What nonfiction about spies should I read?

February 27, 2008 8:48 PM

What should I read to learn about espionage and World War II/start of the Cold War?

I'm starting a project which requires me to learn about the clandestine intelligence services (in the U.S., Britian, Germany, Soviet Union, and elsewhere), specifically in World War II and in the early years of the Cold War. What little I have read is fiction (Le Carre, Littel, Furst). But I need to dig into factual stuff. The origin of the OSS/CIA and the evolution of the NKVD/KGB, how they worked during the war and especially from 1945-1950 or so. Both the lurid stories but also the basic facts of how the agencies were set up, operated, etc.

Ideally, I'd like to err on the side of narrative readability, but if it's truly authoritative but dry, I'm willing. What histories/memoirs/biographies should I have on my list? Novels are also OK, though as I said my real need is to get the facts, such as can be had. Legacy of Ashes is about the only one I'm certain I should get ahold of.

posted by BT to society & culture (25 comments total)

Miles Copeland father of the drummer wrote The Game Player mostly about the "oh so social " aspect of intelligence gathering.
posted by hortense at 9:00 PM on February 27, 2008

Wild Bill Donovan was involved in the transition from the OSS to the CIA. Can't remember the title but I had a copy until they came to check out my library.

Also a book about 'C' who was the real M in the jamesbond stuff. damn, they took that one too.

Colonel Peneskosky was a double/triple agent in Hungary in the 60's.

and Julia Child. Yes, that Julia Child.

I'll look and post again.
posted by lemuel at 9:20 PM on February 27, 2008

Between Silk and Cyanide: it's not just about cryptography. Leo Marks speaks at length about what it was like, training men and women for spy missions that would likely kill them. And about the challenge of trying to read the mind of the "player on the other side"; your opposite number, who is every bit as clever, resourceful and dedicated as you are.
posted by SPrintF at 9:23 PM on February 27, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

A Man Called Intrepid by William Stevenson is a good British-focused WWII espionage history, very highly regarded. I found Russel Jack Smith's The Unknown CIA a quick, fascinating read on the first few decades of the CIA, albeit from more of an analytical point of view. I haven't read it, but I have Bradley Smith's Shadow Warriors on my bookshelf, which is relevant to the topic.

Also, memoirs/biographies of Richard Helms, Allen Dulles, and William Colby have a lot of material on this era.

I have a vast collection of books on this exact subject (including KGB perspective), but alas, most of them are dry/authoritative books. (Well, I guess most of them are more focused on the 1960-80s, not so much WWII.) But I would recommend checking out Christopher Andrew's history of the KGB.
posted by BradNelson at 9:29 PM on February 27, 2008

A Bodyguard of Lies. It talks about the astoundingly detailed and elaborate effort that was put in by the British and Americans to convince Hitler that the Normandy invasion, when it finally happened, was a feint, and that the true invasion would come later at Calais.

It's all about intelligence, and counter-intelligence. It's about how the intelligence operations on both sides played games with each other's minds. It's extremely well written, and quite fascinating.

The same author also wrote a biography of "Wild" Bill Donovan, who was one of the key people involved in setting up the stuff you're talking about. (I haven't read this book.)
posted by Class Goat at 10:19 PM on February 27, 2008

Legacy of Ashes, as you mentioned, is an absolute must read. I dug the following out of the Command and General Staff College's Combined Arms Research Library catalog: The OSS-NKVD relationship, 1943-1945; Covert Warfare; I was an NKVD agent; a top Soviet spy tells his story; American intelligence in war-time London : the story of the OSS; and How the Cold War began : the Igor Gouzenko Affair and the hunt for Soviet spies.

