What’s on My Reading List

0:00Your credit card company is hoping you don't hear this. They're charging you 21% APR interest, making it hard to pay down your balance. A home equity loan from Rocket Mortgage could cut your interest rate by more than half, so you could wipe out your high interest credit card debt with the equity you've built in your home without touching your current mortgage rate. See how much you could save at rocketmortgage.com. Rocket Mortgage LLC, License & 50 States, and MLS Consumer Access.org, No. 3030, call 8004 Rocket for full program details. Welcome to the Watch floor. I'm Sarah Adams. We spend a lot of time in here talking about threats, terrorism, intelligence, and preparedness.

1:04Today, though, I want to do something a little different and give you six new books that are on my radar. One of them I'm reading right now, and the other five have made it onto my reading list because they deal with subjects we talk about all the time on the show. And obviously, you don't want only one source of information on a topic. If you hear something, I say that's interesting. You should be looking for others who are discussing it so you get different perspectives. So this is, of course, not a book review. These are just items that caught my attention and want to flag them for you. But there is a common thread running through all of them. It's kind of the idea of warning, resilience, and what happens when people are in institutions fail to recognize a threat early enough. The first one is the one I'm actually reading right now. It's rooftop Korean, a memoir of the 1992 LA riots by Tony Moon.

2:05I mean, this is one I've been looking forward to for years. So I'm actually excited that it is now in a book. It was released September 15th. Moon recounts what he and other Korean Americans experienced during the 1992 Los Angeles riots when widespread violence overwhelmed normal public safety systems and communities were suddenly forced to make decisions about protecting themselves, their families, and their businesses. I mean, this is perfect for when we say, especially what Scott Mann repeatedly says, no one is coming to save you. Most people have seen the photographs of arm Korean businessmen standing on the rooftops. Those images became iconic in part of the history of the riots. But what interests me is everything that happened before those famous photographs were taken. How quickly did things deteriorate? When did people understand that police and emergency services were not going to be able to protect everyone?

3:10How did families and neighbors communicate? How did communities organize? And at what point did people recognize that the responsibility for their immediate safety had shifted to them? Those are questions you should have when you live with a resilient mindset. We tend to talk about preparedness as something you do for hurricanes, power outages, or natural disasters. But civil disorder is another form of disruption. And we saw this plenty after, of course, the hurricanes hit the Carolinas. And one of the lessons I'm taking away from this book is how quickly assumptions about normal life can change. So I've started rooftop Korean. Super happy with it so far. Highly recommended. I believe you will learn things that you never even understood about these events. The next book on my list is The Defector. By Richard Kerbaj. It was released September 1st and it tells the story of Oleg Lylin, a Soviet KGB officer who defected to Britain in 1971.

4:16His information exposed covert Soviet operations and forced Britain to expel more than 100 Soviet officials in one of the largest counterintelligence actions of the Cold War. But what caught my attention is that the book appears to go deeper than the defection itself. It goes into the relationship between British and American intelligence, competing information from defectors, concerns over Soviet penetrations, and what happens inside intelligence services when nobody is quite sure who to trust. This is a counterintelligence problem that really never goes away. You have to question your information. You have to question your sources. You have to consider deception. But if suspicion takes over the process, that can create its own blind spots. So I'm interested in seeing how Kerbaj handles that balance. And what lessons from that period still apply today.

5:17The third book kind of helps give you tools to do things like analysis better. It's called predictive intelligence for tomorrow's threats, edited by Eric Dahl and David Schrock and Morris. This one was released August 27th. The reason it immediately caught my attention is pretty simple. It asks one of the central questions in intelligence. Why are we so good at explaining attacks afterward and often much less successful at providing warnings beforehand? There is an important distinction here, right? This is something I'm talking about all the time. After an attack, people immediately asked why intelligence didn't know. Why didn't they warn? What did they miss? Sometimes intelligence did know something. The real failure may have been somewhere else. The information did not reach the right person. Analysts did not recognize its significance.

