In 2000 the Washington Post listed The Agency as one of the ten best books on Intelligence in the twentieth century, calling it “An encyclopedic and fair-minded overview of the agency into the 1980s.” A history of the CIA from its intrepid early days to becoming a mature bureaucracy riddled with scandal and scrutiny. During World War II “Wild Bill” Donovan started the Office of Special Services (OSS) and gave the CIA its original image: dashing, Ivy League, and Eastern Establishment. Successive CIA Directors covered in the book were Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby and William Casey. “The Agency is the first comprehensive history of the CIA, a book designed, in its author’s words, to get away from ‘contemporary demonology’ and to place the CIA firmly within the context of its time... a dazzling, panoramic overview of the CIA’s history. [Ranelagh] mixes keen insights into the organization and the people who ran it with superb accounts of specific crises and operations. This brilliant book is so rich both in detail and generalization that even a reader unfamiliar with the history of the CIA will find it hard to put down... the book pursues many... themes, such as organizational changes within the agency and shifts in its sense of mission, its relationship with presidents and their advisers and other intelligence agencies, the history of specific projects and operations, and the general mood within both the CIA and the government and nation at large. The result is a complex tapestry, full of new information and fresh generalizations.” — Reviews in American History “A massive history of the CIA... Ranelagh... has a good feel for the murky world of intelligence, and has constructed quite a readable work... [he] conducted scores of interviews with insiders and studied more than 7,000 pages of classified and formerly classified documents... Great reading and a valuable reference for students of government bureaucracy and intelligence work.” — Kirkus “Ranelagh... provides here a major overview of the Central Intelligence Agency from its founding in 1947 to [1987]. Based largely on hundreds of interviews, the book examines the personality and policies of each director in the context of the times.” — Publishers Weekly “[A] comprehensive examination of the CIA... Unlike most books on the nearly 40-year-old spy organization, The Agency is not a diary of old war stories or a flashy expose; it is a thoughtful analysis of the CIA from gestation to middle age... An important difference between The Agency and many other scholarly treatments of intelligence gathering is the extensive use of quotes from both on-the-record and unattributed sources, as well as documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.” — The New York Times “A thoughtful analysis of the CIA from its beginnings, arguing that dependence on technology has crippled American intelligence.” — The New York Times “Mr. Ranelagh, a British television producer, has written the best comprehensive history of the CIA. He is in control of the massive secondary literature, has used the Freedom of Information Act effectively, interviewed widely, and mined congressional sources. The tone is critical but detached, devoid of both the muckraking passion of the left and the self-congratulatory approach of the old-boy network. A fine book.” — Foreign Affairs “The Agency is without a doubt the finest, best-documented, and most entertainingly written study of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of which I know. It traces the agency from its first gleam in the eye of Wild Bill Donavan through the first term of William Casey on behalf of President Reagan... a genuine literary and stylistic accomplishment.” — Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

A Compilation Of Articles From Various Sources-Relating To The Success And Failures Of Cia In Field Of Intelligence. The Study Is Divided Under 60 Headings Relating To This Sensitive Subject.

"Following the footsteps of Thorstein Veblen, Stuart Chase, Ralph Borsodi, and others, JW Smith demonstrates the wasted labor within the American Economy at fully 50%. Eliminate the monopolization and wars which engenders that waste, share the remaining productive jobs, and each employable person need work outside the home only 2 to 3 days per week."--Publisher description.

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.

This sweeping history of the development of professional, institutionalized intelligence examines the implications of the fall of the state monopoly on espionage today and beyond. During the Cold War, only the alliances clustered around the two superpowers maintained viable intelligence endeavors, whereas a century ago, many states could aspire to be competitive at these dark arts. Today, larger states have lost their monopoly on intelligence skills and capabilities as technological and sociopolitical changes have made it possible for private organizations and even individuals to unearth secrets and influence global events. Historian Michael Warner addresses the birth of professional intelligence in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century and the subsequent rise of US intelligence during the Cold War. He brings this history up to the present day as intelligence agencies used the struggle against terrorism and the digital revolution to improve capabilities in the 2000s. Throughout, the book examines how states and other entities use intelligence to create, exploit, and protect secret advantages against others, and emphasizes how technological advancement and ideological competition drive intelligence, improving its techniques and creating a need for intelligence and counterintelligence activities to serve and protect policymakers and commanders. The world changes intelligence and intelligence changes the world. This sweeping history of espionage and intelligence will be a welcomed by practitioners, students, and scholars of security studies, international affairs, and intelligence, as well as general audiences interested in the evolution of espionage and technology.

