Topics of Interest

The remarkable story of the man who ran Russia's post-Cold War spy program in America. This is a direct account of what the man known only as Comrade J did after we all assumed the spying was over--and of what Putin and Russia continue to do today. From 1997 to 2000, Comrade J was the highest-ranking operative of the KGB's successor agency in the United States. He directed Russian spy action in New York City, and personally oversaw every covert operation against the United States and its allies in the United Nations. He recruited spies, planted agents, penetrated security, manipulated intelligence, and influenced American policy, all under the direct leadership of Boris Yeltsin and then Vladimir Putin. Then in 2000, he defected--and revealed one more secret: for the previous two years, he had also been a double agent for the FBI. He has kept his secrets--until now.

The United States intelligence establishment is a colossus. With stations in 170 countries and armed with cutting-edge surveillance gear, high-tech weapons, and fleets of armed and unarmed drone aircraft, it commands the most extensive and advanced intel force in history. But America's spies still struggle to keep pace with a host of determined enemies around the world. In "Intel Wars," preeminent secrecy and intelligence historian Matthew Aid delivers the inside stories of our decade-long struggle against terrorism-its hard-won successes and bedeviling failures. The massive expansion of the military-intelligence complex since 9/11 has only added to the challenges it faces: our state-of -the-art spy networks are drowning in raw data, buried in paperwork, yet starved for key resources. In the field, overlapping jurisdictions stall CIA operatives, who must wait seventy-two hours for clearance to attack fast-moving Taliban IED teams. Swift, tightly focused operations like the Osama bin Laden strike are the exception rather than the rule. Based on extensive, on-the-ground interviews on the front lines and in Washington, D.C., as well as on revelations from Wikileaks cables and other newly declassified documents, "Intel Wars" is the most authoritative account yet written of the secret war that America is still fighting.