Eternal Vigilance?
Eternal Vigilance?

Author: Christopher Andrew

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1135222533

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Eternal Vigilance? seeks to offer reinterpretations of some of the major established themes in CIA history such as its origins, foundations, its treatment of the Soviet threat, the Iranian revolution and the accountability of the agency. The book also opens new areas of research such as foreign liaison, relations with the scientific community, use of scientific and technical research and economic intelligence. The articles are both by well-known scholars in the field and young researchers at the beginning of their academic careers. Contributors come almost equally from both sides of the Atlantic. All draw, to varying degrees, on recently declassified documents and newly-available archives and, as the final chapter seeks to show, all point the way to future research.

The End of Victory
The End of Victory

Author: Edward Kaplan

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2022-11-15

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1501766139

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The End of Victory recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC). From 1953 onward, US leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen if they failed in a nuclear war—how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of the worst failure of American strategy—a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States. Edward Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR and on the size and shape of the US military. The subcommittee delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the NESC's reports offered the best estimates of the butcher's bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives. Taken with the intelligence community's assessment of the probability of a surprise attack, the NESC's work framed the risks of US strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The End of Victory reveals how all policy decisions run risks—and ones involving military force run grave ones—though they can rarely be known with precision.

The Hidden Hand
The Hidden Hand

Author: Richard H. Immerman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2014-03-03

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1118835581

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THE HIDDEN HAND Since its inception in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency has played an outsized role in the political life of the United States, whether by formulating and implementing policy or by fueling popular culture and imagination. The Hidden Hand is an accessible and up-to-date history of the agency that succinctly takes the reader from its early days of intelligence gathering and analysis to its more recent involvement in the execution of foreign policy through covert operations, psychological warfare, and other programs. In manageable chapters and easy-to-digest prose, the author — a respected scholar who has researched intelligence for more than 30 years and also served as a high-ranking officer in the intelligence community — covers all aspects of the CIA from its mission to its performance to its record. He draws on the latest evidence and research to assess the agency’s successes and failures over the last half century, highlighting key operations of the past and present. Throughout, his assessment is balanced and thorough with an eye on the complex and controversial nature of the subject. This is a masterful account that demythologizes the CIA’s role in America’s global affairs while addressing its integral place within American political and popular culture.

Know Your Enemy
Know Your Enemy

Author: David C. Engerman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009-11-20

Total Pages: 473

ISBN-13: 0199886687

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As World War II ended, few Americans in government or universities knew much about the Soviet Union. As David Engerman shows in this book, a network of scholars, soldiers, spies, and philanthropists created an enterprise known as Soviet Studies to fill in this dangerous gap in American knowledge. This group brought together some of the nation's best minds from the left, right, and center, colorful and controversial individuals ranging from George Kennan to Margaret Mead to Zbigniew Brzezinski, not to mention historians Sheila Fitzpatrick and Richard Pipes. Together they created the knowledge that helped fight the Cold War and define Cold War thought. Soviet Studies became a vibrant intellectual enterprise, studying not just the Soviet threat, but Soviet society and culture at a time when many said that these were contradictions in terms, as well as Russian history and literature. And this broad network, Engerman argues, forever changed the relationship between the government and academe, connecting the Pentagon with the ivory tower in ways that still matter today.