Britain 's Special Intelligence Service, commonly called MI6, is not only the oldest and most storied foreign intelligence unit in the world-it is also the only one to open its archives to an outside researcher. The result, in this authorized history, is an unprecedented and revelatory look at an organization that essentially created, over the course of two world wars, the modern craft of spying. Examining innovations from invisible ink and industrial-scale cryptography to dramatic setbacks like the Nazi sting operations to bag British operatives, this groundbreaking history is as engrossing as any thriller-and much more revealing

Documents how 12 people, as part of a top-secret U.S. government program, traveled to the planet Serpo and lived there for 13 years 

Anthony Summers peels back layers of fact and hearsay to reveal the truth about one of the most powerful Americans of the twentieth century No one exemplified paranoia and secrecy at the heart of American power better than J. Edgar Hoover, the original director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation