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£10.99
‘The Defector’ is the untold account of how, in 1971, the defection of a KGB saboteur in London led to the expulsion of more than a hundred Soviet ‘diplomats’ from the UK. Drawing on newly declassified intelligence documents and dozens of interviews with spymasters, the book tells a startling story of a Soviet mission to plant fake Kremlin agents within British and American intelligence services, the paranoia that ensued, and how the actions of a genuine turncoat, the former KGB officer Oleg Lyalin, and the secrets he revealed resulted to one of the most dramatic and pivotal moments in the Cold War.
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£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.
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£25.00
Antonia Senior has done that rare thing, written an account of the Cambridge Five with an historian’s fidelity to fact and a novelist’s eye for character. Her meticulous research and elegant writing bring to life the story of class-conscious Englishmen whose youthful embrace of Communism led to the 20th century’s most audacious spy network. It’s a spellbinding tale of espionage, friendship, and betrayal.
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£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.
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£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
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The astonishing story of the ten million books that were smuggled across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.
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£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.
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£9.99
It is spring in 1963 and George Smiley has left the Circus. With the wreckage of the West’s spy war with the Soviets strewn across Europe, he has eyes only on a more peaceful life. And indeed, with his marriage more secure than ever, there is a rumour in Whitehall – unconfirmed and a little scandalous – that George Smiley might almost be happy. But Control has other plans. A Russian agent has defected in the most unusual of circumstances, and the man he was sent to kill in London is nowhere to be found. Smiley reluctantly agrees to one last simple task: interview Susanna, a Hungarian émigré and employee of the missing man, and sniff out a lead. But in his absence the shadows of Moscow have lengthened. Smiley will soon find himself entangled in a perilous mystery that will define the battles to come, and strike at the heart of his greatest enemy.
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£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.
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£12.99
George Smiley, who is a troubled man of infinite compassion, is also a single-mindedly ruthless adversary as a spy. The scene which he enters is a Cold War landscape of moles and lamplighters, scalp-hunters and pavement artists, where men are turned, burned or bought for stock. Smiley’s mission is to catch a Moscow Centre mole burrowed thirty years deep into the Circus itself.
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£10.99
An agent, desperate to end his career as a spy during the Cold War, is caught up in a breathlessly perilous assignment to come in from the cold and re-enter the West.