A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

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

The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal

David E. Hoffman · 312 pages

"While getting into his car on the evening of February 16, 1978, the chief of the CIA's Moscow station was handed an envelope by an unknown Russian. Its contents stunned the Americans: details of top-secret Soviet research and development in military technology that was totally unknown to the United States. From 1979 to 1985, Adolf Tolkachev, an engineer at a military research center, cracked open

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

Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew, Annette Lawrence Drew · 406 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

The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Tyrant Who Created North Korea and The Young Lieutenant Who Stole His Way to Freedom

Blaine Harden · 304 pages

Aquarium: The Career and Defection of a Soviet Military Spy

Viktor Suvorov · 416 pages

"We have a very simple rule. It's a rouble to get in, but two to get out." Thus begins the extraordinary chronicle of Viktor Suvorov's early preferment within the Soviet Army which brought him to Vienna as a spy in military intelligence and ended in his defection to the West. Suvorov's path into espionage was a long one, and not one he chose for himself. Throughout this astonishing record of li

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001

Steve Coll · 728 pages

An account of the CIA's involvement in the covert wars in Afghanistan that fueled Islamic militancy and gave rise to bin Laden's al Qaeda. For nearly the past quarter century, while most Americans were unaware, Afghanistan has been the playing field for intense covert operations by U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies-invisible wars which sowed the seeds of the September 11 attacks and which pro

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.

Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

Rosemary Sullivan · 741 pages

"The award-winning author of Villa Air-Bel returns with a painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators--her father, Josef Stalin. Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the

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

Agent Garbo

Stephan Talty · 323 pages

Before he remade himself as the master spy known as Garbo, Juan Pujol was nothing more than a Barcelona poultry farmer. But as Garbo, he turned in a masterpiece of deception that changed the course of World War II. Posing as the Nazis’ only reliable spy inside England, he created an imaginary million-man army, invented armadas out of thin air, and brought a vast network of fictional subagents to l

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

Christopher M. Andrew, Vasili Mitrokhin · 700 pages

Circle of Treason: A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed

Sandra Grimes, Jeanne Vertefeuille · 234 pages

Circle of Treason details the authors' personal involvement in the hunt for and eventual identification of a Soviet mole in the CIA during the 1980s and 1990s.

Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961

Nicholas Reynolds · 384 pages

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

Peter Finn, Petra Couvee

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,

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

The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception

H. Keith Melton · 260 pages

Magic or spycraft? In 1953, against the backdrop of the Cold War, the CIA initiated a top-secret program, code-named MKULTRA, to counter Soviet mind-control and interrogation techniques. Realizing that clandestine officers might need to covertly deploy newly developed pills, potions, and powders against the adversary, the CIA hired America's most famous magician, John Mulholland, to write two manu

The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5

Christopher M. Andrew · 1,032 pages

This book reveals the precise role of the Security Service in 20th-century British history, from its foundation by Captain Kell of the British Army in October 1909, through two world wars, up to and including its present roles in counter-espionage and counter-terrorism.

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

Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion

Martin A. Lee, Bruce Shlain · 384 pages

Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War

Steve Sheinkin · 370 pages

From Steve Sheinkin, the award-winning author of The Port Chicago 50 and Bomb comes a tense, exciting exploration of what the Times deemed “the greatest story of the century”: how Daniel Ellsberg transformed from obscure government analyst into “the most dangerous man in America,” and risked everything to expose the government’s deceit. On June 13, 1971, the front page of the New York Times announ

One Nation Under Blackmail, Vol. 1: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein

Whitney Alyse Webb · 544 pages