Download or read book The Great Game written by Frederick P. Hitz and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this riveting insider’s account, a former inspector general of the CIA compares actual espionage cases and practices with classic and popular spy fiction, showing that the real world of espionage is nearly always stranger and more complicated than even the best spy fiction.Exploring everything from tradecraft and recruitment to bureaucracy and betrayal, The Great Game contrasts fictional spies created by such authors as John Le Carr?, Tom Clancy and Joseph Conrad with their real-life counterparts from Kim Philby to Aldrich Ames. Drawing on his thirty year career with the CIA, Frederick P. Hitz shows that even the most imaginative authors fail to capture the profound human dilemmas raised by real-life cases. Engaging and insightful, The Great Game shines a fascinating light on the veiled history of intelligence.
Download or read book The Great Game written by Peter Hopkirk and published by John Murray. This book was released on 2006-03-27 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For nearly a century the two most powerful nations on earth, Victorian Britain and Tsarist Russia, fought a secret war in the lonely passes and deserts of Central Asia. Those engaged in this shadowy struggle called it 'The Great Game', a phrase immortalized by Kipling. When play first began the two rival empires lay nearly 2,000 miles apart. By the end, some Russian outposts were within 20 miles of India. This classic book tells the story of the Great Game through the exploits of the young officers, both British and Russian, who risked their lives playing it. Disguised as holy men or native horse-traders, they mapped secret passes, gathered intelligence and sought the allegiance of powerful khans. Some never returned. The violent repercussions of the Great Game are still convulsing Central Asia today.
Download or read book Mapping the Great Game written by Riaz Dean and published by Casemate. This book was released on 2020-01-19 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The work of explorers, surveyors and spies in the race to conquer Southern Asia is vividly recounted in this history of British imperial cartography. In the 19th century, the British and Russian empires were engaged in bitter rivalry for the acquisition of Southern Asian. Although India was the ultimate prize, most of the intrigue and action took place along its northern frontier in Afghanistan, Turkestan and Tibet. Mapping the region and gaining knowledge of the enemy were crucial to the interests of both sides. The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India began in the 18th century with the aim of creating a detailed map of the subcontinent. Under the leadership of George Everest—whose name was later bestowed to the world’s tallest mountain—the it mapped the Great Arc running from the country’s southern tip to the Himalayas. Much of the work was done by Indian explorers known as Pundits. They were the first to reveal the mysteries of the forbidden city of Lhasa, and discover the true course of Tibet’s mighty Tsangpo River. These explorers performed essential information gathering for the British Empire and filled in large portions of the map of Asia. Their adventurous exploits are vividly recounted in Mapping the Great Game.
Download or read book Spying for Empire written by Robert Johnson and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Great Game in Central and South Asia, 1757-1947. The Story of the struggle between Russia and Britain for imperial influence over southern and central Asia.
Download or read book Espionage The Great Game written by Robert Thompson and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2017-08-21 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stan, handsome, six feet two inches tall, with dark-brown hair and piercing blue eyes, and neighbor Pete, six feet, 180 pounds, met in scouting at twelve and became brothers in spirit. Their intertwined lives and adventures carry them through college and beyond. Their high school friend Butch leads them astray, but they are redeemed when they meet again at Quanticos CIA training and SEAL training facilities. They are paired in CIA mission assignments. They are EMT noncombatants in Iraq and Iran. Their last assignment is in Afghanistan at which time they are separatedButch is assigned to Damascus and Stan in Kabul. They are in reality espionage agents (spies). Stan sacrifices everything to fulfill his most dangerous secret assignment to infiltrate the highest level of opposition. In the process, physical requirement to ingratiate himself turns into emotional commitment, and he is caught in the trap of his own making. The subject of his surveillance is Prince Mohammed, whose illegitimate brother, Sayed, frees him from Taliban imprisonment. And there begins the beginning of the end.
