The Company We Keep

The Company We Keep PDF

Author: Robert Baer

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2011-03-08

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0307588165

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Robert Baer was known inside the CIA as perhaps the best operative working the Middle East. Over several decades he served everywhere from Iraq to New Delhi and racked up such an impressive list of accomplishments that he was eventually awarded the Career Intelligence Medal. But if his career was everything a spy might aspire to, his personal life was a brutal illustration of everything a spy is asked to sacrifice. Bob had few enduring non-work friendships, only contacts and acquaintances. His prolonged absences destroyed his marriage, and he felt intense guilt at spending so little time with his children. Sworn to secrecy and constantly driven by ulterior motives, he was a man apart wherever he went. Dayna Williamson thought of herself as just an ordinary California girl -- admittedly one born into a comfortable lifestyle. But she was always looking to get closer to the edge. When she joined the CIA, she was initially tasked with Agency background checks, but the attractive Berkeley graduate quickly distinguished herself as someone who could thrive in the field, and she was eventually assigned to “Protective Operations” training where she learned to handle weapons and explosives and conduct high-speed escape and evasion. Tapped to serve in some of the world's most dangerous places, she discovered an inner strength and resourcefulness she'd never known -- but she also came to see that the spy life exacts a heavy toll. Her marriage crumbled, her parents grew distant, and she lost touch with friends who'd once meant everything to her. When Bob and Dayna met on a mission in Sarajevo, it wasn't love at first sight. They were both too jaded for that. But there was something there, a spark. And as the danger escalated and their affection for each other grew, they realized it was time to leave “the Company,” to somehow rediscover the people they’d once been. As worldly as both were, the couple didn’t realize at first that turning in their Agency I.D. cards would not be enough to put their covert past behind. The fact was, their clandestine relationships remained. Living as “civilians” in conflict-ridden Beirut, they fielded assassination proposals, met with Arab sheiks, wily oil tycoons, terrorists, and assorted outlaws – and came perilously close to dying. But even then they couldn’t know that their most formidable challenge lay ahead. Simultaneously a trip deep down the intelligence rabbit hole – one that shows how the “game” actually works, including the compromises it asks of those who play by its rules -- and a portrait of two people trying to regain a normal life, The Company We Keep is a masterly depiction of the real world of shadows.

Secret Agent Affair

Secret Agent Affair PDF

Author: Marie Ferrarella

Publisher: Silhouette

Published: 2008-05-01

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1426816960

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Dr. Marja Pulaski knew she was inviting danger by treating the wounded stranger. The man called Kane wasn't what he pretended to be. But she couldn't begin to guess how much of a threat he really was—or the passion he'd awaken with his very first touch.… A Special Forces agent who put his life on the line every day, Kane Donnelly knew better than to fall for a woman who could compromise his mission. Especially with her life and the lives of countless others at stake. He couldn't risk losing Marja. But he had to let her go before their growing love plunged them into the greatest peril of all.

A Covert Affair

A Covert Affair PDF

Author: Jennet Conant

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2011-04-05

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 9781439168509

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Bestselling author Jennet Conant brings us a stunning account of Julia and Paul Child’s experiences as members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the Far East during World War II and the tumultuous years when they were caught up in the McCarthy Red spy hunt in the 1950s and behaved with bravery and honor. It is the fascinating portrait of a group of idealistic men and women who were recruited by the citizen spy service, slapped into uniform, and dispatched to wage political warfare in remote outposts in Ceylon, India, and China. The eager, inexperienced 6 foot 2 inch Julia springs to life in these pages, a gangly golf-playing California girl who had never been farther abroad than Tijuana. Single and thirty years old when she joined the staff of Colonel William Donovan, Julia volunteered to be part of the OSS’s ambitious mission to develop a secret intelligence network across Southeast Asia. Her first post took her to the mountaintop idyll of Kandy, the headquarters of Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, the supreme commander of combined operations. Julia reveled in the glamour and intrigue of her overseas assignment and lifealtering romance with the much older and more sophisticated Paul Child, who took her on trips into the jungle, introduced her to the joys of curry, and insisted on educating both her mind and palate. A painter drafted to build war rooms, Paul was a colorful, complex personality. Conant uses extracts from his letters in which his sharp eye and droll wit capture the day-to-day confusion, excitement, and improbability of being part of a cloak- and-dagger operation. When Julia and Paul were transferred to Kunming, a rugged outpost at the foot of the Burma Road, they witnessed the chaotic end of the war in China and the beginnings of the Communist revolution that would shake the world. A Covert Affair chronicles their friendship with a brilliant and eccentric array of OSS agents, including Jane Foster, a wealthy, free-spirited artist, and Elizabeth MacDonald, an adventurous young reporter. In Paris after the war, Julia and Paul remained close to their intelligence colleagues as they struggled to start new lives, only to find themselves drawn into a far more terrifying spy drama. Relying on recently unclassified OSS and FBI documents, as well as previously unpublished letters and diaries, Conant vividly depicts a dangerous time in American history, when those who served their country suddenly found themselves called to account for their unpopular opinions and personal relationships.

