Spy Memoir

David Rupert, a complete outsider with no connection to Ireland, rose to the very top of the Real IRA, all while working for the FBI and British intelligence. But the story is really about just how a bored, frustrated New York trucking manager becomes one of Britain’s most valued spies, brings down the entire IRA structure and makes $10 million in the process.

For three nerve-wracking years, Naveed Jamali spied on America for the Russians, trading thumb drives of sensitive technical data for envelopes of cash, selling out his own beloved country across noisy restaurant tables and in quiet parking lots. Or so the Russians believed. In fact this young American civilian was a covert double agent working with the FBI. The Cold War wasn't really over. It had just gone high tech.

He was a career CIA officer. He was also a spy for the Soviet Union. In 1985, Aldrich Ames began selling secrets to the KGB—compromising dozens of CIA operations and costing the lives of multiple American agents. What followed was nearly a decade of deception, luxury, and death, all fueled by greed and personal failure. The CIA had no idea it was being gutted from the inside. In Aldrich Ames: The CIA Turncoat Who Sold Secrets to Moscow, author David G. Stone unpacks the full story of America’s most damaging mole.

As North Korea's State Poet Laureate, Jang Jin-sung led a charmed life. With food provisions (even as the country suffered through its great famine), a travel pass, access to strictly censored information, and audiences with Kim Jong-il himself, his life in Pyongyang seemed safe and secure. But this privileged existence was about to be shattered. When a strictly forbidden magazine he lent to a friend goes missing, Jang Jin-sung must flee for his life.

In September 2001, Christopher Whitcomb was the most visible FBI agent in the world. His bestselling memoir, Cold Zero, had led to novels, articles in GQ, and op-eds in The New York Times. He appeared on Imus in the Morning, Larry King, and Meet the Press; he was nominated for a Peabody reporting for CNBC. He played poker with Brad Pitt while contracting for the CIA.

He was the most wanted man in the world for decades. Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan-born terrorist, carried out a wave of attacks across Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. A ruthless self-proclaimed revolutionary and notorious womanizer, he claimed to fight for the Palestinian cause and communist ideology, but also worked as a mercenary for rogue regimes and organizations. After bursting onto the world stage with the 1975 OPEC siege in Vienna, where he took 60 hostages and killed three people, he managed to evade capture for two decades.

Eugene Bullard lived one of the most fascinating lives of the 20th century. The son of a former slave and an indigenous Creek woman, Bullard fled home at the age of 11 to escape the racial hostility of his Georgia community. When his journey led him to Europe, he garnered worldwide fame as a boxer, and later as the first African-American fighter pilot in history. After the war, Bullard returned to Paris a celebrated hero. But little did he know that the dramatic, globe-spanning arc of his life had just begun.

Ana Montes had spent seventeen years spying for the Cubans. She had been raised in a patriotic Puerto Rican household: Her father, a psychiatrist, was a former colonel in the US Army. Her sister worked as a translator for the FBI and helped break up a ring of Cuban spies in Miami. Her brother was also a loyal FBI agent. Montes impressed her bosses but in secret spent her breaks memorizing top-secret documents before sending them to the Cuban government. Retired FBI agent Peter J. Lapp explains the clues that led their team to catch one of the United States’ most dangerous spies.

Based on remarkable new research, acclaimed historian Alexander Rose brings to life the true story of the spy ring that helped America win the Revolutionary War. For the first time, Rose takes us beyond the battlefront and deep into the shadowy underworld of double agents and triple crosses, covert operations and code breaking, and unmasks the courageous, flawed men who inhabited this wilderness of mirrors—including the spymaster at the heart of it all.

Just days after the 9-11 attacks, a senior Pentagon analyst eased her red Toyota Echo into traffic and headed to work. She never saw the undercover cars tracking her every turn. As she settled into her cubicle on the 6th floor of the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington, FBI Agents and twitchy DIA officers were hiding in nearby offices. For this was the day that Ana Montes--the US Intelligence Community superstar who had just won a prestigious fellowship at the CIA--was to be arrested and publicly exposed as a secret agent for Cuba.