Download or read book America s Great Game written by Hugh Wilford and published by Basic Books (AZ). This book was released on 2013-12-03 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 9/11 attacks to waterboarding to drone strikes, relations between the United States and the Middle East seem caught in a downward spiral. And all too often, the Central Intelligence Agency has made the situation worse. But this crisis was not a historical inevitability—far from it. Indeed, the earliest generation of CIA operatives was actually the region’s staunchest western ally. In America’s Great Game, celebrated intelligence historian Hugh Wilford reveals the surprising history of the CIA’s pro-Arab operations in the 1940s and 50s by tracing the work of the agency’s three most influential—and colorful—officers in the Middle East. Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt was the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and the first head of CIA covert action in the region; his cousin, Archie Roosevelt, was a Middle East scholar and chief of the Beirut station. The two Roosevelts joined combined forces with Miles Copeland, a maverick covert operations specialist who had joined the American intelligence establishment during World War II. With their deep knowledge of Middle Eastern affairs, the three men were heirs to an American missionary tradition that engaged Arabs and Muslims with respect and empathy. Yet they were also fascinated by imperial intrigue, and were eager to play a modern rematch of the “Great Game,” the nineteenth-century struggle between Britain and Russia for control over central Asia. Despite their good intentions, these “Arabists” propped up authoritarian regimes, attempted secretly to sway public opinion in America against support for the new state of Israel, and staged coups that irrevocably destabilized the nations with which they empathized. Their efforts, and ultimate failure, would shape the course of U.S.–Middle Eastern relations for decades to come. Based on a vast array of declassified government records, private papers, and personal interviews, America’s Great Game tells the riveting story of the merry band of CIA officers whose spy games forever changed U.S. foreign policy.
Download or read book Wakhan Quadrangle written by Hermann Kreutzmann and published by Harrassowitz. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Wakhan Quadrangle became an arena of colonial competition when four powers - Afghanistan, China, Great Britain and Russia - struggled for dominance in a remote mountain region where only scattered communities lived in a challenging environment - called the "Great Game". Prior to this, various international travellers had been sent out, commissioned to record routes, military details and strategic information for the respective parties in the contest. Among the explorers were so-called indigenous intermediaries who were trained in measuring geodetic parameters and who noted down their observations about the customs, culture and economy of the people. They were expected to be knowledgeable in terms of linguistic skills and cultural practices and were less likely than their colonial masters to arouse suspicion. Munshi Abdul Rahim was an explorer who was sent to Wakhan and Badakhshan in 1879-1880 by the first British Political Agent in Gilgit. His report, reprinted in facsimile, is the centerpiece of this book. It was written during a crucial period for Wakhan that resulted in the imperial division of the formerly independent principality into two parts and the flight and migration of a large share of its inhabitants. His account is preceded by an introduction to the "Great Game" and its implications for the Central Asian interface. Munshi Abdul Rahim's narrative serves to discuss the function of providers of 'political' and 'non-political' information, i.e. the distinction between exploration and espionage from colonial times to the present day. The comments and interpretations are embedded in archival research and fieldwork done by the author over 40 years.
Download or read book Tournament of Shadows written by Karl E. Meyer and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the romantic conflicts of the Victorian Great Game to the war-torn history of the region in recent decades, Tournament of Shadows traces the struggle for control of Central Asia and Tibet from the 1830s to the present. The original Great Game, the clandestine struggle between Russia and Britain for mastery of Central Asia, has long been regarded as one of the greatest geopolitical conflicts in history. Many believed that control of the vast Eurasian heartland was the key to world dominion. The original Great Game ended with the Russian Revolution, but the geopolitical struggles in Central Asia continue to the present day. In this updated edition, the authors reflect on Central Asia's history since the end of the Russo-Afghan war, and particularly in the wake of 9/11.
Download or read book The Spy and the Traitor written by Ben Macintyre and published by Crown. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The celebrated author of Double Cross and Rogue Heroes returns with a thrilling Americans-era tale of Oleg Gordievsky, the Russian whose secret work helped hasten the end of the Cold War. “The best true spy story I have ever read.”—JOHN LE CARRÉ Named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist • Shortlisted for the Bailie Giffords Prize in Nonfiction If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation's communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union's top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6. For nearly a decade, as the Cold War reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West turn the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots, as the Soviet leadership grew increasingly paranoid at the United States's nuclear first-strike capabilities and brought the world closer to the brink of war. Desperate to keep the circle of trust close, MI6 never revealed Gordievsky's name to its counterparts in the CIA, which in turn grew obsessed with figuring out the identity of Britain's obviously top-level source. Their obsession ultimately doomed Gordievsky: the CIA officer assigned to identify him was none other than Aldrich Ames, the man who would become infamous for secretly spying for the Soviets. Unfolding the delicious three-way gamesmanship between America, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and culminating in the gripping cinematic beat-by-beat of Gordievsky's nail-biting escape from Moscow in 1985, Ben Macintyre's latest may be his best yet. Like the greatest novels of John le Carré, it brings readers deep into a world of treachery and betrayal, where the lines bleed between the personal and the professional, and one man's hatred of communism had the power to change the future of nations.
