Books like The FBI-KGB war by Robert J. Lamphere

A history of Soviet intelligence service and the evolution of the KGB.

Spies are rare. Robert Hanssen was an FBI counterintelligence officer who, for 22 years, secretly supplied the KGB with trade secrets, making him one of the most damaging spies in U.S. history.

Robert Baer, renowned CIA operative, balances a career in the Middle East with a strained marriage and paternity, while his wife Dayna evolves from a California girl to a seasoned intelligence officer facing the personal costs of espionage.

By day, he taught spycraft at the CIA's clandestine training center, The Farm. By night, he was a minivan-driving single father racing home to have dinner with his kids. But for more than two years, Jim Nicholson met covertly with agents of Russia's foreign intelligence service and turned over troves of classified documents. In 1997 Nicholson became the highest ranking CIA officer ever convicted of espionage. But while behind the bars of a federal prison, he groomed the one person he trusted most to serve as his stand-in: his youngest son, Nathan.

"Executions, kidnappings, the assassination of Leon Trotsky, the plunder of gold from the Spanish treasury, Joseph Stalin's "horrible secret" - historical events and classified matters like these are cast in startling new light by KGB General Alexander Orlov, the subject of this riveting and unprecedented memoir by FBI Special Agent Edward Gazur.". "A veteran in East European counter-espionage investigations, Gazur was the final agent assigned to one of the FBI's most fascinating cases - that of the highest-ranking KGB defector ever, General Alexander Orlov. The two men met in 1971, and over the course of their debriefing sessions Gazur learned more of the astonishing details behind the story of Orlov's spectacular disappearance from Soviet intelligence at the height of the Spanish Civil War. With the mine of information he had amassed about his superiors and Stalin's official purges, Orlov fled in 1938 to the United States, where he lived in hiding from both the FBI and KGB for fifteen years. In 1953 he came in from the Cold War, and many of his revelations to the FBI about Stalin's Soviet and life behind the Iron Curtain later found their way into Orlov's best-selling book, The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes, as well as a special issue of Life magazine.". "Gazur did more than debrief Orlov, however. He also befriended the Bolshevik general - and thus became the sole possessor and literary executor of Orlov's as yet unpublished memoir, "The March of Time," in which he recorded other, darker secrets about the dictator behind the brutal Soviet purges and repressive policies. Alexander Orlov: The FBI's KGB General reveals those secrets for the first time in a compelling and authentic account of Stalin's brutal regime and KGB operations in the Cold War. At the same time, it unfolds the chronicle of the FBI's investigation into the life and mysterious death of one man whom even Stalin feared."--BOOK JACKET.

When World War II formally came to a close on to September 1945, a new secret war was only just beginning: the underground conflict between the security services of the two great superpowers, the KGB from the Soviet Union and the CIA from the United States of America. The history of postwar intelligence operations is naturally dominated by the efforts of the KGB and the CIA. Both have conducted a variety of operations, from direct large-scale military intervention and subversion to covert spying and surveillance missions. Both have had their successes and their failures. The fiasco of the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was soon followed by American success in the Cuban missile crisis in which President Kennedy's deft tactics were assisted by intelligence supplied by a Soviet defector. Although the operations of the world's secret services often make the headlines these stories only scratch the surface; the search for the real truth is an elusive affair demanding patience, persistence, foresight and, often, just plain luck. KGB/CIA: Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence Operations goes beyond mere journalistic reportage to discover just how intelligence work is conducted. There are elements of the business which read almost as fiction, and it is this factor which ensures the widespread popular interest in the KGB and CIA. On the one hand we have the CIA creating "Air America" and setting up training camps for irregular forces of Montagnard tribesmen during the Vietnam conflict, while on the other, a Bulgarian dissident is openly murdered in a London street by a specially made weapon concealed in an otherwise innocent umbrella. What have intelligence operations achieved? How have they been planned and carried out? KGB/CIA: Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence Operations examines all these questions while providing a clear and authoritative account of KGB and CIA activities. The history of the intelligence world is traced from the atom spies of the 1940s to the support for the Contras and Sandanistas of the 1980s. The authors'compelling narrative is combined with over 300 painstakingly researched photographs, which provide a superb visual commentary to this traumatic and revealing story. - Jacket flap.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David A. Vise uncovers the life and secrets of Robert Philip Hanssen, a devoted FBI counterintelligence agent who became a Russian spy for decades.

Into the Mirror recounts the shocking career of FBI Special Agent Robert P. Hanssen, the spy whose betrayals created the most significant breach in U.S. security history.