No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama Bin Laden

The #1 New York Times bestselling first-person account of the planning and execution of the Bin Laden raid from a Navy SEAL who confronted the terrorist mastermind and witnessed his final moments.

From the streets of Iraq to the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips in the Indian Ocean, and from the mountaintops of Afghanistan to the third floor of Osama Bin Laden’s compound, operator Mark Owen of the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group—known as SEAL Team Six—has been a part of some of the most memorable special operations in history, as well as countless missions that never made headlines.

No Easy Day puts readers alongside Owen and his fellow SEAL team members as they train for the biggest mission of their lives. The blow-by-blow narrative of the assault, beginning with the helicopter crash that could have ended Owen’s life straight through to the radio call confirming Bin Laden’s death, is an essential piece of modern history.

In No Easy Day, Owen also takes readers into the War on Terror and details the formation of the most elite units in the military. Owen’s story draws on his youth in Alaska and describes the SEALs’ quest to challenge themselves at the highest levels of physical and mental endurance. With boots-on-the-ground detail, Owen describes several missions that illustrate the life and work of a SEAL and the evolution of the team after the events of September 11.

In telling the true story of the SEALs whose talents, skills, experiences, and exceptional sacrifices led to one of the greatest victories in the War on Terror, Mark Owen honors the men who risk everything for our country, and he leaves readers with a deep understanding of the warriors who keep America safe.
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http://elendara.com/books/no-easy-day-the-firsthand-account-of-the-mission-that-killed-osama-bin-laden/

The Secret History of MI6: 1909-1949

The authorized history of the world's oldest and most storied foreign intelligence service, drawing extensively on hitherto secret documents

Britain's Special Intelligence Service, commonly called MI6, is not only the oldest and most storied foreign intelligence unit in the world - it is also the only one to open its archives to an outside researcher. The result, in this authorized history, is an unprecedented and revelatory look at an organization that essentially created, over the course of two world wars, the modern craft of spying. Here are the true stories that inspired Ian Fleming's James Bond's novels and John le Carré George Smiley novels. Examining innovations from invisible ink and industrial-scale cryptography to dramatic setbacks like the Nazi sting operations to bag British operatives, this groundbreaking history is as engrossing as any thriller - and much more revealing.

"Perhaps the most authentic account one will ever read about how intelligence really works." -The Washington Times

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http://elendara.com/books/the-secret-history-of-mi6-1909-1949/

Agent 110: An American Spymaster and the German Resistance in WWII

The “lively and engrossing” (The Wall Street Journal) story of how OSS spymaster Allen Dulles built an underground network determined to take down Hitler and destroy the Third Reich.

Agent 110 is Allen Dulles, a newly minted spy from an eminent family. From his townhouse in Bern, Switzerland, and in clandestine meetings in restaurants, back roads, and lovers’ bedrooms, Dulles met with and facilitated the plots of Germans during World War II who were trying to destroy the country’s leadership. Their underground network exposed Dulles to the political maneuverings of the Soviets, who were already competing for domination of Germany, and all of Europe, in the post-war period.

Scott Miller’s “absorbing and bracing” (The Seattle Times) Agent 110 explains how leaders of the German Underground wanted assurances from Germany’s enemies that they would treat the country humanely after the war. If President Roosevelt backed the resistance, they would overthrow Hitler and shorten the war. But Miller shows how Dulles’s negotiations fell short. Eventually he was placed in charge of the CIA in the 1950s, where he helped set the stage for US foreign policy. With his belief that the ends justified the means, Dulles had no qualms about consorting with Nazi leadership or working with resistance groups within other countries to topple governments.

Agent 110 is “a doozy of a dossier on Allen Dulles and his early days spying during World War II” (Kirkus Reviews). “Miller skillfully weaves a double narrative of Dulles’ machinations and those of the German resistance” (Booklist) to bring to life this exhilarating, and pivotal, period of world history—of desperate renegades in a dark and dangerous world where spies, idealists, and traitors match wits and blows to ensure their vision of a perfect future.
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http://elendara.com/books/agent-110-an-american-spymaster-and-the-german-resistance-in-wwii/

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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http://elendara.com/books/the-second-world-war-a-complete-history/

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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http://elendara.com/books/dear-leader-my-escape-from-north-korea/

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.

elendara
http://elendara.com/books/spies-in-the-congo-americas-atomic-mission-in-world-war-ii/

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:

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[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"]

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Related books about the Cambridge Spies:

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[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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http://elendara.com/cambridge-spies/