The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy

Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S.

Kenneth Sewell, Clint Richmond · 305 pages

This book reads like a Tom Clancy novel, but it is all true. Today our greatest fear is that terrorists may someday acquire a nuclear weapon and use it against us. In fact, they have already tried. In 1968 a Soviet submarine sank off Hawaii, hundreds of miles closer to American shores than it should have been. Evidence strongly suggests that the sub sank while attempting to fire a nuclear missile,

Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War

Giles Whittell · 274 pages

Who were the three men the American and Soviet superpowers exchanged at Berlin's Glienicke Bridge and Checkpoint Charlie in the first prisoner exchange between East and West? Bridge of Spies traces the paths to that exchange on February 10, 1962. It is the story of three men -- William Fisher, alias Rudolf Abel, a British born KGB agent arrested by the FBI in New York City and jailed as a Soviet s

Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story Of American Submarine Espionage

Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew, Annette Lawrence Drew · 406 pages

Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed

Ben R. Rich, Leo Janos · 385 pages

From the development of the U-2 to the Stealth fighter, the never-before-told story behind America's high-stakes quest to dominate the skies Skunk Works is the true story of America's most secret and successful aerospace operation. As recounted by Ben Rich, the operation's brilliant boss for nearly two decades, the chronicle of Lockheed's legendary Skunk Works is a drama of cold war confrontations

Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

Annie Jacobsen · 550 pages

It is the most famous military installation in the world. And it doesn't exist. Located a mere seventy-five miles outside of Las Vegas in Nevada's desert, the base has never been acknowledged by the U.S. government-but Area 51 has captivated imaginations for decades. Myths and hypotheses about Area 51 have long abounded, thanks to the intense secrecy enveloping it. Some claim it is home to aliens,

Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace

Peter Janney, Dick Russell

The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

Ben Macintyre · 364 pages

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

James W. Douglass · 514 pages

In this fascinating and disturbing book James Douglass presents a compelling account of why President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and why the unmasking of this truth remains crucial for the future of our country and the world. Drawing on a vast field of investigation, including many sources available only in recent years, Douglass lays out a sequence of steps by JFK that transformed him, o

Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion

Martin A. Lee, Bruce Shlain · 384 pages

The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government

David Talbot · 704 pages

"An explosive, headline-making portrait of Allen Dulles, the man who transformed the CIA into the most powerful and secretive colossus in Washington, from the founder of Salon.com and author of the New York Times bestseller Brothers. America's greatest untold story: the United States' rise to world dominance under the guile of Allen Welsh Dulles, the longest-serving director of the CIA. Drawing on

MIG Pilot: The Final Escape of Lt. Belenko

John Daniel Barron

Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century

Sergei Kostin, Eric Raynaud · 430 pages

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

Tim Weiner · 727 pages

Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized United States national security. For sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its ter

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

Michael Dobbs · 464 pages

In October 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union came to the brink of nuclear conflict over the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. In this hour-by-hour chronicle of those tense days, veteran Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs reveals just how close we came to Armageddon.Here, for the first time, are gripping accounts of Khrushchev's plan to destroy the

Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age

Matthew Brzezinski · 336 pages

The behind-the-scenes story of the fierce battles on earth that launched the superpowers into space. Khrushchev was frustrated at America's U-2 spy plane, which flew too high to be shot down. But Russia's chief rocket designer, had an answer: an artificial satellite that would orbit the earth and cross American skies at will. The launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957, stunned the world. Sputnik set

The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles & Their Secret World War

Stephen Kinzer · 409 pages

A joint biography of John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, who led the United States into foreign adventures that decisively shaped today's world as the Cold War was at its peak.

The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive & the Secret History of the KGB

Christopher M. Andrew, Vasili Mitrokhin · 700 pages

The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America's Finest Hour

Andrei Cherny · 640 pages

This book is the masterfully told story of the unlikely men who came together to make the Berlin Airlift one of the great military and humanitarian successes of American history. Author Cherny brings together newly unclassified documents, unpublished letters and diaries, and fresh primary interviews to tell the story of the ill-assorted group of castoffs and second-stringers who not only saved mil

The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA

Ted Gup · 398 pages

In the entrance of the CIA headquarters looms a huge marble wall into which seventy-one stars are carved-each representing an agent who has died in the line of duty. Official CIA records only name thirty-five of them, however. Undeterred by claims that revealing the identities of these "nameless stars" might compromise national security, Ted Gup sorted through thousands of documents and interviewe

The File: A Personal History

Timothy Garton Ash · 256 pages

In 1978, fresh out of Oxford, Timothy Garton Ash set out for Berlin to see what he could learn from the divided city about freedom and despotism. As he moved from west to east - from Berlin glamour to Berlin danger - the East German secret police, the so-called Stasi, was compiling a secret file on his activities, monitoring his Berlin days and nights and tracking his growing involvement with the

JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy

L. Fletcher Prouty · 366 pages

Millions have been gripped by Oliver Stone's film JFK and its premise that the plot to assassinate Kennedy originated beyond the highest levels of the U.S. government. In the movie, the advocate of this theory is a character named "X" played by Donald Sutherland, who, as the film's "Deep Throat," explains how and why this plot came about. As Stone acknowledged, "X" not only was faithfully depicted

The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book

Peter Finn, Petra Couvee

The Kennedy Conspiracy

Anthony Summers · 640 pages

Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World--Told from the Inside by the Man Who Ran It

Ken Alibek, Stephen Handelman · 327 pages

Ken Alibek's straightforward story of massive, state-sponsored bio weapons research by the Soviet Union and Modern Russia was too far ahead of its' time. Looking back with post-9/11 vision, "too far" was a mere two years ahead of its' time. *Biohazard* is an eyeopening autobiography of Ken Alibek, AKA Kanatzhan (Kanat) Alibekov, a leading bio weapons developer and Soviet officer of Kazakh anc