Spy Memoir

When Aline Griffith was born in Pearl River, New York, in 1923, one might have guessed from her exceptional beauty that a career as an actress or model might be in her future. Few would have imagined that twenty-one years later, she would find herself in Spain as a deep-cover OSS agent, infiltrating the highest levels of Spanish society, or that five years later still, she would marry a Spanish grandee and become one of the most watched, most admired, most fascinating women of international society. This is the story of Aline, Countess of Romanones, a story of courage, beauty and success that is far more exciting than any fictionalized thriller.

If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation's communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union's top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6.

A legal analyst for NPR, NBC, and CNN, delves into the facts surrounding what has been called the “worst intelligence disaster in US history”: the case of Robert Hanssen—a Russian spy who was embedded in the FBI for two decades.

Before the internet became widely known as a global tool for terrorists, one perceptive US citizen recognized its ominous potential. Armed with clear evidence of computer espionage, he began a highly personal quest to expose a hidden network of spies that threatened national security. But would the authorities back him up? Cliff Stoll's dramatic firsthand account is "a computer-age detective story, instantly fascinating [and] astonishingly gripping" - Smithsonian.

In To Catch a Spy: The Art of Counterintelligence, James M. Olson, former chief of CIA counterintelligence, offers a wake-up call for the American public and also a guide for how our country can do a better job of protecting its national security and trade secrets. Olson takes the listener into the arcane world of counterintelligence as he lived it during his 30-year career in the CIA.

This classic of spycraft is based on Allen Dulles's incomparable experience as a diplomat, international lawyer, and America's premier intelligence officer. Dulles was a high-ranking officer of the CIA's predecessor - the Office of Strategic Services - and was present at the inception of the CIA, where he served eight of his 10 years there as director. Here he sums up what he learned about intelligence from nearly a half-century of experience in foreign affairs.

May 10, 1940. The Netherlands was swarming with Third Reich troops. In seven days it's entirely occupied by Nazi Germany. Joining a small resistance cell in the Dutch city of Haarlem were three teenage girls: Hannie Schaft, and sisters Truus and Freddie Oversteegen, who would soon band together to form a singular female underground squad.

On February 28, 2013, after pleading guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, John Kiriakou began serving a 30 month prison sentence. His crime: blowing the whistle on the CIA's use of torture on al Qaeda prisoners. Doing Time Like a Spy is Kiriakou's memoir of his 23 months in prison. Using 20 life skills he learned in CIA operational training, he was able to keep himself safe and at the top of the prison social heap. It is at once a searing journal of daily prison life and an alternately funny and heartbreaking commentary on the federal prison system.

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.

In June 1952 a woman was murdered by an obsessed colleague in a hotel in the South Kensington district of London. Her name was Christine Granville. That she died young was perhaps unsurprising; that she had survived the Second World War was remarkable. The daughter of a feckless Polish aristocrat and his wealthy Jewish wife, Granville would become one of Britain's most daring and highly decorated special agents.

In Den of Spies, Unger reveals the definitive story of the October Surprise, going inside his three-decade reporting odyssey, along with Parry’s never-before-seen archives, and sharing startling truths about what really happened in 1980. The result is a real-life political thriller filled with double agents, CIA operatives, slippery politicians, KGB documents, wealthy Republicans, and dogged journalists.

Who was Kim Philby? Those closest to him—like his fellow MI6 officer and best friend since childhood, Nicholas Elliot, and the CIA’s head of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton—knew him as a loyal confidant and an unshakeable patriot. Philby was a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain’s counterintelligence against the Soviet Union. Together with Elliott and Angleton he stood on the front lines of the Cold War, holding Communism at bay. But he was secretly betraying them both: He was working for the Russians the entire time.

Long before the waterboarding controversy exploded in the media, one CIA agent had already gone public. In a groundbreaking 2007 interview with ABC News, John Kiriakou called waterboarding torture - but admitted that it probably worked. This book, at once a confessional, an adventure story, and a chronicle of Kiriakou's life in the CIA, stands as an important, eloquent piece of testimony from a committed American patriot.

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.

The Spy with No Name is the unbelievable true story of Erwin van Haarlem, a Cold War secret agent whose stolen identity broke the heart of an innocent woman - who thought she'd found her long-lost son. In 1977, Johanna van Haarlem, 52, finally tracked down the son she had abandoned as a baby, during the Second World War. She was delighted that he had grown into a charming Dutch waiter in London. But Erwin van Haarlem was actually a dangerous Communist spy who had stolen her son's identity to uncover British and American military secrets.

‘”Did you know him?” a priest asked me when I first visited my father’s impressive marble tomb in Bosnia. I gave an honest answer – “No, I can’t say I really knew him at all”. It was a view shared by the former head of the Secret Intelligence Service’s anti-Soviet operations. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever really know the truth about J.B. Wood?” he told me. But he thought I had a better chance of finding out than most. After all, most of my family had at one time or another been with SIS, my mother one of only a handful of female agents to have operated behind the lines in post-war Berlin.

The Unexpected Spy is the riveting story of Walder's tenure in the CIA and, later, the FBI. In high-security, steel-walled rooms in Virginia, Walder watched al-Qaeda members with drones as President Bush looked over her shoulder and CIA Director George Tenet brought her donuts. She tracked chemical terrorists and searched the world for Weapons of Mass Destruction. She created a chemical terror chart that someone in the White House altered to convey information she did not have or believe, leading to the Iraq invasion.

As Adolf Hitler and the Nazis seduced a nation, bullied a continent, and attempted to exterminate the Jews of Europe, a small number of dissidents and saboteurs worked to dismantle the Third Reich from the inside. One of these was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor and author. In this New York Times bestselling biography, Eric Metaxas takes both strands of Bonhoeffer's life—the theologian and the spy—and draws them together to tell a searing story of incredible moral courage in the face of monstrous evil.

He was the billionaire financier and close confidant of presidents, prime ministers, movie stars, and British royalty, the mysterious self-made man who rose from blue-collar Brooklyn to the heights of luxury. But while he was flying around the world on his private jet and hosting lavish parties at his private island in the Caribbean, he also was secretly masterminding an international child sex ring-one that may have involved the richest and most influential men in the world.

The leafy Avenue de Foch, one of the most exclusive residential streets in Nazi-occupied France, was Paris' hotbed of daring spies, murderous secret police, amoral informers, and Vichy collaborators. So when American physician Sumner Jackson, who lived with his wife and young son, Phillip, at Number 11, found himself drawn into the Liberation network of the French resistance, he knew the stakes were impossibly high.