Security Science

At the outbreak of World War II, MI6 spymaster Thomas Kendrick arrived at the Tower of London to set up a top secret operation: German prisoners' cells were to be bugged and listeners installed behind the walls to record and transcribe their private conversations. This mission proved so effective that it would go on to be set up at three further sites - and provide the Allies with crucial insight into new technology being developed by the Nazis. In this astonishing history, Helen Fry uncovers the inner workings of the bugging operation.

The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. The writer is Joan Didion, who delivers an anatomy of that country's particular brand of terror - its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy. As ash travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb "to disappear," Didion gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.

Based on interviews with more than 40 survivors, knowledgeable political insiders, and Soviet archives of the period, investigative writer Joan Mellen presents evidence suggesting complicity between US and Israeli intelligence in the attack on Liberty and the more than 50-year long cover-up. What were the underlying motives? Was this a false flag operation conducted in the midst of the Six-Day War? Was it conceivable that Israel would have initiated such an operation without a green light from the United States?

Kilcullen brings together his most salient writings on this vitally important topic. Here is a picture of modern warfare by someone who has had his boots on the ground in some of today's worst trouble spots - including Iraq and Afghanistan - and who has been studying counterinsurgency since 1985. Filled with down-to-earth, common-sense insights, this book is the definitive account of counterinsurgency, indispensable for all those interested in making sense of our world in an age of terror.

More than a hundred lives are lost to firearms every day in America. The cost is more than the numbers—it is the fear, the anxiety, the dread of public spaces that an armed society has created under the tortured rubric of freedom. But the norms of today are not the norms of American history or the values of its founders. They are the product of a gun culture that has imposed its vision on a sleeping nation. Historian Dominic Erdozain argues that we have wrongly ceded the big-picture argument on guns.

Keith Jeffery’s fascinating and revealing account draws on a wealth of archival materials never before seen by any outsider to unveil the inner workings of the world’s first spy agency. Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service—or MI6—was born a century ago amid rising fears of foreign military powers, especially Germany. The next 40 years saw MI6 taking an increasingly important—and, until now, largely hidden—role in shaping the history of Europe and the world.

Become Ungovernable is a provocative new work of political thought setting out to reclaim "freedom", "justice", and "democracy", revolutionary ideas that are all too often warped in the interests of capital and the state. Revealing the mirage of mainstream democratic thought and the false promises of liberal political ideologies, H. L. T. Quan offers an alternative approach: an abolition feminism drawing on a kaleidoscope of refusal praxes, and on a deep engagement with the Black Radical Tradition and queer analytics.

Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil present an unprecedented look into the murky world of Chinese espionage both past and present, enabling a better understanding of how pervasive and important its influence is, both in China and abroad.

In Den of Spies, Unger reveals the definitive story of the October Surprise, going inside his three-decade reporting odyssey, along with Parry’s never-before-seen archives, and sharing startling truths about what really happened in 1980. The result is a real-life political thriller filled with double agents, CIA operatives, slippery politicians, KGB documents, wealthy Republicans, and dogged journalists.

Nonie Darwish lived for thirty years in a majority Muslim nation. Everything about her life was dictated by the Islamic law code known as Sharia. But Sharia isn't staying in majority Muslim nations. Darwish now lives in the West and brings a warning; the goal of radical Islam is to bring Sharia law to your country. If that happens, the fabric of Western law and liberty will be ripped in two. Weaving personal experience together with extensive documentation and research, Darwish exposes the facts and reveals the global threat posed by Sharia law.

Barrister Michael Mansfield, KC, has spent his career fighting injustice, persecution and corruption. And be it the Birmingham Six, Bloody Sunday, Stephen Lawrence, the Marchioness, Hillsborough or Grenfell, he has come to learn one thing - that people power is unstoppable. Michael draws upon his 50 years of fighting for justice and revisits his most important cases and clients, proving without doubt that when people get together they can make lasting and positive change.

The machine that kills secrets is a powerful cryptographic code that hides the identities of leakers and hacktivists as they spill the private files of government agencies and corporations bringing us into a new age of whistle blowing. With unrivaled access to figures like Julian Assange, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and Jacob Applebaum, investigative journalist Andy Greenberg unveils the group that brought the world WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks, and BalkanLeaks.

The Bureau takes listeners behind the scenes of the FBI, from its creation in 1908 to the scandals of present day. Based on exclusive interviews, Kessler reveals the inside story surrounding the events of September 11 and the investigation into the anthrax mailings. The Bureau delves deep within the agency, presenting the organization in its historical context and answering questions concerning its somewhat checkered past.

The story of Hong Kong has long been dominated by competing myths: to Britain, a “barren rock” with no appreciable history; to China, a part of Chinese soil from time immemorial, at last returned to the ancestral fold. For decades, Hong Kong’s history was simply not taught, especially to Hong Kongers, obscuring its origins as a place of refuge and rebellion.

In 1969, a series of riots over police action against The Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City's Greenwich Village, changed the longtime landscape of the homosexual in society literally overnight. Since then the event itself has become the stuff of legend, with relatively little hard information available on the riots themselves.

For decades after its founding, America was really two nations—one slave, one free. There were many reasons why this composite nation ultimately broke apart, but the fact that enslaved black people repeatedly risked their lives to flee their masters in the South in search of freedom in the North proved that the "united" states was actually a lie. Fugitive slaves exposed the contradiction between the myth that slavery was a benign institution and the reality that a nation based on the principle of human equality was in fact a prison-house in which millions of Americans had no rights.

"Officially" the Vatican has no espionage service; but does no one carry out intelligence operations on its behalf? During the Second World War and Cold War, Rome was teeming with spies. A band of undercover monsignors and priests hunted for Vatican "moles," led clandestine diplomacy, investigated assassinations of priests and other scandals threatening the Church, and conducted high-risk missions behind the Iron Curtain.

Secret Service agents, acting as human surveillance cameras, observe everything that goes on behind the scenes in the president's inner circle. Ronald Kessler reveals what they have seen, providing startling, previously untold stories about the presidents, from John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as about their families, Cabinet officers, and White House aides.

Harvard University professor and U.S. Intelligence Science Board member J. Richard Hackman reveals how to make teams more effective in solving hard, complex problems in intelligence work and other challenging, high-pressure areas.

The companion to the Oscar-nominated documentary, an unparalleled look inside Israel's security establishment. Imagine the following situation: You have just received a tip that six suicide bombers are making their way into the heart of Israel's major cities, each one to a different city, to set off explosions in the most crowded centers of population. How far would you go to stop the attacks?