Download or read book BRIXMIS and the Secret Cold War written by Andrew Long and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2024-09-30 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed account of British intelligence operations in Cold War East Germany, revealing Soviet and East German military secrets from 1946 to 1990. The German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, was the frontline in the Cold War, packed with hundreds of thousands of Soviet and East German troops armed with the latest Warsaw Pact equipment, lined up along the 1,400 km Inner German Border. However, because of the repressive East German police state, little human intelligence about these forces reached the West. Who were they? Where were they located? What were they doing? How were they equipped? What were their intentions? NATO was lined up in West Germany to face these forces and relied on getting up-to-date intelligence to warn of any threat, ‘Indicators of Hostility’ that could be a precursor to an invasion. BRIXMIS, the British Commanders’-in-Chief Mission to the Soviet Forces in Germany, was on hand to provide that intelligence. Thanks to an obscure 1946 agreement between the British and Soviets that established ‘liaison missions’ in their respective zones of occupation, the British were able to send highly qualified military ‘observers’ into East Germany to roam (relatively) freely and keep an eye on what was going on. What started as ‘liaison’, a point of contact between the British and Soviet occupation forces, developed into a very sophisticated intelligence collection operation, sending ‘tours’ out every day of the year, between 1946 and when the Mission closed in 1990. These tours were undertaken in high-performance, highly modified marked vehicles, with personnel in uniform and unarmed, apart from professional photographic equipment and occasionally some top-secret gadgets from the boffins back in the UK. They joined their French and American colleagues in snooping around the opposition, photographing military bases, equipment, and maneuvers, and trying to evade capture by the secret police and counterintelligence units. They faced danger and violence daily, but thanks to their bravery and professionalism, the West had accurate and up-to-date information on what was happening in East Germany which helped keep the peace all that time. This is the story of this little-known unit and their exploits behind enemy lines.
Download or read book Brixmis written by Tony Geraghty and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 1997 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text presents the secrets of how British intelligence officers working undercover as liaison officers in East Germany stole advanced Soviet equipment and penetrated top-secret training areas. For 40 years the men from all three armed services, the SAS and the Foreign Office conducted an intelligence war against the massive Soviet military strength.
Download or read book Special Forces Berlin written by James Stejskal and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2017-02-15 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The previously untold story of a Cold War spy unit, “one of the best examples of applied unconventional warfare in special operations history” (Small Wars Journal). It is a little-known fact that during the Cold War, two US Army Special Forces detachments were stationed far behind the Iron Curtain in West Berlin. The existence and missions of the two detachments were highly classified secrets. The massive armies of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies posed a huge threat to the nations of Western Europe. US military planners decided they needed a plan to slow the expected juggernaut, if and when a war began. This plan was Special Forces Berlin. Their mission—should hostilities commence—was to wreak havoc behind enemy lines and buy time for vastly outnumbered NATO forces to conduct a breakout from the city. In reality, it was an ambitious and extremely dangerous mission, even suicidal. Highly trained and fluent in German, each of these one hundred soldiers and their successors was allocated a specific area. They were skilled in clandestine operations, sabotage, and intelligence tradecraft, and were able to act, if necessary, as independent operators, blending into the local population and working unseen in a city awash with spies looking for information on their every move. Special Forces Berlin left a legacy of a new type of soldier, expert in unconventional warfare, that was sought after for other deployments, including the attempted rescue of American hostages from Tehran in 1979. With the US government officially acknowledging their existence in 2014, their incredible story can now be told—by one of their own.
