"From the time she was a young girl, Luisa Voekler has loved solving puzzles and cracking codes. Brilliant and logical, she’s expected to quickly climb the career ladder at the CIA. But while her coworkers have moved on to thrilling Cold War assignments—especially in the exhilarating era of the late 1980s—Luisa’s work remains stuck in the past decoding messages from World War II. Journalist Haris Voekler grew up a proud East Berliner. But...

"Throughout the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union strategized to prop up friendly dictatorships abroad. Today, it is commonly assumed that the two superpowers' military aid enabled the survival of allied autocrats, from Taiwan's Chiang Kai-shek to Ethiopia's Mengistu Haile Mariam. In Up in Arms, political scientist Adam E. Casey rebuts the received wisdom: Cold War-era aid to autocracies often backfired. Casey draws on extensive original...