S2 Search · Reading list
Books from S2 Actual on Goodreads, organized by his shelves and topic buckets (intel lists, military history, logistics, etc.). Metadata filled via Open Library.
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100 books · Intel history · page 1 of 5
John Keegan
★★★★★Random House · 1994
The acclaimed author of The Face of Battle examines centures of conflict in a variety of diverse societies and cultures. "Keegan is at once the most readable and the most original of living military historians . . . A History of Warfare is perhaps the most remarkable study of warfare that has yet been written."--The New York Times Book Review.
Ben Macintyre
★★★★★Harmony Books · 2007
Eddie Chapman was a charming criminal, a con man, and a philanderer. He was also one of the most remarkable double agents Britain has ever produced. Inside the traitor was a man of loyalty; inside the villain was a hero. The problem for Chapman, his spymasters, and his lovers was to know where one persona ended and the other began. In 1941, after training as a German spy in occupied France, Chapman was parachuted into Britain with a revolver, a wireless, and a cyanide pill, with orders from the Abwehr to blow up an airplane factory. Instead, he contacted MI5, the British Secret Service. For the next four years, Chapman worked as a double agent, a lone British spy at the heart of the German Secret Service who at one time volunteered to assassinate Hitler for his countrymen. Crisscrossing Europe under different names, all the while weaving plans, spreading disinformation, and, miraculously, keeping his stories straight under intense interrogation, he even managed to gain some profit and seduce beautiful women along the way. The Nazis feted Chapman as a hero and awarded him the Iron Cross. In Britain, he was pardoned for his crimes, becoming the only wartime agent to be thus rewarded. Both countries provided for the mother of his child and his mistress. Sixty years after the end of the war, and ten years after Chapman’s death, MI5 has now declassified all of Chapman’s files, releasing more than 1,800 pages of top secret material and allowing the full story of Agent Zigzag to be told for the first time. A gripping story of loyalty, love, and treachery, Agent Zigzag offers a unique glimpse into the psychology of espionage, with its thin and shifting line between fidelity and betrayal.
Stephen Kinzer
★★★★★Wiley · August 12, 2004
Half a century ago, the United States overthrew a Middle Eastern government for the first time. The victim was Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran. Although the coup seemed a success at first, today it serves as a chilling lesson about the dangers of foreign intervention.In this book, veteran New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer gives the first full account of this fateful operation. His account is centered around an hour-by-hour reconstruction of the events of August 1953, and concludes with an assessment of the coup's "haunting and terrible legacy." Operation Ajax, as the plot was code-named, reshaped the history of Iran, the Middle East, and the world. It restored Mohammad Reza Shah to the Peacock Throne, allowing him to impose a tyranny that ultimately sparked the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The Islamic Revolution, in turn, inspired fundamentalists throughout the Muslim world, including the Taliban and terrorists who thrived under its protection."It is not far-fetched," Kinzer asserts in this book, "to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah's repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York."Drawing on research in the United States and Iran, and using material from a long-secret CIA report, Kinzer explains the background of the coup and tells how it was carried out. It is a cloak-and-dagger story of spies, saboteurs, and secret agents. There are accounts of bribes, staged riots, suitcases full of cash, and midnight meetings between the Shah and CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt, who was smuggled in and out of the royal palace under a blanket in the back seat of a car. Roosevelt,the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, was a real-life James Bond in an era when CIA agents operated mainly by their wits. After his first coup attempt failed, he organized a second attempt that succeeded three days later.The colorful cast of characters includes the terrified young Shah, who fled his country at the first sign of trouble; General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, father of the Gulf War commander and the radio voice of "Gang Busters," who flew to Tehran on a secret mission that helped set the coup in motion; and the fiery Prime Minister Mossadegh, who outraged the West by nationalizing the immensely profitable Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The British, outraged by the seizure of their oil company, persuaded President Dwight Eisenhower that Mossadegh was leading Iran toward Communism. Eisenhower and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain became the coup's main sponsors. Brimming with insights into Middle Eastern history and American foreign policy, this book is an eye-opening look at an event whose unintended consequences - Islamic revolution and violent anti-Americanism--have shaped the modern world. As the United States assumes an ever-widening role in the Middle East, it is essential reading.
