The Spy and the Traitor
The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War
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Narrated by:
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John Lee
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By:
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Ben Macintyre
About this listen
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The celebrated author of Double Cross and Rogue Heroes returns with a thrilling Americans-era tale of Oleg Gordievsky, the Russian whose secret work helped hasten the end of the Cold War.
“The best true spy story I have ever read.”—JOHN LE CARRÉ
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist • Shortlisted for the Bailie Giffords Prize in Nonfiction
If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation's communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union's top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6. For nearly a decade, as the Cold War reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West turn the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots, as the Soviet leadership grew increasingly paranoid at the United States's nuclear first-strike capabilities and brought the world closer to the brink of war. 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. Their obsession ultimately doomed Gordievsky: the CIA officer assigned to identify him was none other than Aldrich Ames, the man who would become infamous for secretly spying for the Soviets.
Unfolding the delicious three-way gamesmanship between America, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and culminating in the gripping cinematic beat-by-beat of Gordievsky's nail-biting escape from Moscow in 1985, Ben Macintyre's latest may be his best yet. Like the greatest novels of John le Carré, it brings readers deep into a world of treachery and betrayal, where the lines bleed between the personal and the professional, and one man's hatred of communism had the power to change the future of nations.
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“Every bit as exciting as my favorite spy novels.”—Bill Gates, GatesNotes
“Readers seeking a page-turning spy story, look no further. The author of A Spy Among Friends and Agent Zigzag, among others, does it again, this time delivering a Cold War espionage story for the ages… another can’t miss account of intrigue and intelligence.” —Boston Globe
“The subtitle of Macintyre’s latest real-life spy thriller calls it ‘The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War.’ Like pretty much everything in this fine book, the description is accurate… Macintyre is fastidious about tradecraft details… [he] has become the preeminent popular chronicler of British intelligence history because he understands the essence of the business.” —Washington Post
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In the summer of 1975, 17-year-old Eva Dillon's family was living in New Delhi when her father was exposed as a CIA spy. Eva had long believed that her father was a US State Department employee. She had no idea that he was handling the CIA's highest ranking double agent - Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov, a Soviet general whose code name was TOPHAT. Dillon's father and Polyakov had a close friendship that went back years, to their first meeting in Burma in the mid-1960s.
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LOVED it!
- By SaraofDI on 11-06-17
By: Eva Dillon
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In the Enemy's House
- The Secret Saga of the FBI Agent and the Code Breaker Who Caught the Russian Spies
- By: Howard Blum
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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In 1946, genius linguist and codebreaker Meredith Gardner discovered that the KGB was running an extensive network of strategically placed spies inside the United States, whose goal was to infiltrate American intelligence and steal the nation's military and atomic secrets. Over the course of the next decade, he and young FBI supervisor Bob Lamphere worked together on Venona, a top-secret mission to uncover the Soviet agents and protect the Holy Grail of Cold War espionage - the atomic bomb.
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Excellent non-fiction spy story
- By Katherine on 10-13-18
By: Howard Blum
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Spymaster
- Startling Cold War Revelations of a Soviet KGB Chief
- By: Tennent H. Bagley
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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From the dark days of World War II through the Cold War, Sergey A. Kondrashev was a major player in Russia’s notorious KGB espionage apparatus. Rising through its ranks through hard work and keen understanding of how the spy and political games are played, he “handled” American and British defectors, recruited Western operatives as double agents, served as a ranking officer at the East Berlin and Vienna KGB bureaus, and tackled special assignments from the Kremlin.
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An brilliant personal Cold War perspective
- By Iamnotaspy on 01-09-15
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The Spy Who Knew Too Much
- An Ex-CIA Officer’s Quest Through a Legacy of Betrayal
- By: Howard Blum
- Narrated by: Steve Hendrickson
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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On a sunlit morning in September 1978, a sloop drifts aimlessly across the Chesapeake Bay. The cabin reveals signs of a struggle, and “classified” documents, live 9 mm cartridges, and a top-secret “burst” satellite communications transmitter are discovered aboard. But where is the boat’s owner, former CIA officer John Paisley? One man may hold the key to finding out. Tennent “Pete” Bagley was once a rising star in America’s spy aristocracy, and many expected he’d eventually become CIA director.
