My Twenty Years as a CIA Officer

My Twenty Years as a CIA Officer
Author: Steven Ruth
Publisher: Createspace Independent Pub
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2011
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781456571702

This book details the author's experiences, both good and bad, while working as a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Officer for over twenty years. The book begins with how the author was hired by the CIA to include the grueling polygraph test. Details on the author's first day at the CIA transports the reader's mind into what it must be like to walk through the halls of the world's premier intelligence agency and one of the most secretive buildings in the world. Insights about living in a foreign country abound throughout the book, as are reflections on what it's like living and working "under cover" and having to lie to friends and family about the true nature of his work. The inner workings of the CIA are detailed from an insider point of view and no punches are pulled in the chapters "Victims of Power" "Leadership (or lack of it)" and "Diversity (or lack of it)". The chapter "Gulf War I – 1991" (Persian Gulf War) finds the author less than a year and a half after being hired immersed in war efforts and becoming a victim of an exploding landmine. In 2003 the author again finds himself in the Middle East in the midst of Gulf War II. Chapter "9/11" details what occurred at the CIA on September 11, 2001 and how the CIA reacted to these terrible events. Poignant stories of the death of friends and colleagues in the chapter "Death Happens" provides an understanding to the reader that being a CIA Officer is oftentimes dangerous and can be deadly. The chapter "Special Project", which was heavily redacted by the CIA, provides the reader an insight into covert operations.Humorous aspects of living overseas, interacting with people of different cultures and eating exotic foods are interspersed throughout the book's twenty-eight chapters. Most other books written by former CIA Officers detail one or two specific events; this book is different in that the author provides insight into a whole career, from hiring to retirement, from the mundane to the exciting, to give the reader the full experience of what it's like to be a CIA Officer.

Spy the Lie

Spy the Lie
Author: Philip Houston
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2013-07-16
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1250029627

Three former CIA officers--the world's foremost authorities on recognizing deceptive behavior--share their techniques for spotting a lie with thrilling anecdotes from the authors' careers in counterintelligence.

Breaking Cover

Breaking Cover
Author: Michele Rigby Assad
Publisher: NavPress
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2018-02-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1496419634

A real-life, can’t-put-down spy memoir. The CIA is looking for walking contradictions. Recruiters seek out potential agents who can keep a secret yet pull classified information out of others; who love their country but are willing to leave it behind for dangerous places; who live double lives, but can be trusted with some of the nation’s most highly sensitive tasks. Michele Rigby Assad was one of those people. As a CIA agent and a counterterrorism expert, Michele soon found that working undercover was an all-encompassing job. The threats were real; the assignments perilous. Michele spent over a decade in the agency—a woman leading some of the most highly skilled operatives on the planet, secretly serving in some of the most treacherous areas of the Middle East, and at risk as a target for ISIS. But deep inside, Michele wondered: Could she really do this job? Had she misunderstood what she thought was God’s calling on her life? Did she have what it would take to survive? The answer came when Michele faced her ultimate mission, one with others’ lives on the line—and it turned out to have been the plan for her all along. In Breaking Cover, Michele has at last been cleared to drop cover and tell her story: one of life-or-death stakes; of defeating incredible odds; and most of all, of discovering a faith greater than all her fears.

Blowing My Cover

Blowing My Cover
Author: Lindsay Moran
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2005-11-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1101117796

Call me naïve, but when I was a girl-watching James Bond and devouring Harriet the Spy-all I wanted was to grow up to be a spy. Unlike most kids, I didn't lose my secret-agent aspirations. So as a bright-eyed, idealistic college grad, I sent my resume to the CIA. Getting in was a story in itself. I peed in more cups than you could imagine, and was nearly condemned as a sexual deviant by the staff psychologist. My roommates were getting freaked out by government investigators lurking around, asking questions about my past. Finally, the CIA was training me to crash cars into barriers at 60 mph. Jump out of airplanes with cargo attached to my body. Survive interrogation, travel in alias, lose a tail. One thing they didn't teach us was how to date a guy while lying to him about what you do for a living. That I had to figure out for myself. Then I was posted overseas. And that's when the real fun began.

Company Man

Company Man
Author: John Rizzo
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2014-01-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1451673930

At the intersection of politics, law and national security--from "protect us at all costs" to "what the hell have you guys been up to, anyway?"--A lawyer's life in the CIA. Under seven presidents and 11 different CIA directors, Rizzo rose to become the CIA's most powerful career attorney. Given the agency's dangerous and secret mission, spotting and deterring possible abuses of law, offering guidance and protecting personnel from legal jeopardy was, and remains, no easy task. The author accumulated more than 30 years of war stories, and he tells most of them.

Spy Secrets that Can Save Your Life

Spy Secrets that Can Save Your Life
Author: Jason Hanson
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2015
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0399175148

"When Jason Hanson joined the CIA in 2003, he never imagined that the same tactics he used as a CIA officer for counter intelligence, surveillance, and protecting agency personnel would prove to be essential in every day civilian life. In addition to escaping handcuffs, picking locks, and spotting when someone is telling a lie, he can improvise a self-defense weapon, pack a perfect emergency kit, and disappear off the grid if necessary. He has also honed his "positive awareness" - a heightened sense of his surroundings that allows him to spot suspicious and potentially dangerous behavior - on the street, in a taxi, at the airport, when dining out, or in any other situation."--Provided by publisher.

