30 MAR 2024 · The geography speaks for itself. The bad guys are just kilometers away, across the river. We are the only international (or locals) with a brick and mortar office downtown, for them to go for help. No assistance from govt unless elderly, and the assistance they get is shit. Office safe from “normal” shelling (tank fire, most mortars). Glide bombs and attack drones are new since Ukrainians landed on other side and have beachhead. Quietly, that is a total massacre over there — poorly kept secret here. can’t do much about the big stuff … if we get hit with a glide bomb we’re fucked. I like our chances. Mon wed Friday the FREE STORE AT THE FRONT is open at our office. Basic foods medicines hygiene and winter clothes. Mondays we run bread into insanely dangerous places by the Antonivky bridge, do other stuff like that. Off the radar. For city admin. We are an important “off the books asset” for them.

20 MAR 2024 · The first and only book to be written by a member of America's most secret military unit! Adam Gamal (pseudonym), one of the only Muslim Arab Americans to serve inside "The Unit" - as the Department of Defense has asked us to refer to it - has written one of the most explosive and unlikely stories of immigration, service and sacrifice -- THE UNIT: My Life Fighting Terrorists as One of America's Most Secret Military Operatives, written with Kelly Kennedy (St. Martin's Press, on sale date February 20, 2024, $32.00). ​**As a heads up - Adam will be disguised on camera and voice altered for audio due to security concerns** Within the U.S. military there is a team so secretive that not only is the name of this unit classified, its members are like ghosts to the military personnel in the country. Veterans Affairs doesn't even have them listed. Phantoms or not, this highly-trained team has been responsible for preventing dozens of terrorist attacks against the U.S. and Western world. This is the world in which Adam Gamal lived. Before that, his life in Egypt was one of great dismay as the Muslim Brotherhood overran a once-free country. When he arrived in the U.S., he spoke no English, was 5'1", 112 pounds, and certainly was far from what one would expect a future soldier to be. He loved his new country, and soon enlisted in the U.S. Army, feeling a great compulsion to serve a nation that gave him the freedom he craved. From his first deployment in Bosnia, to his search for Saddam Hussein in Iraq, to his work in Africa fighting against the very same Muslim Brotherhood that terrorized his community in Egypt when he was a child, he offers a gripping first-hand account of our nation's most secret military unit. His tales of a cat-and-mouse game tracking terrorist Aden Hashi Ayro - the head of the Hizb al-Shabab, or youth wing of the Islamic Courts Union, who it was believed led militias within Somalia - are filled with tension.Gamal also goes into great detail about the diversification of our nation's defenses. As he says in THE UNIT, he was often mistaken for being Hispanic, and relates stories of other members of the military who were from a Middle Eastern background who passed for Latino. But because they could blend in within those communities overseas when hunting bad guys, they gave the U.S. an advantage in gathering intelligence necessary to capture terrorists. Fair-haired and fair-skinned American soldiers are going to stick out in many nations dealing with conflict, especially those representing threats to the U.S. Gamal strongly believes that immigrants would make extraordinary soldiers. He feels that women, people of color, and immigrants do things differently. They see things differently, and meld different views, strategies, and thought processes when engaging enemies. This is crucial and often overlooked. Gamal talks about the importance of keeping up with intelligence and why future wars will resemble nothing like they have throughout the 20th century and the very early years of the 21st century. America needs to do a better job relating with the citizenry of our allies, and those defending them. Along the way, we abandoned the idea of winning hearts and minds, he argues, and America needs to return to that way of thinking.

16 MAR 2024 · x-spy Jack Beaumont reveals how he maintained five false identities at once by Emily Pidgeon A former spy has opened up about one of the most grueling aspects of his secretive job. Jack Beaumont (not his real name) is a former operative in the clandestine operations branch of the French foreign secret service, known as the DGSE. Speaking to http://news.com.au/'s podcast, I've Got News For You, Beaumont explained that the job required him to have five false identities on the go at all times, and detailed the incredible effort it took to maintain them all. "If it's an ID you use to try to recruit a human source, and it's a long-term manipulation, then the ID has to be quite solid," Beaumont told podcast host Andrew Bucklow.That meant that each false identity had to have a social media presence and a different address. "Every one of those IDs have to be, if necessary, dismantled in 24 hours," he said. "So you can't just rent a flat because you will leave a trace of payment. "You have to find some place in Paris or in the countryside where you have some empty flats and then you're going to make them yours."

