John Braddock, The Spy's Guide to Strategy

In A Spy's Guide to Strategy, former CIA operative John Braddock writes about the strategy of looking forward and reasoning backward. In other words, to make plans yourself or figure out someone else's likely moves, you look forward to the endgame, and then reason backward through the steps you or they have to take to get there.

Braddock discusses real-life applications of the principle, including sussing out what Bin Laden was up to and a couple of issues Braddock himself had to deal with. One of these was a surprisingly suspenseful story about his shoes going through an explosives testing machine in an airport not long after 9/11.

Braddock's writing is, in his own words, herky-jerky, and it's quite repetitive, more so in this piece than the other two books I've read by him. But reading this was still a net positive for me.