Jamie Smith Gray Work

Blackwater blanketed the headlines like a fresh disease waiting to break free on a danger zone. Who had ever heard of a private security team being trained like warriors of massive destruction? From the iHeart Radio Studio I'm Unplugged and Totally Uncut with the man that created Blackwater. Jamie Smith This April readers will finally get a look inside the secret lives of America’s private warriors and their covert work around the world when William Morrow releases the highly anticipated and unprecedented memoir GRAY WORK: Confessions of an American Paramilitary Spy by Jamie Smith (William Morrow Hardcover; April 7, 2015; $27.99), a paramilitary contractor with more than two decades of experience. As founding director of Blackwater Security, one of the most successful global private security-contracting firms, and then as head of his own company, Smith has helped shape a decade of war. He argues that the men and women who serve in this gray area between the public and the private worlds are transforming the art and science of modern warfare—and that they have become indispensable. Combining the thrilling narrative of an international spy thriller with bracing boots-on-the-ground realism, GRAY WORK follows Smith through grinding CIA training and his career as an operative, his work with Blackwater Security, the creation of his own successful company, and the planning and execution of hundreds of missions on behalf of government agencies and private industry in some of the world’s most dangerous hot spots. For the first time, Smith breaks his silence, by pulling back the curtain to reveal in raw, intimate terms exactly what paramilitary spies and operators like him do when the government cannot act or take public responsibility. Here is the grit and gristle of modern war, from espionage and assassinations to rescues and renditions, from the dark corners of the Arab Spring and the fall of Qadhafi to black ops in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and beyond. Smith has fought terrorists and won; he was ambushed on a mission in Pakistan and took a bullet through his shoulder and into his back, and subsequently survived a grueling mountain trek that almost cost him his life. GRAY WORK is as exhilarating as the best novels by Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler, Vince Flynn, and Brad Thor—and all the more so because it’s true.