Download or read book Encyclopedia of Cold War Espionage Spies and Secret Operations written by Richard Trahair and published by Enigma Books. This book was released on 2012-01-10 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only comprehensive and up-to-date book of its kind with the latest information.
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 The Spy and the Traitor written by Ben Macintyre and published by Crown. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The celebrated author of Double Cross and Rogue Heroes returns with a thrilling Americans-era tale of Oleg Gordievsky, the Russian whose secret work helped hasten the end of the Cold War. “The best true spy story I have ever read.”—JOHN LE CARRÉ Named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist • Shortlisted for the Bailie Giffords Prize in Nonfiction If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation's communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union's top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6. For nearly a decade, as the Cold War reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West turn the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots, as the Soviet leadership grew increasingly paranoid at the United States's nuclear first-strike capabilities and brought the world closer to the brink of war. Desperate to keep the circle of trust close, MI6 never revealed Gordievsky's name to its counterparts in the CIA, which in turn grew obsessed with figuring out the identity of Britain's obviously top-level source. Their obsession ultimately doomed Gordievsky: the CIA officer assigned to identify him was none other than Aldrich Ames, the man who would become infamous for secretly spying for the Soviets. Unfolding the delicious three-way gamesmanship between America, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and culminating in the gripping cinematic beat-by-beat of Gordievsky's nail-biting escape from Moscow in 1985, Ben Macintyre's latest may be his best yet. Like the greatest novels of John le Carré, it brings readers deep into a world of treachery and betrayal, where the lines bleed between the personal and the professional, and one man's hatred of communism had the power to change the future of nations.
Download or read book American Spies written by Michael J. Sulick and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of Americans who spied against their country and what their stories reveal about national security What’s your secret? American Spies presents the stunning histories of more than forty Americans who spied against their country during the past six decades. Michael Sulick, former head of the CIA’s clandestine service, illustrates through these stories—some familiar, others much less well known—the common threads in the spy cases and the evolution of American attitudes toward espionage since the onset of the Cold War. After highlighting the accounts of many who have spied for traditional adversaries such as Russian and Chinese intelligence services, Sulick shows how spy hunters today confront a far broader spectrum of threats not only from hostile states but also substate groups, including those conducting cyberespionage. Sulick reveals six fundamental elements of espionage in these stories: the motivations that drove them to spy; their access and the secrets they betrayed; their tradecraft, or the techniques of concealing their espionage; their exposure; their punishment; and, finally, the damage they inflicted on America’s national security. The book is the sequel to Sulick’s popular Spying in America: Espionage from the Revolutionary War to the Dawn of the Cold War. Together they serve as a basic introduction to understanding America’s vulnerability to espionage, which has oscillated between peacetime complacency and wartime vigilance, and continues to be shaped by the inherent conflict between our nation’s security needs and our commitment to the preservation of civil liberties. Now available in paperback, with a new preface that brings the conversation up to the present, American Spies is as insightful and relevant as ever.
Download or read book Bridge of Spies written by Giles Whittell and published by Doubleday Canada. This book was released on 2010-11-09 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who were the three men the Soviet and American superpowers exchanged on Berlin's Glienicke Bridge on February 10, 1962, in the first and most legendary prisoner exhange between East and West? Bridge of Spies vividly traces the journeys of these men, whose fate defines the complex conflicts that characterized the most dangerous years of the Cold War. Bridge of Spies is a true story of three men — a Soviet Spy who was a master of disguise; Gary Powers, an American who was captured when his spy plane was shot down by the Russians; and Frederic Pryor, a young American doctor mistakenly identified as a spy and captured by the Soviets. The men in this three-way political swap had been drawn into the nadir of the Cold War by duty and curiosity, and the same tragicomedy of errors that induced Khrushchev to send missiles to Castro. Two of them — the spy and the pilot — were the original seekers of weapons of mass destruction. The third was an intellectual, in over his head. They were rescued against daunting odds by fate and by their families, and then all but forgotten. Even the U2 spy-plane pilot Powers is remembered now chiefly for the way he was vilified in the U.S. on his return. Yet the fates of those men exemplified the pathological mistrust that fueled the arms race for the next 30 years. This is their story.
