The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal

From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history The Dead Hand comes the riveting story of a spy who cracked open the Soviet military research establishment and a penetrating portrait of the CIA’s Moscow station, an outpost of daring espionage in the last years of the Cold War
 
   While driving out of the American embassy in Moscow on the evening of February 16, 1978, the chief of the CIA’s Moscow station heard a knock on his car window. A man on the curb handed him an envelope whose contents stunned U.S. intelligence: details of top-secret Soviet research and developments in military technology that were totally unknown to the United States. In the years that followed, the man, Adolf Tolkachev, an engineer in a Soviet military design bureau, used his high-level access to hand over tens of thousands of pages of technical secrets. His revelations allowed America to reshape its weapons systems to defeat Soviet radar on the ground and in the air, giving the United States near total superiority in the skies over Europe.
   One of the most valuable spies to work for the United States in the four decades of global confrontation with the Soviet Union, Tolkachev took enormous personal risks—but so did the Americans. The CIA had long struggled to recruit and run agents in Moscow, and Tolkachev was a singular breakthrough. Using spy cameras and secret codes as well as face-to-face meetings in parks and on street corners, Tolkachev and his handlers succeeded for years in eluding the feared KGB in its own backyard, until the day came when a shocking betrayal put them all at risk. 
   Drawing on previously secret documents obtained from the CIA and on interviews with participants, David Hoffman has created an unprecedented and poignant portrait of Tolkachev, a man motivated by the depredations of the Soviet state to master the craft of spying against his own country. Stirring, unpredictable, and at times unbearably tense, The Billion Dollar Spy is a brilliant feat of reporting that unfolds like an espionage thriller.

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http://elendara.com/books/the-billion-dollar-spy-a-true-story-of-cold-war-espionage-and-betrayal/

The Second World War: A Complete History

Originally published by Weidenfeld in 1989 and now available in paperback, a history of the Second World War, which looks at its political, diplomatic, military and civilian aspects.
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Thirteen: The Apollo Flight That Failed

An “exciting” minute-by-minute account of the Apollo 13 flight based on mission control transcripts from Houston (The New York Times).

On the evening of April 13, 1970, the three astronauts aboard Apollo 13 were just hours from the third lunar landing in history. But as they soared through space, two hundred thousand miles from Earth, an explosion badly damaged their spacecraft. With compromised engines and failing life-support systems, the crew was in incomparably grave danger. Faced with below-freezing temperatures, a seriously ill crewmember, and a dwindling water supply, a safe return seemed unlikely.

Thirteen is the shocking and miraculous true story of how the astronauts and ground crew guided Apollo 13 back to Earth. Expanding on dispatches written for the New Yorker, Henry S. F. Cooper Jr. brings readers unparalleled detail on the moment-by-moment developments of one of NASA’s most dramatic missions.
 

 

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http://elendara.com/books/thirteen-the-apollo-flight-that-failed/

The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin's Secret Service

Filled with dramatic revelations, The Lost Spy may be the most important American spy story to come along in a generation.

For half a century, the case of Isaiah Oggins, a 1920s New York intellectual brutally murdered in 1947 on Stalin's orders, remained hidden in the secret files of the KGB and the FBI—a footnote buried in the rubble of the Cold War. Then, in 1992, it surfaced briefly, when Boris Yeltsin handed over a deeply censored dossier to the White House. The Lost Spy at last reveals the truth: Oggins was one of the first Americans to spy for the Soviets.Based on six years of international sleuthing, The Lost Spy traces Oggins's rise in beguiling detail—a brilliant Columbia University graduate sent to run a safe house in Berlin and spy on the Romanovs in Paris and the Japanese in Manchuria—and his fall: death by poisoning in a KGB laboratory. As harrowing as Darkness at Noon and as tragic as Dr. Zhivago, The Lost Spy is one of the great nonfiction detective stories of our time.
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http://elendara.com/books/the-lost-spy-an-american-in-stalins-secret-service/

Dear Leader: My Escape from North Korea

THE STORY THEY COULDN'T HACK: In this international bestseller, a high-ranking counterintelligence agent describes his life as a former poet laureate to Kim Jong-il and his breathtaking escape to freedom.

As North Korea’s State Poet Laureate, Jang Jin-sung led a charmed life. With food provisions (even as the country suffered through its great famine), a travel pass, access to strictly censored information, and audiences with Kim Jong-il himself, his life in Pyongyang seemed safe and secure. But this privileged existence was about to be shattered. When a strictly forbidden magazine he lent to a friend goes missing, Jang Jin-sung must flee for his life.

