Ambassador Joe DeTrani’s The North Korean Threat: Intelligence and Diplomacy — A Personal Memoir is a candid insider’s account of more than three decades navigating the perilous world of U.S.–North Korea relations. We’ll talk with him about some of his experiences as a CIA officer, senior U.S. negotiator, and Special Envoy for the Six-Party Talks. In his book, which is available for free at this site, DeTrani blends gripping personal stories with sharp analysis of nuclear diplomacy, intelligence challenges, and the delicate regional dynamics that shaped negotiations. The memoir offers rare insights into the mindset of Pyongyang’s leadership and the enduring importance of vigilance, credible intelligence, and sustained dialogue.

Lots of forces were released when the Soviet Union came apart in the early 1990s. Brad Meslin imagines the worst case scenario in his novel “The Moldavian Gambit” in which a man-portable nuclear device goes missing from a Soviet arsenal in Moldova and may have ended up in the hands of terrorists threatening to detonate in a western capital. Meslin has worked in “the intersection of aerospace, defense, private equity, and national security.” His debut novel was very favorably reviewed in the Cipher Brief by former CIA counterproliferation officer Jim Lawler who praised the book for its realism and heart-stopping plot. We will talk with Meslin about what inspired him to write the book and his sources and methods for keeping readers at the edge of their seats.

In October1979, the most powerful cyclone in recorded history, raced across the Pacific and set in motion circumstances that caused a horrendous fire at a U.S. Marine Corps facility at the foot of Japan’s Mount Fuji. Thirteen Marines died of their burns and more than 70 other people were seriously injured. And yet few people today know of or remember these events. Chas Henry who served twenty years as a Marine and went on to have a highly successful career as a broadcast journalist – is out with a new book called “Fuji Fire: Sifting Ashes of a Forgotten U.S. Marine Corps Tragedy.” We will talk with him about his four-year-long effort to investigate the tragedy and what he learned about the chaos of the mass casualty event and the courage of those who fought the fire and battled their injuries during the long recovery process. We will ask him why a disaster of such magnitude is so little remembered and why official investigations into the fire appear to have been so limited.