This image is the cover for the book Honorable Treachery

Honorable Treachery

A “splendidly written, impeccably researched, and perfectly fascinating” look at clandestine operations from colonial times to the Cuban Missile Crisis (The Washington Post Book World).

We’ve always depended on intelligence gathering to drive foreign policy in peacetime and command decision in war—but that work has often taken place in the shadows. Honorable Treachery fills in these details in our national history, dramatically recounting every important intelligence operation from our nation’s birth into the early 1960s.

Among numerous other stories, the book recounts how in 1795, President Washington mounted a covert operation to ransom American hostages in the Middle East; how in 1897, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s plans for an invasion of the United States were stopped by the director of the US Office of Naval Intelligence; and how President Woodrow Wilson created a secret agency called the Inquiry to compile intelligence for the peace negotiations at the end of World War I.

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist who himself worked for the CIA, Honorable Treachery puts America’s use of covert intelligence into a broader historical context, providing a unique insight into the secret workings of our country.

“O’Toole offers fascinating information generally unrecorded in traditional diplomatic and military histories.” —Library Journal

G.J.A. O'Toole

G. J. A. O’Toole was born in 1937 and worked for the CIA from 1966 to 1969. He was the author of several award-winning books, including the Encyclopedia of American Intelligence and Espionage; Honorable Treachery, a history of American intelligence; The Spanish War: An American Epic, 1898, a Pulitzer Prize nominee; and An Agent on the Other Side, a novel. He died at the age of sixty-four in Mount Vernon, NY.

Grove/Atlantic Inc.