newly declassified documents and using on-the-record interviews, Weiner reveals startling new truths and debunks nagging old myths about the FBI. Enemiesreads like a thriller, but don’t let the heart-pumping prose fool you. Weiner has written a scholarly tour de force that will be an instant classic for any serious student of American national security.”—Amy B. Zegart, Ph.D., Stanford University, author of Spying Blind

“Tim Weiner’s Enemies is the most comprehensive history of the FBI as an intelligence agency we have ever had. Based on extensive research in previously unavailable materials, Weiner gives us a fresh way to think about J. Edgar Hoover, the many presidents he worked with, and the FBI as a national security agency. The book is also a cautionary tale that is essential reading for anyone concerned about American civil liberties.”—Robert Dallek, author of An Unfinished Life

The History Of The FBI’s Secret ‘Enemies’ List

NPR Book Review – February 14, 2012 (Excerpt)

Four years after Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Tim Weiner published Legacy of Ashes, his detailed history of the CIA, he received a call from a lawyer in Washington, D.C.

“He said, ‘I’ve just gotten my hands on a Freedom of Information Act request that’s 26 years old for [FBI Director] J. Edgar Hoover’s intelligence files. Would you like them?’ ” Weiner tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “And after a stunned silence, I said, ‘Yes, yes.’ ”

Weiner went to the lawyer’s office and collected four boxes containing Hoover’s personal files on intelligence operations between 1945 and 1972.

“Reading them is like looking over [Hoover's] shoulder and listening to him talk out loud about the threats America faced, how the FBI was going to confront them,” he says. “Hoover had a terrible premonition after World War II that America was going to be attacked — that New York or Washington was going to be attacked by suicidal, kamikaze airplanes, by dirty bombs … and he never lost this fear.” [Read the full article...]

Book review: ‘Enemies: A History of the FBI’ by Tim Weiner

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – February 22, 2012 (Excerpt)

Each week, the FBI sends reporters an email of “top ten news stories” that it hopes will hit the headlines. The press releases usually highlight crooks nabbed, terrorism plots foiled and convictions notched up by the straight-shooting, gang-busting agents from the world’s most famous law enforcement agency.

It’s doubtful any of the cases the FBI likes to publicize made it into Tim Weiner’s absorbing “Enemies: A History of the FBI.” It is a scathing indictment of the FBI as a secret intelligence service that has bent and broken the law for decades in the pursuit of Communists, terrorists and spies. Worse, in his view, the bureau was often grossly inept. As Thomas Kean, Republican chair of the9/11Commission, declared in 2004: “You have a record of an agency that’s failed, and it’s failed again and again and again.”

Weiner eviscerates the FBI in a sweeping narrative that is all the more entertaining because it is so redolent with screw-ups and scandals. Like his bestselling last book, “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA,” which documented misdeeds at the CIA, this is a mordant counter-history. It is a compendium of illegal arrests and detentions, break-ins and burglaries, wiretapping and surveillance. Weiner calls it a chronicle of “the tug-of-war between national security and civil liberties,” but it’s clear to him which side won. The CIA denounced his last book. The FBI won’t give him any medals either. [Read the full article...]

Chasing Radicals (and Breaking the Rule of Law) - Tim Weiner’s ‘Enemies’ and F.B.I. Counterintelligence

The New York Times Book Review – March 14, 2012 (Excerpt)

First things first: Tim Weiner’s new book, “Enemies: A History of the F.B.I.,” is an outstanding piece of work, even-handed, exhaustively researched, smoothly written and thematically timely.

What it is not is a history of the F.B.I. Here’s the thing: For 104 years now the Federal Bureau of Investigation has essentially worn two hats — its traditional law enforcement “arrest a bad guy” hat and its more controversial intelligence hat. The latter is the part of the F.B.I. that from World War I on investigated all manner of political radicals and Communists, compiled lists of Americans to be detained in the event of national emergency and engaged in at least half a century of illegal wiretapping, mail opening and burglaries.

It’s this side of the shop — and exclusively this side — that interests Mr. Weiner, a former reporter for The New York Times. This shouldn’t be too surprising, given that Mr. Weiner previously wrote an admired history of the C.I.A., “Legacy of Ashes.” So, in a 500-page book on the F.B.I., this means not a word on Louis Buchalter — no Mafia at all in fact. There are only glancing references to Waco and Ruby Ridge, and barely a single sentence on the bureau’s Depression-era scramble to hunt down the likes of John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd. This is like writing a history of the New York Yankees but ignoring Whitey Ford and the other pitchers. [Read the full article...]

“Enemies: A History of the FBI” by Tim Weiner

The Washington Post Book Review – March 23, 2012 (Excerpt)

Last year’s film about J. Edgar Hoover spent about 2¹ / ₂ hours dancing around the issue of whether the former FBI director was an uncompromising crime fighter or a cross-dressing closet homosexual. In his new book, “Enemies,” New York Times reporter Tim Weiner dismisses half a century of innuendo about Hoover in slightly more than half a page. Spoiler alert: The dishi-est story ever to come out of the bureau probably isn’t true.

“The one thing everyone seems to know about Hoover is that he had a sexual relationship with his constant companion Clyde Tolson,” Weiner writes early in the book. “The idea was imprinted in the public mind long ago, in a book by a British journalist that included indelible descriptions of Hoover in drag. . . . The allegation rests on third-hand hearsay from highly unreliable sources. Not a shred of evidence supports the notion that Hoover ever had sex with Tolson or any other human being.”

Hoover had no time for intimacy, Weiner suggests, because he was married to the FBI. And the devotion with which he viewed his job cut both ways. While it strengthened the FBI in its early days, it almost led to the bureau’s undoing when it became clear that the FBI had broken the law for decades in pursuit of communists, spies and terrorists. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

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. Readers share his frustrations as he searches in vain for Yamamoto s fleet prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but share his joy when he succeeds in tracking the fleet in early 1942 and breaks the code that leads Rochefort to believe Yamamoto s invasion target is Midway. His conclusions, bitterly opposed by some top Navy brass, are credited with making the U.S. victory possible and helping change the course of the war. The author tells the story of how opponents in Washington forced Rochefort s removal from the decrypt unit at Pearl and denied him the Distinguished Service Medal recommended by Admiral Nimitz. In capturing the interplay of policy and personality and the role played by politics at the highest levels of the Navy, Carlson reveals a side of the intelligence community seldom seen by outsiders.

