Audiobooks by Richard A. Clarke

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats

An urgent new warning from two bestselling security experts--and a gripping inside look at how governments, firms, and ordinary citizens can confront and contain the tyrants, hackers, and criminals bent on turning the digital realm into a war zone. 'In the battle raging between offense and defense in cyberspace, Clarke and Knake have some important ideas about how we can avoid cyberwar for our country, prevent cybercrime against our companies, and in doing so, reduce resentment, division, and instability at home and abroad.'--Bill Clinton There is much to fear in the dark corners of cyberspace. From well-covered stories like the Stuxnet attack which helped slow Iran's nuclear program, to lesser-known tales like EternalBlue, the 2017 cyber battle that closed hospitals in Britain and froze shipping crates in Germany in midair, we have entered an age in which online threats carry real-world consequences. But we do not have to let autocrats and criminals run amok in the digital realm. We now know a great deal about how to make cyberspace far less dangerous--and about how to defend our security, economy, democracy, and privacy from cyber attack. This is a book about the realm in which nobody should ever want to fight a war: the fifth domain, the Pentagon's term for cyberspace. Our guides are two of America's top cybersecurity experts, seasoned practitioners who are as familiar with the White House Situation Room as they are with Fortune 500 boardrooms. Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake offer a vivid, engrossing tour of the often unfamiliar terrain of cyberspace, introducing us to the scientists, executives, and public servants who have learned through hard experience how government agencies and private firms can fend off cyber threats. Clarke and Knake take us inside quantum-computing labs racing to develop cyber superweapons; bring us into the boardrooms of the many firms that have been hacked and the few that have not; and walk us through the corridors of the U.S. intelligence community with officials working to defend America's elections from foreign malice. With a focus on solutions over scaremongering, they make a compelling case for 'cyber resilience'--building systems that can resist most attacks, raising the costs on cyber criminals and the autocrats who often lurk behind them, and avoiding the trap of overreaction to digital attacks. Above all, Clarke and Knake show us how to keep the fifth domain a humming engine of economic growth and human progress by not giving in to those who would turn it into a wasteland of conflict. Backed by decades of high-level experience in the White House and the private sector, The Fifth Domain delivers a riveting, agenda-setting insider look at what works in the struggle to avoid cyberwar.

Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake (Author), Marc Cashman (Narrator)

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Pinnacle Event: A Novel

While in power, the South African apartheid regime made nuclear weapons. Later, they told the UN that the weapons were destroyed. But in fact the weapons were secretly stored by a white South African exile group. Now they have been refurbished and sold, but to whom? American intelligence expert Ray Bowman is brought in to find out. With the help of a black, female South African intelligence officer, he races around the world to discover who bought the bombs and what they plan to do with them. Washington fears the bombs are intended for American cities, timed to explode before a presidential election that is just weeks away. What Bowman discovers is that the people who control the bombs intend to do something so devastating that it will make nuking a few U.S. cities look like a mild attack.

Richard A. Clarke (Author), John Pruden, Jonathan Davis (Narrator)

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Sting of the Drone

In Washington, the Kill Committee gathers in the White House's Situation Room to pick the next targets for the United States drone program. At an airbase just outside Las Vegas, a team of pilots, military personnel and intelligence officers follow through on the committee's orders, finding the men who have been deemed a threat to national security and sentenced to death. On the other side of the world, in the mountains where the drones hunt their prey, someone has decided to fight back. And not just against the unmanned planes that circle their skies, but against the Americans at home who control them. Clarke not only remains an active and respected presence within the national security community but also appears regularly as an expert commentator for ABC and other media. His insider's expertise is on full display in Sting of the Drone, a breathtakingly realistic novel set within America's contentious drone program.

