Threats

Colonel John Hughes-Wilson's case studies — Barbarossa, Pearl Harbor, Tet, Yom Kippur, the Falklands — argue that intelligence rarely fails at collection. It fails at dissemination, reception and institutional incentive.

Germany's former intelligence chief was stopped from publishing his memoir. The polemic he published instead argues that accumulated regulation turned the BND into an administrative authority.

In the 1950s the CIA hired a stage magician to write a manual on deception. Melton and Wallace reproduce it — and its lesson on attention is the mechanism behind pretexting.

A media lawyer's case that reputation is a defensible asset, not weather — with a hard warning that the response, especially litigation, usually does more damage than the original allegation.