spy books

George Crile’s book Charlie Wilson’s War is the most in-depth account of the CIA’s support to the Afghan mujahideen, based...

Aimen Dean, born Ali Al-Duranni, was MI6’s spy inside Al Qaeda from 1998 to 2006. In this episode I do...

The FBI got back to me recently with a response to my request on The Spook Who Sat by the Door, including a few pages from Sam Greenlee's FBI file, which they'd previously claimed they could not find. Amusingly, the version of this file released to my by the National Archives contains several extra pages, while the FBI version of the exact same documents is more heavily redacted.

The CIA’s Office of Public Affairs (OPA) was established in the late 1970s and contains their entertainment liaison office. This week I go through an 8-page summary of the CIA’s Entertainment Liaison and Media Outreach activities covering 2014-16. This includes their relationships with journalists, their involvement in entertainment such as the Benghazi movie 13 Hours, and their relationship with deep state lawyer and Hollywood consultant Rich Klein.

The CIA's Office of Public Affairs is - ironically - very tight-lipped about what they actually do, so I was pleased that they recently responded to a 3 year old FOIA request and provided me with a document summarising their activities from 2014 to 2016. This includes numerous meetings with journalists, facilitating tours of CIA headquarters for Hollywood stars and helping to rewrite the Benghazi movie 13 Hours and one of the Ghost Recon video games.

One of the growing markets in spy fiction is pop culture aimed at teenagers or ‘young adults’. The CHERUB series by Robert Muchamore depicts a junior wing of MI6, with the first novel in the series – The Recruit – depicting the recruitment, training and first mission of our protagonist, James Adams. This week I […](Read more...)

In 1974 former CIA officer Victor Marchetti and former State Department official John Marks published their book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. This week I examine a file in the JFK archives that details what the CIA censored from the book, and why. I look at several categories of CIA operations that were […](Read more...)

Aside from Ian Fleming, there is no more influential spy author than Tom Clancy. Clancy’s books (and the films and computer games based on them) benefited from his close contact with the US government. This week we shed light on his relationships with the CIA and the NSA, and ask whether the CIA’s public affairs […](Read more...)

Just as with James Bond and Ian Fleming, the CIA’s CREST database is littered with reference to Tom Clancy.  In preparation for this weekend’s podcast I put together a collection of over 100 pages of internal Agency memos and open source records that record Clancy’s relationship with the CIA for several years after the publication […](Read more...)

Tom Clancy was a good friend of US intelligence.  After the publication of his enormously successful Hunt for Red October in 1984, he was repeatedly invited to speak at the CIA, NSA and FBI.  The CIA even paid him a $500 honourarium for his ‘performance’ for speaking at Langley in 1986 – but Clancy gave […](Read more...)