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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > International relations > Espionage & secret services
In the Great Terror of 1937 38 more than a million Soviet citizens
were arrested or killed for political crimes they didn't commit.
What kind of people carried out this violent purge, and what
motivated them? This book opens up the world of the Soviet
perpetrator for the first time. Focusing on Kuntsevo, the Moscow
suburb where Stalin had a dacha, Alexander Vatlin shows how
Stalinism rewarded local officials for inventing enemies. Agents of
Terror reveals stunning, detailed evidence from archives available
for a limited time in the 1990s. Going beyond the central figures
of the terror, Vatlin takes readers into the offices and
interrogation rooms of secret police at the district level. Spurred
at times by ambition, and at times by fear for their own lives,
agents rushed to fulfill quotas for arresting ""enemies of the
people"" even when it meant fabricating the evidence. Vatlin pulls
back the curtain on a Kafkaesque system, forcing readers to
reassess notions of historical agency and moral responsibility in
Stalin-era crimes.
The extraordinary untold story of Ernest Hemingway's dangerous
secret life in espionage A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A finalist
for the William E. Colby Military Writers' Award "IMPORTANT" (Wall
Street Journal) * "FASCINATING" (New York Review of Books) *
"CAPTIVATING" (Missourian) A riveting international
cloak-and-dagger epic ranging from the Spanish Civil War to the
liberation of Western Europe, wartime China, the Red Scare of Cold
War America, and the Cuban Revolution, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy
reveals for the first time Ernest Hemingway's secret adventures in
espionage and intelligence during the 1930s and 1940s (including
his role as a Soviet agent code-named "Argo"), a hidden chapter
that fueled both his art and his undoing. While he was the
historian at the esteemed CIA Museum, Nicholas Reynolds, a longtime
American intelligence officer, former U.S. Marine colonel, and
Oxford-trained historian, began to uncover clues suggesting Nobel
Prize-winning novelist Ernest Hemingway was deeply involved in
mid-twentieth-century spycraft -- a mysterious and shocking
relationship that was far more complex, sustained, and fraught with
risks than has ever been previously supposed. Now Reynolds's
meticulously researched and captivating narrative "looks among the
shadows and finds a Hemingway not seen before" (London Review of
Books), revealing for the first time the whole story of this hidden
side of Hemingway's life: his troubling recruitment by Soviet spies
to work with the NKVD, the forerunner to the KGB, followed in short
order by a complex set of secret relationships with American
agencies. Starting with Hemingway's sympathy to antifascist forces
during the 1930s, Reynolds illuminates Hemingway's immersion in the
life-and-death world of the revolutionary left, from his passionate
commitment to the Spanish Republic; his successful pursuit by
Soviet NKVD agents, who valued Hemingway's influence, access, and
mobility; his wartime meeting in East Asia with communist leader
Chou En-Lai, the future premier of the People's Republic of China;
and finally to his undercover involvement with Cuban rebels in the
late 1950s and his sympathy for Fidel Castro. Reynolds equally
explores Hemingway's participation in various roles as an agent for
the United States government, including hunting Nazi submarines
with ONI-supplied munitions in the Caribbean on his boat, Pilar;
his command of an informant ring in Cuba called the "Crook Factory"
that reported to the American embassy in Havana; and his
on-the-ground role in Europe, where he helped OSS gain key tactical
intelligence for the liberation of Paris and fought alongside the
U.S. infantry in the bloody endgame of World War II. As he examines
the links between Hemingway's work as an operative and as an
author, Reynolds reveals how Hemingway's secret adventures
influenced his literary output and contributed to the writer's
block and mental decline (including paranoia) that plagued him
during the postwar years -- a period marked by the Red Scare and
McCarthy hearings. Reynolds also illuminates how those same
experiences played a role in some of Hemingway's greatest works,
including For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea,
while also adding to the burden that he carried at the end of his
life and perhaps contributing to his suicide. A literary biography
with the soul of an espionage thriller, Writer, Sailor, Soldier,
Spy is an essential contribution to our understanding of the life,
work, and fate of one of America's most legendary authors.
