Here are 100 books that Agents of Innocence fans have personally recommended if you like
Agents of Innocence.
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I have always been suspicious of government and corporate power, but it was only when my officemate in graduate school started teaching me about digital technologies that I really focused on the power relations involved in institutionalized surveillance. Eventually, I discovered the cypherpunk movement, which opposes surveillance. I wanted to know what they knew, so I started to read everything I could about surveillance. I found that few journalists and almost no academics attended to the powerful message of the cypherpunks, so I decided that I would write the first academic book about the movement, hoping that I could do my part to raise awareness about this crucial issue.
I read Bamford’s work because I wanted to understand the history of the NSA, and I was not disappointed. I loved learning, in excruciating detail, about the surveillance techniques and programs of the NSA before the internet.
This book shattered my impression that the NSA was a responsible agency that turned “bad” during the War on Terror. Bamford showed me that modern-day NSA mass surveillance, as revealed by Edward Snowden, actually represents the normal workings of the NSA rather than merely being an aberration. The most important lesson, though, was that the NSA has worked so hard to suppress the public use of encryption, the most important anti-surveillance technology we have.
In this remarkable tour de force of investigative reporting, James Bamford exposes the inner workings of America's largest, most secretive, and arguably most intrusive intelligence agency. The NSA has long eluded public scrutiny, but The Puzzle Palace penetrates its vast network of power and unmasks the people who control it, often with shocking disregard for the law. With detailed information on the NSA's secret role in the Korean Airlines disaster, Iran-Contra, the first Gulf War, and other major world events of the 80s and 90s, this is a brilliant account of the use and abuse of technological espionage.
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I played semi-professional baseball in France in 1986. If your baseball career has brought you to France, you should be rethinking your professional aspirations. No problem, I thought. I will write. I like to write. To my dismay, publishers were not fans of novels about French baseball players. The world of espionage I became acquainted with in Europe, however….
Ignatius’s most recent novel is in many respects a mashup of books no. 1 and 2 on this list: terrific storytelling and the latest spy recent tech: You’ll conclude that it’s just a matter of time until “bad actors” (spy speak for “bad guys”) can hack your brain. At the same time, you’ll enjoy the story.
A hyper-fast quantum computer is the digital equivalent of a nuclear bomb; whoever possesses one will be able to shred any encryption and break any code in existence. The question is: who will build one first, the U.S. or China?
In this gripping thriller, U.S. quantum research labs are compromised by a suspected Chinese informant, inciting a mole hunt of history-altering proportions. CIA officer Harris Chang leads the charge, pursuing his target from Singapore to Mexico and beyond. Do the leaks expose real secrets, or are they false trails meant to deceive the Chinese? The answer forces Chang to…
I’ve written several action thrillers about main characters who defy the rules. In my opinion, the key to these stories is giving your protagonist a good cause to break the rules for. Readers don’t want to get behind someone who wreaks havoc just to entertain himself. However, readers can identify with someone who’s pursuing an admirable goal and will stop at nothing to achieve it. These stories shouldn’t motivate anyone to break the law in real life. They serve as a metaphor for going against convention to overcome obstacles. Hopefully, my books, and those of other authors, encourage people to take on challenges in ways they haven’t yet considered.
In The Gray Man, a highly skilled, former CIA operative tries to rescue a colleague and his family while various teams of elite assassins try to stop him however they can.
The Gray Man – AKA Court Gentry or Sierra Six – doesn’t follow anybody’s orders, even those of the most powerful institutions on the planet. Though rebellious, he has morals and only applies his skillset for good.
My favorite part of this book were the action scenes. I liked how big they were, but also the variety of arenas, weapons, and opponents. Also, the Gray Man takes a serious beating through the chapters. Because he’s hurt, but still kicking, the fights progressively get more challenging for him, and more dramatic.
THE FIRST GRAY MAN NOVEL FROM #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR MARK GREANEY - now a Netflix original film starring Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans
'Hard, fast, and unflinching-exactly what a thriller should be.' Lee Child
To those who lurk in the shadows, he's known as the Gray Man. He is a legend in the covert realm, moving silently from job to job, accomplishing the impossible and then fading away. And he always hits his target.
But there are forces more lethal than Gentry in the world. Forces like money. And power. And there are men who hold these…
In 1913, a 15-year-old pregnant girl was found dead of apparent suicide. Dr. James Wilson, a new graduate and the first doctor ever to start a practice in this rural town, feels guilty over her death because of his delayed intervention.
I played semi-professional baseball in France in 1986. If your baseball career has brought you to France, you should be rethinking your professional aspirations. No problem, I thought. I will write. I like to write. To my dismay, publishers were not fans of novels about French baseball players. The world of espionage I became acquainted with in Europe, however….