Antonio J. Méndez
★★★★★Viking · 2012
The true account of the 1979 rescue of six American hostages from Iran On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants stormed the American embassy in Tehran and held dozens of Americans hostage, sparking a 444-day ordeal and a quake in global politics that still reverberates today. Beaneath this crisis another shocking story was known by only a select few: six Americans escaped the embassy and hid within a city roiling with suspicion and fear. A top-level CIA officer named Antonio Mendez devised an ingenious yet incredibly risky plan to rescue them before they were detected. Disguising himself as a Hollywood producer, and supported by a cast of expert forgers, deep-cover CIA operatives, foreign agents, and Hollywood special-effects artists, Mendez traveled to Tehran under the guise of scouting locations for a fake science fiction film called "Argo." While pretending to find the ideal film backdrops, Mendez and a colleague succeeded in contacting the escapees and eventually smuggled them out of Iran. After more than three decades, Antonio Mendez finally details the extraordinarily complex and dangerous operation he led. A riveting story of secret identities, international intrigue, and good old-fashioned American ingenuity, Argo is the pulse-pounding account of the history-making collusion between Hollywood and high-stakes espionage.
Mark Bowden
★★★★★On October 3, 1993, about a hundred U.S. soldiers were dropped by helicopter into a teeming market in the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia, to abduct two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord. The action was supposed to take an hour. Instead, they spent a long and terrible night fighting thousands of armed Somalis. By morning, eighteen Americans were dead, and more than seventy badly injured. Mark Bowden's gripping narrative is one of the most exciting accounts of modern war ever written--a riveting story that captures the heroism, courage and brutality of battle.
Rick Atkinson
★★★★★A definitive account of the Gulf War told by Pulitzer Prize–winning correspondent Rick Atkinson. This previously untold story of the US war with Iraq in the early 1990s, Atkinson follows the 42-day war from the first night to the final day, providing vivid accounts of bombing runs, White House strategy sessions, firefights, and bitter internal conflicts.
Alan Moorehead
★★★★★Penguin Books · 2001
The seminal account of the battle between Montgomery’s Eighth Army and Rommel’s Afrika Corps, amidst the endless harsh wastes of the Western Desert. In 1940, Alan Moorehead was sent to cover the North Africa campaign by the Daily Express, and he followed its dramatic course all the way to 1943. The three books he subsequently wrote about the Desert War – later collected as his ‘African Trilogy’ – were swiftly acclaimed as a classic account of the tussle between Montgomery’s Eighth Army and Rommel’s Afrika Corps, under the beating sun of the Egyptian Sahara's Western Desert. Moorehead was responsible for the celebrated insight that tank battles in the desert are like battles at sea, the lumbering tanks like ships lost in a vast ocean of sand. The New Statesman could not have put it better when it described his achievement with this riveting book: ‘There is something of genius in the breadth and penetration of his vision , which encompasses the whole panorama of war and then narrows it down to the particular: the soldier stubbing out his cigarette before going into action, the expression on a tank commander’s face as he is hit… The story of the African campaigns will go down in history as one of the great epics of mankind, largely thanks to Mr Moorehead’s account.’
