Suggested Upcoming Non-Fiction

I've made a few posts recently about other novels I recommend, but the books I'm most looking forward to this year are non-fiction.

In February, Steve Coll's Directorate S: The CIA and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan will be published. It's apparently a "sequel" of sorts of Coll's Ghost Wars, an extensive volume on CIA operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan from the Soviet Union's Afghan invasion up  to 9/11. Read together, these two hefty volumes will probably contain everything you'd ever want or need to know about  US foreign policy and intelligence operations concerning Afghanistan and Pakistan over the past thirty years. If you have an interest in the subject matter, then Coll's books are required reading.

Also in February, Full Battle Rattle will be published, the memoirs of a Muslim Green Beret who was involved with the attempted rescue of the embassy hostages in Iran, spying on Hezbollah in Lebanon, and fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. It's co-written with Ralph Pezzullo, who has written a number of other CIA/special forces memoirs, notably Jawbreaker with Gary Berntsen, as well as the very addictive SEAL Team Six series of novels with Don Mann.

And later in the year, The Spy Who Was Left Behind: Russia, The New Cold War, and the True Story of the Assassination of a CIA Agent will be published. I'm unfamiliar with the author, Michael Pullara, but the book will be about the assassination of CIA station chief Freddie Woodruff in the former Soviet republic of Georgia in 1993. The incident and the conclusions of the subsequent investigation became the subject of controversy and are believed by many (including a Georgian interior minister in 2013) to raise more questions than satisfactory answers concerning Woodruff's murder. I mentioned this little known bit of Cold War lore in my book SCORPION II, which is largely set in Georgia.