Military True Crime

In this rapid-paced book, a former CIA chief of Soviet bloc counterintelligence breaks open the mysterious case of KGB officer Yuri Nosenko's 1964 defection to the United States. Still a highly controversial chapter in the history of Cold War espionage, the Nosenko affair has inspired debate for more than 40 years. Was Nosenko a bona fide defector with the real information about Lee Harvey Oswald's stay in Soviet Russia, or was he a KGB loyalist, engaged in a complex game of deception?

Karen Abbott illuminates one of the most fascinating yet little-known aspects of the Civil War: The stories of four courageous women - a socialite, a farmgirl, an abolitionist, and a widow - who were spies. After shooting a Union soldier in her front hall with a pocket pistol, Belle Boyd became a courier and spy for the Confederate army, using her charms to seduce men on both sides. Emma Edmonds cut off her hair and assumed the identity of a man to enlist as a Union private, witnessing the bloodiest battles of the Civil War.

Decorated army officer Major Ed Dames tells the shocking true story of his time asoperations and training officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency's top-secret Psychic Intelligence Unit. Together with his PSI Spyteam, Dames used the practice of remote viewing to uncover accurate and verifiable military intelligence by going where no intel operatives on the ground could go - into the very mind of the enemy.

Susan Ronald reveals in this stranger-than-fiction-tale how Hildebrand Gurlitt succeeded in looting in the name of the Third Reich, duping the Monuments Men and the Nazis alike. As an "official dealer" for Hitler and Goebbels, Hildebrand Gurlitt became one of the Third Reich's most prolific art looters. Yet he stole from Hitler, too, allegedly to save modern art. Hitler's Art Thief is the untold story of Hildebrand Gurlitt, who stole more than art - he stole lives, too.

The story of the intelligence war in South Africa during the Second World War is one of suspense, drama and dogged persistence. In 1939, when the Union of South Africa entered the war on Britain’s side, the German government secretly contacted the political opposition, and the leadership of the anti-war movement, the Ossewabrandwag. The Nazis’ aim was to spread sedition, undermine the Allied war effort, and - given the strategic importance of the Cape of Good Hope sea route - gain naval intelligence. Soon U-boat packs were sent to operate in South African waters, to deadly effect.

Chris Thomas is not yet 30 years old when he finds himself managing the immense pressure, eccentric personalities, and extenuating circumstances of an international story, where one small misstep could adversely impact the search for a missing teenager and the reputation of her family. Now, 20 years later, Thomas takes listeners behind the scenes, providing new details, perspectives, and commentary on finding Elizabeth Smart.

The Fourth Horseman tells the startling story of that mission, led by a brilliant but conflicted surgeon who became one of Germany's most daring spies and saboteurs during World War I - and who not only pioneered bio-warfare in his native land but also lead a last-ditch German effort to goad Mexico into invading the United States. It is a story of mysterious missions, divided loyalties, and a new and terrible kind of warfare.

Most Americans have grown accustomed to accept the version of history that the Soviets were our noble allies and took the brunt of the casualties during World War II. But after decades of research by veteran journalist M. Stanton Evans and intelligence expert Herbert Romerstein, the truth has come to light and is now exposed in Stalin's Secret Agents. Evans and Romerstein focus on the role of secret Communist Alger Hiss at the crucial Yalta Conference of 1945, where vast U.S. concessions were made to Russia....

L'opération Moolah était une tentative de la United States Air Force, pendant la guerre de Corée, d'obtenir par le biais de la défection un chasseur MiG-15 complet et opérationnel. Les forces communistes introduisirent le MiG-15 en Corée le 1er novembre 1950. Les pilotes de l'US Air Force rapportèrent que les performances de l'avion soviétique étaient supérieures à celles de tous les avions que pouvaient lui opposer les Nations unies, y compris la dernière acquisition en date de l'armée de l'air américaine, le F-86 Sabre.