Ben Macintyre
★★★★★In his celebrated bestsellers Agent Zigzag and Operation Mincemeat, Ben Macintyre told the dazzling true stories of a remarkable WWII double agent and of how the Allies employed a corpse to fool the Nazis and assure a decisive victory. In Double Cross, Macintyre returns with the untold story of the grand final deception of the war and of the extraordinary spies who achieved it. On June 6, 1944, 150,000 Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy and suffered an astonishingly low rate of casualties. D-Day was a stunning military accomplishment, but it was also a masterpiece of trickery. Operation Fortitude, which protected and enabled the invasion, and the Double Cross system, which specialized in turning German spies into double agents, deceived the Nazis into believing that the Allies would attack at Calais and Norway rather than Normandy. It was the most sophisticated and successful deception operation ever carried out, ensuring that Hitler kept an entire army awaiting a fake invasion, saving thousands of lives, and securing an Allied victory at the most critical juncture in the war. The story of D-Day has been told from the point of view of the soldiers who fought in it, the tacticians who planned it, and the generals who led it. But this epic event in world history has never before been told from the perspectives of the key individuals in the Double Cross System. These include its director (a brilliant, urbane intelligence officer), a colorful assortment of MI5 handlers (as well as their counterparts in Nazi intelligence), and the five spies who formed Double Cross’s nucleus: a dashing Serbian playboy, a Polish fighter-pilot, a bisexual Peruvian party girl, a deeply eccentric Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming and a volatile Frenchwoman, whose obsessive love for her pet dog very nearly wrecked the entire plan. The D-Day spies were, without question, one of the oddest military units ever assembled, and their success depended on the delicate, dubious relationship between spy and spymaster, both German and British. Their enterprise was saved from catastrophe by a shadowy sixth spy whose heroic sacrifice is revealed here for the first time. With the same depth of research, eye for the absurd and masterful storytelling that have made Ben Macintyre an international bestseller, Double Cross is a captivating narrative of the spies who wove a web so intricate it ensnared Hitler’s army and carried thousands of D-Day troops across the Channel in safety.
Fitzroy Maclean
★★★★★Penguin Global · September 1, 2004
70th Anniversary Edition with a New Foreword by Sunday Times Bestselling Author Simon Sebag Montefiore 'A classic' Observer | 'A legend' Washington Post | 'The best book you will read this year' Colonel Tim Collins Posted to Moscow as a young diplomat before the Second World War, Fitzroy Maclean travelled widely, with or without permission, in some of the wildest and remotest parts of the Soviet Union, then virtually closed to foreigners. In 1942 he fought as a founder member of the SAS in North Africa. There Maclean specialised in hair-raising commando raids behind enemy lines, including the daring and outrageous kidnapping of the German Consul in Axis-controlled Iraq. In 1943 he parachuted into German-occupied Yugoslavia as Winston Churchill's personal representative to Josip Broz Tito and remained there until 1945, all enemy attempts to capture him proving unsuccessful. Eastern Approaches is Maclean's classic, gripping account of the sybaritic delights of diplomatic life, the thrill of remote travel in the then-forbidden zones of Central Asia, and the violence and adventure of world-changing tours in North Africa and Yugoslavia. Maclean is the original British action hero and this is blistering reading. 'This book literally changed my life' Simon Sebag Montefiore 'A man of daring character' Winston Churchill 'An absorbing mixture of military adventure, political judgement, urbane wit, cool humour and surprising incident' Financial Times 'One of the bravest men in the British army, and one of the funniest' Ben Macintyre 'Entertaining, important, the model for James Bond' New York Times
Hugh Sebag-Montefiore
★★★★★Wiley · February 12, 2004
Winston Churchill called the cracking of the German Enigma Code "the secret weapon that won the war." Now, for the first time, noted British journalist Hugh-Sebag-Montefiore reveals the complete story of the breaking of the code by the Allies--the breaking that played a crucial role in the outcome of World War II. This fascinating account relates the never-before-told, hair-raising stories of the heroic British and American sailors, spies, and secret agents who faced death in order to capture vital codebooks from sinking ships and snatch them from under the noses of Nazi officials. Sebag-Montefiore also relates new details about the genesis of the code, little-known facts about how the Poles first cracked the Luftwaffe's version of the code (and then passed it along to the British), and the feverish activities at Bletchley Park. Based in part on documents recently unearthed from American and British archives--including previously confidential government files--and in part on unforgettable, firsthand accounts of surviving witnesses, Enigma unearths the stunning truth about the brilliant piece of decryption that changed history.
David E. Johnson
★★★★★The U.S. Army entered World War II unprepared. In addition, lacking Germany's blitzkrieg approach of coordinated armor and air power, the army was organized to fight two wars: one on the ground and one in the air. Previous commentators have blamed Congressional funding and public apathy for the army's unprepared state. David E. Johnson believes instead that the principal causes were internal: army culture and bureaucracy, and their combined impact on the development of weapons and doctrine. Johnson examines the U.S. Army's innovations for both armor and aviation between the world wars, arguing that the tank became a captive of the conservative infantry and cavalry branches, while the airplane's development was channeled by air power insurgents bent on creating an independent air force. He maintains that as a consequence, the tank's potential was hindered by the traditional arms, while air power advocates focused mainly on proving the decisiveness of strategic bombing, neglecting the mission of tactical support for ground troops. Minimal interaction between ground and air officers resulted in insufficient cooperation between armored forces and air forces. Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers makes a major contribution to a new understanding of both the creation of the modern U.S. Army and the Army's performance in World War II. The book also provides important insights for future military innovation.
