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"Spies Soviet Union History."
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Venona
Only in 1995 did the United States government officially reveal the existence of the super-secret Venona Project. For nearly fifty years American intelligence agents had been decoding thousands of Soviet messages, uncovering an enormous range of espionage activities carried out against the United States during World War II by its own allies. So sensitive was the project in its early years that even President Truman was not informed of its existence. This extraordinary book is the first to examine the Venona messages-documents of unparalleled importance for our understanding of the history and politics of the Stalin era and the early Cold War years.Hidden away in a former girls' school in the late 1940s, Venona Project cryptanalysts, linguists, and mathematicians attempted to decode more than twenty-five thousand intercepted Soviet intelligence telegrams. When they cracked the unbreakable Soviet code, a breakthrough leading eventually to the decryption of nearly three thousand of the messages, analysts uncovered information of powerful significance: the first indication of Julius Rosenberg's espionage efforts; references to the espionage activities of Alger Hiss; startling proof of Soviet infiltration of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb; evidence that spies had reached the highest levels of the U.S. State and Treasury Departments; indications that more than three hundred Americans had assisted in the Soviet theft of American industrial, scientific, military, and diplomatic secrets; and confirmation that the Communist party of the United States was consciously and willingly involved in Soviet espionage against America. Drawing not only on the Venona papers but also on newly opened Russian and U. S. archives, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr provide in this book the clearest, most rigorously documented analysis ever written on Soviet espionage and the Americans who abetted it in the early Cold War years.
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Stalin's agent : the life and death of Alexander Orlov
This is the history of an unprecedented deception operation - the biggest KGB deception of all time. It has never been told in full until now. There are almost certainly people who would like it never to be told. It is the story of General Alexander Orlov. Stalin's most loyal and trusted henchman during the Spanish Civil War, Orlov was also the Soviet handler controlling Kim Philby, the British spy, defector, and member of the notorious 'Cambridge Five'. Escaping Stalin's purges, Orlov fled to America in the late 1930s and lived underground. He only dared reveal his identity to the world after Stalin's death, in his 1953 best-seller The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes, after which he became perhaps the best known of all Soviet defectors, much written about, highly praised, and commemorated by the US Congress on his death in 1973. But there is a twist in the Orlov story beyond the dreams of even the most ingenious spy novelist: 'General Alexander Orlov' never actually existed. The man known as 'Orlov' was in fact born Leiba Feldbin. And while he was a loyal servant of Stalin and the controller of Philby, he was never a General in the KGB, never truly defected to the West after his 'flight' from the USSR, and remained a loyal Soviet agent until his death. The 'Orlov' story as it has been accepted until now was largely the invention of the KGB - and one perpetuated long after the end of the Cold War. In this meticulous new biography, Boris Volodarsky, himself a former Soviet intelligence officer, now tells the true story behind 'Orlov' for the first time. An intriguing tale of Russian espionage and deception, stretching from the time of Lenin to the Putin era, it is a story that many people in the world's intelligence agencies would almost definitely prefer you not to know about.
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The billion dollar spy : a true story of Cold War espionage and betrayal
\"While getting into his car on the evening of February 16, 1978, the chief of the CIA's Moscow station was handed an envelope by an unknown Russian. Its contents stunned the Americans: details of top-secret Soviet research and development in military technology that was totally unknown to the United States. From 1979 to 1985, Adolf Tolkachev, an engineer at a military research center, cracked open the secret Soviet military research establishment, using his access to hand over tens of thousands of pages of material about the latest advances in aviation technology, alerting the Americans to possible developments years in the future. He was one of the most productive and valuable spies ever to work for the United States in the four decades of global confrontation with the Soviet Union. Tolkachev took enormous personal risks, but so did his CIA handlers. Moscow station was a dangerous posting to the KGB's backyard. The CIA had long struggled to recruit and run agents in Moscow, and Tolkachev became a singular breakthrough. With hidden cameras and secret codes, and in face-to-face meetings with CIA case officers in parks and on street corners, Tolkachev and the CIA worked to elude the feared KGB. Drawing on previously secret documents obtained from the CIA, as well as interviews with participants, Hoffman reveals how the depredations of the Soviet state motivated one man to master the craft of spying against his own nation until he was betrayed to the KGB by a disgruntled former CIA trainee. No one has ever told this story before in such detail, and Hoffman's deep knowledge of spycraft, the Cold War, and military technology makes him uniquely qualified to bring readers this real-life espionage thriller\"--Provided by publisher.
