Search results for ""Author James Risen""

In this “gripping . . . spectacular piece of reporting” (Ken Burns), a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist examines Senator Frank Church, the man at the center of numerous investigations into the abuses of power within the American government. ​   For decades now, America’s national security state has grown ever bigger, ever more secretive and powerful, and ever more abusive. Only once did someone manage to put a stop to any of it. Senator Frank Church of Idaho was an unlikely hero. He led congressional opposition to the Vietnam War and had become a scathing, radical critic of what he saw as American imperialism around the world. But he was still politically ambitious, privately yearning for acceptance from the foreign policy establishment that he hated and eager to run for president. Despite his flaws, Church would show historic strength in his greatest moment, when in the wake of Watergate he was suddenly tasked with inve

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For decades now, America's national security state has grown ever bigger, ever more secretive and powerful, and ever more abusive. Only once did someone manage to put a stop to any of it.Senator Frank Church of Idaho was an unlikely hero. He led congressional opposition to the Vietnam War and had become a scathing, radical critic of what he saw as American imperialism around the world. But he was still politically ambitious, privately yearning for acceptance from the foreign policy establishment that he hated and eager to run for president. Despite his flaws, Church would show historic strength in his greatest moment, when in the wake of Watergate he was suddenly tasked with investigating abuses of power in the intelligence community. The dark truths that Church exposed-from assassination plots by the CIA, to links between the Kennedy dynasty and the mafia, to the surveillance of civil rights activists by the NSA and FBI-would shake the nation to its core, and forever change the way that Americans thought about not only their government but also their ability to hold it accountable.Drawing upon hundreds of interviews, thousands of pages of recently declassified documents, and reams of unpublished letters, notes, and memoirs, some of which remain sensitive today, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter James Risen tells the gripping, untold story of truth and integrity standing against unchecked power-and winning-in The Last Honest Man.

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Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, its legacy and the accompanying Russian-American tension continues to loom large. Russia's access to detailed information on the United States and its allies may not seem so shocking in this day of data clouds and leaks, but long before we had satellite imagery of any neighborhood at a finger's reach, the amount the Soviet government knew about your family's city, street, and even your home would astonish you. Revealing how this was possible, The Red Atlas is the never-before-told story of the most comprehensive mapping endeavor in history and the surprising maps that resulted. From 1950 to 1990, the Soviet Army conducted a global topographic mapping program, creating large-scale maps for much of the world that included a diversity of detail that would have supported a full range of military planning. For big cities like New York, DC, and London to towns like Pontiac, MI and Galveston, TX, the Soviets gathered enough information to create street-level maps. What they chose to include on these maps can seem obvious like locations of factories and ports, or more surprising, such as building heights, road widths, and bridge capacities. Some of the detail suggests early satellite technology, while other specifics, like detailed depictions of depths and channels around rivers and harbors, could only have been gained by actual Soviet feet on the ground. The Red Atlas includes over 350 extracts from these incredible Cold War maps, exploring their provenance and cartographic techniques as well as what they can tell us about their makers and the Soviet initiatives that were going on all around us. A fantastic historical document of an era that sometimes seems less distant, The Red Atlas offers an uncanny view of the world through the eyes of Soviet strategists and spies.

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In May 2015, Jeffrey Sterling was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. He was convicted of violating the Espionage Act by revealing details about Operation Merlin (a covert operation that aimed to frame Iran by leaking flawed nuclear blueprints) to journalist and author James Risen. He was released from prison in January 2018.Here, Sterling chronicles his story, from his youth in a poor, segregated neighbourhood in the Midwest, through law school and into the CIA. At the CIA, he rose through the ranks to become operations officer in the Iran task force and later a case officer. But then he hit a glass ceiling and was told that as a black man, he stood out too much and couldn't handle sensitive operations. In 2000, he filed a complaint with the CIA's Equal Employment Office and, a year later, the first racial discrimination lawsuit filed against the agency. But his claim was thrown out and he was terminated, even though he was one of few case officers who were fluent in Farsi, a skill that was in high demand at the time. In 2003, he raised concerns about Operation Merlin with the Senate Intelligence Committee, to no effect. Then, after years working as a health-care fraud investigator, he was arrested by FBI agents, his home was searched and he was charged with espionage. The verdict put him in prison.After serving three years in prison, Sterling is still proud of his work with the CIA and considers himself first and foremost a patriot. It is his patriotism that compelled him to blow the whistle on the systemic racism of the CIA and on the misguided operation in Iran and now to pursue justice.

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