Review my bookshelf: Espionage

[jeregenest]

brand_of_amber has asked for books about spying. So I shall review my bookshelf, figuring any book I've kept I've kept for a reason. I'll be doing this slowly, so Brand if you need immediate book recommendations let me know (or want books on specific subjects).

The U.S. Intelligence Community by Jeffrey T. Richelson has been the best one-volume account of the structure and operation of the far-flung U.S. intelligence bureaucracy. The fifth edition is the current version. I have several versions on my shelf, which helps with historical stuff.

Whether you need information on intelligence terms, acronym or organization structure whether big picture or some obscure office somewhere in the bowels of U.S. intelligence, Richelson’s book more often than not — more often than Google — provides the explanation and the needed background, typically with a footnote to an official source. This is the one book anyone who wants to keep track on this issue needs. I could run games just based on this beauty.

Frederick Hitz, The Great Game: Myth & Reality of Espionage (Vintage, 2005)
Frederick P. Hitz 1990 to 1998 as the first presidentially appointed statutory inspector general for the CIA, which could, probably, . qualify him for writing a book on spying but probably not on fiction. Hitz's strategy in this book is clear: "great works of spy fiction are compared to actual espionage operations." He covers recruitment, tradecraft, assassination, sex, even life after spying, as practiced in the real espionage cases of Penkovsky, Popov, Ames, Hannsen, etc., comparing them to the literary examples in the works of Kipling, le Carré, Greene, Furst, etc. Hitz flogs the rather uninteresting conclusion that "no fictional account adequately captures the remarkable variety of twists and turns that a genuine human spy goes through" and completely misses the point of fiction. Hitz misses the point that spying and the agencies nations for to conduct it are "the only real measure of a nation's political health, the only real expression of its subconsciousness," as Bill Haydon claims in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Spy fiction taps into that subconsciousness and probes the issues repressed into the dark heart of the state and society.