The United States intelligence establishment is a colossus. With stations in 170 countries and armed with cutting-edge surveillance gear, high-tech weapons, and fleets of armed and unarmed drone aircraft, it commands the most extensive and advanced intel force in history. But America's spies still struggle to keep pace with a host of determined enemies around the world. In "Intel Wars," preeminent secrecy and intelligence historian Matthew Aid delivers the inside stories of our decade-long struggle against terrorism-its hard-won successes and bedeviling failures. The massive expansion of the military-intelligence complex since 9/11 has only added to the challenges it faces: our state-of -the-art spy networks are drowning in raw data, buried in paperwork, yet starved for key resources. In the field, overlapping jurisdictions stall CIA operatives, who must wait seventy-two hours for clearance to attack fast-moving Taliban IED teams. Swift, tightly focused operations like the Osama bin Laden strike are the exception rather than the rule. Based on extensive, on-the-ground interviews on the front lines and in Washington, D.C., as well as on revelations from Wikileaks cables and other newly declassified documents, "Intel Wars" is the most authoritative account yet written of the secret war that America is still fighting.

Includes maps of: Afghanistan's Political Divisions, 2008.

Lipstick on a pig: warning signs in Afghanistan -- Liberty crossing -- The sword of Damocles: the continuing travails in Afghanistan -- The root of all evil: the Pakistani problem -- We have to kill them all: scenes from the Global War on Terrorism -- Men of zeal: homeland security and domestic terrorism -- Distant battlefields: mission creep and the U.S. intelligence community -- Conclusion: the past is prologue-the lessons for U.S. intelligence from today's battlefields.