San Antonio College Library

"Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones here offers a history of American secret intelligence from the founding of the nation through the present day. Jeffreys-Jones chronicles the expansion of American secret intelligence from the 1790s, when George Washington set aside a discretionary fund for covert operations, to the beginning of the twenty-first century, when United States intelligence expenditure exceeds Russia's total defense budget."--Jacket.

"This highly accessible book provides new material and a fresh perspective on American National Intelligence practice, focusing on the first fifty years of the twentieth century, when the United States took on the responsibilities of a global superpower during the first years of the Cold War. Late to the art of intelligence, the United States during World War II created a new model of combining intelligence collection and analytic functions into a...

"In Selling the CIA, David McCarthy contends that events that unfolded during the 1970s badly damaged the CIA's mystique, which had been assiduously cultivated since the Agency's inception in 1947. In response to the unprecedented crisis, CIA officials developed a far-reaching public relations strategy. McCarthy's is the first systematic history of CIA public relations between 1974 and 2014, demonstrating that the culture of secrecy at the CIA and...

Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security. For sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its...

"Every day, a member of the CIA presents to the president a report detailing the most sensitive activities and analysis of world events. These can range from the behavior of America's allies to the maneuvering of its adversaries, from imminent dangers to long-term strategic opportunities, and are often based on the words of highly placed sources or the interceptions of astonishingly nimble technologies. This report--for the president's eyes only--forms...

Previous histories of the Civil War have explained victory or defeat in terms of the skill of commanders, the fighting qualities of the troops, and resources in men and materiel. Intelligence has been largely ignored, not because it wasn't critically important -- Lincoln called it the most difficult problem faced by the Union -- but because so little has been known about it. At the end of the war most of the intelligence records disappeared, and they...

"In this revelatory account of the CIA's secret fifty-years effort to develop new forms of torture, historian Alfred W. McCoy uncovers the deep, disturbing roots of recent scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Far from aberrations, as the White House has claimed. A Question of Torture shows that these abuses are the product of a long-standing covert program of interrogation."--Jacket.

"Despite all that has already been written on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Joseph Persico has uncovered a hitherto overlooked dimension of FDR's wartime leadership: his involvement in intelligence and espionage operations." "Roosevelt's Secret War also describes how much FDR had been told - before the Holocaust - about the coming fate of Europe's Jews. And Persico also provides a definitive answer to the perennial question: Did FDR know in advance about...

"From the New York Times bestselling author of Rise of the Rocket Girls comes the never-before-told story of a small cadre of influential female spies in the precarious early days of the CIA--women who helped create the template for cutting-edge espionage (and blazed new paths for equality in the workplace) in the treacherous post-WWII era."-- In the wake of World War II, four agents were critical in helping build a new organization that we now know...