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The, too long, story of an obsession
- By Tony on 10-30-22
By: Howard Blum
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A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich
- By: Lucas Delattre
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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A work of remarkable scholarship that moves with the swift pace of a John le Carre thriller, A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich is a chilling addition to the literature of espionage. In 1943, a young official named Fritz Kolbe from the German foreign ministry arranged to meet with Allen Dulles, then an OSS officer in Switzerland and later the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
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100% very good
- By Coco on 06-11-07
By: Lucas Delattre
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Sisters in Resistance
- How a German Spy, a Banker's Wife, and Mussolini's Daughter Outwitted the Nazis
- By: Tilar J. Mazzeo
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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In 1944, Benito Mussolini's daughter, Edda, gave Hitler and her father an ultimatum: release her husband, Galeazzo Ciano, from prison, or risk her leaking her husband's journals to the press. To avoid the peril of exposing Nazi lies, Hitler and Mussolini hunted for the diaries for months, determined to destroy them. Hilde Beetz, a German spy, was deployed to seduce Ciano to learn the diaries' location and take them from Edda. Drawing from in‑depth research and first-person interviews, Mazzeo gives listeners a riveting look into this little‑known moment in history.
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Fascinating WW2 account of women in resistance
- By lgmichael on 10-30-23
By: Tilar J. Mazzeo
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Hunting Eichmann
- Chasing Down the World's Most Notorious Nazi
- By: Neal Bascomb
- Narrated by: Paul Hecht
- Length: 12 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Best-selling author Neal Bascomb has garnered critical acclaim for such riveting nonfiction as Higher and Red Mutiny. Based on extensive interviews and previously classified details, Hunting Eichmann is a compelling account of the relentless hunt for the nefarious Adolf Eichmann.
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A Fascinating Story of Eichmann's Capture
- By S. Perry on 03-15-09
By: Neal Bascomb
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Target Tokyo
- The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring
- By: Gordon Prange, Donald M. Goldstein, Katherine V. Dillon
- Narrated by: David Rapkin
- Length: 20 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Richard Sorge was dispatched to Tokyo in 1933 to serve the spymasters of Moscow. For eight years, he masqueraded as a Nazi journalist and burrowed deep into the German embassy, digging for the secrets of Hitler's invasion of Russia and the Japanese plans for the East. In a nation obsessed with rooting out moles, he kept a high profile - boozing, womanizing, and operating entirely under his own name.
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Riveting
- By Jean on 10-02-14
By: Gordon Prange, and others
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Best of Enemies
- The Last Great Spy Story of the Cold War
- By: Gus Russo, Eric Dezenhall
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In 1978, CIA maverick Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko were new arrivals on the Washington, D.C., intelligence scene, with Jack working out of the CIA's counterintelligence office and Gennady out of the Soviet Embassy. Both men were assigned to seduce the other into betraying his country in the final days of the Cold War, but instead the men ended up becoming the best of friends. Theirs is a friendship that never should have happened, and their story is chock full of treachery, darkly comic misunderstandings, bureaucratic inanity, and landmark intelligence breakthroughs.
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Really?
- By M.E. on 01-13-19
By: Gus Russo, and others
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Argo
- How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History
- By: Antonio Mendez, Matt Baglio
- Narrated by: Dylan Baker
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants stormed the American embassy in Tehran and captured dozens of American hostages, sparking a 444-day ordeal and a quake in global politics still reverberating today. But there's a little-known footnote to the crisis: six Americans escaped. And a midlevel agent named Antonio Mendez devised an ingenious yet incredibly risky plan to rescue them. Armed with foreign film visas, Mendez and an unlikely team of CIA agents and Hollywood insiders traveled to Tehran....
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Better Than the Movie
- By Debra Garfinkle on 11-28-12
By: Antonio Mendez, and others
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Comrade J
- Secrets of Russia's Master Spy in America after the End of the Cold War
- By: Pete Earley
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Spymaster, defector, double agent....Here is the remarkable true story of the man who ran Russia's post-cold-war spy program in America. The revelations are stunning. Many spies have told their stories. None has the astonishing immediacy, relevance, and cautionary warnings of Comrade J.
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Some Inaccuracies, but still good
- By Shopaholic on 09-21-08
By: Pete Earley
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Enemies of the People
- My Family's Journey to America
- By: Kati Marton
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this true-life thriller, Kati Marton draws on her skill as an investigative reporter to discover who her journalist parents really were---and how they survived the Nazis in Budapest and imprisonment by the Soviets during the Cold War.
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Couldn't stop listening
- By Jane on 04-09-10
By: Kati Marton
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Double Cross
- The True Story of the D-Day Spies
- By: Ben Macintyre
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On June 6, 1944, 150,000 Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy and suffered an astonishingly low rate of casualties. A stunning military achievement, it was also a masterpiece of trickery. Operation Fortitude, which protected and enabled the invasion, and the Double Cross system, which specialized in turning German spies into double agents, tricked the Nazis into believing that the Allied attacks would come in Calais and Norway rather than Normandy.
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Are You Sure Ben Macintyre Wrote This?
