This book breaks new ground in two important areas that have yet to be, linked and explored by any JFK-assassination historian. John Koerner argues that the CIA's secret drug trade in Laos, and the president's effort to end it, provided the primary motive that the CIA needed to assassinate the president. A lot of effort has been, made to examine the president's Vietnam policy, but precious little attention has been, paid to the opium trade in Laos...

"The New York Times bestselling author of Code Girls reveals the untold story of how women at the CIA ushered in the modern intelligence age, a sweeping story of a "sisterhood" of women spies spanning three generations who broke the glass ceiling, helped transform spycraft, and tracked down Osama Bin Laden. Upon its creation in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency instantly became one of the most important spy services in the world. Like every male-dominated...

"In 1990, less than a year after the Polish people participated in their first democratic election since the 1930s, the young Polish government sent a veteran spy, who had battled the West for decades, to rescue six American officers trapped in Baghdad. The CIA had asked the Polish government for help, as the U.S. was desperately cobbling together allies to counter Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. The captured Americans held valuable intelligence...

In 1965, the U.S. government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the twentieth century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring copycat terror programs in faraway countries like Brazil and Chile. But these events remain widely overlooked, precisely because the CIA's secret interventions were so successful....