The Cold War, which lasted from the end of the Second World War to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, was fought mostly in the shadows, with the superpowers manoeuvring for strategic advantage in an anticipated global armed confrontation that thankfully never happened. How did the intelligence organisations of the major world powers go about their work? What advantages were they looking for? Did they succeed? By examining some of the famous, infamous, or lesser-known intelligence operations from both sides of the Iron Curtain, this book explains how the superpowers went about gathering intelligence on each other, examines the type of information they were looking for, what they did with it, and how it enabled them to stay one step ahead of the opposition. Possession of these secrets threatened a Third World War, but also helped keep the peace for more than four decades. With access to previously unreleased material, the author explores how the intelligence organisations, both civilian and military, took advantage of rapid developments in technology, and how they adapted to the changing threat. The book describes the epic scale of some of these operations, the surprising connections between them, and how they contributed to a complex multi-layered intelligence jigsaw which drove decision making at the highest level. On top of all the tradecraft, gadgets and cloak and dagger', the book also looks at the human side of espionage: their ideologies and motivations, the winners and losers, and the immense courage and frequent betrayal of those whose lives were touched by the Secrets of the Cold War.

At the end of the Second World War, the city of Berlin was located 100 miles (160 km) inside the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany. The Western Allies insisted on keeping part of the city for themselves, and so it was divided into four sectors, mimicking the rest of Germany. Stalin needed to persuade the British, French and Americans to leave so that there would be nothing in the way of him completing the strategic buffer of territory reaching from the Baltic Sea to the Adriatic, which Churchill would later christen the "Iron Curtain". Cold War Berlin is the story of how Stalin imposed his iron will over eastern Germany, and how he tried to squeeze his former allies out by cutting off their lines of supply and blockading the city. It examines the logistical miracle of the Berlin Airlift, which fed and heated a city of over two million people for almost eleven months. It is a story of alliances forged in the uncertainty of conflict, based on common interests and pragmatic convenience, alliances that would shape the twentieth century but would be betrayed for strategic or political reasons. It is also the tale of how competing ideologies came face to face in the city of Berlin and the new "Cold War" that would come to dominate the second half of the 20th century was created out of the embers of the Second World War. The book is richly illustrated with photos, numerous maps and colour profiles and is the first in a mini-series by this author for Helion's Europe@War series on Cold War Berlin.