Warriors of Disinformation is a scrupulous, honest, and fascinating account of what we have been missing all these years. Snyder reveals both the high-minded principles and the lowbrow comedy and establishes the credit that disinformation's warriors deserve for helping to bring an end to the cold war.
Have you ever thought about what really goes on behind the walls of the White House or the Pentagon? Particularly in times of political upheaval, it often seems that the government and the media work together to keep the voting public confused and distracted. In Warriors of Disinformation, Alvin A. Snyder, a former director of USIA’s Television and Film Service, reveals the various propaganda campaigns sent out by the United States during the Cold War, one of the most strained, uncertain times in American political history. Snyder examines the “shady” billion-dollar dealings dedicated to “an exaggerated version of the truth,” and how President Reagan deceived the Soviets with well-plotted plans of fabrication. Readers will be shocked by the lengths that our government went to in order to hide the truth, and to consistently lie to not only the Soviets, but also to the American people about what was going on in the “land of the free.” Warriors of Disinformation is an incredible look inside the government from someone who was on the front line. Hear stories that were never supposed to leave confidential meeting rooms and find out firsthand what went on behind closed doors. Snyder has a story to tell you, and you’d be crazy not to listen.
The third of Russ Kick’s bestselling Disinformation Guides gathers another all-star line-up of exposés: Juries have ruled in recent trials that Watergate was really about a Democratic Party prostitution ring. Ignored in the U.S. and distorted elsewhere, the Milosevic tribunal hasn’t gone the way authorities were anticipating. (We present exclusive first-hand reporting from the trial). Most theologians don’t believe in the physical Resurrection of Jesus. In 2001, the U.S. uncovered the biggest spy ring in the country since WWII, yet most people never heard about it. The U.S. is engaging in bioweapons research that violates international treaties and federal law. (The New York Times knows about this but refuses to report it). Teddy Roosevelt and Wall Street created Panama for profit. Gandhi wasn’t so wonderful, after all. These are just some of the revelations in the third of our all-star anthologies. Following up on bestsellers You Are Being Lied To and Everything You Know Is Wrong, editor Russ Kick has again assembled a line-up of leading investigative journalists, academics, activists, commentators, and independent researchers, covering CIA assassinations, the anthrax attacks, fluoride, TWA 800, Abraham Lincoln, child protective services, the tobacco industry, forgotten uprisings, the government's missing trillions, even more revelations about 9/11 and much more. Contributors include Gary Webb, Greg Palast, Noreena Hertz, Howard Zinn, Douglas Valentine, Jim Hougan, Kristina Borjesson, Arianna Huffington and many more well-known writers—some of whom you’ll be extremely surprised to see in these pages!
Ever since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, fighters from abroad have journeyed in ever-greater numbers to conflict zones in the Muslim world to defend Islam from-in their view-infidels and apostates. The phenomenon recently reached its apogee in Syria, where the foreign fighter population quickly became larger and more diverse than in any previous conflict. In Road Warriors, Daniel Byman provides a sweeping history of the jihadist foreign fighter movement. He begins by chronicling the movement's birth in Afghanistan, its growing pains in Bosnia and Chechnya, and its emergence as a major source of terrorism in the West in the 1990s, culminating in the 9/11 attacks. Since that bloody day, the foreign fighter movement has seen major ups and downs. It rode high after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, when the ultra-violent Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) attracted thousands of foreign fighters. AQI overreached, however, and suffered a crushing defeat. Demonstrating the resilience of the movement, however, AQI reemerged anew during the Syrian civil war as the Islamic State, attracting tens of thousands of fighters from around the world and spawning the bloody 2015 attacks in Paris among hundreds of other strikes. Although casualty rates are usually high, the survivors of Afghanistan, Syria, and other fields of jihad often became skilled professional warriors, going from one war to the next. Still others returned to their home countries, some to peaceful retirement but a deadly few to conduct terrorist attacks. Over time, both the United States and Europe have learned to adapt. Before 9/11, volunteers went to and fro to Afghanistan and other hotspots with little interference. Today, the United States and its allies have developed a global program to identify, arrest, and kill foreign fighters. Much remains to be done, however-jihadist ideas and networks are by now deeply embedded, even as groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State rise and fall. And as Byman makes abundantly clear, the problem is not likely to go away any time soon.
