The Belgian resistance finally gets its due
Helen Fry’s account of the men and women who risked all to provide intelligence about their German occupiers in both world wars makes for a gripping tale of courage, ingenuity and sacrifice
Mossad’s secret allies in Operation Wrath of God
Aviva Guttmann reveals how the intelligence-sharing network the Club de Berne aided Israel in avenging the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre
Assassinations have an awkward tendency to backfire
A prime example – the murder of the SS officer Reinhard Heydrich in 1942 – may have been a technical success for SOE, but brutal reprisals made it an operational disaster
Everyone who was anyone in Russia was spied on – including Stalin
In 1972,Vasili Mitrokhin oversaw the transfer of thousands of documents in the KGB archives and secretly noted the atrocities they revealed - though Stalin’s file was mysteriously empty
From the early 1930s we knew what Hitler’s intentions were – so why were we so ill-prepared?
Intelligence provided by William de Ropp made the situation painfully clear, but the British political establishment, determined on peace, wilfully ignored the warnings
Were the Arctic convoy sacrifices worth it?
Stalin privately admitted that his army could never have triumphed without western aid, and the convoys also indirectly helped the war in the Atlantic – but the loss of life was horrendous
The spy with the bullet-proof Rolls-Royce
Stationed in Paris from 1926 to 1940, the wealthy, debonair ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale, often seen as a model for James Bond, was also a supremely effective intelligence officer
The assassination of Georgi Markov bore all the hallmarks of a Russian wet job
The Bulgarian dissident sailed too close to the wind with his revelations about Tudor Zhivkov in 1978, provoking the dictator to enlist Russian help in eliminating him
Saving their own skins
Ian Buruma describes three individuals who saved themselves in wartime by betraying others. But none was a ‘typical traitor’, or essentially different from the rest of us
The secret sharers
In February 1941 four US officers were landed from a British warship at Sheerness, bundled into vehicles and driven to…
No blame, no shame
If MI5 had a Cold War file on you – paper in those happy days – it didn’t mean they…
A delicate bargain
This very readable account of relations between the British intelligence services and the Crown does more than it says on…
A fiasco from the start
In carefree days which now seem so distant we used occasionally to take the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry. Docking after a long…
Back to the future
Between 1923 and 1931 the publisher Routledge produced ‘Today and Tomorrow’, a series of 110 short books by intellectual luminaries…
Pacific theatre
It is sometimes said that intelligence failures are often failures of assessment rather than collection. This is especially so when…
The coldest war of all: sabotaging the Nazis in Norway
Anyone mildly interested in the second world war probably knows two things about our wartime alliance with Norway, following its…
Betrayal in Berlin – a small but important part of the Cold War story
The Berlin Tunnel was an Anglo-American eavesdropping operation mounted against Russian-controlled East Berlin in 1955–56. It was a technical and…
It’s judo, not chess, that’s Putin’s game
These two refreshingly concise books address the same question from different angles: how should we deal with Russia? Mark Galeotti…
Why didn’t they try harder to assassinate Hitler?
Awareness of German opposition to Hitler is usually limited to Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg’s attempt to blow up the wretched…
Did the notorious Zinoviev letter ever exist?
This is a well-written, scrupulously researched and argued account of an enduring mystery that neatly illustrates the haphazard interactions of…
Getting women on board: the history of the WRNS
This book is a thoroughly researched account of the parts played by women in the service of the Royal Navy…
Armageddon averted
From 1945 to 1992 the Cold War was the climate. Individual weather events stood out — the Korean War, the…
The infamous four
Most books about British traitors feature those who spied for Russia before and during the Cold War, making it easy…
Out of hot water
During and after the second world war the Fourteenth Army in Burma became famous as the Forgotten Army, almost as…
Listening in to the Russians
There are now enough books about Bletchley Park for it to become part of national mythology, along with the Tudors,…