Life Undercover

Life Undercover
Author: Amaryllis Fox
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0525654984

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Fast and thrilling . . . Life Undercover reads as if a John le Carré character landed in Eat Pray Love." —The New York Times Amaryllis Fox's riveting memoir tells the story of her ten years in the most elite clandestine ops unit of the CIA, hunting the world's most dangerous terrorists in sixteen countries while marrying and giving birth to a daughter Amaryllis Fox was in her last year as an undergraduate at Oxford studying theology and international law when her writing mentor Daniel Pearl was captured and beheaded. Galvanized by this brutality, Fox applied to a master's program in conflict and terrorism at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, where she created an algorithm that predicted, with uncanny certainty, the likelihood of a terrorist cell arising in any village around the world. At twenty-one, she was recruited by the CIA. Her first assignment was reading and analyzing hundreds of classified cables a day from foreign governments and synthesizing them into daily briefs for the president. Her next assignment was at the Iraq desk in the Counterterrorism center. At twenty-two, she was fast-tracked into advanced operations training, sent from Langley to "the Farm," where she lived for six months in a simulated world learning how to use a Glock, how to get out of flexicuffs while locked in the trunk of a car, how to withstand torture, and the best ways to commit suicide in case of captivity. At the end of this training she was deployed as a spy under non-official cover--the most difficult and coveted job in the field as an art dealer specializing in tribal and indigenous art and sent to infiltrate terrorist networks in remote areas of the Middle East and Asia. Life Undercover is exhilarating, intimate, fiercely intelligent--an impossible to put down record of an extraordinary life, and of Amaryllis Fox's astonishing courage and passion.

The Unexpected Spy

The Unexpected Spy
Author: Tracy Walder
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2020-02-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1250230993

A highly entertaining account of a young woman who went straight from her college sorority to the CIA, where she hunted terrorists and WMDs "Reads like the show bible for Homeland only her story is real." —Alison Stewart, WNYC "A thrilling tale...Walder’s fast-paced and intense narrative opens a window into life in two of America’s major intelligence agencies" —Publishers Weekly (starred review) When Tracy Walder enrolled at the University of Southern California, she never thought that one day she would offer her pink beanbag chair in the Delta Gamma house to a CIA recruiter, or that she’d fly to the Middle East under an alias identity. The Unexpected Spy is the riveting story of Walder's tenure in the CIA and, later, the FBI. In high-security, steel-walled rooms in Virginia, Walder watched al-Qaeda members with drones as President Bush looked over her shoulder and CIA Director George Tenet brought her donuts. She tracked chemical terrorists and searched the world for Weapons of Mass Destruction. She created a chemical terror chart that someone in the White House altered to convey information she did not have or believe, leading to the Iraq invasion. Driven to stop terrorism, Walder debriefed terrorists—men who swore they’d never speak to a woman—until they gave her leads. She followed trails through North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, shutting down multiple chemical attacks. Then Walder moved to the FBI, where she worked in counterintelligence. In a single year, she helped take down one of the most notorious foreign spies ever caught on American soil. Catching the bad guys wasn’t a problem in the FBI, but rampant sexism was. Walder left the FBI to teach young women, encouraging them to find a place in the FBI, CIA, State Department or the Senate—and thus change the world.

More Stories from Langley

More Stories from Langley
Author: Edward Mickolus
Publisher: Potomac Books
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2020-09-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1640123695

Who knew the CIA needed librarians? More Stories from Langley reveals the lesser-known operations of one of the most mysterious government agencies in the United States. Edward Mickolus is back with more stories to answer the question, “What does a career in the CIA look like?” Advice and anecdotes from both current and former CIA officers provide a look at the side of intelligence operations that is often left out of the movies. What was it like working for the CIA during 9/11? Do only spies get to travel? More Stories from Langley has physicists getting recruited to “the agency” during the Cold War, foreign-language majors getting lucky chances, and quests to “learn by living” turning into sweaty-palmed calls to the U.S. embassy after being detained by Russian intelligence officers. The world only needs so many suave super spies. More Stories from Langley shows how important academics, retired soldiers, and bilingual nannies can be in preserving the security of our nation.

Deadly Deceits

Deadly Deceits
Author: Ralph W. McGehee
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2015-03-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1497689392

A veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency unmasks its culture of lethal lies in this devastating exposé, now with a new foreword by David MacMichael. Ralph W. McGehee was a patriot, dedicated to the American way of life and the international fight against Communism. Following his graduation with honors from Notre Dame, McGehee was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1952 and quickly became an able and enthusiastic cold warrior. Stationed in Southeast Asia in the mid-1960s, he worked to stem the Communist tide that was sweeping through the region, first in Thailand and later in Vietnam. But despite his notable successes in reversing enemy influence among the local peasants and villagers, McGehee found himself increasingly alienated from a company culture built on deceit and wholesale manipulation of the truth. While his country was being pulled deeper and deeper into the Vietnam quagmire, McGehee awoke to a chilling reality: The CIA was not a gatherer of actual intelligence to be employed in a legitimate war against dangerous enemies, but a tool of the president’s foreign-policy staff designed solely to stifle the truth and fabricate “facts” that supported the agency’s often immoral agenda. With courage and candor, Ralph McGehee illuminates the CIA’s dark catalog of misdeeds in his stunning, no-holds-barred memoir of a life in the service of deception. Startling, eye-opening, and infuriating, Deadly Deceits is an honest and unflinching insider’s look at a toxic government agency that the author cogently argues has no useful purpose and no moral right to exist.