Spy Schools

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

By: Daniel Golden

Narrated by: Jonathan Yen

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.

©2017 Daniel Golden (P)2017 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

R3

great story and an insightful work. It seems factual and provides a rich review of current and historical CIA recruting strategies and practice.

story on how foreign governments try to get access

interesting information not easily available elsewhere about how governments get access to US government

Great book, reading could be improved

Daniel Golden writes an enthralling deep dive into the world of espionage in universities, focusing mainly on spies cultivating while attending US institutions. His research and willingness to display both the foreign and American perspectives make the read more balanced, adding weight to his appeal in the final chapter. Due to the compound sentences and varying diction with which Golden writes, however, many sentences are read by the VA with inaccuracy in inflection and representation of punctuation. This causes minor misunderstandings which force the listener to rewind the book briefly and re-listen to the portion. This could be equally the fault of the writing and the reader. Either way, worth your time if the topic interests you at all.

great book

a great book on spying and Espionage on American college campuses. the use of real cases was very engaging.

Highly recommend for parents with college kids

An eye opening read. Good job telling the stories of both sides foreign services and domestic services.