Robert Ludlum was an American author of 27 thriller novels, best known as the creator of Jason Bourne from the original The Bourne Trilogy series. The number of copies of his books in print is estimated between 300 million and 500 million. They have been published in 33 languages and 40 countries. Ludlum also published books under the pseudonyms Jonathan Ryder and Michael Shepherd.
Addison is a village located in the Chicago Metropolitan Area, in DuPage County, Illinois, United States. The population was 36,942 at the 2010 census.
The Stargate Project was a secret U.S. Army unit established in 1978 at Fort Meade, Maryland, by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and SRI International to investigate the potential for psychic phenomena in military and domestic intelligence applications. The project, and its precursors and sister projects, originally went by various code names – 'Gondola Wish', 'Stargate', 'Grill Flame', 'Center Lane', 'Project CF', 'Sun Streak', 'Scanate' – until 1991 when they were consolidated and rechristened as the "Stargate Project".
The Bourne Identity is a 1980 spy fiction thriller by Robert Ludlum that tells the story of Jason Bourne, a man with remarkable survival abilities who has retrograde amnesia, and must seek to discover his true identity. In the process, he must also determine why several shadowy groups, a professional assassin, and the CIA want him dead. It is the first novel of the original Bourne Trilogy, which also includes The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum.
A covert operation or undercover operation is a military or police operation involving a covert agent or troops acting under an assumed cover to conceal the identity of the party responsible. Some of the covert operations are also clandestine operations which are performed in secret and meant to stay secret, though many are not.
Jason Bourne is the title character and the protagonist in a series of novels and subsequent film adaptations. The character was created by novelist Robert Ludlum. He first appeared in the novel The Bourne Identity (1980), which was adapted for television in 1988. The novel was adapted into a feature film of the same name in 2002 and starred Matt Damon in the lead role.
The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was an anti-communist propaganda group founded on June 26, 1950 in West Berlin, and was supported by the Central Intelligence Agency and its allies. At its height, the CCF was active in thirty-five countries. In 1966 it was revealed that the CIA was instrumental in the establishment and funding of the group. The congress aimed to enlist intellectuals and opinion makers in a war of ideas against communism.
Gayle Lynds is an American former journalist, editor and author. Lynds is known as the Queen of Espionage Fiction for her spy fiction or spy thrillers novels. Lynds is the co-founder of International Thriller Writers.
The Directorate of Operations (DO), less formally called the Clandestine Service, is a component of the US Central Intelligence Agency. It was known as the Directorate of Plans from 1951 to 1973; as the Directorate of Operations from 1973 to 2005; and as the National Clandestine Service (NCS) from 2005 to 2015.
Kyle Mills is an American writer of thriller novels including Rising Phoenix, Fade, and The Second Horseman. Several of his books include a character Mark Beamon, an FBI special agent. He also wrote The Ares Decision (2011), The Utopia Experiment (2013), and The Patriot Attack (2015), the eighth, tenth, and twelfth installments of the Covert-One series, originally created by Robert Ludlum. He is the former writer of the Mitch Rapp series of novels, having written nine books in the series after original author Vince Flynn died in 2013. In February, 2023, Mills announced he would be leaving the Mitch Rapp series after his contribution to the series, Code Red (2023), was published. Author Don Bentley was announced as the new author for the series.
The Central Intelligence Agency, known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, and analyzing national security information from around the world, primarily through the use of human intelligence (HUMINT) and conducting covert action through its Directorate of Operations. As a principal member of the United States Intelligence Community (IC), the CIA reports to the Director of National Intelligence and is primarily focused on providing intelligence for the President and Cabinet of the United States. Following the dissolution of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) at the end of World War II, President Harry S. Truman created the Central Intelligence Group under the direction of a Director of Central Intelligence by presidential directive on January 22, 1946, and this group was transformed into the Central Intelligence Agency by implementation of the National Security Act of 1947.
Covert One: The Hades Factor is a made-for-TV thriller filmed in Toronto that first aired in 2006. Directed by Mick Jackson, the miniseries is loosely based on The Hades Factor, a 2000 novel written by Gayle Lynds as part of the Covert-One series created by Robert Ludlum.
Nick Carter-Killmaster is a series of spy adventures published from 1964 until 1990, first by Award Books, then by Ace Books, and finally by Jove Books. At least 261 novels were published. The character is an update of a pulp fiction private detective named Nick Carter, first published in 1886.
National governments deal in both intelligence and military special operations functions that either should be completely secret, or simply cannot be linked to the sponsor. It is a continuing and unsolved question for governments whether clandestine intelligence collection and covert action should be under the same agency. The arguments for doing so include having centralized functions for monitoring covert action and clandestine HUMINT and making sure they do not conflict, as well as avoiding duplication in common services such as cover identity support, counterespionage, and secret communications. The arguments against doing so suggest that the management of the two activities takes a quite different mindset and skills, in part because clandestine collection almost always is on a slower timeline than covert action.
The Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency is a 69-page formerly classified comprehensive study on the personnel, security, adequacy, and efficacy of the Central Intelligence Agency written by Lieutenant General James H. Doolittle. United States President Dwight Eisenhower requested the report in July 1954 at the height of the Cold War and following coups in Iran and Guatemala. The report compares with other contemporary Cold War documents such as George Kennan's "X" article in Foreign Affairs, which recommended a policy of "containment" rather than direct confrontation with the Soviet Union, and NSC 68, the secret policy document produced in 1950, which recommended a similarly restrained policy of “gradual coercion.” Doolittle wrote with an abandon-all-principles approach that conveyed the national fear that the United States faced the prospect of annihilation at the hands of the Soviet Union: “It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost,” Doolittle wrote. “There are no rules in such a game… If the United States is to survive, long standing concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered.” Doolittle’s forceful policy and language reflected the fear that motivated American citizens and policymakers in the wake of Soviet Communism.
The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) dates from September 18, 1947, when President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 into law. A major impetus that has been cited over the years for the creation of the CIA was the unforeseen attack on Pearl Harbor, but whatever Pearl Harbor's role, at the close of World War II government circles identified a need for a group to coordinate government intelligence efforts, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the State Department, the War Department, and even the Post Office were all jockeying for that new power.
Robert Ludlum (1927–2001) was an American author of twenty-seven novels between 1971 and 2006, the last being issued five years after his death. Of his twenty-seven novels, two were originally published under the pseudonym of Jonathan Ryder and another under the pseudonym of Michael Shepherd. Ludlum also created the Covert-One series, overseeing the first three novels with Gayle Lynds and Philip Shelby before his death. Following Ludlum's death, his estate has continued to publish novels under his name with eleven authors having written a combined thirty-two novels under the Ludlum brand, a trademark inscription of "Robert Ludlum's" on every book. Since 2019, publishing rights in the United States have been held by G. P. Putnam's Sons, taking over from Grand Central Publishing who held the rights from 2007 to 2017.