10 MAR 2024 · In True Face: A Woman's Life in the CIA, Unmasked (PublicAffairs; on sale March 5, 2024) is full of high-stakes stories, like when Mendez came face to face with a rogue Jihadi who had brought down an American plane and when she helped steal a top-secret encryption machine from a Soviet embassy. While In True Face takes readers into the shadowy sides of some of the most important episodes during the Cold War; it also explores the culture within the CIA, making an honest assessment of what it took for a woman to even get a job there-never mind rise through the ranks to one of the agency's most important jobs. This is the story of an incredible spy career and what it took to achieve it.

5 MAR 2024 · The geography speaks for itself. The bad guys are just kilometers away, across the river. We are the only international (or locals) with a brick and mortar office downtown, for them to go for help. No assistance from govt unless elderly, and the assistance they get is shit. Office safe from “normal” shelling (tank fire, most mortars). Glide bombs and attack drones are new since Ukrainians landed on other side and have beachhead. Quietly, that is a total massacre over there — poorly kept secret here. can’t do much about the big stuff … if we get hit with a glide bomb we’re fucked. I like our chances. Mon wed Friday the FREE STORE AT THE FRONT is open at our office. Basic foods medicines hygiene and winter clothes. Mondays we run bread into insanely dangerous places by the Antonivky bridge, do other stuff like that. Off the radar. For city admin. We are an important “off the books asset” for them.

29 FEB 2024 · The day before his discharge from the Army, General Garrett Sinclair is freed from Ft. Leavenworth Disciplinary Barracks by his former Delta Force operative, Jake Mahegan. Meanwhile, his imprisoned teammates are released from Naval incarceration by a manipulative tech magnate, Mitch Drewson, solely for the purpose of having Sinclair and his Dagger team protect his Project Optimus. Author A. J. Tata uses his vast military experience to create thrillers that feel as if they're ripped from today's headlines. In his new masterpiece, THE PHALANX CODE: A Garrett Sinclair Novel (St. Martin's Press, on sale date February 27, 2024; $29.00), Sinclair, newly freed, has to save members of his team while learning of a devastating family secret in the process. Project Optimus - an ambitious endeavor to empower citizens to protect financial and personal data in the face of increasingly authoritarian federal governments - is going face to face against the threat from Aurelius Blanc and Phalanx Corporation. Phalanx's data collection and media application is enabling a global security state through partnerships with the major industrialized nations, creating a form of technofascism that monitors the activity of everyone with a smartphone, tablet, computer, or any web connected device. Though Sinclair is a "free agent," with no military chain of command to deal with, he directly challenges Drewson's motives for gathering his entire team for this mission. At that moment, though, Phalanx assassin squads take over an Optimus server farm in California and grab an Optimus coder named Blair Campbell. With Campbell's well being in jeopardy, Sinclair deploys his team in an attempt to save him and protect the remainder of Optimus so they can complete their vital work, which is highlighted by deciphering the mysterious Phalanx Code, suspected to contain the Phalanx kill list of Optimus employees. Caught in a deadly game between two tech moguls, and with Phalanx squads hunting him and those he loves, Sinclair must determine who he can trust while a devastating part of his family past comes back to haunt him and everything and everyone he holds dear.

10 FEB 2024 · DEAD MAN'S HAND: A Pike Logan Novel (William Morrow; January 23, 2024; $32.00), the eighteenth entry into New York Times bestselling author Brad Taylor's longstanding Pike Logan series, features authentic operational details that will stun even the most prolific military thriller reader. Leaning on his over two decades of service in the Army, Taylor delivers his most timely and prescient thriller to date, pitting Pike Logan and the Taskforce against Putin and his henchman in an all-too-real scenario that could be ripped from today's headlines. To finally end the war between their nations, a rogue band of Ukranian partisans known as the Wolves teams up with members of Russia's military intelligence to assassinate Vladimir Putin. But Putin is aware of the traitors in his midst and assigns the loyal commander of the Russian national guard to root them out. It's a mission Victor Petrov is expected to undertake after he prevents Sweden from joining NATO-by assassinating a deputy minister of foreign affairs. After receiving intelligence about the threat in Sweden, the United States sends Pike Logan to identify Petrov's target-only for him to get caught in the crossfire between Putin's agents and the Wolves. When the smoke clears, Pike makes no effort to stop the Wolves on their ultimate mission, believing it just, until he discovers that their operation has unimaginable consequences. For Putin is preparing a devastating endgame: activating the Dead Man's Hand nuclear response that will launch Russia's missiles in the event of his death. . . This riveting new novel delivers top notch action with each turn of the page. Taylor incorporates current events involving the US military complex to deliver one of the most prophetic thrillers of 2024. This authoritative blend of ripped from the headlines action complemented by authentic characters allows for praise that proclaims with each new entry into his bestselling series, Brad Taylor is "laying claim to being the American John le Carre." (Providence Journal).

