True Spies

1981: Ronald Reagan’s inauguration marks a new escalation in the United States’ Cold War with the USSR. Months later, François Mitterrand is elected president of France with the support of the French Communist Party. The predicted tension between these two men, however, is immediately defused when Mitterrand gives Reagan the Farewell dossier, a file he would later call "one of the greatest spy cases of the 20th century".

These gruesome stories have peppered the pages of newspapers and history books over the centuries. Some are well-known. Some aren’t. They rest in that murky place between true crime and horror. The tales in this, Book Three of the series, shift away from the gruesome. These are instead tales of the secretive and the covert, the figures across time who affected the events etched in history.

Ten years ago, SAS Trooper Aidan Snow was left fighting for his life after a mission went wrong, and ever since, he has been haunted by the image of the man with green eyes. The man who should have killed him. Now, Snow is finally living a peaceful life in Ukraine. Until Taurus Pashinski, the green-eyed man, returns. As Snow’s past catches up with him, he finds himself thrown back into the world of espionage with a vengeance.

The Skripal Files is a remarkable and definitive account of Sergei Skripal’s story, which lays bare the new spy war between Russia and the West. Mark Urban, the diplomatic and defense editor for the BBC, met with Skripal in the months before his poisoning, learning about his career in Russian military intelligence, how he became a British agent, his imprisonment in Russia, and the events that led to his release. Skripal’s first-hand accounts and experiences reveal the high stakes of a new spy game that harks back to the chilliest days of the Cold War.

The fascinating, improbable true story of Maxwell Knight - the great MI5 spymaster and inspiration for the James Bond character M. Maxwell Knight was perhaps the greatest spymaster in history. He did more than anyone in his era to combat the rising threat of fascism in Britain during World War II, in spite of his own history inside this movement. He was also truly eccentric - a thrice-married jazz aficionado who kept a menagerie of exotic pets - and almost totally unqualified for espionage. Yet he had a gift for turning practically anyone into a fearless secret agent.

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.

On April 6, 1940, explorer and future World War II spy Theodore Morde (who would one day attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler), anxious about the perilous journey that lay ahead of him, struggled to fall asleep at the Paris Hotel in La Ceiba, Honduras. Nearly seventy years later, in the same hotel, acclaimed journalist Christopher S. Stewart wonders what he's gotten himself into.

"Crooks And Spies I’ve Known" is a riveting autobiography by Keith Laws, a four-time successful escapee who spent an astounding 15 years on the run in Europe. Laws shares his firsthand experiences, having rubbed shoulders with notorious figures such as mobsters, bank robbers, and traitorous spies, including infamous names like John Walker, Aldridge Ames, and his surprising CIA acquaintance, Edwin Wilson.

In Murder in Manchuria, Scott D. Seligman explores an unsolved murder set amid the chaos that reigned in China in the run-up to World War II. The story unfolds against the backdrop of a three-country struggle for control of Manchuria—an area some called China's "Wild East"—and an explosive mixture of nationalities, religions, and ideologies. Semyon Kaspe, a young Jewish musician, is kidnapped, tortured, and ultimately murdered by disaffected, antisemitic White Russians, secretly acting on the orders of Japanese military overlords who covet his father's wealth.

The threats are many. When the Professor and Doc are attacked in Abu Dhabi, it feels as though the world has changed in an instant. In reality, the threat had been there and growing for a long time. That day was simply the day they failed to prevent it. Few security operations are fully prepared to prevent the unprecedented and highly sophisticated threats the world's leaders are facing. They are coming from unusually organized and adaptable criminals and terrorists, whose goal is to find the one wrinkle in your operations. Our goal is to find it first.

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.

When thinking of New Mexico, few Americans think spy-vs.-spy intrigue, but in fact, to many international intelligence operatives, the state's name is nearly synonymous with espionage, and Santa Fe is a sacred site. The KGB's single greatest intelligence and counterintelligence coups, and the planning of the organization's most infamous assassination, all took place within one mile of Bishop Lamy's statue in front of Saint Francis Cathedral in central Santa Fe.

On a sunny September day in 1931, Soviet spy Stanislav Shumovsky walked down the gangplank of the SS Europa and into New York, concealed in a group of 65 Soviet students. Joseph Stalin had sent him to acquire American secrets to help close the USSR’s yawning technology gap. In this thrilling history, Svetlana Lokhova takes the listener on a journey through Stalin’s most audacious intelligence operation, piecing together every aspect of Shumovsky’s life and character using information derived from American and Russian archives.

In the summer of 1975, 17-year-old Eva Dillon's family was living in New Delhi when her father was exposed as a CIA spy. Eva had long believed that her father was a US State Department employee. She had no idea that he was handling the CIA's highest ranking double agent - Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov, a Soviet general whose code name was TOPHAT. Dillon's father and Polyakov had a close friendship that went back years, to their first meeting in Burma in the mid-1960s.

An African American serviceman is gunned down on a rural Georgia road in July 1964. This shocking murder ensnares a wide range of characters including the journalists who cover it, the lawmen who must solve it, the civil rights leaders who capitalize upon it, the politicians who exploit it, and the Atlanta magnate who fears its impact on the New South image he desperately wants to protect.

This is the story of Esther Simpson, a remarkable woman history has largely forgotten, but whose selfless actions left an indelible mark on the cultural and intellectual landscape of the modern world. Forgoing marriage, family, even, it seems, a private life, she committed her whole life resettling academic refugees before, during and after World War Two. She thought of these refugees as her family and by the end of her life could count among her 'children'.

This is the riveting account of one of the first Americans to spy for Joseph Stalin. A brilliant Columbia University graduate, Isaiah Oggins went to Berlin to establish a safe house and spy for his country - but he turned coat. Working for the Soviets, he was nevertheless poisoned in 1947 on Stalin's orders. Classified for decades, Oggins' story is a cloak-and-dagger tale to rival the best novels.

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.

Boris Morros was a major figure in the 1930s and 1940s. The head of music at Paramount, nominated for Academy Awards, he then went on to produce his own films with Laurel and Hardy, Fred Astaire, Henry Fonda, and others. But as J. Edgar Hoover would discover, these successes were a cover for one of the most incredible espionage tales in the history of the Cold War-Boris Morros also worked for Russian intelligence. Morros's assignments took him to the White House, the Vatican, and deep behind the Iron Curtain.

At the height of World War II, with the Third Reich's final solution in full operation, a small group of Jews who had barely escaped the Nazis did the unthinkable: They went back. Spies now, these men took on a dangerous mission behind enemy lines. They Dared Return is their story - a tale of adventure, espionage, love, and revenge.