Books like The ugly game by Heidi Blake

Simon Singh traces the sweeping history of cryptography, from Mary Queen of Scots to Navajo Code Talkers and the Internet’s secure commerce, revealing how secrecy has shaped wars, nations, and technology.

A biography of Oleg Gordievsky, the Soviet double‑agent who, while working undercover in the KGB, supplied MI6 with critical intelligence that accelerated the collapse of the Cold War.

Bill Browder, a hedge fund magnate, exposes corruption and foreign investment abuses in post‑Soviet Russia, leading to the death of his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky and sparking a global campaign for justice.

After World War II, the U.S. secretly recruited former Nazi scientists for Cold War research in a program called Operation Paperclip.

Henry Crumpton, a former CIA counterterrorism officer, recounts his covert operations against al Qaeda and the Taliban, detailing the agency’s strategic shift in the Afghanistan war and its impact on U.S. national security.

"The definitive account of the FIFA scandal, the biggest international corruption case of recent years, touching dozens of countries and spearheaded by U.S. investigators, published on the eve of the biggest sporting event on the planet, soccer's World Cup"-- The FIFA case began with an IRS agent's review of an American soccer official's tax returns. It led to a huge worldwide corruption scandal that crossed continents and reached the highest levels of the soccer's world governing body in Switzerland. Bensinger shows that this corruption existed for decades before American law enforcement officials began to dig. Nearly every aspect of the planet's favorite sport was corrupted by bribes, kickbacks, fraud, and money laundering. Not even the World Cup was safe from corruption. And it is far from over. -- adapted from jacket