For the period between World War II and the full onset of the Cold War, histories of American intelligence seem to go dark. Yet in those years a little known clandestine organization, the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), emerged from the remnants of wartime American intelligence to lay the groundwork for what would become the CIA and, in ways revealed here for the first time, conduct its own secret war of espionage and political intrigue in postwar Europe. Telling the full story of this earl...

MOSCOW, July 1987. Real-estate tycoon Donald Trump visits Soviet Russia for the first time at the invitation of the government.LONDON, December 2016. Luke Harding meets former MI6 officer Christopher Steele to discuss the president-elect's connections with Russia. Harding follows two leads; money and sex.WASHINGTON, January 2017. Steele's explosive dossier alleges that the Kremlin has been 'cultivating, supporting, and assi...

The New York Times bestselling author of Bringing Down the House and The Accidental Billionaires tells his most incredible story yet: A true drama of obscene wealth, crime, rivalry, and betrayal from deep inside the world of billionaire Russian oligarchs that Booklist called “one more example of just how talented a storyteller [Mezrich] is.”Meet two larger-than-life Russians: former mathematician Boris Berezovsky, who moved into ...

A New York Times bestsellerThe secret history of America's submarine warfare is revealed for the first time in this fast-paced chronicle of adventure and intrigue during the Cold War.**"Vividly told, impressively documented." —**New York TimesFor decades, only a select and powerful few knew the truth about the submarines that silently roamed the ocean in danger and...

1 November 2006. Alexander Litvinenko is brazenly poisoned in central London. Twenty two days later he dies, killed from the inside. The poison? Polonium; a rare, lethal and highly radioactive substance. His crime? He had made some powerful enemies in Russia.Based on the best part of a decade's reporting, as well as extensive interviews with those closest to the events (including the murder suspects), and access to trial evidence, Luke Harding's A Very Expensive Poison is ...

The unputdownable biography of the enigmatic spy and traitor Guy Burgess: 'More riveting than a spy novel' - Sunday TelegraphGuy Burgess was the most important, complex and fascinating of 'The Cambridge Spies' - Maclean, Philby, Blunt - all brilliant young men recruited in the 1930s to betray their country to the Soviet Union. An engaging and charming companion to many, an unappealing, utterly ruthless manipulator to others, Burgess rose through academia, ...

A revelatory and pathbreaking account of the highly secretive world of the Soviet intelligence servicesA uniquely comprehensive and rich account of the Soviet intelligence services, Jonathan Haslam's Near and Distant Neighbors charts the labyrinthine story of Soviet intelligence from the October Revolution to the end of the Cold War.Previous histories have focused on the KGB, leaving military intelligence and the special service—which specialized in ...

The New York Times bestselling author of Dark Invasion and The Last Goodnight once again illuminates the lives of little-known individuals who played a significant role in America's history as he chronicles the incredible true story of a critical, recently declassified counterintelligence mission and two remarkable agents whose story has been called "the greatest secret of the Cold War."In 1946, genius linguist and codebreaker Meredith Ga...

The "definitive" book on the U-2 episode and its disastrous impact on the future of the Cold War ( Kirkus Reviews).On May Day 1960, Soviet forces downed a CIA spy plane flown deep into Soviet territory by Francis Gary Powers two weeks before a crucial summit. This forced President Dwight Eisenhower to decide whether, in an effort to save the meeting, to admit to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev—and the world—that he had secretly ordered Powers's flight, or ...

A real-life James Bond, alleged to have spied for at least four nations and executed on the direct orders of Stalin himself, Sidney Reilly left a trail of false identities that made him precisely the type of person the secret intelligence service needed as an agent. Hero, conman, master spy, womaniser - who really was the 'Ace of Spies'? In September 1925, Sidney Reilly journeyed across the Russian frontier on a mission to overthrow the existing Bolshevik regime and restore the Czar. Yet, ...

An in-depth look at the decades-long effort to escalate hostilities with Russia and what it portends for the future. Since 1945, the US has justified numerous wars, interventions, and military build-ups based on the pretext of the Russian Red Menace, even after the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991 and Russia stopped being Red. In fact, the two biggest post-war American conflicts, the Korean and Vietnam wars, were not, as has been frequently claimed, about stopping...