Espionage & secret services

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  • Ballistic

    £20.00

    In the dying light of an Arctic afternoon a vast black shape slips beneath the waters of Murmansk bay, her full complement of crew on board. But the Russian nuclear-powered submarine the Novorussiya is carrying something else – something so diabolically destructive that not all the crew are aware of this cargo. Kilometres to the south, at a military base hidden in the frozen forests of Arctic Russia, a lone figure steps out into a blast of windblown snow. Unseen, Major Orlov makes his way to a distant corner of the base and retrieves a hidden transmitter. He knows all about the Novorussiya and what she’s carrying and he needs to alert his handlers in London. But Orlov also knows that the net of suspicion is closing in on him and he wants out. Fast. When Orlov’s extraction across the border into Finland goes wrong MI6 assign Luke Carlton to team up with the formidable Finnish Special Forces officer Sini Järvinen to find out the truth.

  • The Nord Stream Conspiracy

    £25.00

    In September 2022, Scandinavian seismologists picked up tremors that resembled a huge undersea earthquake or volcanic eruption. These signals were caused by several devastating explosions that destroyed Nord Stream, the $20 billion pipeline carrying cheap Russian gas to Europe. The consequences were immediate, shifting global geopolitics, delivering a body blow to one of the world’s largest economies, fuelling tensions in the Russo-Ukrainian war and triggering a manhunt that would rupture relations within the NATO alliance. Despite capturing the imagination of millions, the mystery of who blew up the pipeline has so far gone unsolved – was it the CIA? Could Putin himself have been behind it? Was it part of the shadow war between Russia and the West? – until now.

  • The Spy in the Archive

    £10.99

    LONGLISTED for the CWA ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction 2026

    The 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.

  • A Spy in the Blood

    £9.99

    Mark Wolfe was the greatest spy of his generation. Now retired from active service for over two decades, his family know him as a quiet, affable civil servant. Mark still works for MI6, helping to recruit new agents. But he hasn’t got his hands dirty since the spying game involved dead-dropping intel beneath railway station clocks in East Berlin, Czechoslovakia and other foreign lands that no longer exist. When his daughter reveals an unhealthy obsession with joining the service, he is reluctantly thrown back into a terrifying new world of modern espionage.

  • Master of Lies

    £25.00

    ‘Master of Lies’ tells the extraordinary untold story of Anthony Blunt’s life as a spy. Based on extensive research into newly released files he is revealed as not simply ‘the fourth man’, but the most dangerous spy of the twentieth century. During the war, as the fate of the world hung in the balance, Blunt’s intelligence was being fed straight on to the desks of Hitler, Stalin and Churchill. His hand was secretly guiding our collective fate and his treason led to the deaths of tens of thousands. He casts a shadow which looms large to this day. The official narrative is that Blunt was the least of the Cambridge spies – and yet he was the one who got away with it. While the rest drank themselves to death in dingy Moscow flats, Blunt revelled in his brilliant career as an art historian, Surveyor of the Queen’s pictures and Knight of the Realm.

  • The Illegals

    £11.99

    In 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.

  • The Writer and the Traitor

    £22.00

    The friendship between Graham Greene and Kim Philby is one of the most mysterious of the twentieth century. Greene, the internationally lauded novelist who wrestled with the themes of faith and betrayal in his work. Philby, the British intelligence-officer-turned-spy for the Soviets, and one of the most reviled men of his era. The two men met as young MI6 officers in war-torn London, working together to defeat the Nazis. But after Greene suddenly resigned just days before D-Day, questions started to arise. He turned back to literature, using his experience in the intelligence services as a backdrop for ‘Our Man in Havana’ and the screenplay of ‘The Third Man’. Lurking within the pages lay suspicions of his friend, with characters and plots echoing Philby’s life. Robert Verkaik chronicles the relationship of these two giants of the 20th century, spanning the defeat of Nazism and the end of the Cold War, right up until Philby’s death in 1

  • My Family and Other Spies

    £10.99

    As a boy, Alistair Wood lived within the (very high) walls of a Secret Intelligence Service – or MI6 – training camp, surrounded by some of the most senior characters in SIS history. After all, he was family. His mother was one of a handful of women to have operated behind the lines in post-war Berlin. His father, once one of Britain’s most highly-regarded intelligence officers, was an absent and perplexing figure, the reasons for his sudden departure from the Service still classified to this day. But Wood’s search for the truth took him on a journey more remarkable than even he had imagined. This title is a gripping exploration of an extraordinary, scarcely believable life, a globe-trotting spy story that spans a half century from the gathering storm before the Second World War to the fall of Communism, and a son’s reckoning with the secrets of the past.

