{ "item_title" : "Shadow Wars", "item_author" : [" G. a. Thompson "], "item_description" : "September 1776. Nathan Hale crosses behind British lines to gather intelligence. Within ten days, he is captured and hanged.George Washington needs more than another brave volunteer. He needs a way to discover what the enemy is planning-and keep his spies alive.Shadow Wars: The Forging of American Intelligence follows the people who built America's secret capabilities, from Washington's Culper Ring to the CIA, the U-2, and the first reconnaissance satellites.Across nearly two centuries, a troubling pattern emerges. War forces Americans to recruit spies, break codes, and learn hard lessons. Peace scatters experienced people and leaves valuable knowledge unused. Some organizations and records survive. Too often, the judgment needed to use them does not.Along the way, discover: Washington's secret network, whose agents risked their lives while remaining unknown to generations of Americans.Allan Pinkerton's inflated estimates, which helped convince General McClellan that he faced an overwhelming Confederate army.George Sharpe's intelligence work, which helped Union commanders understand what Lee still had in reserve at Gettysburg.The Black Chamber and the Purple codebreakers, whose painstaking work revealed secrets hidden in foreign communications.Wild Bill Donovan's OSS and the Manhattan Project spies, whose operations helped shape the intelligence struggles of the Cold War.The U-2 and early spy satellites, which exposed the distance between Soviet military strength and Washington's worst fears.Written for curious readers, Shadow Wars brings together American espionage, military history, and the human decisions behind intelligence successes and failures. It traces how the United States built a permanent intelligence establishment-and why better information never guaranteed better judgment.Before America could watch its enemies from orbit, it had to learn how to keep a spy alive.Back-cover blurbA young spy on the gallows. A secret message between enemy lines. A camera seventy thousand feet above Soviet territory.America's intelligence capabilities grew through daring experiments, bitter rivalries, and costly mistakes.From Nathan Hale and Washington's Culper Ring to Civil War spy networks, World War II codebreakers, and the founding of the CIA, Shadow Wars follows the people who helped the United States discover its enemies' secrets-and the leaders who decided what those secrets meant.War after war, Americans built capabilities they struggled to preserve when peace returned. By the early Cold War, intelligence had become a permanent instrument of national power. Yet old problems endured: misleading sources, political pressure, bureaucratic conflict, and the temptation to mistake information for understanding.Spanning 1776-1961, this accessible history explores how America learned to spy, what it repeatedly forgot, and what happened when secret power became too important to dismantle.The secrets changed. The challenge of using them wisely remained.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers2.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/826/833/9798268336849_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "19.99", "online_price" : "19.99", "our_price" : "19.99", "club_price" : "19.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

Overview

Customers Also Bought

Details