100 books like The Puzzle Palace

Before reading Zuboff, I tended to think of surveillance only in terms of government surveillance. Zuboff showed me how wrong that was. I learned that corporations conduct as much, if not more, surveillance than governments. What’s more, corporations also collaborate with governments, which expands the overall surveillance apparatus to frightening degrees. 

Zuboff convincingly shows how seemingly unrelated phenomena came together to change capitalism. I learned that Google and Facebook created the framework for surveillance capitalism by combining behavioral psychology with data collection and advertising practices.

These tech giants are not interested in serving free citizens; they are interested in creating docile consumers. While Snowden first showed me the dangers of government surveillance, Zuboff showed me that corporate surveillance may be even more dangerous. 

Washington Post national security reporter Ignatius may not know the world of espionage better than anyone, but he writes about it better than anyone. Agents of Innocence is such a realistic and engaging depiction of the life of a CIA case officer that a copy of it is left in the room of each new arrival at Camp Peary, the CIA training facility. It’s about an idealistic young CIA officer posted to Beirut to penetrate the PLO, and, in the process, learns hard lessons, not least of which is that once human lives are at stake, idealism takes a back seat to pragmatism. Ultimately, it is a compelling story with terrific characters, and I would have rooted for them had they been accountants or fishmongers rather than spies

Ignatius’s most recent novel is in many respects a mashup of books no. 1 and 2 on this list: terrific storytelling and the latest spy recent tech: You’ll conclude that it’s just a matter of time until “bad actors” (spy speak for “bad guys”) can hack your brain. At the same time, you’ll enjoy the story.

In The Gray Man, a highly skilled, former CIA operative tries to rescue a colleague and his family while various teams of elite assassins try to stop him however they can.

The Gray Man – AKA Court Gentry or Sierra Six – doesn’t follow anybody’s orders, even those of the most powerful institutions on the planet. Though rebellious, he has morals and only applies his skillset for good.

My favorite part of this book were the action scenes. I liked how big they were, but also the variety of arenas, weapons, and opponents. Also, the Gray Man takes a serious beating through the chapters. Because he’s hurt, but still kicking, the fights progressively get more challenging for him, and more dramatic.

Exploding wine bottles, guns constructed out of pipes, bullets made of teeth, aspirin explosives: If these sound like props from a B spy movie, it's because, again, truth > fiction. In the early-1970s, the Central Intelligence Agency spent a great deal of effort developing myriad weapons for sabotage. The results were this seventy-two-page illustrated manual, published in 1977 and distributed to American operatives likely to find themselves in situations requiring such improvisation. The manual is also invaluable for writers.

Westin’s book completely blew me away the first time I read it. I felt like I had discovered a long-lost time capsule containing everything I needed to know about the technological and social changes that created the foundations for surveillance in the United States today. 

Since Edward Snowden, I tended to think about surveillance in terms of the internet and the National Security Agency. But Westin showed me that surveillance is much broader—socially and historically—than the NSA’s surveillance of the internet. Westin provided me with a template for analyzing surveillance.

Westin distinguishes physical surveillance from data surveillance, and he examines the difference between corporate and government surveillance. Most importantly, I found his recommendations for protecting privacy in the face of increased surveillance powers incredibly relevant even today. 

This may be the first book about surveillance that I ever read, and it left a lasting impression on me. I was shocked by the details in Greenwald’s analysis of the NSA documents provided to him by Edward Snowden. I was convinced that something had to be done about mass surveillance. 

It was really the later chapters of the book that hooked me. I appreciated Greenwald’s description of the scale of NSA surveillance and the social harms that result from mass surveillance practices. I was also awakened to some of the problems in mainstream journalism when Greenwald recounted his experiences publishing on the Snowden documents. Though some journalists, like Bamford and Burnham, have been willing to challenge the government on surveillance, Greenwald taught me that such journalists are quite rare. 

Jack Devine is the former acting director of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, and ran covert ops that drove the Russians out of Afghanistan. In this book, he shows how the Russians have undermined our democracy for decades and how they’ve now weaponized cyberspace, too. It’s an alarming wake-up call from a true American spymaster. 

I have gotten to know Jack over the years, and have gotten a first-hand glimpse at how clever he must have been running secret operations in some of the world’s scariest neighborhoods. Not a guy to ever underestimate; his books are as fascinating as Jack himself.

This book is a fascinating and comprehensive account of one of the worst intelligence disasters in U.S. history. It is about Robert Hanssen, the late FBI Agent and Russian turncoat who was corrupt, sullen, imperious, and endlessly fascinating.

We know about a lot of his misdeeds and personality disorders because of this groundbreaking book by David Wise. David is a brilliant and accomplished espionage writer who died in 2018. He explains how the FBI spent $7 million to steal Hanssen’s personnel files from the KGB. Those secret Russian files led directly to Hanssen’s 2001 arrest.

Wise also conducted exclusive interviews with the psychiatrist who met Hanssen in his jail cell more than 30 times. Finally, Wise chronicles Hanssen’s bizarre sex life, including the hidden video camera he used to record his wife, so he could share the videos with his best friend. 

If you’re like me, you can’t consume enough news about Robert Hanssen, the FBI Special Agent who sold out his country to Russia.

Elaine Shannon, the longtime Time Magazine correspondent, and Ann Blackman relied on more than 150 interviews in telling Hanssen’s story of deceit and depravity. They reveal the dramatic story of an ex-KGB officer stealing Hanssen’s KGB file, Hanssen’s obsession with kinky sex, and his (ironic) affiliation with the ultra-conservative and moralistic Catholic society, Opus Dei.

Still a great read, all these years later.