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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 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
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The astonishing story of the ten million books that were smuggled across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.
The Hotel Lutetia is a Paris institution, the only ‘grand’ hotel on the city’s bohemian Left Bank. Ever since it opened, it has served as a meeting place for artists, musicians and politicians. Andre Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its rooms, Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. It has a darker history, too. During one short period, it became a focus for some of the most dramatic and terrible events in recent history. In the 1930s the Hotel Lutetia attracted intellectuals and political activists, forced to flee their homes when Hitler came to power, who met here with the hope of forming an alternative government. But when war came, Paris was occupied, and the hotel became the headquarters of the German military intelligence service – and the centre of their operation to root out enemies of the Reich.
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.
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.
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