Exploding wine bottles, guns constructed out of pipes, bullets made of teeth, aspirin explosives: If these sound like props from a B spy movie, it's because, again, truth > fiction. In the early-1970s, the Central Intelligence Agency spent a great deal of effort developing myriad weapons for sabotage. The results were this seventy-two-page illustrated manual, published in 1977 and distributed to American operatives likely to find themselves in situations requiring such improvisation. The manual is also invaluable for writers.
For the record, I’m not a spy. I’m a Lithuanian-American writer who had a dickens of a time validating WWII-era family papers about the Soviet occupation of Lithuania. I don’t speak Lithuanian, so I relied on English-language sources where Lithuania was sometimes little more than a footnote. As I learned more about the Soviet occupation and life after independence, I became convinced that it’s almost impossible to talk about Lithuania without considering the geopolitical tension that comes with having Russia as a neighbor. This grew into a love of spycraft, political strategy, history, international tensions, Lithuania, Eastern Europe, Russia… and pierogis.
Meet Milow Weaver. Anything by Steinhauer appeals to me, but Milow is one of my favorite spies.
He’s a person with flaws who is trying to escape the dark world of espionage for the sake of his family and his future. His nemesis, a Chinese agent, remains a mysterious, although fearsome, force.
The use of spy craft is exquisite and the novel is clever. I think you’ll like it.
Superb new CIA thriller featuring black ops expert Milo Weaver and acclaimed by Lee Child as 'first class - the kind of thing John le Carre might have written'.
In today's CIA, there are hotspots everywhere. And wherever there's trouble, there's a Tourist: the men and women who do the CIA's dirty work. They're the Company's best - and until he burnt out, Milo Weaver was the best of them all.
Milo has spent the last four years behind a desk, tracking the elusive killer known as 'The Tiger'. When the Tiger unexpectedly gives himself up, it's because…
For the record, I’m not a spy. I’m a Lithuanian-American writer who had a dickens of a time validating WWII-era family papers about the Soviet occupation of Lithuania. I don’t speak Lithuanian, so I relied on English-language sources where Lithuania was sometimes little more than a footnote. As I learned more about the Soviet occupation and life after independence, I became convinced that it’s almost impossible to talk about Lithuania without considering the geopolitical tension that comes with having Russia as a neighbor. This grew into a love of spycraft, political strategy, history, international tensions, Lithuania, Eastern Europe, Russia… and pierogis.
What do you get when you combine a disgruntled employee, alligators, organizational politics, and espionage? A compelling look into the culture of the CIA.
Strong characters lead this hunt for a mole within the CIA. Two of the most interesting are women who are radically different from each other. One is rooted organizational politics. The other is determined to save the organization by finding a mole and righting a wrong.
It’s both entertaining and insightful. McCloskey takes a strategic and intellectual approach to the story, which is, for me, refreshing.
A Russian arrives in Singapore with a secret to sell. When the Russian is killed and Sam Joseph, the CIA officer dispatched for the meet, goes missing, operational chief Artemis Procter is made a scapegoat for the disaster and run out of the service. Months later, Sam appears at Procter's doorstep with an explosive secret: there is a Russian mole burrowed deep within the highest ranks of the CIA.
As Procter and Sam investigate, they arrive at a shortlist of suspects made up of both Procter's closest friends and fiercest enemies. The hunt requires Procter to dredge up her…
Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977, and Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977. Both began a historic journey with unique 'time capsules' on board intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record 12-inch gold-plated disk…
For the record, I’m not a spy. I’m a Lithuanian-American writer who had a dickens of a time validating WWII-era family papers about the Soviet occupation of Lithuania. I don’t speak Lithuanian, so I relied on English-language sources where Lithuania was sometimes little more than a footnote. As I learned more about the Soviet occupation and life after independence, I became convinced that it’s almost impossible to talk about Lithuania without considering the geopolitical tension that comes with having Russia as a neighbor. This grew into a love of spycraft, political strategy, history, international tensions, Lithuania, Eastern Europe, Russia… and pierogis.
Geeks are my kind of people. Add exotic locations, a sexy Chinese operative, and industrial espionage for the simmering foundation of The Expat.
Michael Wang is an ambitious engineer enticed to Beijing by the promise of success. Once there, he gradually learns he’s being manipulated, and that’s just the start of it. He becomes a pawn in a swirling game of espionage-chess.
The surprise ending made it one of my favorite and most memorable spy reads.
A fresh and vivid new voice brings a contemporary edge to the classic espionage novel.