- By Sheila Quaid on 08-01-12
By: Ben Macintyre
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Into the Lion's Mouth
- The True Story of Dusko Popov: Word War II Spy, Patriot, and the Real-Life Inspiration for James Bond
- By: Larry Loftis
- Narrated by: Eric G. Dove
- Length: 9 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
James Bond has nothing on Dusko Popov. A double agent for the Abwehr, MI5 and MI6, and the FBI during World War II, Popov seduced numerous women, spoke five languages, and was a crack shot, all while maintaining his cover as a Yugoslavian diplomat....
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A boring account of exciting events.
- By Amazon Customer on 11-30-18
By: Larry Loftis
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Eddie Chapman was a charming criminal, a con man, and a philanderer. He was also one of the most remarkable double agents Britain has ever produced. Inside the traitor was a man of loyalty; inside the villain was a hero. The problem for Chapman, his spymasters, and his lovers was to know where one persona ended and the other began.
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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.
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Wanted to love it
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Rogue Heroes
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Britain's Special Air Service - or SAS - was the brainchild of David Stirling, a young, gadabout aristocrat whose aimlessness in early life belied a remarkable strategic mind. Where most of his colleagues looked at a battlefield map of World War II's African theater and saw a protracted struggle with Rommel's desert forces, Stirling saw an opportunity: Given a small number of elite, well-trained men, he could parachute behind enemy lines and sabotage their airplanes and war matériel.
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Those Who Dared, Won!
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The Siege
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Interesting, but a bit of a slog
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The narrator is incorrectly identified.
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Eddie Chapman was a charming criminal, a con man, and a philanderer. He was also one of the most remarkable double agents Britain has ever produced. Inside the traitor was a man of loyalty; inside the villain was a hero. The problem for Chapman, his spymasters, and his lovers was to know where one persona ended and the other began.
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What a great character
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Wanted to love it
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Interesting, but a bit of a slog
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Prisoners of the Castle
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Another chapter of history brought to life by a master
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Operation Mincemeat
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Ben Macintyre’s Agent Zigzag was hailed as “rollicking, spellbinding” (New York Times), “wildly improbable but entirely true” (Entertainment Weekly), and, quite simply, “the best book ever written” (Boston Globe). In his new book, Operation Mincemeat, he tells an extraordinary story that will delight his legions of fans. In 1943, from a windowless basement office in London, two brilliant intelligence officers conceived a plan that was both simple and complicated - Operation Mincemeat.
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Better than the movie
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The Billion Dollar Spy
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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.
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Compelling as historical thriller, character study
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The Forgotten 500
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Here is the astonishing, never-before-told story of the greatest rescue mission of World War II: when the OSS set out to recover more than 500 airmen trapped behind enemy lines. During a bombing campaign, hundreds of American airmen were shot down in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia. Local Serbian villagers risked their own lives to give refuge to the soldiers, and for months the airmen lived in hiding, waiting for rescue.
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an amazing tale
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A Spy in Plain Sight
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A legal analyst for NPR, NBC, and CNN, delves into the facts surrounding what has been called the “worst intelligence disaster in US history”: the case of Robert Hanssen—a Russian spy who was embedded in the FBI for two decades.
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You almost had me
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A Woman of No Importance
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In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." The target in their sights was Virginia Hall, a Baltimore socialite who talked her way into Special Operations Executive, the spy organization dubbed Winston Churchill's "Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare." She became the first Allied woman deployed behind enemy lines and - despite her prosthetic leg - helped to light the flame of the French Resistance, revolutionizing secret warfare as we know it.
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Maybe it’s the narrator?
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Russians Among Us
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With intrigue that rivals the best le Carre novels, Russians Among Us tells the urgent story of Russia’s espionage efforts against the United States and the West from the end of the Cold War to the present.
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Should be required reading for every citizen
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Circle of Treason
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Circle of Treason is the first account written by CIA agents who were key members of the CIA team that conducted the intense "Ames Mole Hunt." Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille were two of the five principals of the CIA team tasked with hunting one of their own and were directly responsible for identifying Ames as the mole, leading to his arrest and conviction.
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The hunt for a mole
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By: Sandra V. Grimes, and others
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Agent Zigzag
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Eddie Chapman was a charming criminal, a con man, and a philanderer. He was also one of the most remarkable double agents Britain has ever produced. Inside the traitor was a man of loyalty; inside the villain was a hero. The problem for Chapman, his spymasters, and his lovers was to know where one persona ended and the other began. In 1941, after training as a German spy in occupied France, Chapman was parachuted into Britain with a revolver, a wireless, and a cyanide pill, with orders from the Abwehr to blow up an airplane factory. Instead, he contacted MI5, the British Secret Service.