Edwin Westrate
★★★★★Forward Observer, first published in 1944, is the account of a U.S. Army artillery observation crew in World War Two. The author based the book on interviews with two surviving members of the crew while they were recuperating from injuries received after their prison ship was sunk in the Mediterranean (the men were being transferred to Italy from Africa, en route to a German prison camp). The account, fast-paced and filled with action, depicts the soldier's lives from training at the Army's Field Artillery School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a short stay for more training in England, and then the unit's transfer to Tunisia where they occupy the frontlines as forward observers for their artillery battalion. Forward Observer is a moving, personal story of a seldom-told aspect of combat in the Second World War. Included are 3 pages of maps.
Christopher Hale
★★★★★The History Press · 2011
How and why more than one million non-Germans joined Hitler's "war of annihilation" Revealing for the first time Heinrich Himmler's master plan for Europe, this book discusses his dream of an SS empire with no place for either the Nazi Party or Adolf Hitler. His astonishingly ambitious plan depended on the recruitment of tens of thousands of "Germanic" peoples to build an "SS Europa." This book, researched in archives all over Europe and using first-hand testimony, exposes Europe's dirty secret—that nearly half a million Europeans and more than a million Soviet citizens enlisted in the armed forces of the Third Reich—to fight a crusade against "Jewish-Bolshevism." No other historian has examined the connections between these SS "foreign legions" (both police and Waffen-SS) and the Holocaust. Even today, some apologists claim that the foreign volunteers were merely soldiers "like any other" and fought a decent war against Stalin's Red Army. Christopher Hale demonstrates conclusively that these surprisingly common views are mistaken.
Williamson Murray
★★★★★Cambridge University Press · 2012
Hybrid warfare has been an integral part of the historical landscape since the ancient world, but only recently have analysts incorrectly categorized these conflicts as unique. Great powers throughout history have confronted opponents who used a combination of regular and irregular forces to negate the advantage of the great powers' superior conventional military strength. As this study shows, hybrid wars are labor-intensive and long-term affairs; they are difficult struggles that defy the domestic logic of opinion polls and election cycles. Hybrid wars are also the most likely conflicts of the twenty-first century, as competitors use hybrid forces to wear down America's military capabilities in extended campaigns of exhaustion. Nine historical examples of hybrid warfare, from ancient Rome to the modern world, provide readers with context by clarifying the various aspects of conflicts and examining how great powers have dealt with them in the past.
Max Hastings
★★★★★Here, for the first time, Max Hastings gives us a magnificent, single-volume history of World War II in its entirety. Through his strikingly detailed stories of everyday people, he provides an intimate portrait of the world at war.
John Keegan
★★★★★Knopf · 2003
In fiction, the spy is a glamorous figure whose secrets make or break peace, but, historically, has intelligence really been a vital step to military victories? In this breakthrough study, the preeminent war historian John Keegan goes to the heart of a series of important conflicts to develop a powerful argument about military intelligence. In his characteristically wry and perceptive prose, Keegan offers us nothing short of a new history of war through the prism of intelligence. He brings to life the split-second decisions that went into waging war before the benefit of aerial surveillance and electronic communications. The English admiral Horatio Nelson was hot on the heels of Napoleon’s fleet in the Mediterranean and never knew it, while Stonewall Jackson was able to compensate for the Confederacy’s disadvantage in firearms and manpower with detailed maps of the Appalachians. In the past century, espionage and decryption have changed the face of the Japanese surprise attack at the Battle of the Midway was thwarted by an early warning. Timely information, however, is only the beginning of the surprising and disturbing aspects of decisions that are made in war, where brute force is often more critical. Intelligence in War is a thought-provoking work that ranks among John Keegan’s finest achievements.
