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    Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs, from Communism to Al-Qaeda
    Unavailable
    Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs, from Communism to Al-Qaeda
    Unavailable
    Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs, from Communism to Al-Qaeda
    Ebook983 pages12 hours

    Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs, from Communism to Al-Qaeda

    By Robert Wallace, H. Keith Melton, Henry R. Schlesinger and George J. Tenet

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    An unprecedented history of the CIA's secret and amazing gadgetry behind the art of espionage

    In this look at the CIA’s most secretive operations and the devices that made them possible, Spycraft tells gripping life-and-death stories about a group of spytechs—much of it never previously revealed and with images never before seen by the public.
     
    The CIA’s Office of Technical Service is the ultrasecret department that grappled with challenges such as:
     
    What does it take to build a quiet helicopter?
    How does one embed a listening device in a cat?
    What is an invisible photo used for?
     
    These amazingly inventive devices were created and employed against a backdrop of geopolitical tensions—including the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and continuing terrorist threats. Written by Robert Wallace, the former director of the Office of Technical Service, and internationally renowned intelligence historian Keith Melton, Spycraft is both a fantastic encyclopedia of gadgetry and a revealing primer on the fundamentals of high-tech espionage.
     
    “The first comprehensive look at the technical achievements of American espionage from the 1940s to the present.”—Wired
     
    “Reveals more concrete information about CIA tradecraft than any book.”—The Washington Times
     
    “This is a story I thought could never be told.”—JAMES M. OLSON, former chief of CIA counterintelligence
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Group
    Release dateMay 29, 2008
    ISBN9781440635304
    Author

    Robert Wallace

    Robert Wallace retired from the CIA in 2003 with thirty-two years of service as an operations officer and senior executive, including an assignment as director of the Office of Technical Services. Wallace is coauthor, with H. Keith Melton, of Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs from Communism to Al-Qaeda.

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    Reviews for Spycraft

    3.5/5

    4 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A very interesting book. It's written from the perspective of a former CIA chief, so the author is cheerily enthusiastic about the CIA's successes with technology, but he also talks a lot about their failures. If you've ever wondered if there's any truth to the gadgets seen in movies, this book explains it all, from installing tiny microphones to breaking into the KGB's lead-encased sewer pipe wires in downtown Moscow.
    • 3/5
      There was definitely a lot of interesting information in this book, but it suffers from strange organization, and from incomplete information.The technological achievements of the CIA and the KGB are quite impressive, and it was fascinating reading about some of the things they created and how they used them. However, the book is very anecdotal, and a lot of the anecdotes peter out at the end... whether that's because the climactic ending is classified, or because Wallace sets them up to be more interesting than they really are is hard to say.The book suffers from what appear to be several overlapping organizational structures. Sometimes it is chronological, sometimes it is thematic, and sometimes it feels like a bunch of old guys sitting around swapping whatever war stories come to mind. The last few chapters are an overview of spy techniques and how spies use technology, which is really weird - those chapters would have been much more useful at the beginning of the book, but because they were at the end, they re-explain information that has already been covered earlier in the book.What bothered me the most about the book, though, was the information that was not in it. Perhaps some of this is just my personal agenda, but I would have liked more information about the overall impact of the technology developed and the information intercepted with that technology - in other words, was all of this time and money worth the bother? The book also dropped some tantalizing details (for instance, there is a section that talks about small bombs they developed that could, for instance, go off if suddenly plunged into darkness, so that if they were attached to a train, they would blow the train up when it entered a tunnel), but then didn't talk about how much the technology was actually used (how many trains did we blow up? why?). The book also came across as rather defensive at times - for instance, there are several pages about what MKULTRA was not, but very little information about what it actually was, and whether or not the psychological experiments damaged anyone.All in all, the book is interesting, but definitely feels like the "official line" and I found the lack of big picture to be unsatisfying.
    • 3/5
      History of the more technical aspects of the CIA. Very interesting stories, although a bit repetitive at times.
    • 4/5
      In 500 non-encrypted pages, the reader learns the basic elements of espionage and the real history of the first 50 years of the CIA's Office of Technical Services. The tools of espionage were always at the cutting edge of technology. Sometimes, commercially-produced electronics were the basis for a CIA device, but more often, the demands of our spies drove the developments that would later give us pagers and miniature digital cameras. James Bond's toys were more realistic than most people ever realized. Behind them was a dedicated group of clever, driven technologists who supplied agents with better means of surveillance and covert communications. More than just a guide to gadgets, this book tells a meaningful story about the importance of intelligence to national security, and the unfortunate events that occur when the intelligence network is compromised.