Spy Schools

An exposé revealing how academia has become the center of foreign and domestic espionage—and why that is troubling news for our nation's security.

Grounded in extensive research and reporting, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Daniel Golden's Spy Schools reveals how academia has emerged as a frontline in the global spy game. In a knowledge-based economy, universities are repositories of valuable information and research, where brilliant minds of all nationalities mingle freely with few questions asked. Intelligence agencies have always recruited bright undergraduates, but now, in an era when espionage increasingly requires specialized scientific or technological expertise, they're wooing higher-level academics—not just as analysts, but also for clandestine operations.

Golden uncovers unbelievable campus activity—from the CIA placing agents undercover in Harvard Kennedy School classes and staging academic conferences to persuade Iranian nuclear scientists to defect, to a Chinese graduate student at Duke University stealing research for an invisibility cloak, and a tiny liberal arts college in Marietta, Ohio, exchanging faculty with China's most notorious spy school. He shows how relentlessly and ruthlessly this practice has permeated our culture, not just inside the US, but internationally as well. Golden blows the lid off this secret culture of espionage and its consequences at home and abroad.

“Whether you are a teacher, student or parent, Daniel Golden’s closely researched account of the assault on our academic freedoms by home-grown intelligence services is timely and shocking.” -John le Carré

“It’s real-life ‘Spy vs. Spy' . . . [a] fascinating book.” -Washington Post