  • A Rebel and a Traitor

    £22.00

    From the master storyteller behind 2023’s critically acclaimed KILLING THATCHER

  • The CIA Book Club

    £10.99

    A Book of the Year in the Daily Telegraph and Economist

    'This book reads like a spy novel' FINANICAL TIMES

    'Entertaining and vivid' OBSERVER

    'Reads like a thriller' THE SUN

    ————————————

    The astonishing story of the ten million books that were smuggled across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

  • A Spy in the Blood

    £16.99

    Mark Wolfe was the greatest spy of his generation. Now retired from active service for over two decades, his family know him as a quiet, affable civil servant. Mark still works for MI6, helping to recruit new agents. But he hasn’t got his hands dirty since the spying game involved dead-dropping intel beneath railway station clocks in East Berlin, Czechoslovakia and other foreign lands that no longer exist. When his daughter reveals an unhealthy obsession with joining the service, he is reluctantly thrown back into a terrifying new world of modern espionage.

  • Operation Paperclip

    £12.99

    In the chaos following WWII, many of Germany’s remaining resources were divvied up among allied forces. Some of the greatest spoils were the Third Reich’s scientific minds. The United States secretly decided that the value of these former Nazis’ forbidden knowledge outweighed their crimes, and the government formed a covert organization called Operation Paperclip to allow them to work without the knowledge of the American public. In this book, Annie Jacobsen follows more than a dozen German scientists through their postwar lives and into one of the most complex, nefarious, and jealously guarded government secrets of the 20th century.

  • Her Secret Service

    £12.99

    Since the inception of the Secret Service Bureau back in 1909, women have worked at the very heart of British secret intelligence – yet their contributions have been all but written out of history. Now, drawing on private and previously-classified documents, leading historian Claire Hubbard-Hall brings their gripping true stories to life. From encoding orders and decrypting enemy messages to penning propaganda and infiltrating organisations, the women of British intelligence played a pivotal role in both the First and Second World Wars. Prepare to meet the true custodians of Britain’s military secrets.

  • Invasion

    £9.99

    2024, and China is massing troops on its coast across the Strait from Taiwan. This time it looks like they’re serious about invasion – an act that would result in war between the People’s Republic and the US and its allies, including the UK. But Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service has an agent in play: someone close to the top of the Chinese Communist Party and who’s ready to pass on vital secrets that could defuse the escalating situation. But as the handover takes place in a Hong Kong back street cafe, the agent’s MI6 handler is snatched before she can transmit the data back to London and disappears. There are few clues as to who might be responsible. Is it China’s infamous state security agency, the MSS? Or has another, less predictable player entered the game? MI6 field operative Luke Carlton is despatched to track down the missing agent.

  • A Spy Among Friends

    £12.99

    Kim Philby was the most notorious British defector and Soviet mole in history. Agent, double agent, traitor and enigma, he betrayed every secret of Allied operations to the Russians in the early years of the Cold War. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Philby, Nicholas Elliott and James Jesus Angleton were rising stars in the intelligence world and shared every secret. Elliott and Angleton thought they knew Philby better than anyone – and then discovered they had not known him at all. This is a story of loyalty, trust and treachery, of male friendships forged, and then systematically betrayed. With access to newly released MI5 files and previously unseen papers, ‘A Spy Among Friends’ unlocks what was perhaps the last great secret of the Cold War.

  • Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

    £11.99

    On a warm July evening in 1985, a middle-aged man stood on the pavement of a busy avenue in the heart of Moscow, holding a plastic carrier bag. In his grey suit and tie, he looked like any other Soviet citizen. The bag alone was mildly conspicuous, printed with the red logo of Safeway, the British supermarket. The man was a spy. A senior KGB officer, for more than a decade he had supplied his British spymasters with a stream of priceless secrets from deep within the Soviet intelligence machine. No spy had done more to damage the KGB. The Safeway bag was a signal: to activate his escape plan to be smuggled out of Soviet Russia. So began one of the boldest and most extraordinary episodes in the history of spying. Ben Macintyre reveals a tale of espionage, betrayal and raw courage that changed the course of the Cold War forever.