30 DEC 2023 · AMERICAN GUN: The True Story of the AR-15 by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson is about the most lethal handheld icon of the 21st century - the AR-15 rifle - which has become the weapon of choice for mass shooters. The same gun, under the name M16, was the gun that was carried by soldiers in Vietnam. Now, that weapon - or even just the silhouette of its barrel and trigger - has come to symbolize freedom for millions of Americans and the essence of evil for millions of others. AMERICAN GUN tells the essential and extraordinary story of the AR-15 for the first time. Jonathan Eig writes, "With hard-core reporting and gripping prose. [t]his is social history at its finest." AMERICAN GUN authors McWhirter and Elison are both journalists at the Wall Street Journal who have covered gun culture and the industry, including mass shootings, for years. They tell the story in three parts. The first is about an iconoclastic engineer with no formal training, Eugene Stoner, who came up with the idea for the gun in his garage workshop in Los Angeles, solving an age-old problem in weapons design - how to make a lightweight, easy to fire gun that essentially powers itself. He then, somewhat heroically, took on the military industrial complex with a small company and ultimately overcame lies and deceit at the top of the government to establish this weapon as by far the better option for the military. The book then moves to the jungles of Vietnam. It tells another part of the story of the AR-15 where the government modified the gun, naming it the M16, which didn't work very well - jamming repeatedly, costing many lives, and causing a major Congressional investigation. In the final part of the book, the terrifying story of how this weapon that has no use in hunting became more and more popular in the civilian market, beginning in the 1970s and accelerating most recently, is told. We meet upstarts and transgressive gun manufacturers as well as video game developers who celebrate the A-15's outlaw mystique in order to promote it. And we see how attempts to ban and restrict it are foiled again and again, even as mass shootings proliferate.

13 DEC 2023 · In November 1963, Paul Landis was a witness to history. But despite seeing the fatal shot from 20 feet away and being at President John F. Kennedy's side at Parkland Memorial Hospital, Landis was never called on by the Warren Commission to tell his story of the president's assassination. Sixty years later, the former Secret Service agent is telling his story of safeguarding the Kennedy family and the explosive moment in Dallas that changed the course of history-and his life. In The Final Witness (Chicago Review Press, October 10, 2023), Landis shares his role in of one of American history's most shocking events, and the one action that alters our understanding of one of the most notorious murders of the 20th Century. Special Agent Paul Landis was stationed in the car directly behind the president's in Dealey Plaza. He was inside Trauma Room #1 as the president was pronounced dead. He was on Air Force One with the president's casket on the flight back to Washington D.C.-an eyewitness to Lyndon Johnson taking the oath of office. What he saw indelibly imprinted on his psyche. By mid-1964, the nightmares from Dallas remained, and he resigned. It wasn't until the fiftieth anniversary that he began to talk about it and read his first books about the assassination, realizing that they had the story wrong. He has kept his recollections private until now, including details surrounding a key piece of evidence that may permanently change our understanding of this critical moment of U.S. history.

29 NOV 2023 · "A rip-roaring read about spycraft and the CIA's inner workings . . . an inspiring group portrait of extraordinary CIA women whose careers are multisided profiles in courage."-Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars The acclaimed author of Code Girls returns with a revelatory history of three generations at the CIA-the women who fought to become operatives, transformed spy craft, and tracked down Osama Bin Laden. Created in the aftermath of World War Two, the Central Intelligence Agency relied on women even as it attempted to channel their talents and keep them down. Women sent cables, made dead drops, and maintained the agency's secrets. Despite discrimination-even because of it-women who started as clerks, secretaries, or unpaid spouses rose to become some of the CIA's shrewdest operatives. They were unlikely spies-and that's exactly what made them perfect for the role. Because women were seen as unimportant, pioneering female intelligence officers moved unnoticed around Bonn, Geneva, and Moscow, stealing secrets from under the noses of their KGB adversaries. Back at headquarters, women built the CIA's critical archives-first by hand, then by computer. And they noticed things that the men at the top didn't see. As the CIA faced an identity crisis after the Cold War, it was a close-knit network of female analysts who spotted the rising threat of Al Qaeda-though their warnings were repeatedly brushed aside. After the 9/11 attacks, more women joined the Agency as a new job, "targeter," came to prominence. They showed that data analysis would be crucial to the post-9/11 national security landscape-an effort that culminated spectacularly in the CIA's successful efforts to track down Bin Laden in his Pakistani compound.