Cia And The Pursuit Of Security

Written by intelligence scholars and experts, this book chronicles the evolution of the CIA: its remarkable successes, its controversial failures and its clandestine operations. The history of the agency is presented through the prism of its declassified documents, with each being supplemented by insightful contextual analysis.

Al Queda's war on America did not start on September 11, 2001. Just ask the Diplomatic Security Service. It was on February 6, 1993, that the United States was first attacked on its own soil by foreign terrorists. A zealous band of Middle Easterners, holy warriors determined to punish the U.S. for its supposed transgressions against Islam, packed over a ton of home made explosives into the back of a rented van. They drove their bomb across the Hudson from New Jersey, maneuvered it through downtown traffic and parked it in the underground garage at the Vista Hotel, beneath the twin towers of the World Trade Center. They lit a long fuse, which allowed them time to get back to New Jersey to watch the results of the explosion on CNN. They hoped to topple one mammoth tower into the other and kill ten thousand people or more. Miraculously, only six people were killed. Most of the group were captured within a week, but the mastermind behind the attack, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, had immediately gone to JFK airport to fly to Pakistan. Before leaving, he phoned the Associated Press and claimed responsibility for the bombing in the name of the Arab Liberation Army, a terrorist group led by Saudi exile Osama bin Laden. A succession of such brazen crimes has revealed complex connections among terrorist groups with an implacable hostility toward Western civilization. Outrages such as the assassination of the Jewish Defense League founder Meier Kahane, a huge plot in the Philippines to plant bombs on intercontinental airlines and to assassinate the Pope, the bombing of U.S. embassies, culminating in the African embassy bombings of 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in 1999, and the devastating attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 have made it clear that a worldwide network of terrorists led by Osama bin Laden is making war on the United States. On the front lines combating these terrorists in 150 countries around the world have been the 1,200 agents of the U.S. Department of State's Diplomatic Security Service. A little-known but highly effective branch of the government, the DSS is the one arm of federal law enforcement with international powers of arrest. These agents maintain close ties to local police commanders in many countries and can entice informants with bounties of up to $4,000,000. After a challenging international search, it was DSS agents in Pakistan who captured Ramzi Yousef. DSS agents have been in the vanguard of the War on Terrorism long before it was declared. In Relentless Pursuit, Samuel Katz review the escalating series of terrorist attacks on the U.S. during the last decade, including those in many foreign countries and finally in New York and Washington. In the process, he tells the gripping story of the DSS and its agents protecting us and our representatives here and abroad. Katz's detailed, personal, on-the-ground anecdotes bring home the contexts and linkages of the War on Terrorism that has been fought on our behalf by the DSS since the 1980s. Relentless Pursuit is a stirring tribute to an unsung group of brave Americans. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

"You are not thinking, you are merely being logical." -Niels Bohr, Danish physicist and Nobel Laureate Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process is a document prepared in 1983 by the US Army. This document was declassified by the CIA in 2003. This brief report focuses on the so-called "Gateway Experience," a training program originally designed by the Monroe Institute, a Virginia-based institute for the study of human consciousness. The Gateway experience uses sound tapes to manipulate brainwaves with a goal of creating an altered state of consciousness, which includes out-of-body experiences, energy healing, remote viewing, and time travel. The report concluded that the Gateway Experience is 'plausible' in terms of physical science, and that while more research was needed, it could have practical uses in US intelligence. Students of US intelligence, and anyone interested in the cross-roads between consciousness and reality will find this report fascinating reading.

James Lockhart blends Chilean, inter-American and transatlantic national, regional and world-historical trends into a century-long Cold War narrative. He argues that Chileans made their own history as highly engaged internationalists while reassessing American and other foreign-directed intelligence, surveillance and secret warfare operations in Chile and southern South America. The book transcends a well-known, US-centred historiography while offering a more equitable and global interpretation of Chile's Cold War experience than previously possible. This advances research that has progressively expanded the framework of Chile's Cold War experience since the arrest of General Augusto Pinochet in the UK for human rights violations more than 20 years ago.

Four days before Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, someone leaked American contingency war plans to the Chicago Tribune. The small splash the story made was overwhelmed by the shock waves caused by the Japanese attack on the Pacific fleet anchored in Hawaii—but the ripples never subsided, growing quietly but steadily across the Cold War, Vietnam, the fall of Communism, and into the present. Ripped from today’s headlines, Lloyd C. Gardner’s latest book takes a deep dive into the previously unexamined history of national security leakers. The War on Leakers joins the growing debate over surveillance and the national security state, bringing to bear the unique perspective of one our most respected diplomatic historians. Gardner examines how national security leaks have been grappled with over nearly five decades, what the relationship of “leaking” has been to the exercise of American power during and after the Cold War, and the implications of all this for how we should think about the role of leakers and democracy. Gardner’s eye-opening new history asks us to consider why America has invested so much of its resources, technology, and credibility in a system that all but cries out for loyal Americans to leak its secrets.

After spending decades as an agent to the CIA, Jones unravels the blunders and grave mistakes the U.S. has made over the years and makes the case for much-needed intelligence reform.