For a full understanding of the man, Carlson examines Rochefort s love-hate relationship with cryptanalysis, his adventure-filled years in the 1930s as the right-hand man to the Commander in Chief of the U.S. Fleet, and his return to codebreaking in mid-1941 as the officer in charge of Station Hypo at Pearl Harbor. He traces Rochefort s career from his enlistment in 1918 to his posting in Washington as head of the Navy s codebreaking desk at age 25, and beyond. In many ways a reinterpretation of Rochefort, the book makes clear the key role his codebreaking played in the outcome of Midway and the legacy he left of reporting actionable intelligence directly to the fleet. An epilogue describes efforts waged by Rochefort s colleagues to obtain the medal denied him in 1942 a drive that finally paid off in 1986 when the medal was awarded posthumously. With a foreword by Rear Adm. Donald Showers, USN (Ret.).

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Elliot Carlson

Elliot Carlson is a longtime journalist who has worked for such newspapers and magazines as the Honolulu Advertiser, Wall Street Journal and Newsweek. He holds degrees from Stanford University and the University of Oregon and lives with his wife in Silver Spring, MD.

Reader Review

After the declassification of World War II’s communications intelligence (ComInt) history in the 1980s, a few excellent books emerged that revealed the scope of the effort and the names of some of the principals involved, such as CINCPAC intel chief Edwin Layton and the officer in charge of Pearl Harbor’s ComInt unit (“Station Hypo”), Commander Joseph Rochefort. Layton’s story was well told in his wartime biography, “And I Was There,” but until now little has been known about Rochefort beyond the basics of his time at Hypo. It turns out that his personal story is as dramatic as that of any familiar name from the Battle of Midway.

Elliot Carlson’s new book tells that story in superb fashion, and we quickly learn that its title is a metaphor for Rochefort’s entire life, not just his WW2 experience. The first several chapters are a novelette themselves, describing the rigors of his early life, his rocky path to a Naval Reserve commission, his close call with a court martial aboard his first ship, his posting as naval liaison and language student in Tokyo, and the tribulations of his seagoing assignments throughout the 1930s.

But Rochefort’s “war” really begins with his posting as the officer in charge of Hypo in June 1941. The book joins others in debunking the excessively popular myth that Rochefort could read the Japanese navy’s radio code, dubbed JN-25, and thus had prior knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack. But the book isn’t just a copy of the now-known history of ComInt in the war. It’s the day to day chronicle of Rochefort’s life in the “dungeon” of Hypo, and especially of his interactions with those about him–his dedicated staff, his very close ties with Layton, his unusual chain of command in Hawaii’s 14th Naval District, and especially the details of his escalating “war” with his self-serving superiors in Washington, who were appalled to find that they were wrong and Rochefort was right about Midway.

Although the subtitle might suggest that this book is mainly about Midway, there is far more to Rochefort’s story than that. Fully a third of the book covers his life thereafter, and it’s another compelling novelette. Repressed by his Washington bosses for showing them to be idiots regarding Midway, he is transferred out of ComInt to a backwater command, in charge of the construction of a new floating drydock, But he surprised everyone by diving into the job with zeal and getting it done in a manner that brought a sterling evaluation from his commander. That helped get him back into ComInt in Washington, where his innate language and cryptology skills once again were put to their proper use. That’s not to say that everything was then perfect for him–the challenges of the Navy’s bureaucracy and of some of its senior officers still made for a long, sad story not previously revealed.

The tale ends a few years after Rochefort’s death with President Reagan awarding a posthumous Distinguished Service Medal to Rochefort, thanks to a campaign pressed by former Hypo analyst Rear Admiral Donald M. Showers. The DSM was initially recommended in 1942 by both Admiral Nimitz and the 14th Naval District commander, but Rochefort’s enemies in Washington shot it down.

Joe Rochefort’s War is a fine hardbound volume, one of the better offerings by Naval Institute Press. It begins with a foreword by Hypo vet Showers, which validates its importance. Its 467 pages are presented in 30 bite-sized chapters, making for an easy read. The book is enhanced by a good photo set plus a glossary and appendices that further expand the Rochefort and Midway stories. Very highly recommended. – R.W. Russell, Amazon.Com Customer Review

The ‘Codebreaker’ Who Made Midway Victory Possible

NPR Book Review – December 7, 2011 (Excerpt)

The attack on Pearl Harbor 70 years ago set in motion a series of battles in the Pacific between the Japanese and the United States. The turning point in the Pacific came in June 1942, when the U.S. surprised and defeated the Japanese fleet in the Battle of Midway.

That victory was possible, in large part, because of the work of a little-known naval codebreaker named Joe Rochefort. Rochefort, responsible for the Pacific Fleet’s radio intelligence unit at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, felt immense guilt at his failure to predict it.

His work deciphering codes over the subsequent six months revealed the details of the next Japanese offensive against the Hawaiian islands.

On June 4, 1942, armed with information from Rochefort and his team, American planes caught the Japanese by surprise and won the decisive battle in the Pacific.

NPR’s Neal Conan speaks with journalist and historian Elliot Carlson, whose book, Joe Rochefort’s War: The Odyssey of the Codebreaker Who Outwitted Yamamoto at Midway, gives an in-depth account of Rochefort’s life and career in the Navy, his unsuccessful efforts to find the Japanese fleet before Pearl Harbor and, ultimately, his redemption at Midway. [Read the full article...]

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THE BLEEDING HILLS
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

Never before has a journalist penetrated the wall of secrecy that surrounds the U.S. Secret Service. After conducting exclusive interviews with more than one hundred current and former Secret Service agents, bestselling author and award-winning reporter Ronald Kessler reveals their secrets for the first time.

•    George W. Bush’s daughters would try to lose their agents.
•    Based on a psychic’s vision that a sniper would assassinate President George H. W. Bush, the Secret Service changed his motorcade route.
•    To make the press think he came to work early, Jimmy Carter would walk into the Oval Office at 5 a.m., then nod off to sleep.
•    Lyndon Johnson gave dangerous instructions to his Secret Service agents and ­engaged in extensive philandering at the White House.