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Shattered illusions
\"Yevgeni Vladimirovich Brik and James Douglas Finley Morrison were central figures in what was considered one of the most important Cold War operations in the West at the time. Their story, which involves espionage, intelligence tradecraft, intelligence service penetrations, double agent scenarios, and betrayal, is a piece of Cold War intelligence history that has never been fully told. Yevgeni Brik was a KGB deep cover illegal who had been dispatched to Canada in 1951. He settled in Verdun, Quebec. He eventually became the KGB Illegal Resident where he had responsibility for running a number of agents, one of whom was working on the CF-105, Avro Arrow. In 1953, he fell in love with a married Canadian woman to whom he revealed his true identity. She persuaded him to turn himself in, which resulted in his becoming a double agent, working for Canada. He was later betrayed by a Royal Canadian Mounted Police Officer, James Morrison, who sought money from the KGB to pay his debts. Brik was consequently lured back to Moscow in 1955, where he was arrested, and interrogated. Convicted of treason, a traitor's fate awaited him, predictable, grim and final. Incredibly, he reappeared at a British Embassy as an old man in 1992, seeking Canada's help. He was exfiltrated by a joint Canadian/British intelligence team which was headed by Donald Mahar. He was debriefed by Mahar for several months when they returned to Canada\"...
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Agent Sonya
In the quiet Cotswolds village of Great Rollright in 1942, a thin, and unusually elegant, housewife emerged from her cottage to go on her usual bike ride. A devoted mother-of-three, attentive wife and friendly neighbour, Sonya Burton seemed to epitomise rural British domesticity. However, rather than pedalling towards the shops with her ration book, Sonya was heading for the Oxfordshire countryside to gather scientific secrets from a nuclear physicist. Secrets that would enable the Soviet Union to build the atomic bomb. Far from an obedient homemaker, Sonya Burton was a dedicated communist, a decorated colonel and a veteran spy who risked her life to keep the Soviet Union in the nuclear arms race. In 'Agent Sonya', Ben Macintyre reveals the astonishing story behind the most important woman spy in history and the huge emotional cost that came with being a mother, a wife, and a secret agent at once.
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Enemy Archives
Soviet counterinsurgency officers assembled a comprehensive archive documenting the ideological worldview, operational structures, and activities of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. Viatrovych and Luciuk have curated a selection of these documents that challenges prejudices about who these Ukrainian nationalists were, whom they fought, and why.
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A spy named Orphan : the enigma of Donald Maclean
\"Donald Maclean was one of the most treacherous spies of the Cold War era, a member of the infamous \"Cambridge Five\" spy ring. Yet little is known of this shrewd, secretive man. The full extent of his betrayal has never been documented--until now. Drawing on the recent release of previously classified files, A Spy Named Orphan meticulously documents the extraordinary story of a man leading a chilling double life until his exposure and defection to the USSR. Roland Philipps describes a man prone to alcoholic rages, who rose through the ranks of the British Foreign Office while secretly transmitting through his Soviet handlers reams of diplomatic and military secrets detailing intelligence on the making of the atom bomb and the division of power in postwar Europe. His story has inspired an entire genre of spy movies and novels, but no one so far has written the definitive story of the man code-named \"Orphan.\"\"--Provided by publisher.
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Russia and the Cult of State Security
This book explores the mythology woven around the Soviet secret police and the Russian cult of state security that has emerged from it.
Tracing the history of this mythology from the Soviet period through to its revival in contemporary post-Soviet Russia, the volume argues that successive Russian regimes have sponsored a 'cult' of state security, whereby security organs are held up as something to be worshipped. The book approaches the history of this cult as an ongoing struggle to legitimise and sacralise the Russian state security apparatus, and to negotiate its violent and dramatic past. It explores the ways in which, during the Soviet period, this mythology sought to make the existence of the most radically intrusive and powerful secret police in history appear 'natural'. It also documents the contemporary post-Soviet re-emergence of the cult of state security, examining the ways in which elements of the old Soviet mythology have been revised and reclaimed as the cornerstone of a new state ideology.
The Russian cult of state security is of ongoing contemporary relevance, and is crucial for understanding not only the tragedies of Russia's twentieth-century history, but also the ambiguities of Russia's post-Soviet transition, and the current struggle to define Russia's national identity and future development. The book examines the ways in which contemporary Russian life continues to be shaped by the legacy of Soviet attitudes to state-society relations, as expressed in the reconstituted cult of state security. It investigates the shadow which the figure of the secret policeman continues to cast over Russia today.
The book will be of great interest to students of modern Russian history and politics, intelligence studies and security studies, as well as readers with an interest in the KGB and its successors.
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