Download or read book Checkmate in Berlin written by Giles Milton and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a master of popular history, the lively, immersive story of the race to seize Berlin in the aftermath of World War II as it’s never been told before BERLIN’S FATE WAS SEALED AT THE 1945 YALTA CONFERENCE: the city, along with the rest of Germany, was to be carved up among the victorious powers— the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. On paper, it seemed a pragmatic solution. In reality, once the four powers were no longer united by the common purpose of defeating Germany, they wasted little time reverting to their prewar hostility toward—and suspicion of—one another. The veneer of civility between the Western allies and the Soviets was to break down in spectacular fashion in Berlin. Rival systems, rival ideologies, and rival personalities ensured that the German capital became an explosive battleground. The warring leaders who ran Berlin’s four sectors were charismatic, mercurial men, and Giles Milton brings them all to rich and thrilling life here. We meet unforgettable individuals like America’s explosive Frank “Howlin’ Mad” Howley, a brusque sharp-tongued colonel with a relish for mischief and a loathing for all Russians. Appointed commandant of the city’s American sector, Howley fought an intensely personal battle against his wily nemesis, General Alexander Kotikov, commandant of the Soviet sector. Kotikov oozed charm as he proposed vodka toasts at his alcohol-fueled parties, but Howley correctly suspected his Soviet rival was Stalin’s agent, appointed to evict the Western allies from Berlin and ultimately from Germany as well. Throughout, Checkmate in Berlin recounts the first battle of the Cold War as we’ve never before seen it. An exhilarating tale of intense rivalry and raw power, it is above all a story of flawed individuals who were determined to win, and Milton does a masterful job of weaving between all the key players’ motivations and thinking at every turn. A story of unprecedented human drama, it’s one that had a profound, and often underestimated, shaping force on the modern world – one that’s still felt today.
Download or read book The Billion Dollar Spy written by David E. Hoffman and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year • Drawing on previously classified CIA documents and on interviews with firsthand participants, The Billion Dollar Spy is a brilliant feat of reporting and a riveting true story of intrigue in the final years of the Cold War. It was the height of the Cold War, and a dangerous time to be stationed in the Soviet Union. One evening, while the chief of the CIA’s Moscow station was filling his gas tank, a stranger approached and dropped a note into the car. The chief, suspicious of a KGB trap, ignored the overture. But the man had made up his mind. His attempts to establish contact with the CIA would be rebuffed four times before he thrust upon them an envelope whose contents would stun U.S. intelligence. In the years that followed, that man, Adolf Tolkachev, became one of the most valuable spies ever for the U.S. But these activities posed an enormous personal threat to Tolkachev and his American handlers. They had clandestine meetings in parks and on street corners, and used spy cameras, props, and private codes, eluding the ever-present KGB in its own backyard—until a shocking betrayal put them all at risk.
Download or read book Deep Undercover written by Jack Barsky and published by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 2017 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ex-Soviet KGB agent details his primary mission to work undercover in the United States for over a decade and discusses his change of allegiance and defection from the KGB. --Publisher's description.
Download or read book The Cold War Wilderness of Mirrors written by Aden Magee and published by Casemate. This book was released on 2021-07-31 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book details the Soviet Military Liaison Mission (SMLM) in West Germany and the U.S. Military Liaison Mission (USMLM) in East Germany as microcosms of the Cold War strategic intelligence and counterintelligence landscape. Thirty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet and U.S. Military Liaison Missions are all but forgotten. Their operation was established by a post-WWII Allied occupation forces' agreement, and missions had relative freedom to travel and collect intelligence throughout East and West Germany from 1947 until 1990. This book addresses Cold War intelligence and counterintelligence in a manner that provides a broad historical perspective and then brings the reader to a never-before documented artifact of Cold War history. The book details the intelligence/counterintelligence dynamic that was among the most emblematic of the Cold War. Ultimately, the book addresses a saga that remains one of the true Cold War enigmas.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of International Intelligence written by Nigel West and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-05-21 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intelligence is now acknowledged as the hidden dimension to international diplomacy and national security. It is the hidden piece of the jigsaw puzzle of global relations that cements relationships, undermines alliances and topples tyrants, and after many decades of being deliberately overlooked or avoided, it is now regarded as a subject of legitimate study by academics and historians. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of International Intelligence covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on espionage techniques, categories of agents, crucial operations spies, defectors, moles, double and triple agents, and the tradecraft they apply. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the international intelligence.