Download or read book Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe written by Valentina Glajar and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Cold War, stories of espionage became popular on both sides of the Iron Curtain, capturing the imagination of readers and filmgoers alike as secret police quietly engaged in surveillance under the shroud of impenetrable secrecy. And curiously, in the post-Cold War period there are no signs of this enthusiasm diminishing. The opening of secret police archives in many Eastern European countries has provided the opportunity to excavate and narrate for the first time forgotten spy stories. Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe brings together a wide range of accounts compiled from the East German Stasi, the Romanian Securitate, and the Ukrainian KGB files. The stories are a complex amalgam of fact and fiction, history and imagination, past and present. These stories of collusion and complicity, betrayal and treason, right and wrong, and good and evil cast surprising new light on the question of Cold War certainties and divides.
Download or read book Spies Lies and Exile written by Simon Kuper and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2021-06-23 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Fascinating, rich, and probing . . . a beguiling and endlessly interesting portrait”—The Wall Street Journal For fans of John le Carré and Ben Macintyre, an exclusive first-person account of one of the Cold War’s most notorious spies “Kuper provides a different and valuable perspective, humane and informative. If the definition of a psychopath is someone who refuses to accept the consequences of his actions, does George fit the definition? There he sits, admitting it was all for nothing, but has no regrets. Or does he?” —John le Carré Few Cold War spy stories approach the sheer daring and treachery of George Blake’s. After fighting in the Dutch resistance during World War II, Blake joined the British spy agency MI6 and was stationed in Seoul. Taken prisoner after the North Korean army overran his post in 1950, Blake later returned to England to a hero’s welcome, carrying a dark secret: while in a communist prison camp in North Korea, he had secretly switched sides to the KGB after reading Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. As a Soviet double agent, Blake betrayed uncounted western spying operations—including the storied Berlin Tunnel, the most expensive covert project ever undertaken by the CIA and MI6. Blake exposed hundreds of western agents, forty of whom were likely executed. After his unmasking and arrest, he received, for that time, the longest sentence in modern British history—only to make a dramatic escape to the Soviet Union in 1966, five years into his forty-two-year sentence. He left his wife, three children, and a stunned country behind. Much of Blake’s career existed inside the hall of mirrors that was the Cold War, especially following his sensational escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison. Veteran journalist Simon Kuper tracked Blake to his dacha outside Moscow, where the aging spy agreed to be interviewed for this unprecedented account of Cold War espionage. Following the master spy’s death in Moscow at age ninety-eight on December 26, 2020, Kuper is finally able to set the record straight.
Download or read book Spy Flights of the Cold War written by Paul Lashmar and published by US Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the story of the secret aerial espionage war between the West and the Soviet Union during the Cold War era. Uncovers evidence of secret missions flown by US Air Force and Royal Air Force crews into the Soviet Union, drawing on interviews with US, UK, and Soviet pilots, and reveals details of an alarming 1950s US Air Force plan to use spy flights to provoke a nuclear war that would wipe out the Soviet Union and China. Distributed by Books International. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Early Cold War Spies written by John Earl Haynes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-08-28 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Communism was never a popular ideology in America, but the vehemence of American anticommunism varied from passive disdain in the 1920s to fervent hostility in the early years of the Cold War. Nothing so stimulated the white hot anticommunism of the late 1940s and 1950s more than a series of spy trials that revealed that American Communists had co-operated with Soviet espionage against the United States and had assisted in stealing the technical secrets of the atomic bomb as well as penetrating the US State Department, the Treasury Department, and the White House itself. This book, first published in 2006, reviews the major spy cases of the early Cold War (Hiss-Chambers, Rosenberg, Bentley, Gouzenko, Coplon, Amerasia and others) and the often-frustrating clashes between the exacting rules of the American criminal justice system and the requirements of effective counter-espionage.
