Spy Memoir

Harriet the Spy, first published in 1964, has mesmerized generations of readers and launched a million diarists. Its beloved antiheroine, Harriet, is erratic, unsentimental, and endearing—very much like the woman who created her, Louise Fitzhugh. Born in 1928, Fitzhugh was raised in segregated Memphis, but she soon escaped her cloistered world and headed for New York, where her expanded milieu stretched from the lesbian bars of Greenwich Village to the art world of postwar Europe, and her circle of friends included members of the avant-garde.

The generation of young men who grew up in the shadow of World War II but were too young to fight came of age idealizing patriotism and adventure. They burned to live life to the fullest and do their part in the Cold War. In 1951, when BAYARD FOX graduated from Yale, the CIA promised a unique opportunity to do both by serving as a double agent. Assigned to Europe, the Congo, and Iran, Fox—who spoke several languages and was always game to learn new ones—grew disillusioned and resigned after 12 years. Soon after, a horse he was riding cartwheeled on him, shattering his hip.

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.

As war began in Europe in 1939, a naturalized German American was recruited by the Nazis to set up a radio transmitter and collect messages from spies active in the city to send back to Nazi spymasters in Hamburg. This German American, William G. Sebold, approached the FBI and became the first double agent in the Bureau's history, the center of a 16-month investigation that led to the arrest of a colorful cast of 33 enemy agents.

In the World War II era, Geoffrey Pyke was described as one of the world's great minds - to rank alongside Einstein. Pyke was an inventor, adventurer, polymath, and unlikely hero of both world wars. He earned a fortune on the stock market, founded an influential pre-school, wrote a bestseller, and came up with the idea for the US and Canadian Special Forces. Henry Hemming is the first reporter to sift through this extraordinary new information and finally tell Pyke's astonishing story in full: his brilliance, his flaws, and his life of adventures, ideas, and secrets.

Toto Koopman - beautiful, mixed-race, bisexual Vogue cover girl in 1930s Paris and lover of the all-powerful press baron and wartime cabinet minister Lord Beaverbrook. Coco Chanel, brilliant couturier and parfumier, rich beyond dreams and friend of Winston Churchill, the greatest-ever Briton. Both the toast of Parisian and London high society.

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.

Raised in a lush suburb of 1920s Paris, Noor Inayat Khan was an introspective musician and writer, dedicated to her family and to her father’s spiritual values of harmony, beauty, and tolerance. She did not seem destined for wartime heroism. Yet, faced with the evils of Nazi violence and the German occupation of France, Noor joined the British Special Operations Executive and trained in espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance. For crucial months of the war, Noor was the only wireless operator in France sending critical information to London.

God & Spies is a firsthand account of America's greatest intelligence coup. Operation Ivy Bells was not a onetime intercept of foreign intelligence but an ongoing operation of multiple Soviet military channels! "How did I end up as a navy diver, 400 feet down in a frigid Russian sea? After making my dad totally disgusted with me, I set out to make him happy. 'Honor thy father' - I struggled with a decision to serve God. 'Lord, I will give my life to you and serve you if you let me make this dive.'"

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.

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.

The incredible true story of British special agents Eileen and Jacqueline Nearne, sisters who risked everything to fight for freedom during the Second World War. When elderly recluse Eileen Nearne died, few suspected that the quiet little old lady was a decorated WWII war hero. Volunteering to serve for British intelligence at age 21, Eileen was posted to Nazi-occupied France to send encoded messages of crucial importance for the Allies, until her capture by the Gestapo.

The powerful story of a CIA whistleblower and political prisoner who refused to give up on his American dream. In 2015, Jeffrey Sterling was sentenced to prison, convicted of violating the Espionage Act. Sterling, it is now clear, was another victim of our government's draconian crackdown on alleged leakers and whistleblowers.

A former OSS spy looks back to his training in one of the key intelligence agencies in WWII, his experience in espionage, and his remarkable metamorphosis from boy to man, man to soldier, and soldier to spy. This is the story of Helias Doundoulakis, who became a spy for the Office of Strategic Services during WWII. Rescued by the SOE's Patrick Leigh Fermor, he escaped to Egypt and joined the American army and the OSS.

John Cairncross was among the most damaging spies of the 20th century. A member of the infamous Cambridge spy ring, he leaked highly sensitive documents from Bletchley Park, MI6, and the Treasury to the Soviet Union...Based on newly released archival materials, this biography will be the first to cover the life and espionage of this singularly important spy.

In the mid-1970s, the CIA and KGB were both watching Karel Koecher closely—and they were both convinced he was working for the enemy. They were both right. Traveling with his wife, Hana, Koecher posed as a Czechoslovak asylum seeker and arrived in the US as a Communist sleeper agent. After parlaying a doctorate from Columbia into a job at the CIA, Koecher proceeded to operate as a double agent at the height of the Cold War.

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.

Veteran Morgan Stanley banker Alok Sama thought he’d seen it all. Then he found himself chief dealmaker at the most influential technology investor in the world: SoftBank, backer of Arm Holdings, Yahoo, Nvidia, TikTok, Uber, T-Mobile, Alibaba and WeWork.

Recruited by a foreign power in postwar Paris and sent to Washington, Winston Bates is without training or talent. He might be a walking definition of the anti-spy. Yet he makes his way onto the staff of the powerful Senator Richard Russell, head of the Armed Services Committee. From that perch, Bates has extensive and revealing contacts with the Dulles brothers, Richard Bissell, Richard Helms, Lyndon Johnson, Joe Alsop, Walter Lippman, Roy Cohn, and even Ollie North - to name but a few of the historical players in the American experience Winston befriends - and haplessly betrays for a quarter century.

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.