This book addresses a critical question embedded within a heated debate about American intelligence: have Western experts fundamentally failed to understand the dynamics, leaders, and culture of the Middle East? Using the most recently declassified documents, interviews, and Arabic sources, the book examines seminal case studies culminating in Egyptian President Anwar el Sadat's dramatic assassination on live television. It explores how the most knowledgeable and powerful intelligence agencies in the world have been so notoriously caught off guard in this region.

This book reveals, for the first time, a hitherto unexplored dimension of Britain's engagement with the post-war Middle East: the counter-subversive policies and measures conducted by the British Intelligence and Security Services and he Information Research Department (IRD) of the Foreign Office, Britain's secret propaganda apparatus. Between 1948 and 1963, British policymakers used intelligence as a tool to maintain British influence in Middle Eastern countries such as Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iran. Discover how Britain tried to influence regional intelligence and security services and shape their approach to countering communist subversion. However, amidst disagreements over the nature of the threat and levels of brutality used to counter it, intelligence and secret liasons ultimately failed to protect Britain's waning influence.

Drawing on extensive interviews and archival research, this biography uncovers the motivations and ideals that informed Smiley’s commitment to covert action and intelligence during the Second World War and early part of the Cold War, often among tribally based societies. With particular reference to operations in Albania, Oman and Yemen, it addresses the wider issues of accountability and control of clandestine operations.

What is intelligence – why is it so hard to define, and why is there no systematic theory of intelligence? Classic intelligence analysis is based on an inference between history and the future – and this has led to a restriction in how we can perceive new threats, and new variations of threats. Now, Kjetil Anders Hatlebrekke rethinks intelligence analysis, arguing that good intelligence is based on understanding the threats that appear beyond our experience, and are therefore the most dangerous to society.

Reinterprets Chile and southern South America's Cold War experience from a transatlantic perspective James Lockhart blends Chilean, inter-American and transatlantic national, regional and world-historical trends into a century-long Cold War narrative. He argues that Chileans made their own history as highly engaged internationalists while reassessing American and other foreign-directed intelligence, surveillance and secret warfare operations in Chile and southern South America. The book transcends a well-known, US-centred historiography while offering a more equitable and global interpretation of Chile's Cold War experience than previously possible. This advances research that has progressively expanded the framework of Chile's Cold War experience since the arrest of General Augusto Pinochet in the UK for human rights violations more than 20 years ago.

In the 21st century, more than any other time, US agencies have relied on contractors to conduct core intelligence functions. This book charts the swell of intelligence outsourcing in the context of American political culture and considers what this means for the relationship between the state, its national security apparatus and accountability within a liberal democracy. Through analysis of a series of case studies, recently declassified documents and exclusive interviews with national security experts in the public and private sectors, the book provides an in-depth and illuminating appraisal of the evolving accountability regime for intelligence contractors.

Since its creation in 1947, the CIA has been at the heart of America's security apparatus. Written by intelligence scholars and experts, The CIA and the Pursuit of Security offers the reader a lively survey of the CIA past and present. The history of the agency is presented through the prism of its declassified documents, with each being supplemented by insightful contextual analysis. The book chronicles the evolution of the CIA, its remarkable successes, clandestine operations, and its ongoing struggle to maintain American security in an age of proliferating threats.

From Fidel Castro to Qassem Soleimani, the US government has been involved in an array of assassinations and assassination attempts against foreign leaders and officials. The President’s Kill List reveals how the US government has relied on a variety of methods, from the use of poison to the delivery of sniper rifles, and from employing hitmen to simply laying the groundwork for local actors to do the deed themselves. It shows not only how policymakers decided on assassination but also the level of Presidential control over these decisions. Tracing the history of the US government’s approach to assassination,the book analyses the evolution of assassination policies and, for the first time, reveals how successive administrations - through private justifications and public legitimations – ensured assassination remained an available tool.