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    Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America's Universities
    Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America's Universities
    Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America's Universities
    Audiobook13 hours

    Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America's Universities

    Written by Daniel Golden

    Narrated by Jonathan Yen

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Grounded in extensive research and reporting, Spy Schools reveals how academia has emerged as a frontline in the global spy game. In a knowledge-based economy, universities are repositories of valuable information and research, where brilliant minds of all nationalities mingle freely with few questions asked. Intelligence agencies have always recruited bright undergraduates, but now, in an era when espionage increasingly requires specialized scientific or technological expertise, they're wooing higher-level academics-not just as analysts, but also for clandestine operations.

    Golden uncovers unbelievable campus activity-from the CIA placing agents undercover in Harvard Kennedy School classes and staging academic conferences to persuade Iranian nuclear scientists to defect, to a Chinese graduate student at Duke University stealing research for an invisibility cloak, and a tiny liberal arts college in Marietta, Ohio, exchanging faculty with China's most notorious spy school. He shows how relentlessly and ruthlessly this practice has permeated our culture, not just inside the US, but internationally as well.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateOct 10, 2017
    ISBN9781681687032
    Author

    Daniel Golden

    Daniel Golden, a senior editor and reporter at ProPublica, has won a Pulitzer Prize and three George Polk Awards. He is the bestselling author of The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates and Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America’s Universities.

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    Reviews for Spy Schools

    3.5/5

    33 ratings11 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Very interesting book to read to attempt to understand the various ways that both foreign and domestic Intelligence agencies exploit people and assets at Universities. Some areas of the book were repetitive using the same scenarios/examples, but I am assuming that the information about exposed cases in this area are limited to what is unclassified or was discovered in the past. Definitely worth a read if this topic is of interest to you.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      There is a huge difference between an agent and an operations officer. CIA Clandestine Service personnel are called “Operations Officers”. The ops officers run “agents”, such as a penetration of a terrorist cell.

      However, FBI field staff are called “agents”.

