The Covert Peace

"With a combination of personal interviews including several with leading Nazis and with Himmler's daughter, Gudrun Burwitz, and the use of previously unseen documents, Allen presents the whole Nazi high command in a fresh light, demonstrating how Hitler was often manipulated and sometimes sidelined. But perhaps of equal interest is the inside story of secret operations conducted by the Political Warfare Executive, empowered by Churchill to fight a war with weapons of destabilisation and misinformation in support of the oven military campaigns. Allen portrays Himmler's ever more desperate efforts to secretly negotiate his political survival with the Allies, as Hitler's war machine collapses. This book has one more revelation to make, as Allen rewrites history with his account of the true circumstances of Himmler's dramatic death."--BOOK JACKET.

Four girls living in four completely different worlds. The stench from one girls trailer park clung to her as awkwardly as her clothing. She may have been nearly three hundred pounds and standing nearly six feet tall, but her mind was beautiful and her heart was pure. The second girl appeared to be the perfect girl next door, an iconic beauty. But the ugly pain that lurked just beneath her skin painted a very different picture of her reflection. The third girl lives in a house built of secrets, while bearing the fruit of a broken promise. The fourth girl, weaned on abandonment and loss, runs away until she learns that she cannot leave herself behind. All four of them are searching for piece of peace hidden deep within them. Their pathways have one common and covert element. These journeys carry them to places unimagined, as a source of love and happiness guides them into their futures, and teaches them to find a little bit of peace wherever they are.

Martin Allen has achieved pre-eminence as a researcher and writer specializing in the Second World War. In this, his third major book, Heinrich Himmler, Head of the SS, emerges as a man with a huge personal agenda. Having secured for himself an unassailable position by manipulating Hitler into wiping out the SS's left-wing rivals, the SA, in The Night of the Long Knives, he continued to nurture political supremacy for himself while Hitler fought his military war. At the heart of Himmler's Secret War is the turning point of the war when, following the German defeat at Stalingrad, Himmler recognized that Germany would lose. Through his trusted envoy, Walter Schellenberg, he devoted much energy to negotiating his intended post-war role as the man who would lead Germany. He believed his intermediary, the British Ambassador in Sweden, Victor Mallet, was in direct contact with Winston Churchill. In fact, he was the victim of a highly effective sting by the Political Warfare Executive (PWE).

By illuminating the conflict-resolving mechanisms inherent in the relationships between democracies, Bruce Russett explains one of the most promising developments of the modern international system: the striking fact that the democracies that it comprises have almost never fought each other.

States seldom resort to war to overthrow their adversaries. They are more likely to attempt to covertly change the opposing regime, by assassinating a foreign leader, sponsoring a coup d’état, meddling in a democratic election, or secretly aiding foreign dissident groups. In Covert Regime Change, Lindsey A. O’Rourke shows us how states really act when trying to overthrow another state. She argues that conventional focus on overt cases misses the basic causes of regime change. O’Rourke provides substantive evidence of types of security interests that drive states to intervene. Offensive operations aim to overthrow a current military rival or break up a rival alliance. Preventive operations seek to stop a state from taking certain actions, such as joining a rival alliance, that may make them a future security threat. Hegemonic operations try to maintain a hierarchical relationship between the intervening state and the target government. Despite the prevalence of covert attempts at regime change, most operations fail to remain covert and spark blowback in unanticipated ways. Covert Regime Change assembles an original dataset of all American regime change operations during the Cold War. This fund of information shows the United States was ten times more likely to try covert rather than overt regime change during the Cold War. Her dataset allows O’Rourke to address three foundational questions: What motivates states to attempt foreign regime change? Why do states prefer to conduct these operations covertly rather than overtly? How successful are such missions in achieving their foreign policy goals?

The Mumbai blasts of 1993, the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001, Mumbai 26/11—cross-border terrorism has continued unabated. What can India do to motivate Pakistan to do more to prevent such attacks? In the nuclear times that we live in, where a military counter-attack could escalate to destruction beyond imagination, overt warfare is clearly not an option. But since outright peace-making seems similarly infeasible, what combination of coercive pressure and bargaining could lead to peace? The authors provide, for the first time, a comprehensive assessment of the violent and non-violent options available to India for compelling Pakistan to take concrete steps towards curbing terrorism originating in its homeland. They draw on extensive interviews with senior Indian and Pakistani officials, in service and retired, to explore the challenges involved in compellence and to show how non-violent coercion combined with clarity on the economic, social and reputational costs of terrorism can better motivate Pakistan to pacify groups involved in cross-border terrorism. Not War, Not Peace? goes beyond the much discussed theories of nuclear deterrence and counterterrorism strategy to explore a new approach to resolving old conflicts.