(Part 3) Top products from r/Intelligence

Markus Wolf, Man without a face About east german intelligence

Ion Pacepa, Red Horizons: The Extraordinary Memoirs of a Communist Spy Chief About rumanian intelligence in the communist era.

He also wrote the Kremlin's legacy, but that is more speculative and about the political changes, still a good book.

Pacepa has a trilogy: The Black Book of the Securitate from 1999, and recently (3 weeks ago) published: Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategy for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism, but I haven't read these, if anyone has an opinion on them, please share them here or in pm please!


U/animalfarmpig already mentioned Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, but you just can't stress enough the importance of that book, it discusses the very basics of analysis so well, that this should be the first anyone reads and if I may: this book should be at the very top of the suggested reading list.

Oh, fuck off. How great could they be if they got caught? James Angleton said it best:

>"You will never read about successful spies in the newspaper or watch them being interviewed on TV talk shows. Only failure makes a spy famous. Success guarantees that the public will never know the spy's name--and neither will the victims who suffered the results of his efforts."

You really have to wonder what's up with with an agency that glamorizes the idea of betraying people's trust for a living. Getting manipulated into doing somebody else's dirty work while being run by a handler is one of the shittier jobs I can imagine--but all the "strategic messaging" being pushed through movies, TV and video games makes being an expendable patsy seem downright awesome.

And when you have serious, well-respected senior defense analysts being script advisers for crappy "comedies" like The Interview? JFC! It's really the icing on the cake. Wisner's Might Wulitzer delivers.

All these fucking Cheese Wizards are really outdoing themselves lately, I tell you what. lol
^^^.

Recommended reading: The Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion.

>Americans create 57% of the world's advertising while representing only 6% of its population; half of our waking hours are spent immersed in the mass media. Persuasion has always been integral to the democratic process, but increasingly, thoughtful discussion is being replaced with simplistic soundbites and manipulative messages.Drawing on the history of propaganda as well as on contemporary research in social psychology, Age of Propaganda shows how the tactics used by political campaigners, sales agents, advertisers, televangelists, demagogues, and others often take advantage of our emotions by appealing to our deepest fears and most irrational hopes, creating a distorted vision of the world we live in.


Bonus track: George Formby on the MidiTizer: When I'm Cleanin' Windows. lol

Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis is really good, I've got it sitting on my desk right now.

The Thinker's Toolkit: 14 Powerful Techniques for Problem Solving is good for more general analysis.

Mathematical Methods in Counterterrorism is pretty advanced, but gives some really interesting depth.

Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency - (2001) James Bamford

This was the first book I read about the NSA. Up until this point, I knew next to nothing about them. This book did a great job of showing the NSA's systematic crippling of industry encryption standards by infiltration, blackmail, exploitation, politics, etc. Their infiltration of RSA and attempted infiltration of PGP were some of the best parts of the book, as it showed that the NSA was looking beyond code breaking, and specifically at introducing mathematical weaknesses in standard encryption systems.

I've found both Intelligence Analysis: A Target Centric Approach by Robert Clark and Handbook of Scientific Methods of Inquiry for Intelligence Analysis by Hank Prunckun to be quite good.

This is probably not what you are looking for, but John Stockwell was a CIA officer and the Chief of the Angola Task Force during its 1975 covert operations. He later became a whistleblower. Here a video for those who are interested in what he did for the CIA in Angola.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqx_dijObjA

You probably have both Stockwells book In Search of Enemies and John A. Marcums book Angolan Revolution - Vol. 2: Exile Politics and Guerilla Warfare, 1962-1976.

I believe the footnotes of those books might be helpful.

check also
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/johnson/diph_3.pdf

http://www.cnss.org/data/files/resources/FirstPrinciples/FirstPrinciplesVol11No3.pdf

This has some information sources, if you're willing to wade through low-quality manuals. These in particular are good, but this is my bible.

To be fair, I'm not a professional, but a... hobbyist.

Gideon's Spies

By Gordon Thomas

Fantastic book on the Mossad. Shin Bet is showcased a bit as well. Gives an outsider a good idea of just how cutthroat the agency is.

There was a book about the E. German Stasi that came out sometime in the 1990's, but I cannot remember the title for the life of me.

You need a British spy to regurgitate what Kevin Trudeau published in 1987 - [Mega Memory] (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0688153879/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_aHfgAbTRQX302)? Seriously, the article is wholesale ripping off the book and cassette tape publication, which in 1987 wasn't anything new. It does work pretty well though.

Edit - added link

more like mossad/russia.

Chinese Intelligence Operations

Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities

Ghost Plane

State of War

U.S. Army Counterintelligence Handbook

The Psychology of intelligence Analysis

And another

Veil - The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987 by Bob Woodward

I read this a few years back. Amazing book.

You can read more about the Mitrokhin files (concerning Israel) in this story: http://www.ynetnews.com/home/0,7340,L-13181,00.html

Or in the books written by Prof. Christopher Andrew in cooperation with Mitrokhin himsef: https://www.amazon.com/Sword-Shield-Mitrokhin-Archive-History/dp/0465003125/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1476826988&sr=1-1&keywords=the+sword+and+the+shield+the+mitrokhin+archive
Or: https://www.amazon.com/Mitrokhin-Archive-II-KGB-World/dp/0713993596

https://www.amazon.com/House-Bush-Saud-Relationship-Dynasties/dp/0743253396

http://www.amazon.com/Spycraft-History-Spytechs-Communism-Al-Qaeda/dp/0452295475

http://www.amazon.com/Greenpeace-Standing-Earth-2015-Calendar/dp/0761178457

By Way of Deception, The Big White Lie, Reluctant Spy, and The Devil's Chessboard are a few that come to mind immediately.

Sorry can't edit in my phone, here's a link
https://www.amazon.com/Big-Boys-Rules-Struggle-Against/dp/0571168094

No, military is sadly no option for me. I'm about to start my Master's in September in Europe (I'm European myself) and wanted to spend the time until then developing valuable IT skills that could later help me in finding jobs in government (civilian) or private intel analysis jobs.

I was planning to work through Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis and Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda. Do you have additional/alternative books to suggest?