Intelligence History

AIs are everywhere, and they're changing everything. AI Explained: Facts, Fiction, and Future from best-selling author Nigel Poulton is your fast-track easy-to-understand guide to the exciting new world of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Like a scene from Where Eagles Dare, a small team of American spies parachutes into Italy behind enemy lines. Their orders: link up with local partisans and sabotage the well-guarded Brenner Pass - the Nazis' crucial supply route through the Alps - thereby bringing the German war effort in Italy to a grinding halt.

The gripping, vividly told story of the largest POW escape in the Second World War – organized by an Australian bank clerk, a British jazz pianist and an American spy. In August 1944 the most successful POW escape of the Second World War took place – 106 Allied prisoners were freed from a...

In the digital labyrinth of the 21st century, a quiet anxiety has become the soundtrack to our lives. We are drowning in notifications, yet starving for meaning. We chase the ghost of productivity, only to end the day exhausted, wondering what we accomplished. As artificial intelligence accelerates, an urgent question echoes in our boardrooms, living rooms, and classrooms: Will you be replaced, imprisoned, or empowered? The Centaur's Edge is not another technical manual or a breathless prediction of dystopia.

To the undiscerning eye, they were secretaries, typists, personal assistants, and telephonists. But those innocuous job titles provided the perfect cover for what were in reality a range of complex technical, clerical, and occupational roles. Often overlooked and underestimated by outsiders, the women of British intelligence encoded, decoded, and translated enemy messages, wrote propaganda, and oversaw agents, performing duties as diverse as they were indispensable.

In the year 1600, a monk is burned at the stake for claiming to have built a device that will allow him to know all things. 350 years later, having witnessed 'Trinity' — the first test of the atomic bomb — America's leading scientist outlines a memory machine that will help end war on earth. 25 years in the making, an ex-soldier finally unveils this 'machine for augmenting human intellect', dazzling as he stands 'Zeus-like, dealing lightning with both hands'.

Patrick Robinson, coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestseller Lone Survivor and “preeminent writer of modern naval fiction” (The Florida Times Union) shares the gripping untold story of Mohammed Gulab, the Afghani warrior who defied the Taliban and saved the life of American hero and Navy...

In Spymaster's Prism, the legendary former spymaster Jack Devine details the unending struggle with Russia and its intelligence agencies as it works against our national security. Devine tells this story through the unique perspective of a seasoned CIA professional who served more than three decades, some at the highest levels of the agency.

In The OSS: America’s First Spy Agency, acclaimed historian Cyril Marlen peels back the curtain on the secret missions, eccentric characters, and dangerous innovations that defined the OSS’s short but seismic existence. From hidden radios tucked into shaving kits to jungle warfare in Burma, from psychological propaganda campaigns to midnight parachute drops into Nazi territory, this is the untold story of America’s first experiment with shadow war—and the people bold enough to carry it out.

The fascinating, untold story of how British intelligence secretly used homing pigeons as part of a clandestine espionage operation to gather information, communicate, and coordinate with members of the Resistance to defeat the Nazis in occupied Europe during World War II. Between 1941 and 1944...

While Vladimir Putin has been president and prime minister of Russia, the Kremlin has deployed the security services to intimidate the political opposition, reassert the power of the state, and carry out assassinations overseas. At the same time, its agents and spies were put beyond public accountability and blessed with the prestige, benefits, and legitimacy lost since the Soviet collapse.

This fast-paced, behind-the-scenes narrative tells the inside story of how the Bush administration used bad intelligence to sell and then justify the Iraq war. Veteran reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn take the reader behind the scenes at the White House, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, and Congress, where controversial decisions and turf battles were fought in the highest circles of the Bush administration.

Two of the biggest design problems in Artificial Intelligence are how to build robots that behave in line with human values and how to stop them ever going rogue. One under-explored solution to these alignment and control problems might be to examine how these are already addressed in the design of humans. Robot Souls looks at developments in AI and reviews the emergence of ideas of consciousness and the soul. It places our 'junk code' in this context and argues that it is time to foreground that code, and to use it to look again at how we are programming AI.

This second book in the bestselling Forbidden Secrets series goes even deeper into the shocking, suppressed, and true stories of modern and ancient history—featuring classified military programs, secret weapons, unsolved scientific anomalies, and documented human experiments backed by evidence, sources, and historical records. From Cold War operations and CIA mind control to Nazi black ops, lost civilizations, and bizarre natural events, this book is a treasure trove of hidden knowledge.

In this profound and urgent new book, leading thinker on technology Kester Brewin shows how AI is both stunningly new and rooted in the most ancient human desires. Hailed by the UK government's own lead on AI as 'god-like', as we finally welcome this stunning technology amongst us—with Frankenstein and Faustus, from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to the underbelly of Silicon Valley—Brewin skillfully leads us through the myths, machines, and monsters that have influenced the development of our greatest and most longed-for invention, and how we can learn to live alongside it.

From the New York Times bestselling authors of Ghosts of Honolulu comes their most harrowing true story yet. It's 1942, and New York City is at war. German U-boats are sinking ships just miles offshore, and Washington, DC, is convinced that waterfront spies are providing intelligence targeting...

Lovable AI is not a fantasy. It’s the recognition that technology, when guided by empathy, ethics, and imagination, can amplify our humanity instead of replacing it. From healthcare and education to creativity and communication, AI is becoming a mirror of our best selves — when designed with heart.

Kandahar. The ancient desert crossroads and, as of fall of 2001, ground zero for the Taliban and al-Qa'ida in southern Afghanistan. In the northern part of the country, the US-supported Northern Alliance has made progress on the battlefield, but in the south, the country is still under the Taliban's bloody hold and al-Qa'ida continues to operate there. With no "Southern Alliance" for the US to support, a new strategy is needed if victory is to be achieved. Veteran CIA officer Duane Evans is dispatched to Pakistan to "get something going in the South." Foxtrot in Kandahar is his story.

Oleg Gordijewskis Weg in den sowjetischen Geheimdienst war ihm als Sohn zweier KGB-Agenten in die Wiege gelegt. Da er Deutsch konnte, brachte ihn eine seiner ersten Anstellungen nach Berlin, wo er den Bau der Mauer hautnah mitbekam – es sollte sich als eines von vielen Ereignissen erweisen, die seinen Glauben an den Kommunismus zerrütteten.

The decisions to trust—or not—are pervasive throughout our everyday lives. Whether or not we trust others, for example, depends on many factors, and they all have a history. The battle to trust or mistrust, as experienced at the personal, political and cultural levels, are revealed in this well-documented story. This book illuminates the nature of trust, a deeply abstract and critically important concept.