Thwarting Enemies at Home and Abroad: How to Be a Counterintelligence Officer

A Classic in Counterintelligence -- Now Back in Print

Originally published in 1987, Thwarting Enemies at Home and Abroad is a unique primer that teaches the principles, strategy, and tradecraft of counterintelligence (CI). CI is often misunderstood and narrowly equated with security and catching spies, which are only part of the picture. As William R. Johnson explains, CI is the art of actively protecting secrets but also aggressively thwarting, penetrating, and deceiving hostile intelligence organizations to neutralize or even manipulate their operations.

Johnson, a career CIA intelligence officer, lucidly presents the nuts and bolts of the business of counterintelligence and the characteristics that make a good CI officer. Although written during the late Cold War, this book continues to be useful for intelligence professionals, scholars, and students because the basic principles of CI are largely timeless. General readers will enjoy the lively narrative and detailed descriptions of tradecraft that reveal the real world of intelligence and espionage. A new foreword by former CIA officer and noted author William Hood provides a contemporary perspective on this valuable book and its author.

Customer Reviews:

An Accurate Insight Into The World of Counterintelligence

By Michael Chesbro - August 31, 2009

If you are looking for an insight into counterintelligence operations... This Book Is It!

"Thwarting Enemies At Home And Abroad" will give you an inside look at how counterintelligence agents really do their jobs. You will learn how counterintelligence is different from security and different from law enforcement, and you will learn where these areas overlap.

The book explains collection, collation, and indexing, and how to develop counterintelligence databases. It explains how agents are recruited and run, and how they are safeguarded. And... it explains how to manage security of your operations.

Overall this book is very informative and yet still easy to read and understand.

Highly Recommended.

*** Contents ***
1. What Is Counterintelligence?
2. Who Goes Into Counterintelligence, and Why?
3. Conflicting Goals: Law Enforcement versus Manipulation
4. The Support Apparatus
5. Interrogation: How It Really... read more

The best introduction to CI

By D. Edger - January 25, 2009

People have mistaken ideas about what counterintelligence is all about. This book is the clearest, most direct write-up of the nuts and bolts of spy catching and protecting on-going operations that I have read. I fear that over the last few years many of our intelligence professionals have lost some of the skills described in this book and I urge both current and would-be future intelligence officers to read this text.

Yes, the book is a bit dated. The author was an "Angleton" (not a totally good thing) but he definitely knows how to explain a complex issue in terms anyone can understand. I will be using this book with my undergraduate and graduate intelligence classes.

Thwarting Enemies at Home and Abroad

By cortezhill - October 25, 2006

I have written this for people who want to know what counterintelligence is, not what it ought to be, and for people who may be interested in it as a trade or profession.

The book is about what professional intelligence officers call "tradecraft", specifically the craft used in the trade of counterintelligence. It is not about politics or policy or communism or anticommunism or justice in the Third World or human rights or religion, although these affect the trade of counterintelligence just as they do the trade of stock-brokering or oil exploration or journalism. They will be mentioned occasionally, and my concerns about them will be evident, but only as they are elements of the enviroment in which counterintelligence functions.

My thirty-odd years working in counterintelligence have all been spent as an American official, but I have worked much of that time with the counterintelligence officers of other countries. I believe this book will be useful to readers... read more