Fotografía de autor
23 Obras 285 Miembros 5 Reseñas

Sobre El Autor

James M. Olson is on the faculty of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.

Obras de James M. Olson

Etiquetado

Conocimiento común

Género
male

Miembros

Reseñas

This book begins with an overview of philosophers and their views on morality as it pertains to taking care of the best interests of all those who represent a group of people - primarily a city-state or nation.

From there it goes into about 50 real life scenarios faced by today's intelligence and diplomatic corps and offers options to conclude the problems posed in each case. The pros and cons of those options are then discussed by a very diverse group of people.

Sound boring and complicated? It's not. It's a fascinating read that can easily be stopped between scenarios.

More significantly, it raises some excellent questions on the moral ambiguity of spying and its relationship to the world in which we now live.
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1 vota
Denunciada
dlinnen | 3 reseñas más. | Feb 3, 2024 |
Mr. Olson was the keynote speaker at our annual chamber of commerce banquet this year (2011). He was such an interesting and entertaining speaker, that I bought his book afterward. While the scope and topic of the book are quite different from the speech, it's an interesting look at spying in the US.
 
Denunciada
reneeg | 3 reseñas más. | Jan 4, 2022 |
This book was written by the former chief of CIA counterintelligence and was hard to put down at times. The author begins by unveiling some of the United States biggest intelligence threats such as China, Russia, and Cuba. Olson then gives his Ten Commandments of counterintelligence and walks through how to run and manage successful double agent operations. The last half of the book details a number of case studies of defectors, traitors, and double agents working against the the US on behalf of other nations. He concludes each section going through what happened and how it could have been avoided.… (más)
 
Denunciada
joshcrouse3 | Sep 17, 2021 |
The author starts with a review of his career in the CIA. He then reviews moral thought on spying in Western philosophy. He next presents 50 moral dilemmas of spy craft to people (including ex-CIA operatives, clergy, journalists, PhD students--presumably from the courses he teaches--, etc.) After the responses he presents a summary of what intelligence agencies have done about the scenario in the past. Being the good ex-spy that his is, he gave the text to the CIA to censor, so usually his explanations are just getting interesting when they are expunged by big, black blobs of ink. He also has a tendency to make the US the good guys and the Russians and the Chinese the bad guys.

When the review of Western philosophy didn't really come to any conclusions, I didn't have any expectation that the scenarios would either, and they don't. It is, as another reviewer remarked, really a random set of opinions on the scenario. The scenarios themselves are interesting and might be worth discussing in a general class on ethics or social studies in light of the Snowden revelations.

One ex-CIA operative said in response to one scenario that she found it much easier to make ethical judgements now that she didn't work for the agency. She said that when she was working she got too caught up in the operation to actually question what was going on. And that's the real moral problem, people getting into a group-think situation where they let the mission trump ethics--not to mention the law, and most especially common sense.
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Denunciada
aulsmith | 3 reseñas más. | Dec 13, 2013 |

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Estadísticas

Obras
23
Miembros
285
Popularidad
#81,815
Valoración
4.0
Reseñas
5
ISBNs
40
Idiomas
1

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