We all know the spy stories of old; Eric O’Neill tells a story with all the same intrigue but meant for the 21st-century. He details his experience taking down the FBI mole Robert Hanssen with utter honesty and humility, acknowledging when the truth is stranger than fiction and when he has moments of doubt in the mission. O’Neill emerges learning how to be a better spy and with a desire to spread his most important lesson: there are no hackers, only spies. His tale will thrill you, but it will also the illuminate the dangers of the cyber espionage happening right under noses.
The biggest single danger facing America today, according to recent national intelligence assessments, isn’t terrorism or nuclear weapons but cyber threats. David Sanger of the New York Times has broken some big stories in this area. For one, he revealed Olympic Games, the code name for the most sophisticated cyberattack in history, the American-Israeli effort to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program with the Stuxnet worm. And with his Times colleague Bill Broad, he described, in 2017, a different cyber effort to neutralize North Korea’s missiles. In The Perfect Weapon, Sanger explores the growing threat and use of cyberwarfare, the full dimension of which goes well beyond what Russia did to the United States in the 2016 election. As Sanger notes, cyber capabilities nowstand to transform military and geopolitical thinking and strategy as much or more than the advent of nuclear weapons did in the 20th century.
Oxford historian Margaret MacMillan subtly rephrases the usual question about the Great War’s origins, investigating why the long European peace—in place since 1815—failed to hold in the summer of 1914. She suggests that the conflict was not inevitable, assessing Europe on the eve of war as no more rife with tensions and rivalries than it had been for decades. The War That Ended Peace (Random House, $35) erupted on a continent whose 19th-century battles had been mostly brief or at a distance while closer to home, tourism and improved transportation united rather than divided people, as did faith in a bright technological future. But if the 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition pointed to itself as “a symbol of harmony and peace,” the catalog also mentioned that war was “natural to humanity.” MacMillan, whose Paris 1919 so vividly chronicled the war’s aftermath, masterfully charts the two opposing currents in the years leading up to 1914. Her profiles of Europe’s leaders alone make the book worth reading.