Ronald Kessler on the Updated Paperback Edition of “In the President’s Secret Service”

Secret Service agents are like human surveillance cameras: They see everything that goes on behind the scenes involving the president, first lady, vice president, and their families. At the same time, they are a bulwark of democracy. If a president is assassinated, it nullifies democracy.

In a new chapter to the paperback edition of In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect, I reveal that threats against President Obama have become so disturbing that a secret Presidential Threat Task Force has been created within the FBI to gather, track, and evaluate assassination threats that might be related to domestic or international terrorism.

The task force operates within the FBI’s National Security Branch. It consists of twenty representatives from pertinent agencies, including agents from the FBI and Secret Service and operatives from the CIA, the NSA, and the Defense Department, as well as analysts.

The hardcover edition reported that threats against Obama rose by as much as 400 percent compared with when President Bush was in office. While threats fluctuate, the level continues to be high enough to call for the threat task force.

At the same time, the Secret Service, which let party crashers into the White House in November, has been spinelessly acceding to requests of the Obama administration officials for Secret Service protection in instances where there are no threats against them. No one outside of the government has heard of most of these officials, but they have one thing in common: They enjoy being chauffeured free of charge by the Secret Service.

This expansion in protection has occurred at the same time that the Secret Service has cut corners because of understaffing and with a management culture that is complacent about potential risks, thus jeopardizing the president’s safety.

Those Secret Service deficiencies led to Michaele and Tareq Salahi’s intrusion at the White House state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The breach occurred because of a deliberate, conscious decision by uniformed officers to ignore the fact that the Salahis and Carlos Allen, a third intruder, were not on the guest list. Those decisions are an expected consequence of the agency’s practice of cutting corners.

The corner-cutting also include: not passing crowds through magnetometers or shutting down the devices early at presidential events; cutting back on the size of counter-assault teams and bowing to demands of staff that the teams remain at a great distance from protectees; not keeping up to date with the latest, most powerful firearms used by the FBI and the military; not allowing agents time for regular firearms requalification or physical training, which the Secret Service covers up by asking agents to fill out their own test scores.

Undoubtedly, the uniformed officers who decided to wave the Salahis into the state dinner were aware of the corner-cutting and were overwhelmed by the workload. In part because the Secret Service refuses to demand funds for adequate staffing, the attrition rate is as high as 12 percent a year within the Uniformed Division alone.

On top of this, the agency bows to political pressure. When agents refused to drive friends of Dick Cheney’s daughter Mary to restaurants, she got her detail leader removed. The fact that Secret Service management does not back personnel when they are just doing their jobs had to contribute to the uniformed officers’ reluctance to turn away guests at the state dinner and thus potentially face repercussions.

In recounting what protectees are like behind the scenes, the book describes as well how difficult Jenna and Barbara Bush were with their agents and how Vice President Joe Biden ignores Secret Service advice about his protection. To make the press think he came to work early, Jimmy Carter would walk into the Oval Office at 5 a.m., then nod off to sleep. Lyndon Johnson would order Secret Service agents to drive on crowded sidewalks so he could make an appointment on time. Johnson would urinate in front of the press corps, which included women reporters. He had a “stable” of women with whom he had sex at the White House and at his ranch. In addition, Vice President Spiro Agnew, a champion of family values, had extramarital affairs while in office.

Despite the breaches and corner-cutting, President Obama has said he has complete confidence in the Secret Service, indicating that he sees no need for a change in management. Given the clear warning signs, that is just as reckless as Abraham Lincoln’s and John F. Kennedy’s disregard for security.

Lincoln resisted efforts of his friends, the police, and the military to safeguard him. Finally, late in the Civil War, he agreed to allow four Washington police officers to act as his bodyguards, but on the night of his assassination, only one D.C. patrolman, John F. Parker, was guarding him.

Instead of remaining on guard outside the president’s box at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, Parker went to a nearby saloon for a drink. As a result of Parker’s negligence, just after 10 p.m., John Wilkes Booth made his way to Lincoln’s box, sneaked in, and shot him in the back of the head. The president died the next morning.

Kennedy told Secret Service agents he did not want them to ride on the small running boards at the rear of his limousine in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

“If agents had been allowed on the rear running boards, they would have pushed the president down and jumped on him to protect him before the fatal shot,” Charles “Chuck” Taylor, who was an agent on the Kennedy detail, tells me.

In the case of Obama, in the view of many current Secret Service agents interviewed for In the President’s Secret Service, the result of the Secret Service’s corner-cutting could be a security breach with deadly consequences.

While Secret Service agents are brave and dedicated, the agency’s management needs to be replaced. On the night of Obama’s state dinner, it was a pretty blonde. Tomorrow, it could be an assassin.

Reader Review

“In the President’s Secret Service” is something of a guilty pleasure for those interested in learning more about our nation’s presidents and first families and those agents who protect them. Yet it also pays tribute to those agents who put their lives on the line every day for their charges, and also seeks to highlight deficiencies in the agency that desperately need to be addressed. Kessler interviewed a number of active and retired agents in order to describe the dangers the agents and their charges face from a myriad of threats and seeks to personalize the history of this agency that often serves in the shadows and in silence for very obvious reasons. In an age when citizens are critical of the government and it’s agencies it is refreshing to read about these genuinely selfless individuals who are literally willing to take a bullet in their line of duty.

Secret Service agents are a favorite topic for fiction and for Hollywood, but their portrayal there is often stilted and two dimensional rather than the nuanced portrait Kessler reveals. Agents endure considerable abuse and difficulty with supreme diffidence and their demonstration of duty, honor, and valor that emerges is very much what you would find in the Armed Forces. Along the way Kessler gives readers a healthy amount of anecdotes about Presidents and their families and how they interacted with the agents assigned to protect them. These stories are by turns funny, interesting, and sometimes downright disturbing. Rather than being a distraction from the more serious messages of the book they help to provide levity when needed. Many of these stories give readers greater insight into the agents and their charges, particular how those protected react to having someone shadow their every move. “In the President’s Secret Service” is also rather topical as it focuses primarily on the more recent history of the service and recent presidents, primarily from George H. W. Bush to President Obama, but it also does occasionally touch on earlier Administrations.

