Four Books.
One Tradecraft.
Treadstone 71 has spent since 2002 in the cognitive fight — running the operations, building the analysts, naming the doctrine. That work now sits on a shelf: two field references and two novels by Jeffrey Bardin, a career intelligence officer. Read apart, each stands alone. Read together, a curriculum disguised as a bookshelf.
A single body of knowledge, split four ways.
Most intelligence books pick a lane. They teach method, or they tell a story, and they rarely admit the two are the same craft seen from different chairs. These four refuse the split. The references carry the doctrine and the technique. The novels carry the texture — the way an alias ages on a face, the way a betrayal feels in the hand, the price the work extracts from the operator who runs it.
Drawn from real cases and written by a practitioner who has both run operations and trained the people who hunt them, the set forms one progression: understand the fight, master the method, then live inside the consequence. The novels are not a reward for finishing the manuals. The novels are the manuals, told straight.
The Mind Domain
How foreign services map a population and move whole publics without firing a round — and the tell that gives each one away.
Tradecraft at Machine Speed
Sixty-six structured analytic techniques for analysts who apply the method during the incident, not after it.
The Two Novels
Deep cover rendered without a safety net. The full analog and digital trade, and what it costs to run it for twenty years.
Doctrine and method, built for pressure.
Two hardcover references that turn decades of Treadstone 71 practice into something an analyst opens during the campaign. Estimative language throughout. Real adversaries worked as live cases.
Cognitive Operations & AI-Era Influence
The Mind Domain
A Practitioner's Doctrine — People Intelligence · Narrative Intelligence · Cognitive Warfare · by Jeffrey Bardin
Wars now open in the mind. The sabotage, the leak, the ballot — each one lands after the story has already turned the ground. Twenty-three chapters lay out how foreign services map a population, shape what it believes, and move whole publics without firing a round.
Russia comes first, because Russia has done this longest and at the largest scale. China follows, with patient networks strung through business, press, and the schools. Then Iran and North Korea. For every adversary the book hands you two things: the play they run, and the tell that gives them away. AI runs front to back — the same models that draft your reports now draft an adversary's personas, clone a voice, and flood a feed.
- ▸Population mapping and narrative intelligence
- ▸Source ranking and plainly stated confidence
- ▸Adversary playbooks: the play and the tell, by nation
- ▸Where AI sharpens the threat — and the prints it leaves
- ▸Rules of engagement that hold up in law and in public
Hardcover · Pairs with the two-tier Cognitive Operations programme
Find on AmazonCyber Threat Intel · Cognitive Warfare · AI-Era
Tradecraft at Machine Speed
Advanced Structured Analytic Techniques · by Jeffrey Bardin
When adversaries automate cyber operations and shape reality at industrial scale, conventional analysis falls behind. This reference answers with sixty-six structured analytic techniques across nine families, built to advance the classic Heuer–Pherson canon into modern hybrid conflict.
An operational, eight-part execution structure for teams working under pressure. Salt Typhoon, Volt Typhoon, Spamouflage, and Wagner worked as live cases. Sherman Kent estimative language and source-quality tags throughout. Built for the analyst who applies the method during the incident — not in the after-action.
- ▸66 structured analytic techniques, nine families
- ▸Eight-part execution structure for live operations
- ▸Estimative probability language and source-quality tagging
- ▸Threat calibration through offensive-tradecraft analytics
- ▸Real campaign teardowns, worked end to end
Hardcover · Advances the Heuer–Pherson SAT canon
Find on AmazonFiction. The texture is not.
Two tragedies in a thriller's coat, in the tradition of le Carré and Forsyth, written by a career intelligence officer. Every operational detail is drawn from the real trade.
Deep Cover · Moral Injury · The Making of an Enemy
The Cyclone Inheritance
by Jeffrey Bardin
Eighteen chapters. One decade. One man who stops being himself. Rhys Morgan, flagged at twelve as something rare, claimed years later by a service with no name. The service takes his one gift — an ear that hears the shape of a language before he knows a word of it — and builds other men out of him.
Hamburg. Beirut. Istanbul. The analog trade run the hard way: aliases aged in person, paranoid networks earned and then turned, dead drops, cassettes, money sewn into a coat lining. Then a cover demands a price with a body count — and in the white heat of Jeddah he shakes the hand of a soft-spoken young veteran of the war he helped win, and understands, far too late, that he had a hand in building the next one.
- ▸Legend-building and alias aging, done in person
- ▸Agent recruitment, network penetration, and turning
- ▸Dead drops, brush passes, analog secure comms
- ▸The moral injury of sustained deep cover
- ▸Blowback, taught as a strategic lesson, not a footnote
Paperback · East 71st Tradecraft Publishing
Find on AmazonDeep Cover · Divided Loyalty · The Unmaking of a Self
The Quiet Siege
by Jeffrey S. Bardin
Ten chapters. Twenty years. One woman who becomes everyone but herself. Elena Vavilova — a Tomsk University idealist recruited young, remade at Yasenevo, then sent west to vanish into a life assembled from a dead child's name, the legend the world later knew as Tracey Foley.
Toronto. Cambridge. The bland green suburbs of the enemy, inhabited for two decades. The slow trade run with monastic patience: coded bursts ticking off a shortwave after midnight, messages folded into the pixels of a vacation photo, cash lifted from a hole in the frozen ground, neighbors loved and quietly filed. Then the life she faked so flawlessly produces the one thing she cannot fake — two sons she loves without performance — and the mission asks her to raise them inside the lie.
- ▸The illegals programme, seen from the inside
- ▸Steganography — live messaging hidden in image pixels
- ▸Shortwave burst comms, caches, and identity laundering
- ▸Twenty-year cover maintenance under counterintelligence pressure
- ▸Counterintelligence failure as a cautionary case study
Paperback · East 71st Tradecraft Publishing
Find on AmazonStrip away the plot and a novel by a career officer is a field manual that happens to keep you up at night.
The trade, rendered exactly
The references tell you how a technique works. The novels show you how it feels to run it for real — the patience a recruitment demands, the cold arithmetic of a dead drop, the discipline of a legend that has to survive a curious neighbor and a hostile service for twenty years. Texture the manuals cannot carry, the fiction delivers without flinching.
Legend & alias craftRecruit · penetrate · turnDead drops & brush passesSteganographyBurst comms · cachesThe cost, made impossible to ignore
Every analyst studies counterintelligence failure as a diagram. These books make you live it — the moral injury of deep cover, the betrayal traded for a lie that must hold, the operator who wins the mission and loses the self that started it. Read the doctrine to understand the fight. Read the novels to understand the people inside it, on both sides of the wire.
Moral injuryDivided loyaltyCI failure, livedBlowback as doctrineThe operator's priceAll four. On Amazon.com.
The two novels are available now. The two field references release this summer — The Mind Domain in mid-July 2026 and Tradecraft at Machine Speed in early August 2026. Every title publishes through East 71st Tradecraft Publishing and lists on Amazon.com.
Read the books.
Then run the method.
The doctrine changes how you see the next campaign run against your people. The method turns the worry into a named, evidenced finding. The novels make sure you never forget what the work costs. Bring all of it to your unit.
