Operation Stopwatch/Gold, according to CIA chief Alan Dulles, was one of the most valuable and daring projects ever undertaken. In 1955 it ran a tunnel 800 metres under the Russian sector of Cold War Berlin, and for more than a year tuned into Red Army intelligence. This was an almost impossible trick: apart from the technical wizardry needed, any noise or vibration could have given the game away.

Provides an account of Stopwatch/Gold, a joint Cold War operation between the CIA and Britain's Secret Intelligence Service conducted from a tunnel under the Russian sector of Berlin in an effort to gain information about the planned actions of the German Red Army.

The Berlin spy tunnel, said CIA chief Alan Dulles, was one of the most valuable and daring projects ever undertaken. In 1955 it ran a tunnel 800 metres under the Russian sector of Cold War Berlin, and for more than a year tuned into Red Army intelligence. This was an almost impossible trick: apart from the technical wizardry needed, any noise or vibration could have given the game away. When snow fell panic measures were suddenly needed to prevent it thawing in a tell-tale line leading to the target building. Trust, even between allies, was dangerous. Despite the Burgess and Maclean affair, the Americans had decided that co-operation was safe once more, and the tunnel was a joint CIA/MI6 project using British expertise from a prototype in Vienna. This was a mistake: there was another mole in the British secret services, and the KGB knew about the tunnel even before it was built. Why the KGB kept the secret to itself is one of the puzzles explored in this book. Was it inter-service rivalry? Was the British mole so valuable that the KGB sacrificed Red Army secrets rather than blow his cover? Or, since the Russians in fact had no plans to attack the West, did the KGB want that information leaked to reduce the risk of surprise strikes the other way? Spies Beneath Berlin draws on eyewitness interviews and the full range of sources. Praise for Spies Beneath Berlin: 'A remarkable book . . . which reminds us of something we should never forget - how a few outstanding Britons and Americans helped to preserve the peace, security and freedom of the West in the harshest years of the Cold War' - Oleg Gordievsky 'Spies Beneath Berlin delivers surprise after surprise and makes all previous accounts of this amazing story quite obsolete. It's a real page turner too - I read it virtually at a sitting' - Len Deighton 'Impeccably convincing . . . as exciting as a good detective story' - The Spectator David Stafford is an historian and former diplomat who has written extensively on espionage, intelligence, Churchill, and the Second World War. The former Project Director at the Centre for The Study of the Two World Wars at the University of Edinburgh, he is now an Honorary Fellow of the University and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where he and his wife now live.

Now available: a special Tenth Anniversary Edition with bonus material to celebrate ten years of continuing reader demand. Look for it here on Amazon. Voices Under Berlin: The Tale of a Monterey Mary is the tale of one of the early skirmishes of the Secret Cold War told with a pace and a black humor reminiscent of that used by Joseph Heller (Catch-22) and Richard Hooker (M*A*S*H*). It is set against the backdrop of the CIA cross-sector tunnel operation to tap three Russian telecom�munications cables in Berlin in the mid-nineteen-fifties. It is the story of the American soldiers who worked the tunnel, and how they fought for a sense of purpose against boredom and the enemy both within and without. One of them is the target of a Russian "honey-trap," but which one? Kevin, the Russian transcriber, Blackie, the blackmarketeer, or Lt. Sheerluck, the martinet? The other end of the tunnel is the story of the Russians whose telephone calls the Americans are intercepting. Their end of the tale is told in the unnarrated transcripts of their calls. They are the voices under Berlin. * Dr. Wesley Britton, author of Spy Television, Beyond Bond: Spies in Fiction and Film, and Onscreen and Undercover: The Ultimate Book of Movie Espionage, calls Voices Under Berlin "a spy novel that breaks all the molds," adding that "in the tradition of Greene and Ambler, 'Voices Under Berlin' contains many literate qualities that make it a work of special consideration, worthy of an audience much broader than that of espionage enthusiasts or those interested in Cold War history. In fact, one indication of the book's quality is that it was among the award winners at the 2008 Hollywood Book Festival, a very rare honor for a spy novel." * Po Wong writing at bookideas.com says "Kevin is a hero in the mold of McMurphy, the rebellious asylum inmate who is the protagonist in Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Kevin manages to do his job despite the blind obedience to stringent regulations that frequently overrides common sense and intelligence in large military operations, and despite the widespread ineptness around him. ... Voices under Berlin is a coherent, funny, and often sardonic look at real espionage work. The detail is so realistic that you may find yourself wondering, as I did, whether this is a novel or the memoirs of an actual intelligence agent. Of course, if you're looking for James Bond, you won't find him here. What you will find is a fascinating account of what it must have been like to be toiling away at an important but often dreary job underneath the streets of Berlin during the Cold War years. * Midwest Book Review says one of the things that sets this novel apart is "the author's combining a genuine gift for humor with a deft literary astuteness in telling a story that fully engages the reader quite literally from first page to last." Winner of six book awards. Also by this author: Berlin in Early Cold-War Army Booklets The Day Before the Berlin Wall: Could We Have Stopped It? - An Alternate History of Cold War Espionage Berlin in Early Berlin-Wall Era CIA, State Department, and Army Booklets Reunification: A Monterey Mary Returns to Berlin Berlin in D�tente-era Berlin Brigade Booklets

Based on a hit podcast series, this book tells the unbelievable true story of an escape tunnel under the Berlin Wall--the people who built it, the spy who betrayed it, and the media event it inspired. In September 1961, at the height of the Cold War, 22-year-old Joachim Rudolph escaped from East Germany, one of the world's most brutal regimes. He'd risked everything to do it. Then, a few months later, working with a group of students, he picked up a spade... and tunneled back in. The goal was to tunnel into the East to help people escape. They spend months digging, hauling up carts of dirt in a tunnel ventilated by stove pipes. But the odds are against them: a Stasi agent infiltrates their group and on their first attempt, and dozens of escapees and some of the diggers are arrested and imprisoned. Despite the risk of prison and death, a month later, Joachim and the other try again and hit more bad luck: the tunnel springs a leak. After several attempts, run-ins with a spy and secret police, and some unlikely financial aid from an American TV network, they finally break through into the East, and free 29 people. This is the story of their great escape, the NBC documentary crew that filmed it, and the U.S. government's attempts to block the film from ever seeing the light of day. But more than anything, this is the story of what people will do to be free.