“In the President’s Secret Service” is a lively page turner that will certainly inspire confidence in the agents, but Kessler also points out alarming deficiencies in how the agency presently operates and how cutbacks have potentially weakened the effectiveness of their protections. Kessler exposes these weaknesses in the hope of shaming the agency and the branches of government to rectify them. Considering the stakes involved and our ongoing “War on Terror” lets hope that this book is reaching the right people! – Todd Bartholomew, Amazon.Com Customer Review

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BOILED PEANUTS
A Novel by John Patrick Doyle

A Peeping Tom Goes Nuts Over A Blind Girl

Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents.  In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding.

Then Paul meets Bronwyn, a counselor who is lovely, independent and blind. She has inherited her Aunt Phyllis’ house and is newly arrived in town. When Paul first sees Bronwyn at church, he knows he wants to be part of her life. As the mystery of Aunt Phyllis unfolds, Bronwyn and Paul become more deeply involved as they learn about Phyllis’ secrets and how they relate to Bronwyn and her past, but Paul’s peeping ways may ruin it all. [Read more...]

Boiled Peanuts is available through Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

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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.” Shulsky, a senior fellow at the National Strategy Information Center in Washington, D.C., reviews the wide variety of activities that come under the heading “covert intelligence” and defines counterintelligence. His approach is basically theoretical and refers almost exclusively to the Anglo-American experience. – Publishers Weekly

Intended as a textbook to contribute to the academic study of this specialized field, this work also aims to counter some of the more alarmist and anti-intelligence books available. In eight chapters it explains the concepts, philosophies, and procedures of intelligence-gathering analysis and management. It examines how intelligence was used in various historical situations to explain a government’s actions. It shows the importance of an individual’s personality at every step of the process, particularly when it comes to acting on available intelligence. This easy-to-read-and-understand book should be considered by academic and large public libraries and those collections that support courses in security studies.
- Daniel K. Blewett, Loyola Univ. Lib., Chicago

Review

Both the authors, Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt, are respected intelligence organization professionals who have taken up university-level teaching and writing. The book is focused on intelligence theory and organization – not on tradecraft. As such, the principal audience of this book would likely be future intelligence policymakers or foreign intelligence organizations trying to gain an insight into US intelligence systems.

The book does a solid job of identifying what intelligence is, how it is collected (humint vs. techint), how it is processed, how it is systematically protected, and what counter-intelligence includes. In addition, it addresses the gray areas of covert action (Is it intelligence or military activity?) and plausible denial. Although much of this discussion could apply to most nations’ intelligence bureaus, the authors only explicity describe the American intelligence system.

Perhaps the most outstanding feature of the book is the wealth of sources it contains. Many of these are freely and immediately available on the web for all to read. All the footnotes are very thoroughly explained and usually refer to a specific source. The source list itself adds tremendous value to the book by guiding the reader to so many numerous definitive works on intelligence operations.

All in all, this is a solid introduction to intelligence and a great book for pursuing its addition sources. – George Coppedge, Amazon.Com Customer Review

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The Bleeding Hills

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

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.

Fleming admitted freely that he had lifted the idea from a detective novel he once read. “That’s why I love this story,” MacIntyre says. “It starts in fiction, and in a way it really is a case of somebody just imagining their way into reality.” (Source: NPR Book Reviews)

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Ben Macintyre’s Agent Zigzag was hailed as “rollicking, spellbinding” (New York Times), “wildly improbable but entirely true” (Entertainment Weekly), and, quite simply, “the best book ever written” (Boston Globe). In his new book, Operation Mincemeat, he tells an extraordinary story that will delight his legions of fans.

In 1943, from a windowless basement office in London, two brilliant intelligence officers conceived a plan that was both simple and complicated— Operation Mincemeat. The purpose? To deceive the Nazis into thinking that Allied forces were planning to attack southern Europe by way of Greece or Sardinia, rather than Sicily, as the Nazis had assumed, and the Allies ultimately chose.

Charles Cholmondeley of MI5 and the British naval intelligence officer Ewen Montagu could not have been more different. Cholmondeley was a dreamer seeking adventure. Montagu was an aristocratic, detail-oriented barrister. But together they were the perfect team and created an ingenious plan: Get a corpse, equip it with secret (but false and misleading) papers concerning the invasion, then drop it off the coast of Spain where German spies would, they hoped, take the bait. The idea was approved by British intelligence officials, including Ian Fleming (creator of James Bond). Winston Churchill believed it might ring true to the Axis and help bring victory to the Allies.

Filled with spies, double agents, rogues, fearless heroes, and one very important corpse, the story of Operation Mincemeat reads like an international thriller.

Unveiling never-before-released material, Ben Macintyre brings the reader right into the minds of intelligence officers, their moles and spies, and the German Abwehr agents who suffered the “twin frailties of wishfulness and yesmanship.” He weaves together the eccentric personalities of Cholmondeley and Montagu and their near-impossible feats into a riveting adventure that not only saved thousands of lives but paved the way for a pivotal battle in Sicily and, ultimately, Allied success in the war. (Source: Amazon.Com)

Review

I came across this story in the 1950s as a schoolboy reading “The Man who Never Was” and seeing the movie. I didn’t think there was much more to tell until I read this book, where a combination of new facts (like the Enigma machine) and Ben Macintyre’s easy style made me happy to read it again.

In 1943 the Allies were victorious in Africa, driving Rommel’s Afrika Corps back to Italy. The next step was to invade some part of Europe, and “Operation Husky” was to take the fight to Italy. The Allies deluded the Nazis into thinking that the main attack on Sicily was just a diversion, and that the attack would fall on Greece and Corsica. Troops and weapons would be stationed in other places than Sicily, so the invasion would meet less resistance.

The plan was outrageous, and the central figure was a dead man. The British made the Germans believe that this was a courier whose plane had crashed off the Southern Atlantic coast of Spain. Spain was ostensibly neutral, but there was a strong Nazi diplomatic presence and many Nazi sympathizers in Spain’s bureaucracy. The Spanish officials, it was hoped, would let the Germans copy letters in the dead man’s briefcase, and forward their finding to Berlin.

