The Invisible Empire Israel's AI Warriors and the Algorithmic Future of Warfare (Paperback)

They told us algorithms would make war more precise. They were right. They just didn't tell us what else they'd make possible.

Between 2020 and 2025, Israel's legendary Unit 8200 crossed a line that changed warfare forever. What began as cyber defense evolved into something unprecedented: AI systems that could identify targets, calculate "acceptable" casualties, and recommend strikes faster than human conscience could process them.

THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE takes you inside the secure facilities where operators approve kills in twenty seconds that should take twenty hours, where facial recognition hunts targets across Gaza, where algorithms named "Lavender" and "Gospel" industrialize death with mathematical precision.

Through composite characters based on real testimonies, witness: - The analyst who approved 800 targets and can't sleep anymore - The engineer who built the targeting system and now questions everything
- The whistle-blowers who broke silence because silence became complicity - The recruits refusing to weaponize their skills for algorithmic warfare

From cyber-assassinations in Iran to the catastrophic intelligence failure of October 7, from systematic surveillance of Palestinians to the global export of these tools, this book exposes how a small nation became the laboratory where the future of warfare is being tested.

Based on ground-breaking investigative journalism, leaked documents, and veteran testimony, this narrative non-fiction reveals the terrifying reality: we've entered an age where machines recommend who dies, humans rubber-stamp those decisions in seconds, and killing feels like data entry.

The algorithms don't sleep. The surveillance never stops. And what Israel pioneered, the world is copying.

Author's Note: This is narrative non-fiction using composite characters and reconstructed dialogue based on extensive research to reveal how these closed systems actually operate.

I was born in Varna, Bulgaria, on the edge of the Black Sea - a place where history is never really "past". Growing up between old empires and new borders, I was surrounded by stories of wars, occupations, disappearances and sudden changes of flag.

Later I moved to Warsaw, Poland, where I studied history and public relations at the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). Warsaw is a city built on ruins and memories, and it forced me to ask one question over and over again:

Why is so much of our most important history told in the most boring way possible?

From dry facts to living stories

Like every history student, I spent endless hours buried in heavy academic books - dates, treaties, footnotes stacked on footnotes. I respected the work, but I often felt like the life had been drained out of the events themselves.

That changed when I discovered Ryszard Kapuściński. His books had that rare tone I'd been searching for: history and politics told through people, scenes and atmosphere. It was factual, but it breathed.

From that moment I knew what I wanted to do: take serious history and tell it with the clarity and tension of a documentary - so future generations don't have to suffer through dead, lifeless books to understand the past.

What I write about

My books focus on the places where power is most visible - and most hidden:

• Wars and battles
• Espionage and cyber conflict
• Country histories

Some books are big, sweeping national histories. Others zoom in on a single battle, uprising or covert operation. All of them try to answer the same question: What really happened here, and what does it mean for the people who had to live through it?

How I tell history

If you read my books, you can expect narrative, scene-by-scene storytelling - not just lists of dates. Serious research from archives, memoirs, official reports and investigative journalism. Clear explanations of complex events like cyberattacks and proxy wars. And a refusal to simplify messy, uncomfortable truths.

I don't write official history. I don't write propaganda. I write stories that are honest, human and readable - the kind of books I was always looking for as a student and rarely found.

If you care about how we got from trenches and partitions to cyberwar and drone strikes - and you don't want to fall asleep over another textbook - I wrote these books for you.