Fox was in an undergraduate at Oxford studying theology and international law when her mentor Daniel Pearl was captured and beheaded. Galvanized by this brutality, she applied to a master's program in conflict and terrorism at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, where she created an algorithm that predicted the likelihood of a terrorist cell arising in any village around the world. Recruited by the CIA, she was fast-tracked into advanced operations...

In the wake of World War II, four agents were critical in helping build a new organization that we now know as the CIA. Adelaide Hawkins, Mary Hutchison, Eloise Page, and Elizabeth Sudmeier, called the "wise gals" by their male colleagues because of their sharp sense of humor and even quicker intelligence, were not the stereotypical femme fatale of spy novels. They were smart, courageous, and groundbreaking agents at the top of their class, instrumental...

The 1983 attack on the American Embassy in Beirut killed 63 people, including America's most influential and effective intelligence officer in the Middle East -- CIA operative Robert Ames. Kai Bird, who as a child lived in the Beirut Embassy and knew Ames as a neighbor, draws on years of research and hours of interviews to produce a masterpiece-level narrative of the making of a CIA officer and a uniquely insightful history of the Middle East conflict....

In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." This spy was Virginia Hall, a young American woman -- rejected from the foreign service because of her gender and her prosthetic leg -- who talked her way into the spy organization dubbed Churchill's "ministry of ungentlemanly warfare," and, before the United States had even entered the war, became the first woman to...