News Updates

Two Books of Interest

Repton Group founder and CEO Agostino von Hassell has co-edited two books of interest to everyone seeking increased security from terrorists for themselves, their business, or their nation. Both books revolve around the many manifestations modern terrorism has taken—and might very well take in the near future—and both give prescriptive information and tips on how to avoid being victimized by these modern barbarians.

Hassell’s co-author on each book is M.R. Haberfeld, M.R. Haberfeld, who teaches about terrorism and how to counter it as a Professor of Professor of Criminal Justice at New York City’s legendary John Jay College of Criminal Justice.  Hassell has taught these same subjects as an adjunct professor in the graduate program. Haberfeld has extensive experience in the antiterrorism field from her time serving with the Israel National Police and with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Hassell is a former Marine Intelligence Captain and Combat Correspondent who spent years combating terrorism around the world before he settled in New York City and founded The Repton Group twenty years ago.

These two terrorism experts have two new books coming out; Maritime Terrorism (Kendall Hunt Publishing, release August 2009), and A New Understanding of Terrorism (Springer Publishing, release September 2009). Maritime Terrorism addresses the operational, legal, and policy challenges maritime terrorism poses and will continue to pose in the 21^st Century. Piracy has a long history, mostly sordid and often murderous, despite its being glamorized in films and books. With its unfortunate revival in today’s headlines, chiefly perpetrated by ruthless terrorists, no book is timelier than this one.

Composed of both new and previously published articles, Maritime Terrorism offers an overview of the links and connections between modern pirates and other terrorist groups. It explores how treacherous maritime assaults in remote corners of the globe will impact the economies of the United States and other leading industrial nations and harm world commerce and tranquility.

Unless the proper techniques are used against modern pirates they are sure to disrupt the future safety and security of the shipping industry and wreak havoc on the ability of peaceful nations to ship their goods and raw materials around the world in profitable ways. Hassell and Haberfeld spell out what those proper techniques are now and how they’ll likely evolve going forward.

The authors’ second book, A New Understanding of Terrorism, is a magnum opus on every aspect of modern terrorism and the best means, both strategic and technical, to thwart it. Collections of academic articles on terrorism will not fill the intelligence and know-how gap this vast modern threat has exploited. The authors fully realize this. That’s why they’ve employed a new paradigm to get their message, their techniques, and their philosophy across to criminologists, political scientists, and criminal justice researchers.

Some chapters concentrate on analyzing terrorist attacks that have already taken place. In doing so they lay out the entire event and dissect it in order to make preventive stratagems and effective countermeasures plain and comprehensible to people with a real need to master this knowledge and pass it on to those in law enforcement, intelligence, espionage, and military work around the world.

The most piquant feature of the book, however, is the devotion the authors show to laying out possible—even probable—future scenarios likely to be attempted by terrorists. With an ingenious approach, Hassell and Haberfeld invent and explore these speculative future scenarios so fully and so roundly that they are as complete as a hologram. They are four dimensional, with even the timeline of the event playing an important part.

The result is that the futuristic treatments are as convincing as virtual reality can make them. As importantly, the authors then dissect and analyze these speculative scenarios every bit as incisively and thoroughly as they did in the instances of the historical terrorism events.

The great contribution this book makes is delineating every aspect of the modern terrorism crisis and then facilitating the education, coordination, and synergy that will be increasingly needed in the future by academic, intelligence, military, and law enforcement personnel in thwarting this crisis to ensure the safe and secure atmosphere needed to live and work in comfort and assurance in our troubled times.

Anyone who reads either or both of these books will come away much the wiser.