Peter FitzSimons
★★★★★HarperCollins Publishers · 28 January 2001
'Freedom is the only thing worth living for. While I was doing that work I used to think that it didn't matter if I died, because without freedom there was no point in living'. Nancy Wake In the early 1930's, Nancy Wake was a young woman enjoying a bohemian life in Paris. By the end of the Second World War she was the Gestapo's most wanted person. As a naive, young journalist, Nancy Wake witnessed a horrific scene of Nazi violence in a Viennese street. From that moment, she declared that she would do everything in her power to rid Europe of the Nazi presence. What began as a courier job here and there, became a highly successful escape network for Allied soldiers, perfectly camouflaged by Nancy's high-society life in Marseille. Her network was soon so successful - and so notorious - that he had to flee France to escape the Gestapo who had dubbed her 'the white mouse' for her knack of slipping through its traps. But Nancy was a passionate enemy of the Nazis and refused to stay away. She trained with the British Special Operations Executive and parachuted back into France behind enemy lines. Again, this singular woman rallied to the cause, helping to lead a powerful underground fighting force, the Maquis. Supplying weapons and training the civilian Maquis, organising Allied parachute drops, cycling four hundred kilometres across a mountain range to find a new transmitting radio - nothing seemed too difficult in her fight against the Nazis. Peter FitzSimons reveals Nancy Wake's compelling story, a tale of an ordinary woman doing extraordinary things.
John Arquilla
★★★★★Rand · 2001
Netwar―like cyberwar―describes a new spectrum of conflict that is emerging in the wake of the information revolution. What distinguished netwar is the networked organizational structure of its practitioners and their quickness in coming together in swarming attacks. To confront this new type of conflict, it is crucial for governments, military, and law enforcement to begin networking themselves.
Ben Macintyre
★★★★★Bloomsbury · 2010
In 1943, from a windowless London basement office, two intelligence officers conceived a plan that was both simple & complicated—Operation Mincemeat. Purpose? To deceive the Nazis into thinking the Allies were planning to attack Europe by way of Greece or Sardinia, rather than Sicily, as the Nazis had assumed & the Allies ultimately chose. Charles Cholmondeley of MI5 and the British naval intelligence officer Ewen Montagu were very different. Cholmondeley was a dreamer seeking adventure. Montagu was an aristocratic, detail-oriented barrister. A perfect team, they created an ingenious plan: equip a corpse with secret (but false) papers concerning the invasion, then drop it off the coast of Spain where German spies would hopefully take the bait. The idea was approved by British intelligence officials, including Ian Fleming (007's creator). Winston Churchill believed it might ring true to the Axis & help bring victory. Filled with spies, double agents, rogues, heroes & a corpse, the story of Operation Mincemeat reads like an international thriller. Unveiling never-before-released material, Macintyre goes into the minds of intelligence officers, their moles & spies, & the German Abwehr agents who suffered the “twin frailties of wishfulness & yesmanship.” He weaves together the eccentric personalities of Cholmondeley & Montagu & their improbable feats into an adventure that saved thousands & paved the way for the conquest of Sicily.
Max Hastings
★★★★★Vintage · January 3, 2006
On June 6, 1944, American and British troops staged the greatest amphibious landing in history to begin Operation Overlord, the battle to liberate Europe from the scourge of the Third Reich. With gut-wrenching realism and immediacy, Hastings reveals the terrible human cost that this battle exacted. Moving beyond just the storming of Omaha beach and D-Day, he explores the Allies’ push inward, with many British and American infantry units suffering near 100 percent casualties during the course of that awful summer. Far from a gauzy romanticized remembrance, Hastings details a grueling ten week battle to overpower the superbly trained, geographically entrenched German Wehrmacht. Uncompromising and powerful in its depiction of wartime, this is the definitive book on D-Day and the Battle of Normandy.