Never before has a member of the elite described the inner workings of this totalitarian state and its propaganda machine. An astonishing exposé told through the heart-stopping story of Jang Jin-sung’s escape to South Korea, Dear Leader is an “impossibly dramatic story…one of the best depictions yet of North Korea’s nightmare” (Publishers Weekly).
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Spies in the Congo: America's Atomic Mission in World War II

In the 1940s, the brightest minds of the United States and Nazi Germany raced to West Africa with a single mission: to secure the essential ingredient of the atomic bomb—and to make sure nobody saw them doing it

Albert Einstein told President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 that the world's only supply of uniquely high-quality uranium ore—the key ingredient for bomb— could be found in the Katanga province of the Belgian Congo at the Shinkolobwe Mine. Once the US Manhattan Project was committed to developing atomic weapons for the war against Germany and Japan, the rush to procure this uranium became a top priority—one deemed “vital to the welfare of the United States.”
But covertly exporting it from Africa posed a major risk: the ore had to travel via a spy-infested Angolan port or 1,500 miles by rail through the Congo, and then be shipped by boats or Pan Am Clippers to safety in the United States. It could be poached or smuggled at any point on the orders of Nazi Germany. To combat that threat, the US Office of Strategic Services sent in a team of intrepid spies, led by Wilbur Owings “Dock” Hogue, to be America's eyes and ears and to protect its most precious and destructive cargo.

Packed with newly discovered details from American and British archives, this is the gripping, true story of the unsung heroism of a handful of good men—and one woman—in colonial Africa who risked their lives in the fight against fascism and helped deny Hitler his atomic bomb.

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Books About The Cambridge Spies | The Cambridge Spy Ring

I have been fascinated with the Cambridge Spies (or Cambridge Spy Ring) ever since I read Kim Philby's My Silent War (read the review HERE).  Philby became a communist and Soviet agent in the 1930s. He easily joined MI6 and rose to be head of British Counterintelligence. He seeked asylum in Moscow in 1963, where he lived until his death in 1988.  The Cambridge Spies were spies from the United Kingdom, who spied for the Soviet Union during World War II and up to the early 1950s. Not a single one was prosecuted for spying.

The Cambridge Spies were discovered with the sudden disappearance of Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess in 1951.  Both of them were working for the Foreign Office at that time.  They showed up and appeared in a press conference in the Soviet Union in 1956.  With the flight of Burgess and Maclean, suspicion fell on Kim Philby (MI6) and Anthony Blunt  (Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures).  Both of them were friends of the missing diplomats.  Kim Philby fled to the Soviet Union in 1963 when new evidence was discovered about his being a Soviet spy.  Anthony Blunt confessed to British Intelligence but was never prosecuted and only publicly exposed in 1979.  Another spy, John Cairncross, also confessed to British Intelligence but it remained secret for many years.

The term "Cambridge" refers to the recruitment of the Cambridge Spy Ring during their education at the University of Cambridge in the 1930s. Blunt was several years older than Burgess, Maclean, and Philby; he acted as a talent-spotter and recruiter for most of the group.

The Cambridge Spies were ideologically persuaded that Communism was the best available political system and much better than fascism. They had successful careers in different branches of the British government. The Cambridge Spies passed large amounts of intelligence to the Soviet Union.

 



 

As I said at the start, I have been reading a lot about them.  I will update this post every time I get to finish a book about them.  For the meantime, below is the list:

Books about the Cambridge Spies:

[mybooktable book="a-spy-among-friends-kim-philby-and-the-great-betrayal" display="summary" buybutton_shadowbox="false"]

[mybooktable book="stalins-englishman-guy-burgess-the-cold-war-and-the-cambridge-spy-ring" display="summary" buybutton_shadowbox="false"]

[mybooktable book="my-5-cambridge-friends-burgess-maclean-philby-blunt-and-cairncross-by-their-kgb-controller" display="summary" buybutton_shadowbox="false"]

[mybooktable book="my-silent-war-the-autobiography-of-a-spy" display="summary" buybutton_shadowbox="false"]

[mybooktable book="guy-burgess-the-spy-who-knew-everyone" display="summary" buybutton_shadowbox="false"]

[mybooktable book="deceiving-the-deceivers-kim-philby-donald-maclean-and-guy-burgess" display="summary" buybutton_shadowbox="false"]

---

Related books about the Cambridge Spies:

[mybooktable book="a-brief-history-of-the-spy" display="summary" buybutton_shadowbox="false"]

[mybooktable book="gchq" display="summary" buybutton_shadowbox="false"]

[mybooktable book="spycatcher-the-candid-autobiography-of-a-senior-intelligence-officer" display="summary" buybutton_shadowbox="false"]

[mybooktable book="the-art-of-betrayal-the-secret-history-of-mi6-life-and-death-in-the-british-secret-service" display="summary" buybutton_shadowbox="false"]

[mybooktable book="defend-the-realm-the-authorized-history-of-mi5" display="summary" buybutton_shadowbox="false"]

 
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