    • 3/5
      This is a very interesting book covering both foreign countries stealing intellectual property and recruiting spies from schools, and US agencies also looking to recruit students and professors. At times the book was a bit hard to follow as it seemed to jump from thread to thread without any warning. Also, for a book this size with such an impressive list of references, I expected more evidence of wrongdoing. The book really only covers a few cases (sometimes in too much unnecessary depth), and has failed to convince me that this is a huge problem.
    • 3/5
      As a child of the 1960s and a college student in the 1980s, I'm used to a more open view of academia - and the distance between the intelligence community and universities. But the reality is that except for a relatively short time (that I happened to fall in), universities and their faculty worked pretty closely with those trying to gather intelligence or prevent other nations from doing that. Danial Golden's Spy Schools is a well-researched account of some specific instance of both sides: intelligence gathering, in our schools by other nations, and in foreign countries by our side.Golden is a journalist, and the writing shows his journalistic roots. While it's a good book, it often comes across as a set of interconnected news articles rather than a single work, and this detracts from the work. On the other hand, it's an important subject, and Spy Schools is worth a look as we hear more and more about issues like US universities expanding into other countries.
    • 3/5
      I applaud the author of this book for the painstaking amounts of research that went into it. It was very interesting to read about the various attempts of countries and spy agencies to use our education system to recruit spies. I will say however, that I feel like the overall narrative suffered a bit under the weight of all that research. That said, it was still an enjoyable read and made me wonder why I wasn't recruited to be a spy during my formative years.
    • 4/5
      American Universities are known for their open, collaborative projects and for their special interest in attracting international students.  As well as increasing the Universities international prestige, apparently this also leaves them vulnerable to spying.  This is not something that I ever considered but it does make perfect sense.  Golden explores several cases where international students and faculty have been spies for either the United States or their home country, including Russia, China and Cuba.  I found this interesting but also oddly repetitive and had a hard time holding my focus on the pages at times.  I did learn more about how these government organizations recruit and manage their spies.  I received this book from LibraryThing in exchange for an honest review. 
    • 3/5
      Three words can describe this book: too much information. The author seemingly identifies and describes every incident and near-incident in which a teacher or a student was recruited as a spy by either foreign or domestic intelligence agents. I thought the book would be informative and interesting to read. But it turned out to be too hard to read. After reading half the book, I went on to reading something else.
    • 3/5
      Spy Schools by Daniel Golden is a meticulously researched and detailed history of espionage and against America through Universities. The subject is interesting, but the book reads as one long newspaper article and becomes dry when reading. Recommended based on the importance and interest of the topic, but readers advised that it's a very long read.
    • 4/5
      I guess I am naive in my view of politics, but I thought spies went away with the Cold War. Not that much thought has gone to it, but I thought most governmental interaction and progress came from people sitting around a long table or negotiating peace after an "incident." This book has definitely opened my eyes. Not only do spies and human assets used for intelligence gathering still exist, they are being recruited, groomed or even installed as undergraduates, graduate students and even professors. And the motivations are so wide ranging! Always assumed it was a sense of patriotism or sense of adventure that would cause people to choose this lifestyle, and for some it is, but for others it's just money, or medical care for family members, or freedom from oppressive governments or, and this one surprised me most(although thinking of really bright and successful business people it shouldn't have) ego. At any rate, definitely worth checking out. I'd loan you my copy, but I already have multiple requests to borrow it.
    • 4/5
      The openness of American colleges and universities for thought and research is seen by academics as the keystone to higher education. However Daniel Golden writes in Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America’s Universities this is seen as opportunities to recruit agents and cultivate operatives as well steal technological innovations both by our own intelligence agencies and those across the globe.Golden divided his book into foreign and domestic intelligence agencies exploitation of American universities. The first focused how foreign agencies, mainly the Chinese, have been exploiting American universities need of prestige and tuition money to gain partnerships between Chinese universities and their American counterparts resulting in an exchange of students and professors. Yet the most important focus of Golden’s investigation was on how the openness and collaboration within American university labs opens up opportunities for individuals to funnel research, including those paid by the U.S. government and American companies, to their home country to be exploit by their own government or to patient and start up a business. The second half was on the complicated relationship between American intelligence agencies and universities, some of who encourage a relationship and those that do not. The aspect of conflict between secrecy and openness is seen throughout the latter half of the book with 9/11 playing a pivotal role in each side’s views. Unlike the first half of the book, this section is seen over the course of 60 years compared to more near 2000 but in a way to show that past is prologue.As an investigative journalist, Golden uses extensive research and a multitude of interviews in giving a full history and the scale of a front in the global spy game that many in the United States haven’t been aware of. Unfortunately for Golden the timing of this book while on the one hand current and on the other potentially dated. Nearly all his interviews take place no later than 2015, but since the election of Donald Trump with a seemingly nativist groundswell behind him and student demonstrations against conservative speakers might have begun a fundamental shift that could drastically change how both American and foreign intelligence services are seen on American universities especially as a post-9/11 “tolerance” on campus changes to hostility.Even though the subject Daniel Golden has written about could be in the midst of a sudden sea change, Spy Schools is still a book to read in at least to understand an important part of the global spy game. Although no up-to-date, the recent and long-term history is significant for anyone who is concerned about national security and foreign intervention in American affairs.
    • 5/5
      SPY SCHOOLS: HOW THE CIA, FBI, AND FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SECRETLY EXPLOIT AMERICA’S UNIVERSITIES is written by Daniel Golden and published by Henry Holt & Company.Daniel Golden is also the author of PRICE OF ADMISSION, based on his Pulitzer prize-winning series of articles on admissions preferences at elite colleges. He also wrote about for-profit colleges and U.S. tax-dodging companies moving overseas. Mr. Golden is an excellent investigative journalist. His books and articles take your breath away with their factual exposes. In SPY SCHOOLS, Mr. Golden exposes how academia “has become the center of foreign and domestic espionage and why that is troubling news for our nation’s security.”The book contains excellent access points with an Introduction; a Table of Contents; Notes; selected Bibliography; Acknowledgements and an Index.I read an ‘Advance Reader’s edition’ which I obtained from Library Thing’s Early Review List in exchange for an unbiased and honest review. Thank You LT and Henry Holt Publishers.The primary goal (by Mr. Golden) was “to set out and explore how and why intelligence services were targeting American higher education, and what the implications were for national security and intellectual freedom.”The book is divided into 2 parts “examining foreign and American espionage on campus in turn.”The Introduction was a very informative ‘introduction’ to espionage and espionage services from the U.S., China, Russia and Cuba. I learned that most (if not all) spy services view universities as “prime recruiting ground” and blatantly “exploit - and taint - the traditional academic ideals of transparency and independent scholarship.”It is quite astonishing to read of the different ‘cases’ and student (some very young) escapades. The Notes and Bibliography - both are fascinating reading in their own right.Information that I was especially interested in included Chapter 4 describing the relationship between international students and Marietta College (in Ohio) and Introduction page xxii which mentioned the Peace Corps. Having grown up in Ohio and having been a Peace Corps volunteer, suddenly I became a bit uneasy.I would sincerely recommend this thorough look at ‘spy schools’ in the U.S. and abroad.