The Puzzle Palace: A Report on NSA, America's Most Secret Agency

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001

Steve Coll · 728 pages

An account of the CIA's involvement in the covert wars in Afghanistan that fueled Islamic militancy and gave rise to bin Laden's al Qaeda. For nearly the past quarter century, while most Americans were unaware, Afghanistan has been the playing field for intense covert operations by U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies-invisible wars which sowed the seeds of the September 11 attacks and which pro

One Nation Under Blackmail, Vol. 1: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein

Whitney Alyse Webb · 544 pages

Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987

Bob Woodward · 543 pages

Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times

George Crile · 550 pages

"In a little over a decade, two events have transformed the world we live in: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of militant Islam. Charlie Wilson's War is the untold story behind the last battle of the Cold War and how it fueled the new jihad. George Crile tells how Charlie Wilson, a maverick congressman from east Texas, conspired with a roque CIA operative to launch the biggest, meane

The Cuckoo's Egg

Clifford Stoll · 356 pages

In the days when the presence of a computer did NOT presume the presence of a network (they used to be freestanding units that could not easily communicate with another system), accounts to use the computer were expensive to maintain and heavily scrutinized by management. When the Accounting staff of Stoll's university employer discovered 75 cents' worth of time used with which no user was associ

The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA

Ted Gup · 398 pages

In the entrance of the CIA headquarters looms a huge marble wall into which seventy-one stars are carved-each representing an agent who has died in the line of duty. Official CIA records only name thirty-five of them, however. Undeterred by claims that revealing the identities of these "nameless stars" might compromise national security, Ted Gup sorted through thousands of documents and interviewe

The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government

David Talbot · 704 pages

"An explosive, headline-making portrait of Allen Dulles, the man who transformed the CIA into the most powerful and secretive colossus in Washington, from the founder of Salon.com and author of the New York Times bestseller Brothers. America's greatest untold story: the United States' rise to world dominance under the guile of Allen Welsh Dulles, the longest-serving director of the CIA. Drawing on

Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

Annie Jacobsen · 550 pages

It is the most famous military installation in the world. And it doesn't exist. Located a mere seventy-five miles outside of Las Vegas in Nevada's desert, the base has never been acknowledged by the U.S. government-but Area 51 has captivated imaginations for decades. Myths and hypotheses about Area 51 have long abounded, thanks to the intense secrecy enveloping it. Some claim it is home to aliens,

Red Carpet

Joseph Finder · 372 pages

"A New republic book." Includes bibliographical references and index.

The Falcon and the Snowman: A True Story of Friendship & Espionage

Robert Lindsey · 387 pages

True story about two young men from affluent families who, under the code names "Falcon" and "Snowman," commit a brazen act of espionage, by selling some of America's most sensitive secrets to the KGB.

The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI

Betty Medsger · 624 pages

The never-before-told complete story of the history-changing break-in at the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, by a group of unlikely activists -- quiet, ordinary, hardworking Americans -- that exposed the shocking truth and confirmed what some had long suspected: that J. Edgar Hoover was operating, in violation of the U.S. Constitution, his own shadow Bureau of Investigation.

Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion

Martin A. Lee, Bruce Shlain · 384 pages

The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

Masha Gessen · 333 pages

This is the chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to her own people and to the world. Handpicked by the "family" surrounding an ailing and increasingly unpopular Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin seemed like a perfect choice for the oliga

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

Tim Weiner · 727 pages

Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized United States national security. For sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its ter

Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace

Peter Janney, Dick Russell

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

Luke Harding · 346 pages

"IT BEGAN WITH A TANTALIZING, ANONYMOUS EMAIL: "I AM A SENIOR MEMBER OF THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY." What followed was the most spectacular intelligence breach ever, brought about by one extraordinary man. Edward Snowden was a 29-year-old computer genius working for the National Security Agency when he shocked the world by exposing the near-universal mass surveillance programs of the United States

Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century

Sergei Kostin, Eric Raynaud · 430 pages

The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal

David E. Hoffman · 312 pages

"While getting into his car on the evening of February 16, 1978, the chief of the CIA's Moscow station was handed an envelope by an unknown Russian. Its contents stunned the Americans: details of top-secret Soviet research and development in military technology that was totally unknown to the United States. From 1979 to 1985, Adolf Tolkachev, an engineer at a military research center, cracked open

The Kennedy Conspiracy

Anthony Summers · 640 pages

The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

Ben Macintyre · 364 pages

Circle of Treason: A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed

Sandra Grimes, Jeanne Vertefeuille · 234 pages

Circle of Treason details the authors' personal involvement in the hunt for and eventual identification of a Soviet mole in the CIA during the 1980s and 1990s.

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

James W. Douglass · 514 pages

In this fascinating and disturbing book James Douglass presents a compelling account of why President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and why the unmasking of this truth remains crucial for the future of our country and the world. Drawing on a vast field of investigation, including many sources available only in recent years, Douglass lays out a sequence of steps by JFK that transformed him, o

Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

Giles Whittell · 274 pages

Who were the three men the American and Soviet superpowers exchanged at Berlin's Glienicke Bridge and Checkpoint Charlie in the first prisoner exchange between East and West? Bridge of Spies traces the paths to that exchange on February 10, 1962. It is the story of three men -- William Fisher, alias Rudolf Abel, a British born KGB agent arrested by the FBI in New York City and jailed as a Soviet s

Disinformation

Ion Mihai Pacepa · 429 pages

The highest-ranking Soviet bloc intelligence official ever to defect to the West, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa is at it again. A quarter century ago, in his international bestseller Red Horizons, Pacepa exposed the massive crimes and corruption of his former boss, Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, giving the dictator a nervous breakdown and inspiring him to send assassination squads to the U.S. t