Spy Memoir

In 1944, Benito Mussolini's daughter, Edda, gave Hitler and her father an ultimatum: release her husband, Galeazzo Ciano, from prison, or risk her leaking her husband's journals to the press. To avoid the peril of exposing Nazi lies, Hitler and Mussolini hunted for the diaries for months, determined to destroy them. Hilde Beetz, a German spy, was deployed to seduce Ciano to learn the diaries' location and take them from Edda. Drawing from in‑depth research and first-person interviews, Mazzeo gives listeners a riveting look into this little‑known moment in history.

A definitive, deeply moving narrative, Bonhoeffer is a story of moral courage in the face of monstrous evil. As Adolf Hitler and the Nazis seduced a nation, bullied a continent, and attempted to exterminate the Jews of Europe, a young pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer become one of the first to speak out against Hitler.

In his empowering book, Dan Schilling shares how to identify and avoid threats using situational awareness and intuition just like the pros. Told with wit and wisdom, this compelling guide uses harrowing stories from Dan's special operations career and those of other experts to outline six easily implemented rules you can apply anywhere to improve your personal safety.

Based on extensive research and hundreds of interviews, including two with active directors of Central Intelligence, William H. Webster and Robert M. Gates, and with three former D.C.I.s, Inside the C.I.A. is the first in-depth, unbiased account of the Agency's core operations, its abject failures, and its resounding successes.

The most remarkable double agent of World War II, Eddie Chapman was witty, handsome, and charming. Too bad he was also a con man, womanizer, and safe-cracker. To the British, though, he was known as ZigZag, one of MI5's most valuable agents. To the Abwehr - German military intelligence - he was known as Fritzchen (Little Fritz), and was believed to be one of their most valued and trusted spies.

The longest serving spy for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Charles Howard "Dick" Ellis came to New York at the beginning of World War II as deputy to William Stephenson at British Security Coordination (BSC) and helped set up for William Donovan the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), what would eventually evolve into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Ellis allegedly received prior warning of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and, through the conduit of Stephenson, relayed that warning to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Intrepid's Last Case chronicles the post-World War II activities of Sir William Stephenson, whose fascinating role in helping to defeat the Nazis was the subject of the worldwide best seller A Man Called Intrepid.

Call me naïve, but when I was a girl - watching James Bond and devouring Harriet the Spy - all I wanted was to grow up to be a spy. Unlike most kids, I didn't lose my secret-agent aspirations. So as a bright-eyed, idealistic college grad, I sent my resume to the CIA. Getting in was a story in itself.

Secrecy came naturally to John le Carré, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep. Adam Sisman's definitive biography, published in 2015, provided a revealing portrait of this fascinating man; yet some aspects of his subject remained hidden. The Secret Life of John le Carré reveals a hitherto-hidden perspective on the life and work of the spy-turned-author and a fascinating meditation on the complex relationship between biographer and subject. “Now that he is dead,” Sisman writes, “we can know him better.”

Today's global economy has a dark underbelly. Using cutting-edge technology and age-old techniques of deceit and manipulation, corporate spies are the hidden puppeteers of globalized business. In his gripping, alarming exposé, Eamon Javers recounts the sordid history of this hidden world - from Allan Pinkerton, the nation's first "private eye" through Howard Hughes's private CIA, to the shocking realities of a vast modern-day spying network with tentacles reaching into virtually every corner of the globe.

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.

Handcuff King. Escape Artist. International Superstar. Since his death in 1926, Harry Houdini's life has been chronicled in books, in films, and on television. Now, in this groundbreaking biography, renowned magic expert William Kalush and best-selling writer Larry Sloman team up to find the man behind the myth.

Guy Burgess was the most important, complex, and fascinating of "The Cambridge Spies" - Maclean, Philby, Blunt - brilliant young men recruited in the 1930s to betray their country to the Soviet Union. An engaging and charming companion to many, an unappealing, utterly ruthless manipulator to others, Burgess rose through academia, the BBC, the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6, gaining access to thousands of highly sensitive secret documents which he passed to his Russian handlers.

In 1941 a 31-year-old Frenchwoman, a young mother born to privilege and known for her beauty and glamour, became the leader of a vast intelligence organization - the only woman to serve as a chef de résistance during the war. Strong-willed, independent, and a lifelong rebel against her country’s conservative, patriarchal society, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was temperamentally made for the job. No other French spy network lasted as long or supplied as much crucial intelligence. Fourcade was captured twice by the Nazis - and both times she managed to escape.

While he was the curator of the CIA Museum, Nicholas Reynolds, a longtime military intelligence expert, began to discover tantalizing clues that suggested Ernest Hemingway's involvement in the Second World War was much more complex and dangerous than has been previously understood. Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy brings to light for the first time this riveting secret side of Hemingway's life - when he worked closely with both the American OSS and the Soviet NKVD to defeat Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

When the 2010 earthquake struck Haiti, Raymond Joseph, the former Haitian ambassador to the United States, found himself rushing back to his beloved country. The earthquake ignited a passion in Joseph, inspiring him to run for president against great competition, including two well-known Haitian pop stars, his nephew Wyclef Jean and Michel Martelly. But he couldn't compete in a democratic system corrupt to the core.

Eddie Chapman was a charming criminal, a con man, and a philanderer. He was also one of the most remarkable double agents Britain has ever produced. Inside the traitor was a man of loyalty; inside the villain was a hero. The problem for Chapman, his spymasters, and his lovers was to know where one persona ended and the other began. In 1941, after training as a German spy in occupied France, Chapman was parachuted into Britain with a revolver, a wireless, and a cyanide pill, with orders from the Abwehr to blow up an airplane factory. Instead, he contacted MI5, the British Secret Service.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, American intelligence caught three high-profile Russian spies: Aldrich Ames, Edward Lee Howard, and Robert Hanssen. However, rumors have long swirled of another mole, one perhaps more damaging than all the others combined. Perhaps the greatest traitor in American history, perhaps a Russian ruse to tear the CIA apart, or perhaps nothing more than a bogeyman, he is often referred to as the Fourth Man.

Kim Philby, the so-called Third Man in the Cambridge spy ring, was the Cold War's most infamous traitor, a Soviet spy at the heart of British intelligence. Philby joined Britain's secret service MI6 during the war and went on to head the section tasked with rooting out Russian spies before becoming the service's chief liaison officer with the CIA. He betrayed hundreds of British and US agents to the Russians and compromised numerous operations inside the Soviet Union.

In Operation Whisper, Barnes Carr tells the true story of the most effective Soviet spy couple in America, a pair who vanished under the FBI's nose only to turn up posing as rare book dealers in London, where they continued their atomic spying. The Cohens were talented, dedicated, worldly spies - an urbane, jet-set couple loyal to their service and their friends. Most people they met seemed to think they represented the best of America. The Soviets certainly thought so.