American Power and Secrecy series

Washington, D.C.
June 1971

The system did not fail quietly.

It did not fracture in some distant corridor or obscure archive. It broke at the very centre of power, where classified truth was meant to remain contained, controlled, and unquestioned. When the first instalments of what would become known as the Pentagon Papers leak appeared in print,...

June 17, 1972,
Washington, D.C.

It did not begin as a constitutional crisis.

It began with a door that would not lock.

Shortly after midnight, a security guard making a routine round through the Watergate complex noticed something that did not belong. A strip of tape had been placed across the latch of a basement door—carefully positioned to prevent...

In the closing years of the Cold War, the United States government found itself navigating a series of conflicts that did not fit neatly into declared wars or openly debated policy. These were operations conducted in the margins—between diplomacy and force, between law and expediency—where decisions were made quickly and often without full...

For decades, America’s intelligence agencies operated behind walls of secrecy.

Wiretaps.
Hidden surveillance.
Covert operations.
Mail interception.
Psychological experiments.
Secret watchlists.

Most Americans never knew how far the machinery had expanded during the Cold War.

Then, in 1975, the United States Senate launched one of the most explosive...

On September 11th, 2001, the world changed forever.

Within weeks, the United States government passed sweeping emergency legislation designed to prevent another catastrophic attack. The Patriot Act expanded surveillance powers, strengthened intelligence operations and transformed how governments monitored threats in the digital age.

But what began...

The battlefield of the twenty-first century is no longer defined only by armies, missiles, and borders.

It is fought through algorithms, propaganda, artificial intelligence, cyber warfare, social media, and the global struggle to control information itself.

In The Information Wars, Bill Stewart explores how modern societies entered a new age of...