Spy Memoir

From the snowy Soviet shooting range to the heat and dust of Africa, nothing is what it seems. And neither is Sue Dobson. The image of South Africa in the 1980's as the golden paradise on the tip of the African continent conceals a brutal, racist Apartheid regime. Those who oppose it risk their lives. Beauty and brutality go hand in hand.

Cambridge spy Guy Burgess was a supreme networker. He also set a gold standard for conflicts of interest, working variously for the BBC, MI5, MI6, the War Office, the Ministry of Information and the KGB. Yet Burgess was never challenged by Britain's spy catchers: his superiors were convinced he was too much of a liability to have been recruited by Moscow. Now, with a major new release of hundreds of files into the National Archives, Purvis and Hulbert reveal just how this charming establishment insider was able to fool everyone for so long.

In November 1974, British MP and former cabinet minister John Stonehouse walked into the sea off a beach in Miami and disappeared, seemingly drowned. Then he was found—on the other side of the world, in Australia—and his extraordinary story began to come to light: a Labour cabinet minister and a devoted family man, also in a long-term affair with his secretary, and a spy for the Czech State Security agency, who had committed fraud and attempted to fake his own death to escape catastrophic business failures.

For Leslie Absher, secrecy is just another member of the family. Throughout childhood, her father's shadowy government job was ill-defined, her mother's mental health stayed off limits—even her queer identity remained hidden from her family and unacknowledged by Leslie herself.

Few people are deemed smart enough to be selected and trained as a spy for Her Majesty’s Government, and fewer qualify. The author is one such man, who was uniquely chosen at the age of 16, the only person still to pass selection without an education through the university system. Carefully written to avoid revealing government secrets, this is his personal story, thrilling, surprising, and an eye opener into the life of A Philippine Spy.

Col. Sidney Mashbir so embraced the Japanese language and culture, that he achieved a closer intimacy with Emperor Hirohito than any Westerner. In spite of Mashbir and his Japanese allies' courageous, peace-keeping efforts, World War II erupted. Mashbir was then forced to take a pivotal role in defeating Japan, a nation and its people whom he had so befriended.

In the wake of World War II, four agents were critical in helping build a new organisation now known as the CIA. Adelaide Hawkins, Mary Hutchison, Eloise Page, and Elizabeth Sudmeier, called the "wise gals" by their male colleagues because of their sharp sense of humour and even quicker intelligence, were not the stereotypical femme fatale of spy novels. They were smart, courageous, and groundbreaking agents at the top of their class, instrumental in both developing innovative tools for intelligence gathering—and insisting that they receive the credit and pay their expertise deserved.

Her father was a man cloaked in mystery, a man of contradiction. James M. Eichelberger was a writer, philosopher, decorated WWII intelligence officer, CIA Agent, and oil industry consultant who died a penniless alcoholic. After he left her family in Beirut, Lebanon when she was six years old, Anne E. Tazewell only saw her father seven times before his death in 1989.

Butcher, Biter, Spy is a chilling retelling of one of the most brutal killing sprees in German history. Ryan Green’s riveting narrative draws the listener into the real-live horror experienced by the victims and has all the elements of a classic thriller.

The United Kingdom. A story based on real events. Few people are deemed smart enough to be selected and trained as a spy for Her Majesty’s Government, fewer qualify. The author is one such man, who, uniquely, was chosen at the age of 16, the only person still to pass selection without an education through the university system. Andy describes his unbelievable life, from the beginning, as a child, playing in the woods and fields around his home in Maple Cross, Hertfordshire, learning the skills he had no idea he would need in his future spy world.

In 2012, 21-year-old Dutch hacker David Schrooten was living at his parents’ house in the Netherlands and spending most of his time online. When he wasn’t squabbling with fellow hackers, he was making plans to visit his Romanian girlfriend. His life turned upside-down when Interpol agents arrested him at an airport in Romania on international hacking charges involving $63 million in damages. Soon Schrooten found himself extradited to the United States, a country where he had never been before.

Why you may ask, would they want to stop you from listening to my story? They say it’s because it tells too many secrets and that I’m a spy … a spy for the Brotherhood! Now you can follow my story from my birth in the Midwestern city of St. Louis, Missouri, to the gang-infested streets of Chicago, Illinois, and into the war-torn jungles of Vietnam.

And the Rest Is History takes listeners on a traveling circus from Paris to Beirut, Baghdad, and beyond, introducing them to spies and terrorists, arms dealers and crooks, and along the way reveals a few surprises about the secret underbelly of recent history you won’t find in WikiLeaks. This book pinpoints precisely when the era of “fake news” actually began in America, and will change the way you think about journalism and journalists.

Since Goronwy Rees' death, his daughter, Jenny, has had to cope with the frequently made allegation that her father was another of the spies recruited at Cambridge in the 1930s. He never disguised his friendship with Guy Burgess, who, with Donald Maclean, had defected to Moscow in 1951, and in 1979, Rees helped Andrew Boyle unmask Anthony Blunt, the Fourth Man. So, was Rees himself actually a spy? The opening of KGB files has acted as a spur to Jenny Rees in her quest to exorcise the past.

As a child, Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop, along with her five brothers, was raised to revere the tribal legends of the Alsop and Roosevelt families. Her parents’ marriage was not what either of her parents had imagined it would be. Her mother’s strict Catholicism and her father’s restless ambition collided to create a strangely muted and ominous world, one that mirrored the whispered conversations in the living room as the power brokers of Washington came and went through their side door. Through it all, her mother, trained to keep secrets as a decoding agent with MI5, said very little.

Ian Withers rewrote the book on what it means to be a Private Investigator. He traversed the world recovering abducted children, gathered intelligence for left and right-wing regimes, and was jailed over a British prime minister's bad bet. Across 60 years, he chased down fraudsters, bugged leaders of international coups, and cracked open assassination plots. He tracked the IRA’s Hyde Park bomber with a bluffed phone call, located Jeremy Thorpe’s illicit lover, and put his life on the line to return snatched tug-of-love kids to desperate parents.

Kristie Macrakis combines a storyteller's sense of drama with a historian's respect for evidence in this pause-resisting history of intrigue and espionage, love and war, magic and secrecy. From the piazzas of ancient Rome to the spy capitals of the Cold War, Macrakis' global history reveals the drama and importance of invisible ink. From Ovid's advice to use milk for illicit love notes, to al-Qaeda's hidden instructions in pornographic movies, this book presents stories of secret messaging that chart its evolution in sophistication and its impact on history.

From living in a tin-roofed shack north of Dar es Salaam 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 - an extraordinary achievement for a woman working within this most male-dominated and secretive of organizations.

In the tradition of Ben MacIntyre, Game of Spies tells the story of a lethal spy triangle in Bordeaux between 1942 and 1944 - and of France's greatest betrayal, by aristocratic and right-wing Resistance leader Andre Grandclement. The story centres on three men - one British, one French and one German - and the duel they fought out in an atmosphere of collaboration, betrayal and assassination, in which comrades sold fellow comrades, Allied agents and downed pilots to the Germans as casually as they would a bottle of wine.

The gripping true story of Klaus Fuchs: the spy who sold the nuclear secrets to the Russians. When the three leaders of the victorious allies, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, met at Potsdam in July 1945, President Truman announced to Stalin that the US had a new and devastating weapon. Observers report that Stalin paid no attention to this remark. In fact, Stalin was well aware of the existence of the atomic bomb, and the Soviet Union was rapidly developing its own.