Richard A. Clarke (Author), Ari Fliakos (Narrator)

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Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It

Richard A. Clarke warned America once before about the havoc terrorism would wreak on our national security-and he was right. Now he warns us of another threat, silent but equally dangerous. Cyber War is a powerful book about technology, government, and military strategy; about criminals, spies, soldiers, and hackers. This is the first book about the war of the future-cyber war-and a convincing argument that we may already be in peril of losing it. Cyber War goes behind the "geek talk" of hackers and computer scientists to explain clearly and convincingly what cyber war is, how cyber weapons work, and how vulnerable we are as a nation and as individuals to the vast and looming web of cyber criminals. From the first cyber crisis meeting in the White House a decade ago to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley and the electrical tunnels under Manhattan, Clarke and coauthor Robert K. Knake trace the rise of the cyber age and profile the unlikely characters and places at the epicenter of the battlefield. They recount the foreign cyber spies who hacked into the office of the Secretary of Defense, the control systems for U.S. electric power grids, and the plans to protect America's latest fighter aircraft. Economically and militarily, Clarke and Knake argue, what we've already lost in the new millennium's cyber battles is tantamount to the Soviet and Chinese theft of our nuclear bomb secrets in the 1940s and 1950s. The possibilities of what we stand to lose in an all-out cyber war-our individual and national security among them-are just as chilling. Powerful and convincing, Cyber War begins the critical debate about the next great threat to national security.

Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake (Author), Pete Larkin (Narrator)

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Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters

"Your government failed you . . . and I failed you." Richard Clarke's dramatic statement to the grieving families during the 9-11 Commission hearings touched a raw nerve across America. Not only had our government failed to prevent the 2001 terrorist attacks, but it has proven itself, time and again, incapable of handling the majority of our most crucial national security issues, from Iraq to Katrina and beyond. This is not just a temporary failure of our current leadership, it is a systemic problem, the result of a pattern of incompetence that must be understood, confronted, and prevented. In Your Government Failed You, Clarke looks at why these unconscionable failures have continued and how America and the world can succeed against the terrorists. Clarke minces no words in his examination of the breadth and depth of the mediocrity, entropy and collapse endemic in America's national security programs. In order for the United States to stop its string of strategic mistakes, we first need to understand why they happen. Clarke gives us a privileged, if horrifying, inside look into the debacle of the government policies, discovering patterns in the failure and offering ways to stop the cycle once and for all.

Richard A. Clarke (Author), Richard A. Clarke (Narrator)

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Breakpoint

Richard A. Clarke (Author), Robertson Dean (Narrator)

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Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror

"The [Bush] administration has squandered the opportunity to eliminate al Qaeda....A new al Qaeda has emerged and is growing stronger, in part because of our own actions and inactions. It is in many ways a tougher opponent than the original threat we faced before September 11, and we are not doing what is necessary to make America safe from that threat." No one has more authority to make that claim than Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar for both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The one person who knows more about Usama bin Laden and al Qaeda than anyone else in this country, he has devoted two decades of his professional life to combating terrorism. Richard Clarke served seven presidents and worked inside the White House for George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush until he resigned in March 2003. He knows, better than anyone, the hidden successes and failures of the Clinton years. He knows, better than anyone, why we failed to prevent 9/11. He knows, better than anyone, how President Bush reacted to the attack and what happened behind the scenes in the days that followed. He knows whether or not Iraq presented a terrorist threat to the United States and whether there were hidden costs to the invasion of that country. Most disturbing of all are Clarke's revelations about the Bush administration's lack of interest in al Qaeda prior to September 11. From the moment the Bush team took office and decided to retain Clarke in his post as the counterterrorism czar, Clarke tried to persuade them to take al Qaeda as seriously as had Bill Clinton. For months, he was denied the opportunity even to make his case to Bush. He encountered key officials who gave the impression that they had never heard of al Qaeda; who focused incessantly on Iraq; who even advocated long-discredited conspiracy theories about Saddam's involvement in previous attacks on the United States. Clarke was the nation's crisis manager on 9/11, running the Situation Room -- a scene described here for the first time -- and then watched in dismay at what followed. After ignoring existing plans to attack al Qaeda when he first took office, George Bush made disastrous decisions when he finally did pay attention. Coming from a man known as one of the hard-liners against terrorists, Against All Enemies is both a powerful history of our two-decades-long confrontation with terrorism and a searing indictment of the current administration.

Richard A. Clarke (Author), Richard A. Clarke (Narrator)

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