No Shadows in the Desert reveals the untold story of the behind-the-scenes fight against ISIS - one coordinated by heads of state and ultimately fought in the alleyways and open deserts of the Middle Eastern battlefield by spies and soldiers. Samuel M. Katz draws upon his sources within the global intelligence and counterterrorism community, as well as the international special operations and espionage fraternity, to tell the story of the covert campaign against ISIS by the operatives who ventured deeply and secretly into enemy territory.

In 1978, CIA maverick Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko were new arrivals on the Washington, D.C., intelligence scene, with Jack working out of the CIA's counterintelligence office and Gennady out of the Soviet Embassy. Both men were assigned to seduce the other into betraying his country in the final days of the Cold War, but instead the men ended up becoming the best of friends. Theirs is a friendship that never should have happened, and their story is chock full of treachery, darkly comic misunderstandings, bureaucratic inanity, and landmark intelligence breakthroughs.

This is the incredible true story of the greatest spy you’ve never heard of - as told to the author by the woman herself. At the outbreak of World War Two, Nancy Wake’s glamorous life in the South of France seemed far removed from the fighting. But when her husband was called up for military service, Nancy felt she had just as much of a duty to fight for freedom. By 1943, her fearless undercover work even in the face of personal tragedy had earned her a place on the Gestapo’s "most wanted" list.

Tom spent years working covertly to stop those who want to do us harm. In his best-selling memoir Soldier Spy, he told how he was recruited and described some of his top-secret operations. In I Spy, he takes us deeper undercover as he puts his life on the line once more. I Spy plunges the listener straight into the action as Tom and his team race to prevent terrorists from causing carnage on our streets and outsmart Russian agents, blocking a daring plot that threatens the security of the nation.

Wilhelm Canaris was appointed by Hitler to head the Abwehr (the German secret service) 18 months after the Nazis came to power. But Canaris turned against the Fuhrer and the Nazi regime, believing that Hitler would start a war Germany could not win. In 1938 he was involved in an attempted coup, undermined by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. In 1940 he sabotaged the German plan to invade England, and fed General Franco vital information that helped him keep Spain out of the war.

The first major bioterror event in the United States - the anthrax attacks in October 2001 - was a clarion call for scientists who work with “hot” agents to find ways of protecting civilian populations against biological weapons. In The Demon in the Freezer, Richard Preston takes us into the heart of USAMRIID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, once the headquarters of the US biological weapons program and now the epicenter of national biodefense.

Years after meeting Pablo Escobar, Peter was hired by the Cali Cartel to assassinate the Colombian drug lord. After months of grueling training, Peter and his group of mercenaries were alerted that the day had come to pick up their weapons and board two helicopters bound for Escobar’s mansion. This book also details Peter’s 25 years of engaging in hair-raising conflict worldwide, from Britain's parachute regiment and the SAS to private military companies and an almost fatal skydiving incident.

In January 2003, 28-year-old GCHQ translator Katharine Gun received an email from the US National Security Agency that would turn her world upside down. The message requested Katharine’s assistance in co-ordinating an illegal US-UK spy operation which would secure UN authorisation for the Iraq invasion. Horrified, she decided to leak the information to the British press. Katharine’s decision would change her life forever, as she was arrested under the Official Secrets Act whilst becoming a cause célèbre for political activists.

The gripping narrative of one of the last Nazi criminal trials in Germany—that of Bruno Dey, a 93-year-old former concentration camp guard charged with aiding the murder of more than 5,000 people—and a larger exploration of Germany's reckoning with the Holocaust, from silence to memory to today's rising tide of fascism and antisemitism.

At the end of the summer of 1859, 22-year-old Peachy Quinn Harrison went on trial for murder in Springfield, Illinois. Abraham Lincoln, who had been involved in more than 3,000 cases - including more than 25 murder trials - during his two-decades-long career, was hired to defend him.

Committed in utmost secrecy in April-May 1940 by the NKVD on the direct orders of Joseph Stalin, for nearly 50 years the Soviet regime succeeded in maintaining the fiction that Katyn was a Nazi crime, their story unchallenged by Western governments fearful of upsetting a powerful wartime ally and Cold War adversary. Surviving Katyn explores the decades-long search for answers, focusing on the experience of those individuals with the most at stake.