True Spies

Grounded in extensive research and reporting, Spy Schools reveals how academia has emerged as a frontline in the global spy game. In a knowledge-based economy, universities are repositories of valuable information and research, where brilliant minds of all nationalities mingle freely with few questions asked. Intelligence agencies have always recruited bright undergraduates, but now, in an era when espionage increasingly requires specialized scientific or technological expertise, they're wooing higher-level academics.

After the fall of France in the mid-1940s, Adolf Hitler faced a British Empire that refused to negotiate for peace. With total war looming, he ordered the Abwehr, Germany's defense and intelligence organization, to carry out Operation Lena - a program to place information-gathering spies within Britain. Quickly, a network of secret agents spread within the United Kingdom and across the British Empire. The stunning truth, though, was that every last one of these German spies had been captured and turned by the British.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

In early 1967, a bored, adventurous photojournalist on an Air Force base in Texas is offered a Temporary Duty (TDY) assignment somewhere overseas. The mission is steeped in secrecy, but Pete is promised a large bonus and hazardous duty pay. So he agrees. He and a small group of photojournalists, each with a special skill, are isolated on a Special Forces base where they are kept under constant surveillance by a group of highly trained and menacing soldiers.

Defeating the witch was just the beginning… Now we have to survive betrayal, birth, and a kingdom on the edge of war. Isla Maddox and I sailed to my home island of Maatua and returned victorious—with the Diamond of Faith. But restoring peace to Crescent Falls won’t be as easy as we hoped. Enemies surround us. Loyalties are tested. And the one Maddox trusts most is about to betray him. As I prepare to give birth to our son, I can feel death circling. If the battle doesn’t take me... childbirth might. How are we ever going to make it out of this alive? Maddox I’ve finally found my ...

A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist’s journey into a billon-dollar secret industry that is shaping our world - the booming business of private spying, operatives-for-hire retained by companies, political parties, and the powerful to dig up dirt on their enemies and, if need be, destroy them.

In 1982, a 20-something named Michael Ross left home to backpack across Europe. Little did he know that his vacation would set in motion a chain of events that would hurl him into a career where the bosses are seasoned spies, and the work is tracking the world’s most dangerous terrorists. The Volunteer is a fast-paced memoir that provides insight into our world, both pre- and post-9/11, told by a man on the front lines in the war against terror.

1444. Three princes. Two clashing empires. One deadly game few survive. Vlad Dracula is shattered. After a daring escape sets him free, his kindness gets him recaptured, and he fears he ran out of chances. When his brother Radu saves his head, but the sultan’s mercy throws him back in jail, Vlad vows to get even or die. Can Vlad best Radu and clear his honor in the sultan’s blood? Or will his enemies break his spirit in a fate worse than death? Throne of Blood is the second installment in the Curse of the Dracula Brothers sweeping saga, where dark medieval history meets Romanian ...

Cambridge spy Guy Burgess was a supreme networker. He also set a gold standard for conflicts of interest, working variously for the BBC, MI5, MI6, the War Office, the Ministry of Information and the KGB. Yet Burgess was never challenged by Britain's spy catchers: his superiors were convinced he was too much of a liability to have been recruited by Moscow. Now, with a major new release of hundreds of files into the National Archives, Purvis and Hulbert reveal just how this charming establishment insider was able to fool everyone for so long.

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.

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.

"While some of his followers clearly understand it's satire, many others seem not to." -PBS Newshour "Young is trolling the media, too, getting his opinions into mainstream publications." -The Huffington Post Can finding a woman's head in a box help solve one of history's most infamous murders? Just drifting through life, Thom Wilson sells computer software, has no future, is a manic depressive, and ponders his meaningless existence. He finds a woman's head in a box which puts him on a mission to solve the mystery. Mental Illness has never been this much fun.

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.

When Carolina Cunningham’s perfect life in retirement at the Villas begins to feel less than perfect, she realizes something is missing in her life. Even though she finds enjoyment reading her Mrs. Craycraft Super Agent books, she wants something more. When she decides what is missing in her life is adventure, excitement, and romance, she convinces two bridge-playing friends to take a Caribbean cruise onboard The Emerald Dream. During the cruise, the women cross paths with a stowaway, a hunky spy, a smuggling ring, assassins, and kidnappers. As their fears are brushed aside by authorities...

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.