Hi,

I've recently discovered a healthy fascination with intelligence/counterintelligence and the various methods of espionage utilized by everyone from national governments to corporations to terrorist/insurgent groups and sadly the content that I could dig up on it was somewhat...lacking. The few threads the search function dug up for me that seemed relevant seemed to primarily focus on WW2 era espionage, though I did find a few promising titles related to the Cold War.

My interest is rather broad so I'm looking for information on both pre-modern espionage methods from before the days of rapid long distance communication all the way up to the current (though I understand that anything post-1996 is technically off-limits, which cuts off what I'd imagine to be a very, very important period of intelligence history post-9/11). Topics of particular interest to me would be the formation of the Soviet intelligence apparatus, the intelligence/counterintelligence operations the superpowers launched against each other in Asia, South America, Africa, and Europe through the Cold War, and if possible how the advent of widely available computers (and thus hacking, using malware to steal/destroy information or hardware, and the vastly reduced time between gaining actionable intelligence and acting on it that they allowed) effected the field.

I'd also love to read any good accounts of corporate espionage or the methods used by terrorist/insurgent groups, as frankly most of what I've found on the latter via google have been short 30 page think tank PDF extracts...which, while interesting, aren't quite meaty enough for my preference.

Thanks in advance.