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.

Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea
Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea

Author: Jeffrey T. Richelson

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2007-09-17

Total Pages: 732

ISBN-13: 0393244024

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Spying on the Bomb is an "engrossing" (Wall Street Journal) global history of the American-led effort to spy on every nation with nuclear ambitions. A global history of U.S. nuclear espionage from its World War II origins to twenty-first century threats from rogue states. For more than sixty years, the United States has monitored friends and foes who seek to develop the ultimate weapon. Since 1952 the nuclear club has grown to at least nine nations, while others are making serious attempts to join. Each chapter of Spying on the Bomb chronologically focuses on the nuclear activities of one or more countries, intermingling what the United States believed was happening with accounts of what actually occurred in each country's laboratories, test sites, and decision-making councils. Jeffrey T. Richelson weaves recently declassified documents into his interviews with the scientists and spies involved in the nuclear espionage. Spying on the Bomb reveals new information about U.S. intelligence work on the Soviet/Russian, French, Chinese, Indian, Israeli, and South African nuclear programs; on the attempts to solve the mysterious Vela Incident; and on current efforts to uncover the nuclear secrets of Iran and North Korea. The book also includes spy satellite photographs never before extracted from the national archives.

The Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency

Author: Arthur B. Darling

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2007-06-05

Total Pages: 574

ISBN-13: 0271044160

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This unique history offers the most detailed and best documented account of the early years of the CIA currently available. It reveals the political and bureaucratic struggles that accompanied the creation of the modern U. S. intelligence community. In addition, it proposes a theory of effective intelligence organization, applied both to the movement to create the CIA and to the form it eventually took. The period covered by this study was crucially important because it was during this time that the main battles over the establishment, responsibilities, and turf of the agency were fought. Many of these disputes framed the forty years, such as the relationship of the CIA to other government agency intelligence operations, the role of covert action, and Congressional oversight of the intelligence community. The sources upon which Darling drew for this study include the files of the National Security Council, the wartime files of the OSS, and interviews and correspondence with many of the principal players.

Sherman Kent and the Board of National Estimates
Sherman Kent and the Board of National Estimates

Author: Donald P. Steury, Editor

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2011-03-21

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1257781898

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These collected essays by Sherman Kent were edited by Donald P. Steury and published in 1994 by the History Staff of the Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington D.C. Kent was chairman of the Board of National Estimates from 1952 - 1967 and these declassified essays represent the essence of his thinking on estimate preparation as well as important historical background on the methodology used before and during his tenure. The foreword is by J. Kenneth McDonald, then (1994) chief of the CIA History Staff and the text includes some security-related redactions. This book, long out of print, is a foundational text in the study of intelligence analysis. For the general non-fiction reading public, Kent's illustrative anecdotes about De Gaulle, Bedell Smith, Dean Acheson, etc., offer color and interest, as does his "lessons learned" essay on analysis failure in predicting Soviet missile deliveries to Cuba.