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Is it a novel? Is it a newspaper article? No, its
- By Steven on 03-27-11
By: Ben MacIntyre
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The Demon of Unrest
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On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter.
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Vividly Told History of the Start of the Civil War
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The Best Minds
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Acclaimed author Jonathan Rosen’s haunting investigation of the forces that led his closest childhood friend, Michael Laudor, from the heights of brilliant promise to the forensic psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved. A story about friendship, love, and the price of self-delusion, The Best Minds explores the ways in which we understand—and fail to understand—mental illness.
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The Overwhelming Tragedy of Mental Illness
- By Elephants Matter on 12-30-23
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The Main Enemy
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- By: Milton Bearden, James Risen
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A landmark collaboration between a thirty-year veteran of the CIA and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, The Main Enemy is the inside story of the CIA-KGB spy wars, told through the actions of the men who fought them. Based on hundreds of interviews with operatives from both sides, The Main Enemy puts us inside the heads of CIA officers as they dodge surveillance and walk into violent ambushes in Moscow. This is the story of the generation of spies who came of age in the shadow of the Cuban missile crisis and rose to run the CIA and KGB in the last days of the Cold War.
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A masterpiece of espionage history
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What listeners say about The Spy and the Traitor
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- Donald
- 10-21-18
Amazing Story!
Well-researched history of a unique and extremely important spy working within the KGB for the Brits. The twists and turns of the story, and the extremely professional handling of this KGB officer, Oleg Gordievsky, made this book more exciting than any fictional spy novel. Not much on the CIA turncoat, Aldrich Ames, the "Traitor" in the book, but enough where you learned how and when and why Ames gave up so many key agents, including Gordievsky. The story is exciting to the end, including the implausible exfiltration of Gordievsky from the Soviet Union in a plan that could have gone wrong — and almost did — in so many ways.
John Lee is a top-notch narrator, with all the right attributes of diction, emphasis, fluidity, and drama one would want for a book with this continuing level of excitement.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Michael Camardese
- 06-22-22
Patriotism Supercedes Stupid Cultists
Communism was a cult of beliefs. Tyranny is a cult of personality. The first was undermined by patriots who realized the danger. The latter is more dangerous because the believers swallow lies with relish but don't see them as lies. We need more patriots to overcome tyranny. Gordievski should be the model to destroy tryants.
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1 person found this helpful
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- barie pollock
- 11-11-18
Wow
Found this book so informative and thrilling to the end
I did not know anything about this spy and had a renewed appreciation for what these brave people risk for their ideals and love of country and freedom
Wonderfully written and performed. 5 stars
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- Gary W Dix
- 02-19-19
There is so much more
When you read of the remarkable risks and personal sacrifice one takes for their beliefs, you can only marvel.
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- Margaret
- 11-08-18
Profound
This man’s story deserves to be heard. A page turner, if you will. Maybe my favorite by the author.
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- Catherine
- 03-14-19
recommended for any Le Carre fan
This is a fabulous story wonderfully written and read. It revisits the Cold War from an unusual perspective. Margaret Thatcher plays a "walk on" role that reflects amazingly well on her. My only problem with the audio version is that it's difficult to keep the Russian names straight, and it omits some of the photos that appear in the printed version. Otherwise, it was one of those books where I was sad when it ended.
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- Evan MacManus
- 03-19-19
AMAZING BOOK
I highly recommend this book to everyone. The world of espionage is beautifully presented in this book.
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- Michael Fincher
- 06-15-19
Awesome!
Can't say enough good about it! Listened to it while working and it was easy enough to follow.. but complex enough it had me skipping back to make sure I heard it right. Loved this book!
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- Everard (Desert Islander)
- 08-14-19
Outstanding!
This ‘audiobook’ has been narrated in a way all audiobooks should be.
John Lee has done an outstanding job. He is someone who knows how to read/narrate prose. I have enjoyed listening to several, but not all, audiobooks. The latter were all returned simply because of ‘narrator assault’ on my ears, and insult to my intelligence. I recently returned Roland Philipp’s “A Spy Named Orphan” for this very reason. Unless I buy a hard copy of that book I will never know if the book was well written and poorly narrated, or badly written and badly narrated.
However, Ben Macintyre’s “The Spy and The Traitor” is only been well written, but outstandingly (if this word exists) narrated.
Anyone taking notice of this review should keep an eye open for more Ben Macintyre, and more John Lee. I don’t think I have enjoyed an audiobook more than this one.
Simply outstanding!
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- Scott A.
- 03-14-19
Wow! Very relevant and Interesting story!
Really enjoyed the story, it was long but gripping and kept my attention all the way through. I think everyone should here this story as it is very relevant to today.
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