The Cicero Spy Affair

The Cicero Spy Affair PDF

Author: Richard Wires

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 1999-09-30

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 0313028494

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The episode of the opportunistic valet of Britain's ambassador to neutral Turkey during World War II—dubbed Cicero for the eloquence of the top-secret material he appropriated from his employer Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen and sold to the Nazis—is a staple of intelligence lore. Yet this remarkable and sometimes comical story has often been recounted with little regard for the facts, most prominently in the popular film Five Fingers. Now, historian and former intelligence officer Richard Wires presents the first full and objective account of the Cicero spy episode, offering closure to past discrepancies and credible solutions to remaining mysteries. Copiously documented, The Cicero Spy Affair provides readers with the true chronology of events and places them in an international context. It is a story set in the hotbed of intrigue that was wartime Turkey, replete with a dramatic car chase, a series of colorful mistresses ever loyal to their lover the spy, and an old-school British ambassador whose documents are photographed at night as he plays the piano in the drawing room and/or slips into a sleeping pill-induced slumber. Despite the affair's amusing aspects, it is also a sobering tale in which there are no winners and from which there are serious lessons to be learned. Germany never made use of the highly sensitive British documents it obtained during this crucial four-month period of the war because the handling of the information was caught up in a bitter and wasteful personal rivalry between Ribbentrop and Schellenberg. It was sheer luck for the British that their war effort did not sustain any significant damage. For, while the book states definitively that security regarding the Allied invasion of Normandy was not breached in the Cicero affair, Germany did gain a potential advantage concerning campaigns in the Aegean and the Balkans. This embarrassed the British greatly, especially since Cicero walked away a free man. However, the greedy valet—the most highly paid spy in history at that time—did not achieve his goals, either; he discovered some years later that the British banknotes he insisted on as payment were counterfeited by the Germans as part of a larger counterfeiting project. Cicero died a desperate man, deeply in debt—a fitting anticlimax for an espionage episode resulting in neither bodily injury nor strategic impact, but in humiliation on all sides.

Zero Fail

Zero Fail PDF

Author: Carol Leonnig

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2021-05-18

Total Pages: 561

ISBN-13: 0399589015

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “This is one of those books that will go down as the seminal work—the determinative work—in this field. . . . Terrifying.”—Rachel Maddow The first definitive account of the rise and fall of the Secret Service, from the Kennedy assassination to the alarming mismanagement of the Obama and Trump years, right up to the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6—by the Pulitzer Prize winner and #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of A Very Stable Genius and I Alone Can Fix It NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST Carol Leonnig has been reporting on the Secret Service for The Washington Post for most of the last decade, bringing to light the secrets, scandals, and shortcomings that plague the agency today—from a toxic work culture to dangerously outdated equipment to the deep resentment within the ranks at key agency leaders, who put protecting the agency’s once-hallowed image before fixing its flaws. But the Secret Service wasn’t always so troubled. The Secret Service was born in 1865, in the wake of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but its story begins in earnest in 1963, with the death of John F. Kennedy. Shocked into reform by its failure to protect the president on that fateful day in Dallas, this once-sleepy agency was radically transformed into an elite, highly trained unit that would redeem itself several times, most famously in 1981 by thwarting an assassination attempt against Ronald Reagan. But this reputation for courage and excellence would not last forever. By Barack Obama’s presidency, the once-proud Secret Service was running on fumes and beset by mistakes and alarming lapses in judgment: break-ins at the White House, an armed gunman firing into the windows of the residence while confused agents stood by, and a massive prostitution scandal among agents in Cartagena, to name just a few. With Donald Trump’s arrival, a series of promised reforms were cast aside, as a president disdainful of public service instead abused the Secret Service to rack up political and personal gains. To explore these problems in the ranks, Leonnig interviewed dozens of current and former agents, government officials, and whistleblowers who put their jobs on the line to speak out about a hobbled agency that’s in desperate need of reform. “I will be forever grateful to them for risking their careers,” she writes, “not because they wanted to share tantalizing gossip about presidents and their families, but because they know that the Service is broken and needs fixing. By telling their story, they hope to revive the Service they love.”

