Intercept

by Don Pendleton

From Bletchley Park to cyber-attacks in the twenty-first century, this is the untold story of computers and past, present and future.

The computer was born to spy, and now computers are transforming espionage. But who are the spies and who is being spied on in today's interconnected world?
This is the exhilarating secret history of the melding of technology and espionage. Gordon Corera's compelling narrative, rich with historical details and characters, takes us from the Second World War to the internet age, revealing the astonishing extent of cyberespionage carried out today. Drawing on unique access to intelligence agencies, heads of state, hackers and spies of all stripes, INTERCEPT is a ground-breaking exploration of the new space in which the worlds of espionage, geopolitics, diplomacy, international business, science and technology collide. Together, computers and spies are shaping the future. What was once the preserve of a few intelligence agencies now matters for us all.

Genres: Nonfiction

448 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1992

About the author

Don Pendleton was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, December 12, 1927 and died October 23, 1995 in Arizona.

He wrote mystery, action/adventure, science-fiction, crime fiction, suspense, short stories, nonfiction, and was a comic scriptwriter, poet, screenwriter, essayist, and metaphysical scholar. He published more than 125 books in his long career, and his books have been published in more than 25 foreign languages with close to two hundred million copies in print throughout the world.

After producing a number of science-fiction and mystery novels, Don launched in 1969 the phenomenal Mack Bolan: The Executioner, which quickly emerged as the original, definitive Action/Adventure series. His successful paperback books inspired a new particularly American literary genre during the early 1970's, and Don became known as "the father of action/adventure."

"Although The Executioner Series is far and away my most significant contribution to world literature, I still do not perceive myself as 'belonging' to any particular literary niche. I am simply a storyteller, an entertainer who hopes to enthrall with visions of the reader's own incipient greatness."

Don Pendleton's original Executioner Series are now in ebooks, published by Open Road Media. 37 of the original novels.

Wikipedia: Don Pendleton

Reviews

[LuisJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent read as a complement to the book GHCQ by Aldrich which covers more the early days (first and second World Wars) as well as better focus on the use of Intelligence Signals.
I found some of the chapter transitions a little jarring (clearly having been written out of sequence and at different times) and sometimes this was the case within a chapter; and there was significantly more needless repetition than the GHCQ book. Like the other book I found the last chapter delving into questions of morality to be of little substance or worth and felt tacked on just to tick a box, which is a missed opportunity.

[Andrewh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this journalistic history of the link between computers and spying to be compelling, although I got the feeling he could have said a lot more about the Prism and Tempora programmes revealed by Snowden, had he wanted to (or been allowed to). As the book notes, computers were invented for the purpose of spying and organisations like the NSA now employ skilled hackers to spy on potential evil doers using supercomputers making a trillion calculations a second. Whether we find this a comforting thought may depend on where you stand politically but it is certainly not going away.

[Odhran · Rating 3 out of 5]

Moderately well-written and interesting, but didn't really excite me in the way that, say, Simon Singh's The Code Book did. Readable, but not highly recommended.

[Martin Mckenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but a bit too repetitive in my view, too much policy and philosophy commentary and not enough real factual content.