There's just a hell of a lot out there. There's even quite a bit at the CIA's own website. For example: The OSS and the London 'Free Germans'; OSS and the Maginot and Siegfried Lines, The : Courier, Leonard C. : Summer 1984; OSS Assessment Program, The : MacKinnon, Donald W. : Fall 1979; OSS Mission to the Burgundian Maquis : Courier, Leonard C. : Spring 1985; OSS-German POW Controversy, The : Murphy, Mark : Spring 1988; OSS: Lessons for Today : Casey, William J. : Winter 1986; With the OSS in China : Adams, George E. : Winter 1990 (all the unlinked ones are indexed here some of them might be in full text here).
posted by cog_nate at 10:23 PM on February 27, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

I once stumbled across a cool book called The Double-Cross System. It describes how British agents intercepted and turned German agents, so that by the end of the war they had complete control over Germany's British intelligence network. The "Normandy feint" was the end result and is described in some detail. It's a fascinating read.
posted by PercussivePaul at 11:56 PM on February 27, 2008

Ike's Spies by, surprize, Ike worshiper Stephen Ambrose has some interesting info on the era, is a quick read and has a bibliography, always a plus. The Arrogance of Power, the Nixon bio, is a fun read and has some insight into the era as well from a Nixo-centric perspective.
posted by Pollomacho at 5:12 AM on February 28, 2008

The Book of Honor, by Ted Gup (review) is a good look at individual CIA agents who died in the line of duty, starting immediately after WWII. The Code Book is a good overview of secret communications.
posted by TedW at 5:21 AM on February 28, 2008

Funnily enough, this touches on one of my two posts to the Blue - Christine: SOE Agent and Churchill's Favourite Spy: A Search for Christine Granville. It's an excellent biography. I've also got on my shelf but have not yet read Spymistress: The Life of Vera Atkins, the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II. The Christine one, though, is just riveting.
posted by Medieval Maven at 5:28 AM on February 28, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

BT,

Writing this in a great hurry (minor domestic dramas/bloody teenagers...), you cannot do anything with the rest of your life until you've read Agent Zigzag by UK Times guy Ben Macintyre.

It's recent - last year, I think - probably the most jaw-dropping non-fiction account of harnessing semi-criminal smarts for spying (done by the Brits in WW2) you could possibly imagine - funny as hell, about class, sex, using stage magic to fool the Nazis, the Enigma coup, the first icy prickles of the cold war - it's all true - impeccably sourced, moving and written a little in the style of Bill Bryson - that is, sinfully page-turning.

The reviews are extraordinary.

(And if it isn't being optioned for a film now, words fail...).

And it's always worth repeating - ask your local library to order it if needed. I buy tons of books anyway - so I don't feel guilty when I use this budget option!
posted by Jody Tresidder at 5:48 AM on February 28, 2008

One book which should certainly be on your reading list is Robin Winks's Cloak and Gown, about the links between the Ivy League universities (particularly Yale) and the OSS/CIA. Winks is particularly good in charting the shift from the inspired amateurism of the OSS to the career professionalism of the CIA -- and there's a great chapter (particularly enjoyable for a librarian like myself) on the Yale Library Project, a scheme to channel covert funds abroad under the pretence of buying books for Yale University Library.

On the British side, the standard account is the five-volume official history of British Intelligence in the Second World War, most importantly Michael Howard's volume on the work of the 'Twenty Committee' (a typically British donnish joke: twenty in Latin numerals is XX, i.e. 'double-cross', and the Twenty Committee was responsible for feeding false intelligence to the Germans via double-agents). You can also find some fascinating insights into the culture of MI5 and MI6 in Miranda Carter's biography of Anthony Blunt and Nicola Lacey's biography of H.L.A. Hart. (Adam Sisman's forthcoming biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper should also be a fascinating read.)

A few fiction recommendations: don't overlook Le Carre's A Small Town in Germany (less well known than the Smiley novels); Joseph Kanon's Los Alamos and The Prodigal Spy; and the late William F. Buckley's excursion into pulp spy fiction, Saving the Queen, which has some suspiciously plausible details about recruitment into the CIA.
posted by verstegan at 5:53 AM on February 28, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Nigel West.
posted by adamvasco at 7:11 AM on February 28, 2008

The Codebreakers, by David Kahn.
posted by newmoistness at 7:15 AM on February 28, 2008