When Strategies of Containment was first published, the Soviet Union was still a superpower, Ronald Reagan was president of the United States, and the Berlin Wall was still standing. This updated edition of Gaddis' classic carries the history of containment through the end of the Cold War. Beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt's postwar plans, Gaddis provides a thorough critical analysis of George F. Kennan's original strategy of containment, NSC-68, The Eisenhower-Dulles "New Look," the Kennedy-Johnson "flexible response" strategy, the Nixon-Kissinger strategy of detente, and now a comprehensive assessment of how Reagan - and Gorbechev - completed the process of containment, thereby bringing the Cold War to an end. He concludes, provocatively, that Reagan more effectively than any other Cold War president drew upon the strengths of both approaches while avoiding their weaknesses. A must-read for anyone interested in Cold War history, grand strategy, and the origins of the post-Cold War world.

All democracies have had to contend with the challenge of tolerating hidden spy services within otherwise relatively transparent governments. Democracies pride themselves on privacy and liberty, but intelligence organizations have secret budgets, gather information surreptitiously around the world, and plan covert action against foreign regimes. Sometimes, they have even targeted the very citizens they were established to protect, as with the COINTELPRO operations in the 1960s and 1970s, carried out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) against civil rights and antiwar activists. In this sense, democracy and intelligence have always been a poor match. Yet Americans live in an uncertain and threatening world filled with nuclear warheads, chemical and biological weapons, and terrorists intent on destruction. Without an intelligence apparatus scanning the globe to alert the United States to these threats, the planet would be an even more perilous place. In Spy Watching, Loch K. Johnson explores the United States' travails in its efforts to maintain effective accountability over its spy services. Johnson explores the work of the famous Church Committee, a Senate panel that investigated America's espionage organizations in 1975 and established new protocol for supervising the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the nation's other sixteen secret services. Johnson explores why partisanship has crept into once-neutral intelligence operations, the effect of the 9/11 attacks on the expansion of spying, and the controversies related to CIA rendition and torture programs. He also discusses both the Edward Snowden case and the ongoing investigations into the Russian hack of the 2016 US election. Above all, Spy Watching seeks to find a sensible balance between the twin imperatives in a democracy of liberty and security. Johnson draws on scores of interviews with Directors of Central Intelligence and others in America's secret agencies, making this a uniquely authoritative account.

From its inception more than half a century ago and for decades afterward, the Central Intelligence Agency was deeply shrouded in secrecy, with little or no real oversight by Congress—or so many Americans believe. David M. Barrett reveals, however, that during the agency’s first fifteen years, Congress often monitored the CIA’s actions and plans, sometimes aggressively. Drawing on a wealth of newly declassified documents, research at some two dozen archives, and interviews with former officials, Barrett provides an unprecedented and often colorful account of relations between American spymasters and Capitol Hill. He chronicles the CIA’s dealings with senior legislators who were haunted by memories of our intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor and yet riddled with fears that such an organization might morph into an American Gestapo. He focuses in particular on the efforts of Congress to monitor, finance, and control the agency’s activities from the creation of the national security state in 1947 through the planning for the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Along the way, Barrett highlights how Congress criticized the agency for failing to predict the first Soviet atomic test, the startling appearance of Sputnik over American air space, and the overthrow of Iraq’s pro-American government in 1958. He also explores how Congress viewed the CIA’s handling of Senator McCarthy’s charges of communist infiltration, the crisis created by the downing of a U-2 spy plane, and President Eisenhower’s complaint that Congress meddled too much in CIA matters. Ironically, as Barrett shows, Congress itself often pushed the agency to expand its covert operations against other nations. The CIA and Congress provides a much-needed historical perspective for current debates in Congress and beyond concerning the agency’s recent failures and ultimate fate. In our post-9/11 era, it shows that anxieties over the challenges to democracy posed by our intelligence communities have been with us from the very beginning.

The world’s leading expert on Osama bin Laden delivers for the first time the “riveting” (The New York Times) definitive biography of a man who set the course of American foreign policy for the 21st century and whose ideological heirs we continue to battle today. In The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, Peter Bergan provides the first reevaluation of the man responsible for precipitating America’s long war with al-Qaeda and its decedents, capturing bin Laden in all the dimensions of his life: as a family man, as a zealot, as a battlefield commander, as a terrorist leader, and as a fugitive. The book sheds light on his many contradictions: he was the son of a billionaire yet insisted his family live like paupers. He adored his wives and children, depending on his two wives, both of whom had PhDs, to make critical strategic decisions. Yet, he also brought ruin to his family. He was fanatically religious but willing to kill thousands of civilians in the name of Islam. He inspired deep loyalty, yet, in the end, his bodyguards turned against him. And while he inflicted the most lethal act of mass murder in United States history, he failed to achieve any of his strategic goals. In his final years, the lasting image we have of bin Laden is of an aging man with a graying beard watching old footage of himself, just as another dad flipping through the channels with his remote. In the end, bin Laden died in a squalid suburban compound, far from the front lines of his holy war. And yet, despite that unheroic denouement, his ideology lives on. Thanks to exclusive interviews with family members and associates, and documents unearthed only recently, Bergen’s “comprehensive, authoritative, and compelling” (H.R. McMaster, author of Dereliction of Duty and Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World) portrait of Osama bin Laden reveals for the first time who he really was and why he continues to inspire a new generation of jihadists.