The story moves from London to Wales (where the dead man came from), to Scotland where he was placed on a submarine which released the body off the Spanish coast. As the story unfolds, Ben Macintyre describes the scene and is particularly good at portraying the major characters. It would be very easy to slip into stereotypical Allied and Nazi personalities, but Macintyre shows that the cast comprises a part-Jewish German officer and an English racing car driver, and you soon get the feeling that you know these people.

Macintyre shows the same skill as he did in his earlier book – “Agent Zigzag.” The writing never flags and you want to know how things turned out. The book almost descends into farce when the Spanish have the documents, but aren’t letting the Germans look at them, while the British have to both act like they want the documents to remain a secret while privately hoping that the Germans will be taken in by them.

I chose this book because I like military history, but even if you don’t I think you be carried along by it. Good writing and a great story make this one to take notice of. And of course, if you’ve never heard the tale before, Macintyre is the ideal guide. – David Field, Amazon.Com Customer Review

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Queen of Misfortune

A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same ‘stranger’ who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

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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.

William Joseph Donovan’s life was packed with personal drama. The son of poor Irish Catholic parents, he married into Protestant wealth and fought heroically in World War I, where he earned the nickname “Wild Bill” for his intense leadership and the Medal of Honor for his heroism. After the war he made millions as a Republican lawyer on Wall Street until FDR, a Democrat, tapped him to be his strategic intelligence chief. A charismatic leader, Donovan was revered by his secret agents. Yet at times he was reckless—risking his life unnecessarily in war zones, engaging in extramarital affairs that became fodder for his political enemies—and he endured heartbreaking tragedy when family members died at young ages.

Wild Bill Donovan reads like an action-packed spy thriller, with stories of daring young men and women in his OSS sneaking behind enemy lines for sabotage, breaking into Washington embassies to steal secrets, plotting to topple Adolf Hitler, and suffering brutal torture or death when they were captured by the Gestapo. It is also a tale of political intrigue, of infighting at the highest levels of government, of powerful men pitted against one another. Donovan fought enemies at home as often as the Axis abroad. Generals in the Pentagon plotted against him.

J. Edgar Hoover had FBI agents dig up dirt on him. Donovan stole secrets from the Soviets before the dawn of the Cold War and had intense battles with Winston Churchill and British spy chiefs over foreign turf. Separating fact from fiction, Waller investigates the successes and the occasional spectacular failures of Donovan’s intelligence career.

It makes for a gripping and revealing portrait of this most controversial spymaster.

Editorial Reviews

“Wild Bill Donovan, the founding father of American espionage, jumps off the page in Douglas Waller’s superb biography of one of the nation’s most important and least understood leaders of the 20th Century. Waller marvelously evokes an era when a matinee-idol character like Donovan could turn Washington into his own secret playground even as he ended America’s naivete about the necessity of stealing the secrets of other gentlemen. Waller takes us back to a time, long before bureaucratic sclerosis set in at the Central Intelligence Agency, when American spies lived in technicolor.” – James Risen, author of State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration

“Whether fighting on the battlefield during World War I, leading the OSS during World War II, or prosecuting Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, William Donovan’s service to his country was historic and extraordinary. In Wild Bill Donovan, Douglas C. Waller’s impressive research and riveting writing bring the ‘Father of American Intelligence’ to life, drawing the reader into one of the most thrilling and remarkable periods in American history.” –Lee H. Hamilton, former Chairman, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

In Wild Bill Donovan, Douglas Waller brings the larger than life William J. Donovan – a World War I Medal of Honor winner, Office of Strategic Services founder, CIA architect, and one of the 20th century’s most compelling figures – to life. Waller’s impressive skill as a journalist, his expertise about the U.S. intelligence community, and a remarkable writing ability complement one another in this fascinating and insightful portrait of Donovan the man, not the myth, and enhances our appreciation of his remarkable legacy. General Donovan attributed much of the success of the Office of Strategic Services to “good old fashioned intellectual sweat.” This informative, enjoyable, and important book deserves the same compliment. –Charles Pinck, President, The OSS Society, Inc.

“An extraordinary portrait of an extraordinary figure in 20th century American history, a man beyond the power of fiction to invent. Wild Bill Donovan is brilliantly researched and beautifully told, as evocative and enlightening as it is entertaining.” –Rick Atkinson, author of An Army at Dawn and The Day of Battle

“Douglas Waller gives us the definitive portrait of the fascinating, creative, disorganized, brave man who—starting from nothing during our biggest war—created our modern capacity for human intelligence and covert operations. A must for all who would understand American intelligence.” –R. James Woolsey, Chair, Woolsey Partners, LLC and Director of Central Intelligence, 1993-1995

“In a time when espionage consists largely of technicians in windowless rooms, far from the battlefield, collecting signals and pictures from satellites and drones, it is both refreshing and fascinating to read Doug Waller’s story of the man behind World War II’s spy organization, the OSS. Long before there was a CIA, there was Major General “Wild Bill” Donovan, and Waller’s extensively researched and highly entertaining book takes the reader back to the days when spying meant sending dedicated agents behind enemy lines to risk their lives to steal secrets and help win the war.” –James Bamford, bestselling author of Body of Secrets and The Shadow Factory

Swashbuckling Spymaster

The New York Times Book Review – February 11, 2011 (Excerpt)

In January 1940, William J. Donovan sat in a Manhattan radio studio plugging “The Fighting 69th,” a Hollywood movie about the cocky, mostly Irish New York regiment whose exploits during World War I had made Donovan a national hero and earned him the Medal of Honor. The release of the film, starring James Cagney and Pat O’Brien, with George Brent as the rakishly handsome Donovan, put the then wealthy and well-connected corporate attorney back in the spotlight just at the moment President Franklin Roosevelt was looking for men who could help mobilize the country for war.

Roosevelt and Donovan could not have been more different, Douglas Waller writes in this entertaining history, and it was, at best, an uneasy alliance. They came from divergent backgrounds — one the scion of an old aristocratic family, the other a poor Irish Catholic boy from Buffalo — and barely acknowledged each other while at Columbia Law School. They were also members of opposing political parties, and the fiercely Republican Donovan, during a failed bid to become governor of New York in 1932, campaigned not only against his rival for the office, Herbert Lehman, but also against Roosevelt’s domestic policies, and ridiculed him as a dictator with “delusions of grandeur.” But the growing military crisis in Europe gave them a common cause. [Read the full article...]