In a rush just now but a quick thanks to ALL for this amazing list. (Oh, and Jody Tresidder -- I had Agent Zigzag on my must-read list, but had forgotten to mention. Sounds awesome. verstegan, you're right that A Small Town in Germany is not to be missed; read it last year and it was one of the ones (along with Littell's The Sisters) that got my mind working along these lines.
posted by BT at 7:30 AM on February 28, 2008

The Puzzle Palace by James Bamford is an excellent book that covers the history of the NSA, including it's origins in the OSS and development through the Cold War.
posted by slogger at 8:37 AM on February 28, 2008

See J. Ransom Clark's on-line bibliography, The Literature of Intelligence.
posted by russilwvong at 10:13 AM on February 28, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Also try this link to a huge amount of (dis)information: counterintelligenge books.
posted by adamvasco at 10:20 AM on February 28, 2008

russilwvong, thank you!
posted by BT at 8:23 PM on February 28, 2008

What, no "Witness"?
posted by rush at 12:29 PM on February 29, 2008

My husband is finishing his PhD in Intelligence History, with a focus on the early Cold War.

He says that Legacy of Ashes is terrible - the title itself contains a misuse of a quote, and it goes downhill from there.

He suggests that you begin with Jeffery T. Richelson's A Century of Spies -- it's great introductory textbook for intelligence history in general, and would provide the wide scope you are looking for.

Other recommendations:

For Germany: Khan, Hitler's Spies

For Britain (WW2): he says "Use the force, go to the source", and read F. Harry Hinsley (who was an intelligence analyst during WW2, and became a preeminant scholar and founder of the field of intelligence history), British Intelligence in the Second World War (there both is a multi-volume and a good abridged verison)

For Britain (Cold War): Aldrich, The Hidden Hand

For the USSR: Christopher Andrew's books based on the the Mitrokhin Archive (which have different titles in the US and the UK)

For the US: he says that it is more difficult because there are "so many good books" on the CIA and the American Intelligence services in general. There is a break in the US Intelligence Services at 1945 when they shut everything down and restart again, so the literature also has this break. Christopher Andrew's For the President's Eye's Only is a great narrative history about the relationship between the US Intelligence Services and the presidency, and covers WW2 and the early Cold War (and the creation of the CIA). My husband also says: "The most authoritative history of the early CIA, but you will not thank me for recommending it, is Arthur B. Darling's The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government, to 1950. It is the driest book ever; it makes the phone book look lyrical. Professional Intelligence historians have told me that they couldn't make it through that book because it was too boring. But it's all there."


If you wish further suggestions, please feel free to email me, and he can send you a reading list. (I'm the one with the Metafilter account and the laptop in hand - but he's sitting behind me reading titles off the bookshelf.)
posted by jb at 6:37 PM on February 29, 2008

Ah, I see Hinsley was recommended above. But the abridged version is also good.
posted by jb at 6:38 PM on February 29, 2008

On Bodyguard of Lies, my husband says - "It's a great book, but there are inaccuracies. It's an old book, and he exagerrated some things. This is where the urban myth of Churchill allowing Coventry to be bombed came from; the facts of the case are a lot more complicated. They thought the principle target was going to be London, but when they realised their mistake they tried to act, but there was an typographical error and the jamming for the German bombers was set to the wrong frequency. We know this now because there has simply been a lot more research done since. Intelligence history can have a very short shelflife, with a few exceptions. (Darling, for instance, was writing an official internal history and had better access to documents and members of the CIA than any researcher working today)."

Also, he suggests looking up Studies in Intelligence, if you wish to go farther - it's the CIA's inhouse classified journal, but a lot of articles have been declassified.
posted by jb at 6:48 PM on February 29, 2008

A further note about Legacy of Ashes: most of the favourable reviews have been from reviewers who have no background in the subject. But reviews from those familiar with the topic are much more negative. For example, Christopher Andrew's review in the Times. This review from the CIA's Studies in Intelligence brings out some examples of the problems in the book.
posted by jb at 6:58 PM on February 29, 2008

A late return to this thread -- thanks, jb, for the additional information and references. And thank your husband, too. I'll take his perspective into account as I look at Legacy.
posted by BT at 1:31 PM on March 5, 2008