At twenty-six, Princeton grad Michael Wang is trapped. Stifled under the bamboo ceiling at General Motors, he’s working quietly on a breakthrough in self-driving car technology that he hopes will catapult him out of obscurity. Disaffected and largely friendless in San Francisco, he’s dogged by resentment towards the Ivy Leaguers who never accepted him and his colleagues at GM who see him as passive and faceless. …
For the record, I’m not a spy. I’m a Lithuanian-American writer who had a dickens of a time validating WWII-era family papers about the Soviet occupation of Lithuania. I don’t speak Lithuanian, so I relied on English-language sources where Lithuania was sometimes little more than a footnote. As I learned more about the Soviet occupation and life after independence, I became convinced that it’s almost impossible to talk about Lithuania without considering the geopolitical tension that comes with having Russia as a neighbor. This grew into a love of spycraft, political strategy, history, international tensions, Lithuania, Eastern Europe, Russia… and pierogis.
I’ve always been interested in the impact of technology on espionage - not from a gadgetry perspective, but from a security and informational context.
In The Director, a young punk exposes a flaw in a CIA computer network and offers a list of agents to prove it. This leads to an intense search for a mole within the agency. Disinformation is a compelling plot driver and feels relevant to today’s world of AI-driven manipulation.
Graham Weber has been the director of the CIA for less than a week when a Swiss kid in a dirty T-shirt walks into the American consulate in Hamburg and says the agency has been hacked, and he has a list of agents' names to prove it. This is the moment a CIA director most dreads. Like the new world of cyber-espionage from which it's drawn, The Director is a maze of double dealing, about a world where everything is written in zeroes and ones-and nothing can be trusted.
I am a retired university professor. My research, in which I am still actively engaged, deals with decision-making under deep uncertainty: how to make a decision, or design a project, or plan an operation when major relevant factors are unknown or highly uncertain. I developed a decision theory called info-gap theory that grapples with this challenge, and is applied around the world in many fields, including engineering design, economics, medicine, national security, biological conservation, and more.
This is an interesting collection of essays on the history of the CIA.
A spy agency thrives on deceit and uncertainty, making plans and taking actions when the adversary also thrives on those same elements.
Arranged in chronological order, the essays cover nearly 20 different incidents, describing the challenges, uncertainties, goals, and decisions made by both high-level political decision-makers and practitioners in the field.
Topics covered include early stages in the development of the CIA (founded in 1947), including covert action against the Soviet Union in the 1950s, the Bay of Pigs (1961), the Iran-Contra affair (mid-1980s), up to more recent events with bin Laden, fake news, and more.
A Question of Standing deals with recognizable events that have shaped the history of the first 75 years of the CIA. Unsparing in its accounts of dirty tricks and their consequences, it values the agency's intelligence and analysis work to offer balanced judgements that avoid both celebration and condemnation of the CIA.
The mission of the CIA, derived from U-1 in World War I more than from World War II's OSS, has always been intelligence. Seventy-five years ago, in the year of its creation, the National Security Act gave the agency, uniquely in world history up to that point, a…
Deputy Jenna Hart has only been working in her sleepy hometown of Pearl Springs for seven months when city officials begin to be targeted by a killer. Twenty years ago, the construction of a dam caused people to lose their land to eminent domain. That wound has not healed with…
I am an author and veteran journalist who reported for The Washington Post for more than two decades, and I write frequently about military history and intelligence. My father worked for the CIA, and I was born in Berlin when he was stationed there as a case officer. Later I was based in Germany as a foreign correspondent when the Berlin Wall came down. So it’s not too surprising that I am interested in Cold War espionage and history. As a reporter, author, and reader, I’ve always been attracted to stories off the beaten track, the ones that most people know little or nothing about.
Sandy Grimes and Jeanne Verterfeuille were part of the CIA team that identified Aldrich Ames, perhaps the most damaging spy in the agency’s history. Not only is the book a riveting account of the detective work that went into Ames’ arrest, it provides a wealth of information about the valuable agents and operations that he betrayed, and the incalculable damage he caused, including the loss of GRU General Dmitriy Polyakov, the highest-ranking spy run by the U.S. during the Cold War.
While there have been other books about Aldrich Ames, Circle of Treason is the first account written by CIA agents who were key members of the CIA team that conducted the intense "Ames Mole Hunt." Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille were two of the five principals of the CIA team tasked with hunting one of their own and were directly responsible for identifying Ames as the mole, leading to his arrest and conviction.
One of the most destructive traitors in American history, CIA officer Aldrich Ames provided information to the Soviet Union that contributed to the deaths of at least…