Queen of Misfortune

A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll

Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same ‘stranger’ who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16^th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]

Available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.

Click on image to buy from Amazon.com

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.

But, as investigative journalists Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz document masterfully, the claim that Khan’s operation had been dismantled was a classic case of too little, too late. Khan’s ring had, by then, sold Iran the technology to bring Tehran to the brink of building a nuclear weapon. It had also set loose on the world the most dangerous nuclear secrets imaginable—sophisticated weapons designs, blueprints for uranium enrichment plants, plans for warheads—all for sale to the highest bidder. Relying on explosive new information gathered in exclusive interviews with key participants and previously undisclosed, highly confidential documents, the authors expose the truth behind the elaborate efforts by the CIA to conceal the full extent of the damage done by Khan’s network and to cover up how the profound failure to stop the atomic bazaar much earlier jeopardizes our national security today.

Fallout takes readers inside the CIA’s covert operation to penetrate the Khan network and exposes the agency’s desperate and ultimately flawed plans to sabotage the nuclear programs of Iran and Libya. In vivid scenes and convincing detail, the book reveals how the CIA recruited a family of Swiss nuclear traffickers to spy on Khan and help bring down parts of his operation. Collins and Frantz also take readers behind closed doors in the hallowed halls of power in Washington and other world capitals, where they chronicle how the U.S. intelligence agency later enlisted the most senior officials of the Bush administration to protect CIA assets by pressuring the Swiss government to destroy a staggering amount of evidence and derail the planned prosecution of a team of U.S. intelligence agents who violated Swiss laws.

More than a high-stakes espionage thriller, Fallout painstakingly examines the huge costs of the CIA’s errors and the lost opportunities to halt the spread of nuclear weapons technology long before it was made available to some of the most dangerous and reckless adversaries of the United States and its allies. At its heart, this book stands as a sober warning to citizens and policymakers in the United States and throughout the world. Only sheer luck has allowed us to avoid a nuclear catastrophe so far. If failures like those recounted in Fallout are not remedied, and if fighting nuclear proliferation does not become the number one priority of the world’s governments, we will assuredly run out of luck one of these days.

About the Authors

Catherine Collins has been a foreign correspondent and reporter for the Chicago Tribune and written for the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. She has authored several books with her husband, Douglas Frantz, including The Man from Pakistan and Death on the Black Sea.

Douglas Frantz was the former managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, where he was a business reporter, an investigative reporter and a foreign correspondent based in Istanbul. He has also been a reporter for The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. He was part of a team which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, in addition to which he is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-finalist, and as won several honors for his investigative reporting. He is now an investigator for the U.S. Congress.

The ‘Fallout’ Of The CIA’s Race To Get Khan

NPR Book Review – January 4, 2011 (Excerpt)

In early 2004, A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, was placed under house arrest for his role in an international nuclear trafficking network. For five years, Khan was confined to his home, after admitting that he shared nuclear secrets with countries including North Korea, Libya and Iran.

At the time, President George W. Bush declared the breakup of Khan’s nuclear black market as a major victory for the United States. But in a new book about the takedown of Khan’s network, two journalists argue that the United States should have acted much sooner — and when they did, it was too little, too late.

In Fallout, Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins track the ways the United States secretly penetrated Khan’s network to prevent Libya and Iran from obtaining nuclear secrets. Frantz tellsFresh Air‘s Dave Davies that the CIA knew about and tracked Khan’s nuclear trafficking network for more than 30 years — but was so obsessed with getting information that it let Khan and his associates spread dangerous nuclear technology around the globe rather than moving aggressively to shut the network down. [Read the full article...]

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. Well, not all the names; about half the entries are blank because the CIA says it doesn’t want to compromise ongoing operations. Yet, as Gup argues in his own tome, also called The Book of Honor, the truth behind many of the stories that aren’t being told threatens nothing–except perhaps the agency’s own sense of shame over botched operations.

Gup, a well-known investigative reporter with experience at The Washington Post and Time, interviewed hundreds of current and former CIA case officers to tell the stories behind the stars. “In the aggregate, the stories of the stars form a kind of constellation that, once connected, reveal not only the CIA’s history but something of its soul as well,” he writes. Yet this is, thankfully, not an indiscrete book. He writes of “a young woman who died a violent and selfless death in 1996 … her name is withheld from this book. The Agency made a compelling case that to identify her would put others at risk.” The bulk of The Book of Honor does, in fact, name names and describe how they died. In this sense, it is similar to the runaway bestseller Blind Man’s Bluff, which described the secret history of American submarine espionage during the cold war. Yet what’s most striking about Gup’s accounts is how many of the deaths were routine or accidental. Many agents merely had the misfortune of being on planes that crashed–hardly the stuff of a James Bond adventure. Throughout, Gup is sensitive to a situation in which, “between the values of an open society and the demands of a craft rooted in deception and betrayal, the CIA is asked to steer an uneasy, often irreconcilable course.” This fascinating book strikes a clean blow for the open society–but it serves a larger purpose as well: telling the truth. –John J. Miller

Reviews

An interesting and timely book. “The Book of Honor” sheds light on the extreme sacrifices made by a unique breed of Americans who were involved in the clandestine services and risked all for their country’s security. It’s appropriate to note and honor those brave men and women–including those who are still “out there”–engaged in our Nation’s intelligence business. It is understandable, of course, that in some instances there are valid reasons why certain identities cannot be revealed, when this revelation may implicate others who might still be in the service and may endanger both them and/or their work. In reading about those in the book who have paid the highest price, I hope that others will become aware that there have been–and still are–thousands of men and women doing this dangerous work, all over the world, often under hazardous conditions and in places in which they undergo risks and hardships that would make most Americans cringe. They do it, not only out of a sense of adventure, but out of patriotism and a dedication that is not unlike that of young Americans who have gone to war throughout our country’s history. These individuals are highly trained and educated; most could earn much higher salaries in the private sector, but they choose service instead, taking an oath of allegiance to our country and its Constitution. While the author is unable to name all of the fallen heroes that the stars represent, it is hoped that one day it will be possible that they all may be recognized and appropriately honored. For them, it was enough that they be known to their family, colleagues and friends. In the meantime, I hope this book will go a long way towards awakening the reader to the stories of these courageous Americans. The book is a service to their surviving families, who can be proud. – S. Singleton, Amazon Review

Even though I’m a compulsive reader of books about espionage and intelligence issues, I wasn’t sure I was going to like “The Book of Honor.” Some of the life stories it tells happened so long ago that at first blush they don’t seem relevant to the present day.