Download or read book God s Spies written by Elisabeth Braw and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The real-life cloak-and-dagger story of how East Germany’s notorious spy agency infiltrated churches here and abroad East Germany only existed for a short forty years, but in that time, the country’s secret police, the Stasi, developed a highly successful “church department” that—using persuasion rather than threats—managed to recruit an extraordinary stable of clergy spies. Pastors, professors, seminary students, and even bishops spied on colleagues, other Christians, and anyone else they could report about to their handlers in the Stasi. Thanks to its pastor spies, the Church Department (official name: Department XX/4) knew exactly what was happening and being planned in the country’s predominantly Lutheran churches. Yet ultimately it failed in its mission: despite knowing virtually everything about East German Christians, the Stasi couldn’t prevent the church-led protests that erupted in 1989 and brought down the Berlin Wall.
Download or read book Queen of Spies written by Paddy Hayes and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2016-01-19 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “fascinating and long overdue” biography reveals the remarkable life of a Baroness who was one of Britain’s most celebrated spies (Washington Post). From living in a shack in Tanzania to becoming Baroness Park of Monmouth, Daphne Park led a most unusual life—one that consisted of a lifelong love affair with the world of Britain’s secret services. In the 1970s, she was appointed to Secret Intelligence Service’s most senior operational rank as one of its seven Area Controllers. In Queen of Spies, Paddy Hayes recounts the evolution of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from World War II to the Cold War through the eyes of Daphne Park, one of its outstanding and most unusual operatives. It is a fascinating and intimate narrative of how the modern SIS went about its business whether in Moscow, Hanoi, or the Congo, and shows how Park was able to rise through the ranks of a field that had been comprised almost entirely of men. Queen of Spies captures all the paranoia, isolation, and deception of Cold War intelligence work, and combines it with the personal story of one extraordinary woman trying to navigate this secretive world. It is “as exciting as any good spy thriller—but it’s all true” (Kirkus, starred review).
Download or read book Secrets of the Cold War written by Leland C. McCaslin and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the espionage files, an American soldier is nearly recruited in a downtown bar to be a spy and a First Sergeant is lured by sex to be an unknowing participant in spying. Behind-the-lines images are historic and intriguing. See photographs of a French officer and a Soviet officer relaxing in the East German woods in a temporary unofficial peace; 'James Bond' type cars with their light tricks and their ability to leave their Stasi shadows 'wheel spinning' in the snow will amaze readers. A Russian translator for the presidential hotline recounts a story about having to lock his doors in the Pentagon, separating himself and his sergeant from the Pentagon Generals when a message comes in from the Soviets. When he called the White House to relay the message to the President and stood by for a possible reply to the Soviet Chairman, he stopped working for the Generals and started working solely for the President.
Download or read book Best of Enemies written by Gus Russo and published by Twelve. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thrilling story of two Cold War spies, CIA case officer Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko -- improbable friends at a time when they should have been anything but. In 1978, CIA maverick Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko were new arrivals on the Washington, DC intelligence scene, with Jack working out of the CIA's counterintelligence office and Gennady out of the Soviet Embassy. Both men, already notorious iconoclasts within their respective agencies, were assigned to seduce the other into betraying his country in the urgent final days of the Cold War, but instead the men ended up becoming the best of friends-blood brothers. Theirs is a friendship that never should have happened, and their story is chock full of treachery, darkly comic misunderstandings, bureaucratic inanity, the Russian Mafia, and landmark intelligence breakthroughs of the past half century. In Best of Enemies, two espionage cowboys reveal how they became key behind-the-scenes players in solving some of the most celebrated spy stories of the twentieth century, including the crucial discovery of the Soviet mole Robert Hanssen, the 2010 Spy Swap which freed Gennady from Soviet imprisonment, and how Robert De Niro played a real-life role in helping Gennady stay alive during his incarceration in Russia after being falsely accused of spying for the Americans. Through their eyes, we see the distinctions between the Russian and American methods of conducting espionage and the painful birth of the new Russia, whose leader, Vladimir Putin, dreams he can roll back to the ideals of the old USSR.