Download or read book Able Archer 83 written by Nate Jones and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In November 1983, Soviet nuclear forces went on high alert. After months nervously watching increasingly assertive NATO military posturing, Soviet intelligence agencies in Western Europe received flash telegrams reporting alarming activity on U.S. bases. In response, the Soviets began planning for a countdown to a nuclear first strike by NATO on Eastern Europe. And then Able Archer 83, a vast NATO war game exercise that modeled a Soviet attack on NATO allies, ended. What the West didn't know at the time was that the Soviets thought Operation Able Archer 83 was real and were actively preparing for a surprise missile attack from NATO. This close scrape with Armageddon was largely unknown until last October when the U.S. government released a ninety-four-page presidential analysis of Able Archer that the National Security Archive had spent over a decade trying to declassify. Able Archer 83 is based upon more than a thousand pages of declassified documents that archive staffer Nate Jones has pried loose from several U.S. government agencies and British archives, as well as from formerly classified Soviet Politburo and KGB files, vividly recreating the atmosphere that nearly unleashed nuclear war.
Download or read book Looking Down the Corridors written by Kevin Wright and published by History Press. This book was released on 2017-04-03 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1945 and 1990 the Western Allies mounted some of the most audacious and successful intelligence collection operations of the Cold War. Conducted in great secrecy, aircrews flew specially modified transport and training aircraft along the Berlin Air Corridors and Control Zone to gather intelligence on Soviet and East German military targets in the German Democratic Republic and around Berlin. The Air Corridors comprised three regulated airways for civil and military air traffic that connected West Berlin to West Germany. Operating under the guise of innocent transport and training flights, the pilots used their right of access to gather huge amounts of imagery for forty-five years. They also provided the western intelligence community with unique knowledge of the organisation and equipment used by Warsaw Pact forces.For the first time, using recently declassified materials and extensive interviews with those involved, Looking Down the Corridors provides a detailed account and analysis of these operations and their unique contribution to the Cold War.
Download or read book The Skripal Files written by Mark Urban and published by Macmillan Publishers Aus.. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 4th March 2018, Salisbury, England. Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were enjoying a rare and peaceful Sunday spent together, completely unaware they had been poisoned with the deadly nerve agent Novichok. Hours later both were found slumped on a park bench close to death. Following their attempted murders on British soil, Russia was publically accused by the West of carrying out the attack, marking a new low for international relations between the two since the end of the Cold War. The Skripal Files is the definitive account of how Skripal's story fits into the wider context of the new spy war between Russia and the West. The Skripal Files explores the time Skripal spent as a spy in the Russian Military Intelligence, how he was turned to work as an agent by MI6, his imprisonment in Russia and his eventual release as part of a spy-swap that would bring him to Salisbury, where on that fateful day he and his daughter found themselves fighting for their lives.
Download or read book The Cybersecurity Dilemma written by Ben Buchanan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do nations break into one another's most important computer networks? There is an obvious answer: to steal valuable information or to attack. But this isn't the full story. This book draws on often-overlooked documents leaked by Edward Snowden, real-world case studies of cyber operations, and policymaker perspectives to show that intruding into other countries' networks has enormous defensive value as well. Two nations, neither of which seeks to harm the other but neither of which trusts the other, will often find it prudent to launch intrusions. This general problem, in which a nation's means of securing itself threatens the security of others and risks escalating tension, is a bedrock concept in international relations and is called the 'security dilemma'. This book shows not only that the security dilemma applies to cyber operations, but also that the particular characteristics of the digital domain mean that the effects are deeply pronounced. The cybersecurity dilemma is both a vital concern of modern statecraft and a means of accessibly understanding the essential components of cyber operations.