Yet I found the book very hard to put down and the story of the first man who died in CIA service (1949) to be one of the most poignant. I won’t spoil the tale here but will simply say oh, to have come so far after suffering so much and then to die like that!

James Bond addicts are not going to find much here to their liking. The deaths Gup chronicles are either very ordinary –a car accident, a plane crash– or provide dramatic proof that even intelligence officers are not immune to a bullet or bomb. But the character sketches of the often heroic men and women who died these sad deaths are quite compelling.

And even though I accept that some of the recent entries in the Book of Honor have to remain annonymous (at least for the time being), it is very difficult to understand why a 21 year old secretary who died in a car bombing 35 years ago in Saigon cannot be acknowledged as one of the Agency’s own. I think refusing to do so is cruel to her survivors. – Amazon Customer Review

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.

Prior to 2001, he was working on an operation called Able Danger, which, according Shaffer, uncovered some of the 9/11 terrorists a full year before the attacks, although—again, according to Shaffer—the government blocked attempts to act upon the information. He saw the same sort of thing happen again in Afghanistan, when red tape and inept policies hindered efforts to fight the Taliban. This is almost two books in one: a rousing chronicle of the author’s experiences on foreign soil and an examination of a bloated bureaucracy that is in desperate need of retooling.

Shaffer adopts a mostly objective tone, although there are moments when his personal views sneak through (the phrase “Bush administration lunacy,” for example). Although no coauthor is listed, the book reads like it was transcribed from taped interviews (see the occasional oddly constructed paragraph where it looks like someone stuck in parenthetical explanations of things the author was saying). All in all, a fascinating, eye-opening book. –David Pitt

Editorial Reviews

“Anthony Shaffer has written a gripping account, filled with amazing detail, of an otherwise secret world. Shaffer has the instincts of a thriller writer and the knowledge and perspective of the professional insider. Operation Dark Heart is a fascinating page-turner.” — Doug Stanton, author of Horse Soldiers

“A fascinating look into the highly complex world of modern combat, clandestine intelligence and bureaucrats run amok. Tony Shaffer walks and runs us through a critical time in the history in the war in Afghanistan. From the opening to the closing, you are on the edge of your seat. Tony is, in all aspects, the real Jack Bauer – but with an intellect.” –Dr. Christopher M. Lehman, former Special Assistant to President Reagan, National Security Counsel

“[Operation Dark Heart] takes you inside the espionage world, a labyrinth of secret agencies that do not like to share secrets.” –Army Times

Review

I’m not angry at Amazon, nor am I angry with the author or his book, and that’s why I gave this item a perfect, five-star rating; they don’t provide a rating scale that can accurately manifest my disappointment in the situation that has been forced upon us–each and every one of us who ordered this book with the belief that we were going to receive it, only to have the rug torn out from under us. A cover-up set in motion by a nation who denounces censorship, praises freedom of speech, and who won’t hesitate to annihilate any person or entity daring enough to threaten our “god given” rights; daring enough to go toe-to-toe with the most powerful, morally bankrupt nation on this planet (but hey, at least we’re not Communists!).

Our country, the land of the “free,” home of the brave, where democracy is more of a buzzword than a legitimate political system–unless you’re voting for America’s newest idol, model, or celebrity dance duo.

But, I digress… I searched high and low for this book. Every possible website you could think of; some saying that the item wasn’t in stock, some that it was available for pre-order and would be delivered 23 December, 2010, still others not even mentioning that it’s not available until after you purchased it. The latter is what I dealt with.

I found the book on a site that shall remain nameless, and it was the 1st edition, uncensored print. It was in stock for $17.98, so I promptly placed my order. The following day I checked my order status, ecstatic that I was lucky enough to snag a copy of this now infamous book, only to find that my order was still being “processed.” After checking the status of the item itself, I was deflated when I saw that it was no longer available, with an availability date of 24 September, 2010. I promptly canceled my order as I knew that I would not be getting the 1st edition print, but rather the redacted, government approved edition when the supply was replenished on 24 September, 2010.

The fact that the we all have been denied access to this literature is a violation of our rights, and I don’t think that I should have to shell out $1,000+ in a 10 day bidding war on a well known auction site just to read this book in its original form. How long before our leaders deny us access to websites critical of this country and its foreign policy?

Mass surveillance, control over the economy, propaganda disseminated through government controlled mass media–this is not where America is headed, this is where America is NOW. Totalitarianism at its finest. You may think you’re free, but the only thing you’re free to do is work, consume, and die. – ickytips, Amazon Review

‘Operation Dark Heart’ Author Sues for Uncensored Edition

The New York Times Book Review – December 14, 2010 (Excerpt)

WASHINGTON — A former Defense Intelligence Agency officer whose Afghan memoir was belatedly censored by the Pentagon filed a lawsuit on Tuesday seeking to have the book’s full text restored in future printings.

In September, the Defense Department spent $47,300 to purchase and destroy the entire first printing of “Operation Dark Heart” by Anthony A. Shaffer, asserting that it contained classified information.

The book was hastily reprinted with many passages blacked out and has become a best seller. But unredacted advance copies of the book, among a few dozen distributed by St. Martin’s Press before the Pentagon’s intervention, are still for sale on eBay for $1,995 to $4,995.

The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court here, recounts how Mr. Shaffer, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, submitted his original manuscript to the Army to be checked for classified information and got official approval to publish it last January. But when theDefense Intelligence Agency saw the manuscript in May and showed it to the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, all three agencies asserted that the approved manuscript still contained secrets.

After a second review was completed, passages were removed from 250 of the book’s 320 pages. [Read the full article...]

A book so compelling it deserves to become one of the nonfiction classics of our time. 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.

“In Milan a known fact is always explained by competing stories,” Hendricks writes, but the stories that swirled around the February 2003 disappearance of the radical imam Abu Omar would soon point in one direction—to a covert action by the CIA. The police of Milan had been exploiting their wiretaps of Abu Omar for useful information before the taps went silent. The Americans were their allies in counterterrorism—would they have disrupted a fruitful investigation?

