Macintyre, Ben

"In this . . . narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend. But as Macintyre shows, the story of Colditz was about much more than escape. Its population represented a society in miniature, full of heroes and traitors, class conflicts and secret alliances, and the full range of human joy and despair. In Macintyre's telling, Colditz's most famous names-like the indomitable Pat Reid-share glory with lesser known but equally remarkable characters like Indian doctor Birendranath Mazumdar whose ill treatment, hunger strike, and eventual escape read like fiction; Florimond Duke, America's oldest paratrooper and least successful secret agent; and Christopher Clayton Hutton, the brilliant inventor employed by British intelligence to manufacture covert escape aids for POWs. Prisoners of the Castle traces the war's arc from within Colditz's stone walls, where the stakes rose as Hitler's war machine faltered and the men feared that liberation would not come soon enough to spare them a grisly fate at the hands of the Nazis"--Provided by publisher.

Macintyre reveals the story of the female spy hidden in plain sight who set the stage for the Cold War--one of the last great intelligence secrets of the 20th century.

"Tells the story of the most important female spy in history, Ruth Werner: an agent code-named "Sonya," who set the stage for the Cold War. In 1942, in a quiet village in the leafy English Cotswolds, a thin, elegant woman lived in a small cottage with her three children and her husband, who worked as a machinist nearby. 'Ursula Burton' was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a slight foreign accent. By all accounts, she seemed to be living a simple, unassuming life. Her neighbors in the village knew little about her. They didn't know that she was a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer. They didn't know that her husband was also a spy, or that she was running powerful agents across Europe. Behind the facade of her picturesque life, Burton was a dedicated Communist, a Soviet colonel, and a veteran agent, gathering the scientific secrets that would enable the Soviet Union to build the bomb. Over the course of her career, she was hunted by the Chinese, the Japanese, the Nazis, MI5, MI6, and the FBI-and she evaded them all"--Adapted from publisher description.

"Oleg Gordievsky took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and became the Soviet Union's top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6. Desperate to keep the circle of trust close, MI6 never revealed Gordievsky's name to its counterparts in the CIA, which in turn grew obsessed with figuring out the identity of Britain's obviously top-level source. The CIA officer assigned to identify him was Aldrich Ames, who would become infamous for secretly spying for the Soviets"--OCLC.

Kim Philby was the most notorious British defector and Soviet mole in history. Agent, double agent, traitor and enigma, he betrayed every secret of Allied operations to the Russians in the early years of the Cold War. Philby's two closest friends in the intelligence world, Nicholas Elliott of MI6 and James Jesus Angleton, the CIA intelligence chief, thought they knew Philby better than anyone, and then discovered they had not known him at all. This is a story of intimate duplicity; of loyalty, trust and treachery, class and conscience; of an ideological battle waged by men with cut-glass accents and well-made suits in the comfortable clubs and restaurants of London and Washington; of male friendships forged, and then systematically betrayed.

The incredible untold story of WWII?s greatest secret fighting force, as told by our great modern master of wartime intrigue.

Kim Philby was the greatest spy in history---a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain's counterintelligence against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, while also secretly working for the enemy. Nicholas Elliott, Philby's best friend and fellow officer in MI6, had no trouble trading confidences with Philby as the two had gone to the same schools and belonged to the same exclusive clubs. But Philby was betraying his British friend as well as an American one--James Jesus Angleton, the head of the CIA's counterintelligence. Every word of Elliott's and Angleton's unwitting disclosures helped Philby sink almost every great Anglo-American spy operation for twenty years, leading countless operatives to their doom.