Download or read book The Bookman written by Lavie Tidhar and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a 19th century unlike our own, the shadowy assassin known as the Bookman moves unseen. His weapons are books; his enemies are many. And when Orphan, a young man with a mysterious past, loses his love to the sinister machinations of the Bookman, Orphan would stop at nothing to bring her back from the dead. In The Bookman, World Fantasy Award winner Lavie Tidhar writes a love letter to books, and to the serial literature of the Victorian era: full of hair-breadth escapes and derring-dos, pirates and automatons, assassins and poets, a world in which real life authors mingle freely with their fictional creations – and where nothing is quite as it seems. New 2016 edition includes the novelette “Murder in the Cathedral”. Discover, truthfully, what actually happened when Orphan visited Paris. File Under: Steampunk [Alternate Victorian London | Reptilian royalty | Diabolical anarchists | Extraordinary adventure!]
Download or read book Great Game East written by Bertil Lintner and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1950s, China and India have been locked in a monumental battle for geopolitical supremacy. Chinese interest in the ethnic insurgencies in northeastern India, the still unresolved issue of the McMahon Line, the border established by the British imperial government, and competition for strategic access to the Indian Ocean have given rise to tense gamesmanship, political intrigue, and rivalry between the two Asian giants. FormerFar Eastern Economic Review correspondent Bertil Lintner has drawn from his extensive personal interviews with insurgency leaders and civilians in remote tribal areas in northeastern India, newly declassified intelligence reports, and his many years of firsthand experience in Asia to chronicle this ongoing struggle. His history of the “Great Game East” is the first significant account of a regional conflict which has led to open warfare on several occasions, most notably the Sino-India border war of 1962, and will have a major impact on global affairs in the decades ahead.
Download or read book Mapping the Great Game written by Riaz Dean and published by Penguin Random House India Private Limited. This book was released on 2019-12-13 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Great Game raged through the wilds of Central Asia during the nineteenth century, as Imperial Russia and Great Britain jostled for power. Tsarist armies gobbled up large tracts of Turkestan, advancing inexorably towards their ultimate prize, India. These rivals understood well that the first need of an army in a strange land is a reliable map, prompting desperate efforts to explore and chart out uncharted regions. Two distinct groups would rise to this challenge: a band of army officers, who would become the classic Great Game players; and an obscure group of natives employed by the Survey of India, known as the Pundits. While 'the game' played out, a self-educated cartographer named William Lambton began mapping the Great Arc, attempting to measure the actual shape of the Indian subcontinent. The Great Arc would then lauded as 'one of the most stupendous works in the whole history of science'. Meanwhile, the Pundits, travelling entirely on foot and with meagre resources, would be among the first to enter Tibet and reveal the mysteries of its forbidden capital, Lhasa. Featuring forgotten, enthralling episodes of derring-do combined with the most sincere efforts to map India's boundaries, Mapping the Great Game is the thrilling story of espionage and cartography which shrouded the Great Game and helped map a large part of Asian as we know it today.
Download or read book The Good Spy written by Kai Bird and published by Crown. This book was released on 2014-05-20 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Good Spy is Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird’s compelling portrait of the remarkable life and death of one of the most important operatives in CIA history – a man who, had he lived, might have helped heal the rift between Arabs and the West. On April 18, 1983, a bomb exploded outside the American Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people. The attack was a geopolitical turning point. It marked the beginning of Hezbollah as a political force, but even more important, it eliminated America’s most influential and effective intelligence officer in the Middle East – CIA operative Robert Ames. What set Ames apart from his peers was his extraordinary ability to form deep, meaningful connections with key Arab intelligence figures. Some operatives relied on threats and subterfuge, but Ames worked by building friendships and emphasizing shared values – never more notably than with Yasir Arafat’s charismatic intelligence chief and heir apparent Ali Hassan Salameh (aka “The Red Prince”). Ames’ deepening relationship with Salameh held the potential for a lasting peace. Within a few years, though, both men were killed by assassins, and America’s relations with the Arab world began heading down a path that culminated in 9/11, the War on Terror, and the current fog of mistrust. Bird, who as a child lived in the Beirut Embassy and knew Ames as a neighbor when he was twelve years old, spent years researching The Good Spy. Not only does the book draw on hours of interviews with Ames’ widow, and quotes from hundreds of Ames’ private letters, it’s woven from interviews with scores of current and former American, Israeli, and Palestinian intelligence officers as well as other players in the Middle East “Great Game.” What emerges is a masterpiece-level narrative of the making of a CIA officer, a uniquely insightful history of twentieth-century conflict in the Middle East, and an absorbing hour-by-hour account of the Beirut Embassy bombing. Even more impressive, Bird draws on his reporter’s skills to deliver a full dossier on the bombers and expose the shocking truth of where the attack’s mastermind resides today.
