I was hoping to get the story of developing and using spy gadgets, instead I got a self-serving story of a CIA historian who praised the work the department he worked for at some point. Bunch of abbreviations, dates and names I don't care about. Politics inside CIA. Booooooring. I only made it through first 2 hours and then gave up.

no

It took a while for me to get into this one, but after a couple hours in I found myself unable to shut it off.

The book is a definite must read for lovers of spy-tech and spy history. It is very detailed in its stories of individual instances used to illustrate techniques and technologies. Unfortunately, it meanders just a bit in its tellings. In using individual people as vehicles for technology, it seems to cover large spans of time (years or decades) talking about a specific peice of spycraft, then jumps back in time to tell yet another story of another person, in the same time periods, to talk about another peice of technology. Finally, the use of the title word (Spycraft) for every peice of technology, technique, and procedure, while potentially acurate, gets some what distracting as you listen along and hear everything described as a "new piece of spycraft" or an "innovative development in spycraft."

All in all, the reading is magnificent, the stories are fun and the technology is innovative. A great genre piece.

This book had great information about the tech. The real-world examples made it a thriller at times. Technical people will appreciate this book. The political analysis and back-drop help paint a precise picture of the time periods.

This book is very long and only intermittently interesting. The first seven or so chapters are comprised largely of the humdrum history of CIA personnel, organization, and bureaucracy. The final section is a glorified appendix, and it repeats much of the information found earlier in the book.

There are intriguing stories of operations and fascinating descriptions of equipment interspersed among the dullness, but it's an exercise in patience getting from one to the next.

In the end the book illustrated to me what an incredible waste of resources have gone and continue to go into spying on our enemies and ourselves, with little (or no?) substantive results to show for it.

so it starts off slow and ends sorta slow, but the middle is great [{}]

near the end there is some repeating of stuff that was in the beginning of the book but it is really to give more info about the device or operation [{}]

this is a great book that covers some great times in history, although you dont know of what is told as it was secret at the time and was not made public so its not something that was in newspapers or on tv, you can still understand and appreciate what is going on [{}]

the beginning of the book is sorta slow but it picks up pretty fast and keeps going until the last 2 hours or so ad its then a recap or just a closing - its not that its a bad ending its just that you dont get much of the Al-Queda stuff its mostly Cold War through the book as that was a huge part and took up so much of the CIA's time - there is then some Vietnam stuff and brief Afghanistan section then back to a recap of items used and some terms and its over [{}]

I liked the book as it was a departure from normal "Spy Novels" as it was mostly real stuff and how technological problems were overcome as well as a few failures [{}]

I say get this book because its something that anyone should be able to enjoy

Part one was mezmorizing, Part two was great but not as much fun as the cold war.

A great peace of history.