Download or read book Edith and Kim written by Charlotte Philby and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2022-03-31 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of ‘the heirs to John le Carré’ The Times ‘A tremendous achievement’ WILLIAM BOYD ‘Behold the new Golden Age of Spy Kings’ Sunday Times
Download or read book Betrayal in Berlin written by Steve Vogel and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 682 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A riveting and vivid account. ... A remarkable story. ... It reads like a Hollywood screenplay." —Foreign Affairs The astonishing true story of the Berlin Tunnel, one of the West’s greatest espionage operations of the Cold War—and the dangerous Soviet mole who betrayed it. Its code name was “Operation Gold,” a wildly audacious CIA plan to construct a clandestine tunnel into East Berlin to tap into critical KGB and Soviet military telecommunication lines. The tunnel, crossing the border between the American and Soviet sectors, would have to be 1,500 feet (the length of the Empire State Building) with state-of-the-art equipment, built and operated literally under the feet of their Cold War adversaries. Success would provide the CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service access to a vast treasure of intelligence. Exposure might spark a dangerous confrontation with the Soviets. Yet as the Allies were burrowing into the German soil, a traitor, code-named Agent Diamond by his Soviet handlers, was burrowing into the operation itself. . . Betrayal in Berlin is Steve Vogel’s heart pounding account of the operation. He vividly recreates post-war Berlin, a scarred, shadowy snake pit with thousands of spies and innumerable cover stories. It is also the most vivid account of George Blake, perhaps the most damaging mole of the Cold War. Drawing upon years of archival research, secret documents, and rare interviews with Blake himself, Vogel has crafted a true-life spy story as thrilling as the novels of John le Carré and Len Deighton. Betrayal in Berlin includes 24 photos and two maps.
Download or read book Checkpoint Charlie written by Iain MacGregor and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'As convoluted and deadly as the plot of a novel by John le Carre, but all too real' Daily Mail, Must Reads 'With a gripping narrative and vivid interviews with those on all sides whose lives were directly affected by that grim symbol of the East-West divide that poisoned Europe for almost half a century, [MacGregor] has made an important contribution to the history of our times' Jonathan Dimbleby 'Captures brilliantly and comprehensively both the danger and exhilaration that I and other reporters, soldiers, and people experienced intersecting with the wall - a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the Europe we have inherited' Jon Snow A powerful, fascinating, and ground-breaking history of Checkpoint Charlie, the legendary and most important military gate on the border of East and West Berlin where the United States and her allies confronted the USSR during the Cold War. As the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaches in 2019, Iain MacGregor captures the mistrust, oppression, paranoia, and fear that gripped the city throughout this period. Checkpoint Charlie is about the nerve-wracking confrontation between the West and the Soviet Union that contains never-before-heard interviews with the men who built and dismantled the Wall; lovers who crossed it; relatives and friends who lost family trying to escape over it; German, British, French, and Russian soldiers who guarded its checkpoints; CIA, MI6 and Stasi operatives who oversaw secret operations across its borders; politicians whose ambitions shaped it; journalists who recorded its story; and many more whose living memories contributed to the full story of Checkpoint Charlie. A brilliant work of historical journalism, Checkpoint Charlie is an invaluable record of this period.
Download or read book The Spycraft Manual written by Barry Davies and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Spycraft Manual is unique. There has never been a book to reveal the secret 'tradecraft' techniques used by spies the world over - until now...The Spycraft Manual is a step-by-step instruction book on the tradecraft and skills that spies use. Each individual subject contains masses of fascinating information, all graphically illustrated with simple black and white line drawings and photographs. From the seven basic drills of agent contact to satellite surveillance, The Spycraft Manual is a perfect reference to the whole world of espionage.
Download or read book UK Eyes Alpha written by Mark Urban and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2013-02-07 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of British intelligence since Gorbachev came to power in 1985. The author presents a list of what he claims are failures by every British intelligence organization, and raises questions about the value of the traditional structures and organizations that are a legacy of the Cold War.