Secret Affairs

Secret Affairs PDF

Author: Mark Curtis

Publisher: Serpent's Tail

Published: 2018-01-04

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1782834338

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This updated edition of Secret Affairs covers the momentous events of the past year in the Middle East and at home in the UK. It reveals the unreported attempts by Britain to cultivate relations with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after the fall of Mubarak, the military intervention on the side of Libyan rebel forces which include pro-al-Qaeda elements, and the ongoing reliance on the region's ultimate fundamentalist state, Saudi Arabia, to safeguard its interest in the Middle East. It illuminates path of Salman Abedi, the bomber who attacked Manchester in May 2017, and his terror network: how he fought in Libya in 2011 as part of a group of fighters which the UK allowed to leave the country to go and battle against Gadafi to topple him. In this ground-breaking book, Mark Curtis reveals the covert history of British collusion with radical Islamic and terrorist groups. Secret Affairs shows how governments since the 1940s have connived with militant forces to control oil resources and overthrow governments. The story of how Britain has helped nurture the rise of global terrorism has never been told.

Most Secret Agent of Empire

Most Secret Agent of Empire PDF

Author: Taline ter Minassian

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-03-15

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 0190257490

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Dubbed an "agent of British imperialism" by Joseph Stalin, Reginald Teague-Jones (1889- 1988) was the quintessential English spy whose exceptional story is recounted in this new biography. He studied in St Petersburg, participated in the 1905 Revolution and spent the rest of his life working for various branches of British secret intelligence. Plunging into the Great Game, he participated in daring operations against the Bolsheviks and tracked down a turbulent German agent, Wilhelm Wassmuss, who was spreading anti-British propaganda in Persia. Teague-Jones was also held responsible for the execution of 'the 26 Commissars' after the fall of the Baku Commune in 1918. This became one of the Soviet Union's most powerful cults of martyrology, inspiring a poem by Yesenin, a Brodsky painting, a 1933 feature film and an immense monument. Shortly after, Teague-Jones changed his name to Ronald Sinclair and adopted a secret persona for the next five decades, for part of which he worked undercover in the United States as an expert on Indian, Soviet and Middle-Eastern affairs, possibly in collaboration with the OSS, the new American secret service. In his swan song in espionage he kept a gimlet eye on the Soviet delegation to the UN in New York. For these reasons, and many others besides, Reginald Teague-Jones is the most important British spy you have never heard of.

An Affair of Spies

An Affair of Spies PDF

Author: Ronald H. Balson

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2022-09-13

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 1250282470

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From the winner of the National Jewish Book Award—Ronald H. Balson's An Affair of Spies tells of a spy mission to rescue a defector from Germany and prevent the Nazis from creating an atomic bomb. Nathan Silverman grew up in Berlin in the 1920s, the son of a homemaker and a theoretical physicist. His idyllic childhood was soon marred by increasing levels of bigotry against his family and the rest of the Jewish community, and after his uncle is arrested on Kristallnacht, he leaves Germany for New York City with only his mother’s wedding ring to sell for survival. While attending an evening course at Columbia in 1942, Nathan notices a recruitment poster on a university wall and decides to enlist in the military and help fight the Nazi regime. To his surprise, he is quickly selected for a special assignment; he is trained as a spy, and ordered to report to the Manhattan Project. There he learns that the Allies are racing to develop a nuclear weapon before the Nazis, and a German theoretical physicist is hoping to defect. The physicist was a friend of his father's, and Nathan's mission is to return to Berlin via France and smuggle him out of Europe. Nathan will be accompanied by Dr. Allison Fisher, a brilliant young scientist who can speak French; he travels to her lab at the University of Chicago for a crash course in nuclear physics, then they embark on their adventure. Nathan and Allison soon develop feelings for one another, but as their relationship deepens they move ever closer to their dangerous goal. Will they be able to escape Europe with the defector and start a new life together, or will they fail their mission and become two more casualties of war? An Affair of Spies is an action-packed tale of heroism and love in the face of unspeakable evil. Author Ronald H. Balson has applied his unmatched talent for evocative and painstakingly authentic storytelling to the high-stakes world of espionage and created his most thrilling novel yet.

Secret Agent Sheikh/Special Ops Affair

Secret Agent Sheikh/Special Ops Affair PDF

Author: Jennifer Morey

Publisher: HarperCollins Australia

Published: 2011-08-01

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 1742906877

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Secret Agent Sheikh by Linda Conrad Jass O'Reilly doesn't trust ex–agent Tarik Kadir. The dark and brooding Bedouin isn't who the determined CIA agent wants by her side as she tracks down rogue nuclear weapons. Tarik knows Jass doesn't want him to work with her as they delve deeper into the sultry Rio nightlife. But before the Carnivale is over, he will have to question everything he thought he knew about his own mission, job, and family. Special Ops Affair by Jennifer Morey Odelia Frank's heart went into lockdown the day her husband was killed. Then Jagger Benney is assigned to help her investigate a notorious arms broker, and the intelligence officer feels a glimmer of vulnerability she hasn't felt in years Despite their chemistry, Jag has his own suspicions about Odie. But soon, Odie will have to decide if her quiet, clever, and sexy partner is someone she can trust– or just a terrible reminder of what happens when you mix duty and love.