Book and Film Recommendations

Daniel Syrkin
2025

The third season of this AppleTV+ smash hit about Mossad operations inside Iran, originally scheduled to air in April this year before current events triggered a decision to delay release, is anticipated to launch in the coming months. Billed as a Middle-East espionage thriller, this original foreign-language drama’s next installment is sure to please spy buffs and professionals alike. Read more about the show here. 

Tim Weiner
Mariner, 15 Jul 25

At the turn of the century, the Central Intelligence Agency was in crisis. The end of the Cold War had robbed the agency of its mission. More than thirty overseas stations and bases had been shuttered, and scores that remained had been severely cut back. Many countries where surveillance was once deemed crucial went uncovered. Essential intelligence wasn’t being collected. At the dawn of the information age, the CIA’s officers and analysts worked with outmoded technology, struggling to distinguish the clear signals of significant facts from the cacophony of background noise.

Then came September 11th, 2001. After the attacks, the CIA transformed itself into a lethal paramilitary force, running secret prisons and brutal interrogations, mounting deadly drone attacks, and all but abandoning its core missions of espionage and counterespionage. The consequences were grave: the deaths of scores of its recruited foreign agents, the theft of its personnel files by Chinese spies, the penetration of its computer networks by Russian intelligence and American hackers, and the tragedies of Afghanistan and Iraq. A new generation of spies now must fight the hardest targets—Moscow, Beijing, Tehran—while confronting a president who has attacked the CIA as a subversive force. 

From Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Weiner, The Mission tells the gripping, high-stakes story of the CIA through the first quarter of the twenty-first century, revealing how the agency fought to rebuild the espionage powers it lost during the war on terror—and finally succeeded in penetrating the Kremlin. The struggle has life-and-death consequences for America and its allies. The CIA must reclaim its original mission: know thy enemies. The fate of the free world hangs in the balance. 

A masterpiece of reporting, The Mission includes exclusive on-the-record interviews with six former CIA directors, the top spymaster, thirteen station chiefs, and scores of top operations officers who served undercover for decades and have never spoken to a journalist before.  

Bjørn Elias Mikalsen Grønning (Editor), Stig Stenslie (Editor)
Edinburgh Press, 31 December 2024

Contemporary Intelligence Warning Cases presents lessons learned and recommendations for producers and users of intelligence warning in their joint venture to anticipate, prepare for, mitigate, and prevent future threats to national security.

It presents and synthesizes the findings of 16 contemporary intelligence warning case studies undertaken by leading intelligence scholars and former intelligence practitioners. It is the first multi-case study of intelligence warning and adopts a uniquely broad and contemporary approach to the phenomenon, featuring both successful and failed cases. Consistent with the increasing complexity of intelligence problems and scope of intelligence services, it ranges from traditional warning problems such as invasions and wars, through terrorist attacks, to threats that lie beyond the traditional core scope of intelligence services such as pandemics, financial crises, climate change, strategic acquisitions and attacks on cultural heritage.

Kit Bennetts 
RHNZ Adult eBooks, 31 October 14 

In 1975 Kit Bennetts was one of the youngest officers ever to serve in the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service. Fresh out of training, on routine surveillance duty one night he followed a big Mercedes from the Soviet Embassy in Wellington and witnessed a meeting between a KGB officer and an unknown man. That man turned out to be Dr William Sutch, one of New Zealand's most eminent citizens. Five months later, after more surveillance and a major sting, Sutch was arrested and charged with passing information to the Russians.

A spectacular trial ensued — New Zealand's only epionage trail, ever — at which Sutch was acquitted, only to die seven months later. Thirty years on, and with the recent release of the Mitrokhin archives, fascination with the case and speculation about whether Sutch was indeed a KGB mole endures.

Spy marks the first time an SIS officer has ever gone public. Fast paced, humorous, it details how the SIS got their man, only to lose the case against him in court.