This topical volume offers a comprehensive review of secret intelligence organizations and activities.

Intelligence has been in the news consistently since 9/11 and the Iraqi WMD errors. Leading experts in the field approach the three major missions of intelligence: collection-and-analysis; covert action; and counterintelligence. Within each of these missions, the dynamically written essays dissect the so-called intelligence cycle to reveal the challenges of gathering and assessing information from around the world. Covert action, the most controversial intelligence activity, is...

Many experts on security intelligence distinguish mysteries from secrets . Mysteries (e.g. can Pakistan survive the threat it faces from the presence of insurgents in its western provinces?) are worldly phenomena that governments may wish to understand, but which are difficult to fathom given the foibles of human beings, not least their inability accurately to foretell the future. Secrets (e.g. the number of nuclear submarines in the Chinese navy), however, are more susceptible to understanding. Indeed, with the right spy in place, with surveillance satellites in their proper orbit, or...