If you care about:
- security in technology
- global security
- international relations and foreign policy
- very unlikely-sounding, but true stories including untraceable poison pellets inside modified umbrellas for assassinations (that actually occurred) and things of that nature
- or you have an opinion on international affairs today, regardless of your particular political views.
I insist ;-) that you go out and buy yourself The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (and also Volume 2, if you want a global view.) While this opus was on the NY Times bestseller list, few people seem to know it, and that’s a shame. From the introduction:
In early 1992, a Russian man walked into the British embassy in a newly independent Baltic republic and asked to “speak to someone in authority.” As he sipped his first cup of proper English tea, he handed over a small file of notes. Eight months later, the man, his family, and his enormous archive had been safely exfiltrated to Britain. When news that a KGB officer had defected with the names of hundreds of undercover agents leaked out in 1996, a spokesperson for the SVR (Russia’s foreign intelligence service, heir of the KGB) said, “Hundreds of people! That just doesn’t happen! Any defector could get the name of one, two, perhaps three agents–but not hundreds!”
Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin worked as chief archivist for the FCD, the foreign-intelligence arm of the KGB. Mitrokhin was responsible for checking and sealing approximately 300,000 files, allowing him unrestricted access to one of the world’s most closely guarded archives. He had lost faith in the Soviet system over the years, and was especially disturbed by the KGB’s systematic silencing of dissidents at home and abroad. Faced with tough choices–stay silent, resign, or undermine the system from within–Mitrokhin decided to compile a record of the foreign operations of the KGB. Every day for 12 years, he smuggled notes out of the archive. He started by hiding scraps of paper covered with miniscule handwriting in his shoes, but later wrote notes on ordinary office paper, which he took home in his pockets. He hid the notes under his mattress, and on weekends took them to his dacha, where he typed them and hid them in containers buried under the floor. When he escaped to Britain, his archive contained tens of thousands of pages of notes.
[What WikiPedia has to say about Vasili Mitrokhin.]
This book is basically an inside history of the KGB from the Russion Revolution in 1917 to after the Soviet Union disintegrated, of course slanted by what Mitrokhin thought was worth risking his life for. And of course, it is a one-sided story as we do not have a similar history for the other side of the Cold War. But:
I’m old enough to remember some of the political events that took place when they took place, and I have to say that I have to revise some of my views on those that I had at the time. Why? Simply because by reading the book I realized that so many other things happened concurrently outside of the public eye, that if I had known, would have changed my perception dramatically.
If you are "only" interested in security on the internet, this book also makes excellent reading about how professionals go about undermining whatever technologies and organizational models we are putting in place. Many of them can be translated one-to-one into the electronic realm, and some of it makes for rather scary reading.
As I said, highly recommended, for many reasons.