Download or read book Game of Spies written by Paddy Ashdown and published by William Collins. This book was released on 2017-05-22 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting three-way spy story set in occupied France. 'Game of Spies' tells the story of a lethal spy triangle between 1942 and 1944 in Bordeaux - and of France's greatest betrayal by aristocratic and right-wing Resistance leader Andre Grandclement. The story centres on three men: one British, one French and one German and the duel they fought out in an atmosphere of collaboration, betrayal and assassination, in which comrades sold fellow comrades, Allied agents and downed pilots to the Germans, as casually as they would a bottle of wine. It is a story of SOE, treachery, bed-hopping and executions in the city labelled 'la plus collaboratrice' in the whole of France.
Download or read book Sikunder Burnes written by Craig Murray and published by Birlinn Ltd. This book was released on 2016-10-20 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an astonishing true tale of espionage, journeys in disguise, secret messages, double agents, assassinations and sexual intrigue. Alexander Burnes was one of the most accomplished spies Britain ever produced and the main antagonist of the Great Game as Britain strove with Russia for control of Central Asia and the routes to the Raj. There are many lessons for the present day in this tale of the folly of invading Afghanistan and Anglo-Russian tensions in the Caucasus. Murray's meticulous study has unearthed original manuscripts from Montrose to Mumbai to put together a detailed study of how British secret agents operated in India. The story of Burnes' life has a cast of extraordinary figures, including Queen Victoria, King William IV, Earl Grey, Benjamin Disraeli, Lola Montez, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx. Among the unexpected discoveries are that Alexander and his brother James invented the myths about the Knights Templars and Scottish Freemasons which are the foundation of the Da Vinci Code; and that the most famous nineteenth-century scholar of Afghanistan was a double agent for Russia.
Download or read book Legends written by Robert Littell and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Brooklyn P.I. and ex-CIA agent looks for a missing man while suffering from an identity crisis in this thriller by the bestselling author of The Company. Martin Odum is a onetime CIA field agent turned private detective in Brooklyn, struggling his way through a labyrinth of memories and past identities—“legends” in Agency parlance. But who is Martin Odum? Is he a creation of the Legend Committee at the CIA’s Langley headquarters? Is he suffering from multiple personality disorder, brainwashing, or simply exhaustion? Widely considered one of the true grand masters of American spy fiction, Robert Littell shifts focus from the broad Cold War canvas of his international bestseller The Company to the life of a single CIA operative caught in a contradictory “wilderness of mirrors” in which remembering the past and forgetting it are both deadly options. From unforgettable opening to astonishing ending, Legends again proves Littell’s unparalleled prowess as a seductive storyteller. “Littell provides plenty of inside intelligence info in his superb new thriller, but he adds a decidedly comic spin. . . . As the bodies of his friends and clients begin to pile up, Odum searches for answers about not only the missing husband but also himself. Wonderful writing and a great sense of fun make this another winner.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “Now and then novels come along of such originality and power that they blow me away.... [Legends] makes it blazingly clear that Littell’s is one of the most talented, most original voices in American fiction today.” —The Washington Post
Download or read book The Dark Game written by Paul B. Janeczko and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2012-09-11 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A wealth of information in an engaging package." — Kirkus Reviews Ever since George Washington used them to help topple the British, spies and their networks have helped and hurt America at key moments in history. In this fascinating collection, Paul B. Janeczko probes examples from clothesline codes to surveillance satellites and cyber espionage. Colorful personalities, daring missions, the feats of the loyal, and the damage of traitors are interspersed with a look at the technological advances that continue to change the rules of gathering intelligence. Back matter includes source notes and a bibliography.