Peter McCarthy
★★★★★Carroll & Graf Publishers · 2002
The image that defines the Nazis’ Blitzkrieg is that of the Panzerwaffe’s massed columns of tanks sweeping through Europe, all resistance smashed in their wake. The Panzers’ achievements in battle were largely responsible for Germany’s early successes in World War II, and once the tide had turned against the Reich, the Panzers became the backbone of its defense. But the dramatic story of Hitler’s tank divisions is more than one of mere mechanical efficiency. It hangs, too, on those who commanded and fought in them, and believed in their near invincibility. These are the men who come to life in this immensely readable narrative. Great generals like Guderian, Rommel, and Manstein, tank masters like Wittmann and Bake, and inspired commanders like Balck and Bayerlein dominate the story of Panzerkreig. Dispensing with jargon, but including explanatory maps, rare illustrations, and fascinating detail on uniforms, crew members, and the mechanical features of the machines, the authors give a comprehensive overview of all aspects of the subject, both human and technical. They have also benefited from new information available since the opening of Cold War archives. Emerging from the narrative is the whole vast canvas of the war, as it follows the titanic struggles that raged between France’s bocage country, North Africa’s desert wastes, and Russia’s limitless steppes. The development of German fighting vehicles and tactics is fully charted, and the many myths and misconceptions of the Panzerwaffe are exploded. Extensive research, maps, illustrations throughout, reference to the leading participants’ memoirs, and original new conclusions all contribute to this finely measured assessment of the evolution, exploits, and eventual destruction of this superlative fighting force.
Sean Naylor
★★★★★St. Martin's Press · 2015
The New York Times Bestseller and Winner of the 2015 Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award for Unit History Since the attacks of September 11, one organization has been at the forefront of America's military response. Its efforts turned the tide against al-Qaida in Iraq, killed Bin Laden and Zarqawi, rescued Captain Phillips and captured Saddam Hussein. Its commander can direct cruise missile strikes from nuclear submarines and conduct special operations raids anywhere in the world. Relentless Strike tells the inside story of Joint Special Operations Command, the secret military organization that during the past decade has revolutionized counterterrorism, seamlessly fusing intelligence and operational skills to conduct missions that hit the headlines, and those that have remained in the shadows-until now. Because JSOC includes the military's most storied special operations units-Delta Force, SEAL Team 6, the 75th Ranger Regiment-as well as America's most secret aviation and intelligence units, this is their story, too. Relentless Strike reveals tension-drenched meetings in war rooms from the Pentagon to Iraq and special operations battles from the cabin of an MH-60 Black Hawk to the driver's seat of Delta Force's Pinzgauer vehicles as they approach their targets. Through exclusive interviews, reporter Sean Naylor uses his unique access to reveal how an organization designed in the 1980s for a very limited mission set transformed itself after 9/11 to become the military's premier weapon in the war against terrorism and how it continues to evolve today.
Ben Macintyre
★★★★★Crown · 2016
In the summer of 1941, at the height of the war in the Western Desert, a bored and eccentric young officer, David Stirling, came up with a plan that was radical and entirely against the rules: a small undercover unit that would inflict mayhem behind enemy lines. Despite intense opposition, Winston Churchill personally gave Stirling permission to recruit the toughest, brightest and most ruthless soldiers he could find. So began the most celebrated and mysterious military organisation in the world: the SAS. Now, 75 years later, the SAS has finally decided to tell its astonishing story. It has opened its secret archives for the first time, granting historian Ben Macintyre full access to a treasure trove of unseen reports, memos, diaries, letters, maps and photographs, as well as free rein to interview surviving Originals and those who knew them. The result is an exhilarating tale of fearlessness and heroism, recklessness and tragedy; of extraordinary men who were willing to take monumental risks. It is a story about the meaning of courage.
T.E. Lawrence
★★★★★Anchor Books · 1991
In his classic book, T.E. Lawrence—forever known as Lawrence of Arabia—recounts his role in the origin of the modern Arab world. At first a shy Oxford scholar and archaeologist with a facility for languages, he joined and went on to lead the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks while the rest of the world was enmeshed in World War I. With its richly detailed evocation of the land and the people Lawrence passionately believed in, its incisive portraits of key players, from Faisal ibn Hussein, the future Hashemite king of Syria and Iraq, to General Sir Edmund Allenby and other members of the British imperial forces, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is an indispensible primary historical source. It helps us to understand today’s Middle East, while giving us thrilling accounts of military exploits (including the liberation of Aqaba and Damascus), clandestine activities, and human foibles.