This fascinating account of how two young Americans turned traitor
during the Cold War is an "absolutely smashing real-life spy story"
(The New York Times Book Review). At the height of the Cold War,
some of the nation's most precious secrets passed through a CIA
contractor in Southern California. Only a handful of employees were
cleared to handle the intelligence that came through the Black
Vault. One of them was Christopher John Boyce, a hard-partying
genius with a sky-high IQ, a passion for falconry, and little love
for his country. Security at the Vault was so lax, Boyce couldn't
help but be tempted. And when he gave in, the fate of the free
world would hang in the balance. With the help of his best friend,
Andrew Daulton Lee, a drug dealer with connections south of the
border, Boyce began stealing classified documents and selling them
to the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. It was an audacious act of
treason, committed by two spoiled young men who were nearly always
drunk, stoned, or both--and were about to find themselves caught in
the middle of a fight between the CIA and the KGB. This Edgar
Award-winning book was the inspiration for the critically acclaimed
film starring Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn--a true story as
thrilling as any dreamed up by Ian Fleming or John le Carre. Before
Edward Snowden, there were Boyce and Lee, two of the most unlikely
spies in the history of the Cold War.
A compelling new narrative about how two Great Powers of the early
twentieth century did battle, both openly and in the shadows
Decades before the Berlin Wall went up, a Cold War had already
begun raging. But for Bolshevik Russia, Great Britain - not America
- was the enemy. Now, for the first time, Victor Madeira tells a
story that has been hidden away for nearly a century. Drawing on
over sixty Russian, British and French archival collections,
Britannia and the Bear offers a compelling new narrative about how
two great powers of the time did battle, both openly and in
theshadows. By exploring British and Russian mind-sets of the time
this book traces the links between wartime social unrest, growing
trade unionism in the police and the military, and Moscow's
subsequent infiltration of Whitehall. As early as 1920, Cabinet
ministers were told that Bolshevik intelligence wanted to recruit
university students from prominent families destined for
government, professional and intellectual circles. Yet despite
these early warnings, men such as the Cambridge Five slipped the
security net fifteen years after the alarm was first raised.
Britannia and the Bear tells the story of Russian espionage in
Britain in these critical interwar years and reveals how British
Government identified crucial lessons but failed to learn many of
them. The book underscores the importance of the first Cold War in
understanding the second, as well as the need for historical
perspective ininterpreting the mind-sets of rival powers. Victor
Madeira has a decade's experience in international security
affairs, and his work has appeared in leading publications such as
Intelligence and National Securityand The Historical Journal. He
completed his doctorate in Modern International History at Gonville
and Caius College, Cambridge.
In King of Spies, prize-winning journalist and bestselling author
of Escape From Camp 14, Blaine Harden, reveals one of the most
astonishing -- and previously untold -- spy stories of the
twentieth century. Donald Nichols was "a one man war", according to
his US Air Force commanding general. He won the Distinguished
Service Cross, along with a chest full of medals for valor and
initiative in the Korean War. His commanders described Nichols as
the bravest, most resourceful and effective spymaster of that
forgotten war. But there is far more to Donald Nichols' story than
first meets the eye . . . Based on long-classified government
records, unsealed court records, and interviews in Korea and the
U.S., King of Spies tells the story of the reign of an intelligence
commander who lost touch with morality, legality, and even sanity,
if military psychiatrists are to be believed. Donald Nichols was
America's Kurtz. A seventh-grade dropout, he created his own
black-ops empire, commanding a small army of hand-selected spies,
deploying his own makeshift navy, and ruling over it as a
clandestine king, with absolute power over life and death. He
claimed a "legal license to murder"-and inhabited a world of mass
executions and beheadings, as previously unpublished photographs in
the book document. Finally, after 11 years, the U.S. military
decided to end Nichols's reign. He was secretly sacked and forced
to endure months of electroshock in a military hospital in Florida.
Nichols told relatives the American government was trying to
destroy his memory. King of Spies looks to answer the question of
how an uneducated, non-trained, non-experienced man could end up as
the number-one US spymaster in South Korea and why his US
commanders let him get away with it for so long . . .
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