In an extraordinary tale of detective versus spy, Italian investigators under the leadership of prosecutor Armando Spataro unraveled in embarrassing detail the “covert” action in which Abu Omar had been kidnapped and sent to be tortured in Egypt. Spataro—seasoned in prosecutions of the Mafia and the Red Brigades and a passionate believer in the rule of law—sought to try the kidnappers in absentia: the first-ever trial of CIA officers by a U.S. ally. An exemplary achievement in narrative nonfiction writing, A Kidnapping in Milan is at once a detective story, a history of the terrorist menace, and an indictment of the belief that man’s savagery against man can be stilled with more savagery yet.

Editorial Review

Exceptionally well written and deeply reported—a gripping novel-like book that brilliantly reconstructs one of the more revealing episodes of the ‘war on terror.’ (Peter Bergen, author of The Osama bin Laden I Know )

Steve Hendricks is a gifted writer as well as a dogged sleuth, a combination that has turned this account—a journey through some of the darker human mazes of the war on terror—into one of those rarities, an important story, excellently told. (Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life )

Review

I had the pleasure of reading this book and to summarize my reactions I see no better way than to enumerate its attractions.
Extremely well researched CHECK
It’s about real events but reads like a novel CHECK
Well written CHECK
Hard to put it down until finished CHECK
Thought-provoking CHECK

As an Italian, who actually remembers reading and following the events as they were happening, I’m overwhelmed of how well researched the book is and well informed its author.
The only possible drawback that I can see, which could prevent this book from becoming a major best-seller, is that the subject might look “minor”, at least in the view of many potential American readers.
But let me say that the real subject is not the kidnapping itself, grippingly told and with a sense of being-there intensity, but the moral conundrum that modern societies have to face ( and decide on) when dealing with terrorism.
As The Bard would have said: To Be or Not To Be ( a renditioner and a torturer)?
Hendricks’ adamant and passionate response is that we cannot renounce the tenets and foundations of our present civilized society. To do so would mean dropping ” civilized” from the description of the world we live in and eventually fulfilling the terrorists’ aim of dragging us down to their level of incivility.
Hendricks is especially focused in trying to show the extreme “ordinariness” of both the kidnappers and the kidnapped. It’s an eloquent appeal to our souls not to repeat the mistakes of the past ( with Nazism coming to mind, where people were so dispossessed of their critical capacities as to condone all the atrocities that the regime carried out).

I’m looking forward to reading Hendricks’s previous book to get a better sense of his self.
But I’m also looking forward to his next book hoping, for him, that the subject has wider appeal for his American readers.
From what I can see, it seems to me that he is sharpening his writing skills and his amazing research capabilities while looking for some even more controversial, big time subject to tackle. – Bruno E. Basile, Amazon Review

Spy vs. Spy

The New York Times – November 12, 2010 (Excerpt)

Inside the Central Intelligence Agency, it came to be known as “The Italian Job,” a botched operation in 2003 that snatched a radical cleric off a Milan street in broad daylight and spirited him to Egypt, where he says he endured months of torture at the hands of his Egyptian jailers.

The C.I.A. operatives had successfully nabbed their quarry — Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar — but they made a number of dizzyingly stupid decisions while in Italy. They spoke on commercial cellphones, used traceable toll scanners to breeze down highways in the getaway van, checked into ritzy hotels using the addresses of post office boxes located near C.I.A. headquarters and even gave the hotels frequent flier numbers so they could earn miles during their stay in Milan. The missteps left a lengthy evidence trail for Italian prosecutors, and 23 Americans were ultimately convicted on kidnapping charges after being tried in absentia.

Italian and American journalists have already unearthed many details of the case, and others came out during the trial. Yet a more thorough treatment has been needed to resolve a number of mysteries. [Read the full article...]

Conservatives Have Lower IQ

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.

It is a daily business in the political arena to categorize an opponent as naive, simple, and stupid. A new study conducted by psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa could strengthen the beliefs of lefties and liberals that they are indeed smarter than their conservative counterparts. According to Kanazawa, intelligent people tend more easily to accept social values as well as political and religious convictions new to the human evolution. The preservation of old values is, however, a matter of conservatives, who are supposedly less intelligent.

The scientist, in cooperation with his colleagues at the London School of Economics and Political Science, analyzed a survey of 14,000 US adolescents conducted between the year 2001 and 2002. One question addressed their level of religious beliefs. The options they were given ranged from “not at all religious”, “somewhat religious”, “moderately religious”, and “very religious.” The “not at all religious” group showed the highest IQ (103), while the “very religious” group came up with an average IQ of 97. This is, after all, only a minute but detectable difference. The average IQ of the entire population lies at 100.

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health – used by the London scientists – also inquired the adolescents’ political convictions. As the scientists wrote in Social Psychology Quarterly, those who saw themselves as “very liberal” reached an IQ of 106, while those who characterized themselves as “very conservative” had only an average IQ of 95.

“Intelligence was advantageous for our ancestors when it came to solve new emerging problems for which they had no existing solutions,” says Kanazawa. For the same reason, intelligent people would detect and understand such scenarios sooner. The same is true when it comes to rethinking values and lifestyles. A higher IQ makes it possible to go new ways that are not compliant with values and convictions developed in the course of evolution.

The London scientist also claims, conservatives primarily take care of their family and friends, while lefties and liberals also have a heart for foreigners, people with whom they are in no direct genetical relationship. This may be a new development in evolution.

However, in case you are a lefty or liberal, don’t get too excited about the Kanazawa study. There are some slight side effects. People with higher IQs are often dissatisfied with their lives and make less money than conservatives.

Reference: http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,680956,00.html

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The Bleeding Hills

A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss

I have fought a good fight,
I have finished my course,
I have kept the faith.
- 2 Timothy iv. 7

The Irish War is officially a part of history, but not for Finnean Whelan, an IRA veteran of almost 40 years. British Intelligence has produced evidence that he is the mastermind behind a conspiracy to assassinate the First Minister of Northern Ireland. For Whelan this is not only a mission of revenge, but marks the beginning of a journey into the past and the return to the one true love: Ireland. [More...]

The Bleeding Hills is available at Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Nobel, and any other good bookstore.