In 1978 the Bulgarian author and dissident Georgi Markov was assassinated by a poisoned umbrella on Waterloo Bridge in London. His murder is the most iconic killing in almost five decades of the Cold War, and no one has ever been prosecuted for it. The Umbrella Murder reveals the real architect and hit man behind this spectacular killing: a spy code-named Piccadilly who worked for the Bulgarian secret service and the KGB, who has been hiding for more than forty years.

Intrepid's Last Case chronicles the post-World War II activities of Sir William Stephenson, whose fascinating role in helping to defeat the Nazis was the subject of the worldwide best seller A Man Called Intrepid.

This is the story of the most dangerous triple-agent in US history. Peter Lance, author of the highly acclaimed 1000 Years for Revenge and Cover Up, returns to uncover the story of Ali Mohamed, a trusted security advisor of Osama bin Laden who hoodwinked the United States for more than a decade. As Lance reveals for this first time, this one man served in a series of high-security position within the United States security establishment, as a Special Forces advisor, FBI informant, and CIA operative.

The Widow Spy is the firsthand account of a true Cold War spy operation in Moscow told exclusively by the CIA case officer who lived this experience. Martha D. Peterson was one of the first women to be assigned to Moscow, a very difficult operational environment. Her story begins in Laos during the Vietnam War where she accompanied her husband, a CIA officer. She describes their life in a small city in Laos, ending with the tragic death of her husband. Then her own 30-year career begins in Moscow.

As one of al-Qaeda's most respected bomb-makers, Aimen Dean rubbed shoulders with the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden himself. As a double agent at the heart of al-Qaeda's chemical weapons program, he foiled attacks on civilians and saved countless lives, brushing with death so often that his handlers began to call him their spy with nine lives. This is the story of how a young Muslim, determined to defend his faith, found himself fighting on the wrong side - and his fateful decision to work undercover for his sworn enemy.

As the son-in-law of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and a close advisor to his successor, Anwar Sadat, Ashraf Marwan had access to the deepest secrets of the country's government. But he himself had a secret: he was a spy for the Mossad, Israel's intelligence service. Under the codename "The Angel", Marwan turned Egypt into an open book for the Israeli intelligence services and, by alerting the Mossad in advance of the joint Egyptian-Syrian attack on Yom Kippur, saved Israel from a devastating defeat.

George Blake was the last remaining Cold War spy. As a senior officer in the British Intelligence Service who was double agent for the Soviet Union, his actions had devastating consequences for Britain. Yet he was also one of the least-known double agents, and remained unrepentant. In 1961, Blake was sentenced to 42 years imprisonment for betraying to the KGB all of the Western operations in which he was involved, and the names of hundreds of British agents working behind the Iron Curtain. This was the longest sentence for espionage ever to have been handed down by a British court

In 1942, the Allies were losing, Germany seemed unstoppable, and every able man in England was on the front lines. To "set Europe ablaze," in the words of Winston Churchill, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), whose spies were trained in everything from demolition to sharpshooting, was forced to do something unprecedented: recruit women. Thirty-nine answered the call, leaving their lives and families to become saboteurs in France.

This revealing memoir from a 34-year veteran of the CIA who worked as a case officer and recruiter of foreign agents before and after 9/11 provides an invaluable perspective on the state of modern spy craft, how the CIA has developed, and how it must continue to evolve. If you've ever wondered...

On March 7, 2004, former SAS soldier and mercenary Simon Mann prepared to take off from Harare International Airport. His destination was Equatorial Guinea; his intention was to remove one of the most brutal dictators in Africa in a privately organized coup d’état. The plot had the tacit approval of Western intelligence agencies, and Mann had already planned, overseen, and won two wars in Angola and Sierra Leone. So why did it go so wrong?