6:17The warning was too vague to drive action. Decision makers did not believe it. Or pieces of information sitting in different places were never put together. Good intelligence is not about producing a perfect report after something happens. The objective is to identify enough of the threat beforehand that somebody still has an opportunity to act. Right? Nothing beats time. That's why I tell people all the time, you are lucky. You know when an attack is coming, you have the time to prepare. Please use it. Anything that seriously examines this problem is of course going to get my attention. The fourth book takes us to Europe. It is Understanding Spanish Gihottas Terrorism by Carlos Yebra Lopez. It was also released on August 27th. I wanted to include this one because a lot of the terrorism discussion on the show is US focused. But Gihottas Terrorism is obviously not just an American problem.

7:21Europe has dealt with its own networks, recruitment pipelines, radicalization challenges, foreign fighters and terrorist attacks. Spain also occupies a particularly interesting place in that history. There was of course the 2004 Madrid train bombings. This was one of the key events that actually pushed me into a career to do with terrorism because in 2005 I was in Spain and actually got debris things from some of the investigators who worked on that incident. And it was one of the first times I thought myself, hey, I could be investigating these sorts of attacks. And then of course I ended up getting pulled into the whole world of that. After so many years now in this field, one problem I see is when terrorism in Europe is discussed, it's just kind of this blanket European terrorism. Nobody really gets into the details. And I think we're missing a lot of knowledge when we don't.

8:24There's this great initiative out of Italy called the Monitoring Gihottism Project. That's one really great tool you should look at. They focus on the Italy piece of it. Now of course this book then brings us to the piece that is solely Spain. Without treating European terrorism as one single problem, right? France is not Spain. Spain is not Belgium. Belgium is not the United Kingdom. There's different communities, different networks, different histories, and sometimes different indicators. So for those watching or listening in Europe, I wanted at least one book on the list that looks at the threat from that perspective. My fifth book kind of moves from the intelligence and terrorism space directly into preparedness. It's called Common Sense Preparedness. Building resilience for uncertain times by Laurie Neverman. And this was released September 15th. The title is what caught my attention because I'm constantly telling people to prepare. But I want Common Sense Preparedness.

9:26We're not talking about the collapses civilization here. We want you to do little things. You should have water. You should have food. You should have basic first aid supplies and skills. You should know how you're going to communicate with your family if the cell service goes down. You should understand where you're going to go if you are forced to leave your home. And you should have some idea of what your household can handle for 24 hours, 72 hours, or just even a week's time. None of that requires panic. Preparedness gives you options. The person who has already thought through a problem is starting from a very different position than the person encountering that problem for the first time during an emergency. And the final book on my radar is The Protector's Edge. Leadership through strategy and action by Charles Randolph, Jonathan Wacker out in Fred Burton. Obviously, anything with Fred Burton's name on it gets me to zone right in.

10:30I love all of the things he works on. It was released this summer and looks at the evolution of protective security. We just talked about the Utah Valley University's report into the assassination of Charlie Kirk. This is another tool in the toolkit. If you want to learn more about how this works when it comes to protective security, it's not a series of reactions to individual threats. A concerning person appears. You respond. A threat comes in. You respond. Someone notices a suspicious behavior. You respond. Those actions may all be necessary, but they are not the same thing as running a protective security operation. A real operation is continuously looking at the threat environment. It identifies vulnerabilities. It collects information. It recognizes changes. It shares information across the people responsible for protection,

11:31and it adjusts before something happens. This is the part of the book I'm the most interested in, because I have threats against my life. From what I've seen, the best protective operation is not necessarily the one that reacts fast as once the attack begins. It's the one that identifies enough beforehand that the attacker never gets the opportunity. That's why this is sitting on my reading list right now. It's six very different books, but when I look at them together, I keep coming back to the same idea, recognize the problem early. Whether you're protecting a country, a community, an organization, your own family or yourself, time matters. The earlier you can recognize that something is changing, the more opportunities you have. If you've seen any recent books, you know that help us get ahead of big problems, please send them my way. Thanks for being here today on The Watch Floor.