The Mission
£25.00‘No one has opened up the CIA to us like Weiner has, and The Mission deserves to win him a second Pulitzer’ JOHN SIMPSON, GUARDIAN
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All His Spies
£12.99Robert Cecil, statesman and spymaster, lived through an astonishingly threatening period in English history. Queen Elizabeth had no clear successor and enemies both external and internal threatened to destroy England as a Protestant state, most spectacularly with the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot. Cecil stood at the heart of the Tudor and then Stuart state, a vital figure in managing the succession from Elizabeth I to James I & VI, warding off military and religious threats and steering the decisions of two very different but equally wilful and hard-to-manage monarchs. The promising son of Queen Elizabeth’s chief minister Lord Burghley, for Cecil there was no choice but politics, and he became supremely skilled in the arts of power, making many rivals and enemies. ‘All His Spies’ is an engaging and original work of history.
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The CIA
£12.99As World War II ended, the United States stood as the dominant power on the world stage. In 1947, to support its new global status, it created the CIA to analyse foreign intelligence. But within a few years, the Agency was engaged in other operations: bolstering pro-American governments, overthrowing nationalist leaders, and surveilling anti-imperial dissenters in the US. The Cold War was an obvious reason for this transformation – but not the only one. Intelligence historian Hugh Wilford draws on decades of research to show the Agency as part of a larger picture, the history of Western empire. While young CIA officers imagined themselves as British imperial agents like T.E. Lawrence, successive US presidents used the covert powers of the Agency to hide overseas interventions from postcolonial foreigners and anti-imperial Americans alike.
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The Spy in the Archive
£25.00The compulsively readable new book from The Rest is Classified host Gordon Corera. About how one man – Vasili Mitrokhin – turned first disaffected dissident and then traitor to the KGB, stealing the most secret Soviet archives and smuggling them to the West.
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My family and other spies
£22.00All families have secrets. But Alistair Wood’s family have more than most. He grew up within the four (very high) walls of SIS’s specialist training camp, surrounded by the most senior and colourful characters in the Service’s history. His mother was one of only a handful of female agents to have operated behind enemy lines in Berlin. And his father, an ostensibly heroic humanitarian who died ‘in the field’ in Bosnia at 82, had in fact led a highly secret double life since his summary (and still classified) expulsion from the Service forty years earlier.
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The illegals
£22.00In 2010, two decades after the Cold War, ten Russian spies were arrested in the US following a ten-year FBI operation. Among them were three couples who had lived as Americans for years, and one agent who had nearly forgotten Russian. They had hidden their true identities from their children, neighbours and even their partners. Moscow expert Shaun Walker captures the untold history of Russia’s deep cover spy programme, from the ‘great illegals’ of the 1920s and 1930s to the twenty-first century, when agents maintained their fake identities and loyalties after the fall of the Soviet Union.
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Agent Zo
£12.99This is the incredible story of Elzbieta Zawacka, the WW2 female resistance fighter known as Agent Zo. Agent Zo was the only woman to reach London from Warsaw during the Second World War as an emissary of the Polish Home Army command, and then in Britain she became the only woman to join the Polish elite Special Forces, known as the ‘Silent Unseen’. After the war she was demobbed as one of the most highly decorated women in Polish history. Yet the Soviet-backed post-war Communist regime not only imprisoned her, but also ensured that her remarkable story remained hidden for over forty years. Now, through new archival research and exclusive interviews with people who knew and fought alongside Zo, Clare Mulley brings this forgotten heroine back to life, and also transforms how we see the history of women’s agency in the Second World War.
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The CIA book club
£25.00‘Entertaining and vivid? This is a gripping account of an intriguing and little-known Cold War moment’ OBSERVER
The astonishing story of the ten million books that were smuggled across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.
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A spy in the family
£20.00This title tells the fascinating story of how the authors helped Johanna, now 99, find her real son, who is now married with children and grandchildren and living close to the orphanage in Bohemia where she left him in 1945.
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Vatican spies
£25.00An astonishing history of the priests and missionaries whose ‘special ops’ serve the Holy See and 1.3 billion Catholics worldwide.
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The peacock and the sparrow
£9.99Prize winning and critically acclaimed spy fiction from an ex-CIA operations officer.