Can Germany and Japan do more militarily to uphold the international order? Since the end of World War II, Germany and Japan have been the most reluctant of all major U.S. allies to take on military responsibilities. Given their histories, this reluctance certainly is understandable. But because of their size and economic importance, Germany and Japan are the most important U.S. allies in Europe and in East Asia, respectively, and their long-term reluctance to share the defense burden has become a perennial source of frustration for Washington. The potential security roles of Germany and Japan are becoming increasingly important given the uncertainty, indeed volatility, of today’s international environment. Under President Trump, friction among allies over burden-sharing is more intense than ever before. Meanwhile, the security environments in Europe and Asia have deteriorated because of the resurgence of a belligerent Russia under Vladimir Putin, the steady rise of an increasingly assertive China, and North Korea’s worrisome acquisition of nuclear weapons. Partly in response to these developments, Germany and Japan in recent years have boosted their security efforts, mainly by increasing defense spending and taking on a somewhat broader range of military missions. Even so, because of their cultures of anti-militarism resistance remains strong in both countries to rebuilding the military and assuming more responsibility for sustaining regional or even global peace. In Reluctant Warriors, a team of noted international experts critically examines how and why Germany and Japan have modified their military postures since 1990 so far, and assesses how far the countries still have to go—and why. The contributors also highlight the risks the United States takes if it makes too simplistic a demand for the two countries to “do more.”
Timmerman contends that partisan bureaucrats at the State Department, the CIA, and other key agencies, together with Democratic politicians, are actively undermining the Bush administration policy at every turn, thus gutting America's ability to fight the War on Terror.
We live in an age of subterfuge. Spy agencies pour vast resources into hacking, leaking, and forging data, often with the goal of weakening the very foundation of liberal democracy: trust in facts. Thomas Rid, a renowned expert on technology and national security, was one of the first to sound the alarm. Even before the 2016 election, he warned that Russian military intelligence was 'carefully planning and timing a high-stakes political campaign' to disrupt the democratic process. But as crafty as such so-called active measures have become, they are not new. In this astonishing journey through a century of secret psychological war, Rid reveals for the first time some of history's most significant operations - many of them nearly beyond belief. A White Russian ploy backfires and brings down a New York police commissioner; a KGB-engineered, anti-Semitic hate campaign creeps back across the Berlin Wall; the CIA backs a fake publishing empire, run by a former Wehrmacht U-boat commander that produces Germany's best jazz magazine.
In this brilliant account of the literary war within the Cold War, novelists and poets become embroiled in a dangerous game of betrayal, espionage, and conspiracy at the heart of the vicious conflict fought between the Soviet Union and the West During the Cold War, literature was both sword and noose. Novels, essays, and poems could win the hearts and minds of those caught between the competing creeds of capitalism and communism. They could also lead to blacklisting, exile, imprisonment, or execution for their authors if they offended those in power. The clandestine intelligence services of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union recruited secret agents and established vast propaganda networks devoted to literary warfare. But the battles were personal, too: friends turned on one another, lovers were split by political fissures, artists were undermined by inadvertent complicities. And while literary battles were fought in print, sometimes the pen was exchanged for a gun, the bookstore for the battlefield. In Cold Warriors, Duncan White vividly chronicles how this ferocious intellectual struggle was waged on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Among those involved were George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, John le Carré, Anna Akhmatova, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Boris Pasternak, Gioconda Belli, and Václav Havel. Here, too, are the spies, government officials, military officers, publishers, politicians, and critics who helped turn words into weapons at a time when the stakes could not have been higher. Drawing upon years of archival research and the latest declassified intelligence, Cold Warriors is both a gripping saga of prose and politics, and a welcome reminder that--at a moment when ignorance is all too frequently celebrated and reading is seen as increasingly irrelevant--writers and books can change the world.
Learn how the perception of truth has been weaponized in modern politics with this "insightful" account of propaganda in Russia and beyond during the age of disinformation (New York Times). When information is a weapon, every opinion is an act of war. We live in a world of influence operations run amok, where dark ads, psyops, hacks, bots, soft facts, ISIS, Putin, trolls, and Trump seek to shape our very reality. In this surreal atmosphere created to disorient us and undermine our sense of truth, we've lost not only our grip on peace and democracy -- but our very notion of what those words even mean. Peter Pomerantsev takes us to the front lines of the disinformation age, where he meets Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, "behavioral change" salesmen, Jihadi fanboys, Identitarians, truth cops, and many others. Forty years after his dissident parents were pursued by the KGB, Pomerantsev finds the Kremlin re-emerging as a great propaganda power. His research takes him back to Russia -- but the answers he finds there are not what he expected. Blending reportage, family history, and intellectual adventure, This Is Not Propaganda explores how we can reimagine our politics and ourselves when reality seems to be coming apart.
In Code Warriors, Stephen Budiansky--a longtime expert in cryptology--tells the fascinating story of how NSA came to be, from its roots in World War II through the fall of the Berlin Wall. Along the way, he guides us through the fascinating challenges faced by cryptanalysts, and how they broke some of the most complicated codes of the twentieth century. With access to new documents, Budiansky shows where the agency succeeded and failed during the Cold War, but his account also offers crucial perspective for assessing NSA today in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations. Budiansky shows how NSA's obsession with recording every bit of data and decoding every signal is far from a new development; throughout its history the depth and breadth of the agency's reach has resulted in both remarkable successes and destructive failures.