True Spies

On November 1, 2006, Alexander Litvinenko sipped tea in London's Millennium Hotel. Hours later, the Russian émigré and former intelligence officer, who was sharply critical of Russian president Vladimir Putin, fell ill and within days was rushed to the hospital. Fatally poisoned by a rare radioactive isotope slipped into his drink, Litvinenko issued a dramatic deathbed statement accusing Putin himself of engineering his murder.

Why did the US intelligence services fail so spectacularly to know about the Soviet Union's nuclear capabilities following World War II? As Vince Houghton, historian and curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, shows us, that disastrous failure came just a few years after the Manhattan Project's intelligence team had penetrated the Third Reich and knew every detail of the Nazi's plan for an atomic bomb. What changed and what went wrong?

In literature and film, the spy chief is an all-knowing, all-powerful figure who masterfully moves spies into action like pieces on a chessboard. How close to reality is that depiction, and what does it really take to be an effective leader in the world of intelligence? This first volume of Spy Chiefs broadens and deepens our understanding of the role of intelligence leaders in foreign affairs and national security in the US and UK from the early 1940s to the present.

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.

On May 1, 1960, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union just weeks before a peace summit between the two nations. The CIA concocted a cover story for President Eisenhower to deliver, assuring him that no one could have survived a fall from that altitude. But against all odds, pilot Francis Gary Powers emerged from the wreckage and was seized by the KGB. Award-winning journalist Monte Reel reveals how the U-2 spy program, principally devised by four men working in secret, upended the Cold War and carved a new mission for the CIA.

Decorated army officer Major Ed Dames tells the shocking true story of his time asoperations and training officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency's top-secret Psychic Intelligence Unit. Together with his PSI Spyteam, Dames used the practice of remote viewing to uncover accurate and verifiable military intelligence by going where no intel operatives on the ground could go - into the very mind of the enemy.

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.

A US Navy commander is attacked by an unidentified Russian man while having dinner with his wife. A CIA operative travelling on a Canadian passport is intercepted and interrogated at Tehran Airport. A team of FBI officers are arrested by Indonesian police for travelling under fake passports in Jakarta. These apparently unrelated incidents point to a compromise in US government security, and Jack Ryan and his team must find out where it is coming from.

It is the spring of 1945, and in a dusty, remote community, the world’s most brilliant minds have come together in secret. Their mission: to split an atom and end a war. But among those who have come to Robert Oppenheimer’s "enchanted campus" of foreign-born scientists, baffled guards, and restless wives is a simple man in search of a killer. Michael Connolly has been sent to the middle of nowhere to investigate the murder of a security officer on the Manhattan Project.

In the quiet cul-de-sac where Keith and Stephen live, the only immediate signs of the Second World War are the blackouts at night and a single random bomb-site. But the two boys suspect that the ordinary houses in the Close and their inhabitants are not what they seem.

In 2017, a routine network television investigation led Ronan Farrow to a story only whispered about: one of Hollywood's most powerful producers was a predator, protected by fear, wealth, and a conspiracy of silence. As Farrow drew closer to the truth, shadowy operatives, from high-priced lawyers to elite war-hardened spies, mounted a secret campaign of intimidation, threatening his career, following his every move and weaponizing an account of abuse in his own family.

When James Bond was still in diapers, Virginia Hall was behind enemy lines, playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse with Hitler’s henchmen. Virginia was the baddest broad in any room she walked into. When the State Department proved to be a sexist boys’ club that wouldn’t let her in, she became a spy for the British. This boss lady helped arm and train the French Resistance and organized sabotage missions. There was just one problem: The Butcher of Lyon, a notorious Gestapo commander, was after her. But Virginia’s classmates didn’t call her the Fighting Blade for nothing.

The true story of a mysterious, dashing stuntman-turned-spy who may have been behind John F. Kennedy's assassination. His name was René Dussaq. He was born in Buenos Aires and educated in Geneva and Cuba. He was a daring WWII paratrooper who parachuted behind enemy lines for dangerous undercover work in support of the French Resistance. He was a handsome, charming man who briefly worked as a Hollywood stuntman. He was also a spy who may have killed John F. Kennedy.

This is the true story of James Lafayette, a slave who spied for George Washington's army during the American Revolution. But while America celebrated its newfound freedom, James returned to slavery. His service hadn't qualified him for the release he'd been hoping for. For James, the fight wasn't over; he'd already helped his country gain its freedom, now it was time to win his own.

In 1978 the Bulgarian author and dissident Georgi Markov was assassinated by a poisoned umbrella on Waterloo Bridge in London. His murder is the most iconic killing in almost five decades of the Cold War, and no one has ever been prosecuted for it. The Umbrella Murder reveals the real architect and hit man behind this spectacular killing: a spy code-named Piccadilly who worked for the Bulgarian secret service and the KGB, who has been hiding for more than forty years.

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 Second World War changed the course of modern history. It is filled with incredible stories of daring risks and exceptional struggles, but in the popular imagination, these stories are more often than not the stories of men. There is, however, a hidden treasure trove of untold stories of heroic women who have risked their lives in the monumental battle against fascism. We’ve heard of women who became nurses treating soldiers with battlefield injuries, partisans who fought occupying armies, and skilled laborers who worked in wartime industries.

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.

When bestselling thriller writer Ian Ferguson's research gets too close to the enigmatic founder of a classified-leaks website, he becomes the victim of a ruthless pair of assassins. Convinced that Ferguson was on to something big, his publisher enlists crusading journalists Tom Novak and Stella Mitchell to complete his book, and identify who was behind the hit. But when the pair link Ferguson's death to a notorious member of the British royal family, they begin to uncover a plot that points uncomfortably close to home – Stella's estranged mother.

America is coming apart. An illegal immigration crisis has broken out along America's Southern border, there are race riots in Detroit, a fiery female rancher-turned-militia leader has vowed revenge on the president for his arrogant policies, and the world's most notorious terrorist is planning a massive attack that could destroy the United States as we know it. Meanwhile the president is too consumed by legacy-seeking to see our country's deep peril.