Download or read book Hollywood Double Agent written by Jonathan Gill and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This true story of Golden Age Hollywood and Cold War espionage is a “captivating, fast-paced narrative [that] reads like a thriller” (Library Journal). Boris Morros was a major figure in the 1930s and ’40s. The head of music at Paramount, nominated for Academy Awards, he then went on to produce his own films with Laurel and Hardy, Fred Astaire, Henry Fonda, and others. But as J. Edgar Hoover would discover, these successes were a cover for one of the most incredible espionage tales in the history of the Cold War—Boris Morros also worked for Russian intelligence. Morros’s assignments took him to the White House, the Vatican, and deep behind the Iron Curtain. The high-level intel he provided the KGB included military secrets and compromising information on prominent Americans: his friends. But in 1947, Morros flipped. At the height of the McCarthy era, he played a leading role in a deadly tale. Jonathan Gill’s Hollywood Double Agent is an extraordinary story about Russian spies at the heart of American culture and politics, and one man caught in the middle of the Cold War. “Well-written and perceptive . . . Morros was an empty vessel who could be turned left or right depending on how it satisfied his personal interest.” —New York Journal of Books “Reads like an espionage thriller . . . with malevolent, powerful—and sometimes bumbling—characters.” —Kirkus Reviews “A fascinating and swift-reading biography.” —The Wall Street Journal
Download or read book The Moscow Rules written by Antonio J. Mendez and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the spymaster and inspiration for the movie Argo, discover the "real-life spy thriller" of the brilliant but under-supported CIA operatives who developed breakthrough spy tactics that helped turn the tide of the Cold War (Malcolm Nance). Antonio Mendez and his future wife Jonna were CIA operatives working to spy on Moscow in the late 1970s, at one of the most dangerous moments in the Cold War. Soviets kept files on all foreigners, studied their patterns, and tapped their phones. Intelligence work was effectively impossible. The Soviet threat loomed larger than ever. The Moscow Rules tells the story of the intelligence breakthroughs that turned the odds in America's favor. As experts in disguise, Antonio and Jonna were instrumental in developing a series of tactics -- Hollywood-inspired identity swaps, ingenious evasion techniques, and an armory of James Bond-style gadgets -- that allowed CIA officers to outmaneuver the KGB. As Russia again rises in opposition to America, this remarkable story is a tribute to those who risked everything for their country, and to the ingenuity that allowed them to succeed.
Download or read book The Spy in Moscow Station written by Eric Haseltine and published by Icon Books. This book was released on 2019-05-09 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'All the power and intrigue of a cinematic thriller ... immersive, dramatic, and historically edifying' Kirkus Moscow in the late 1970s: one by one, CIA assets are disappearing. The perils of American arrogance, mixed with bureaucratic infighting, had left the country unspeakably vulnerable to ultra-sophisticated Russian electronic surveillance.. The Spy in Moscow Station tells of a time when-much like today-Russian spycraft was proving itself far ahead of the best technology the U.S. had to offer. This is the true story of unorthodox, underdog intelligence officers who fought an uphill battle against their government to prove that the KGB had pulled off the most devastating and breathtakingly thorough penetration of U.S. national security in history. Incorporating declassified internal CIA memos and diplomatic cables, this suspenseful narrative reads like a thriller-but real lives were at stake, and every twist is true as the US and USSR attempt to wrongfoot each other in eavesdropping technology and tradecraft. The book also carries a chilling warning for the present: like the State and CIA officers who were certain their "sweeps" could detect any threat in Moscow, we don't know what we don't know.
Download or read book Last of the Cold War Spies written by Roland Perry and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2008-12-17 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most damaging spy network of the Cold War, the infamous Cambridge Spy Ring, comprised several influential British citizens-and one American, Michael Straight. While a student at Cambridge University in the 1930s, Straight fell in with the circle of notorious spies, including the infamous Kim Philby. For the next several decades, Michael Straight led the secret life of a secret agent: While working at the State Department, he passed intelligence reports to a Russian agent; while running his family's magazine, The New Republic, he funded several Communist fronts; and while serving U.S. presidents, he continued to meet with Soviet agents around the world. Despite Straight's 1963 "confession" to the F.B.I. that his covert activity ceased in 1941, investigative journalist and author Roland Perry has unearthed a different story-the full and complete portrait of Michael Straight, last of the Cold War spies.
