March 1968: three miles below the stormy surface of the North Pacific, a Soviet submarine lay silent as a tomb-its crew dead, its payload of nuclear missiles, once directed toward strategic targets in Hawaii, inoperable. No longer a real threat, the sub still presented an alluring target and it was not long before the CIA answered its siren call—even at the risk of igniting World War III.Project AZORIAN—the monumentally audacious six-year mission to recover the sub and learn its se...

From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history The Dead Hand comes the riveting story of a spy who cracked open the Soviet military research establishment and a penetrating portrait of the CIA’s Moscow station, an outpost of daring espionage in the last years of the Cold WarWhile driving out of the American embassy in Moscow on the evening of February 16, 1978, the chief of the CIA’s Moscow station heard a knock on his car window. A man on the curb ...

Here, for the first time, in a brilliant, panoramic portrait by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is the definitive, often shocking story of the politics and the science behind the development of the hydrogen bomb and the birth of the Cold War.Based on secret files in the United States and the former Soviet Union, this monumental work of history discloses how and why the United States decided to create the bomb that would ...

PO Box 500, London W2; the nondescript address from behind which one of the worlds most famous Secret Services hid: MI5. This book, based on previously secret sources, lifts the lid on Britains Security Service.The authors look in detail at MI5s role in the post-Cold War world; in particular, they consider its changing role as it took on the main responsibility in countering terrorist threats to Britain. Controversy has never been far away during MI5s battle against the IRA, which ...

An epic story of science and technology at the very limits of human understanding: the monumental race to build the first atomic weapons.Rich in personality, action, confrontation, and deception, The First War of Physics is the first fully realized popular account of the race to build humankind's most destructive weapon. The book draws on declassified material, such as MI6's Farm Hall transcripts, coded soviet messages cracked by American cryptographers in...

PO Box 500, London W2; the nondescript address from behind which one of the worlds most famous Secret Services hid: MI5. This book, based on previously secret sources, lifts the lid on Britains Security Service in its battle against German espionage. During the Second World War, the Security Service, through brilliant officers such as Guy Liddell, Dick White and the fearsome spy-breaker, Tin-eye Stephens, commandant of MI5s interrogation centre, Camp 020, successfully ran the Double Cross ...

In the dark days immediately after 9/11, the CIA turned to Dr. James Mitchell to help craft an interrogation program designed to elicit intelligence from just-captured top al-Qa'ida leaders and terror suspects.A civilian contractor who had spent years training U.S. military members to resist interrogation should they be captured, Mitchell, aware of the urgent need to prevent impending catastrophic attacks, worked with the CIA to implement "enhanced interrogation te...

In this "thoughtful, entertaining, and often insightful" book, a former CIA director explores the delicate give-and-take between the Oval Office and Langley.With the disastrous intelligence failures of the last few years still fresh in Americans minds--and to all appearances still continuing--there has never been a more urgent need for a book like this.In Burn Before Reading, Admiral Stansfield Turner, the CIA director under President Jimmy Carter,...

Until the watershed leak of top-secret documents by Edward Snowden to the Guardian UK and the Washington Post, most Americans did not realize the extent to which our government is actively acquiring personal information from telecommunications companies and other corporations. As made startlingly clear, the National Security Agency (NSA) has collected information on every phone call Americans have made over the past seven years. In that same time, the NSA and the FBI have...

PO Box 500, London W2 the nondescript address from behind which one of the worlds most famous secret services hid: MI5. Drawing on previously secret sources, this book lifts the lid on Britains Security Service in its battle against German and Soviet espionage. It tells the sensational stories of the officers and agents and the enemies they confronted, from MI5s creation in 1909 under the direction of Vernon Kell, Britains first spymaster.Building on the services wartime success, M...

Major investigative nonfiction on one of the most important stories of our time -- the spread of nuclear weapons -- written by two award-winning journalists who for years have followed the trail of the world's most notorious arms dealer.The world has entered a second nuclear age. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear annihilation is on the rise. Should such an assault occur, there is a strong likelihood that the trail of devastatio...

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...