"A riveting and vivid account. ... A remarkable story. ... It reads like a Hollywood screenplay." —Foreign Affairs The astonishing true story of the Berlin Tunnel, one of the West’s greatest espionage operations of the Cold War—and the dangerous Soviet mole who betrayed it. Its code name was “Operation Gold,” a wildly audacious CIA plan to construct a clandestine tunnel into East Berlin to tap into critical KGB and Soviet military telecommunication lines. The tunnel, crossing the border between the American and Soviet sectors, would have to be 1,500 feet (the length of the Empire State Building) with state-of-the-art equipment, built and operated literally under the feet of their Cold War adversaries. Success would provide the CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service access to a vast treasure of intelligence. Exposure might spark a dangerous confrontation with the Soviets. Yet as the Allies were burrowing into the German soil, a traitor, code-named Agent Diamond by his Soviet handlers, was burrowing into the operation itself. . . Betrayal in Berlin is Steve Vogel’s heart pounding account of the operation. He vividly recreates post-war Berlin, a scarred, shadowy snake pit with thousands of spies and innumerable cover stories. It is also the most vivid account of George Blake, perhaps the most damaging mole of the Cold War. Drawing upon years of archival research, secret documents, and rare interviews with Blake himself, Vogel has crafted a true-life spy story as thrilling as the novels of John le Carré and Len Deighton. Betrayal in Berlin includes 24 photos and two maps.

A thrilling Cold War narrative of superpower showdowns, media suppression, and two escape tunnels beneath the Berlin Wall. In the summer of 1962, the year after the rise of the Berlin Wall, a group of young West Germans risked prison, Stasi torture, and even death to liberate friends, lovers, and strangers in East Berlin by digging tunnels under the Wall. Then two U.S. television networks heard about the secret projects and raced to be first to document them from the inside. NBC and CBS funded two separate tunnels in return for the right to film the escapes, planning spectacular prime-time specials. President John F. Kennedy, however, was wary of anything that might spark a confrontation with the Soviets, having said, “A wall is better than a war,” and even confessing to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “We don’t care about East Berlin.” JFK approved unprecedented maneuvers to quash both documentaries, testing the limits of a free press in an era of escalating nuclear tensions. As Greg Mitchell’s riveting narrative unfolds, we meet extraordinary characters: the legendary cyclist who became East Germany’s top target for arrest; the Stasi informer who betrays the “CBS tunnel”; the American student who aided the escapes; an engineer who would later help build the tunnel under the English channel; and the young East Berliner who fled with her baby, then married one of the tunnelers. The Tunnels captures the chilling reach of the Stasi secret police as U.S. networks prepared to “pay for play” but were willing to cave to official pressure, the White House was eager to suppress historic coverage, and ordinary people in dire circumstances became subversive. The Tunnels is breaking history, a propulsive read whose themes still reverberate.

The Second World War is coming to a close. But their fight is just beginning... Berlin, 1945: A group of Nazis frantically plot the next steps for their country. SS recruits gather east of the city for an audacious yet ill-fated mission to bring about a Fourth Reich. Three decades later, a young British diplomat in East Berlin is compromised after falling into a honey-trap. He contacts Major Edgar, a veteran British spymaster, who is drawn into an unlikely alliance with his old adversary, Viktor Krasotkin. Soon they are plunged into a world of Nazi war criminals and double agents. With nobody to trust, they must rely on each other. But as Cold War tensions rise, the cracks begin to show. The thrilling final novel in the Spies series, with an astonishing twist, perfect for fans of Jack Higgins, Frederick Forsyth and John le Carré.

A thrilling, critically-acclaimed account of the Cold War spies and spycraft that changed the course of history, perfect for readers of Bomb and The Boys Who Challenged Hitler. The Cold War spanned five decades as America and the USSR engaged in a battle of ideologies with global ramifications. Over the course of the war, with the threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction looming, billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives were devoted to the art and practice of spying, ensuring that the world would never be the same. Rife with intrigue and filled with fascinating historical figures whose actions shine light on both the past and present, this timely work of narrative nonfiction explores the turbulence of the Cold War through the lens of the men and women who waged it behind closed doors, and helps explain the role secret and clandestine operations have played in America's history and its national security.

“Fascinating, rich, and probing . . . a beguiling and endlessly interesting portrait”—The Wall Street Journal For fans of John le Carré and Ben Macintyre, an exclusive first-person account of one of the Cold War’s most notorious spies “Kuper provides a different and valuable perspective, humane and informative. If the definition of a psychopath is someone who refuses to accept the consequences of his actions, does George fit the definition? There he sits, admitting it was all for nothing, but has no regrets. Or does he?” —John le Carré Few Cold War spy stories approach the sheer daring and treachery of George Blake’s. After fighting in the Dutch resistance during World War II, Blake joined the British spy agency MI6 and was stationed in Seoul. Taken prisoner after the North Korean army overran his post in 1950, Blake later returned to England to a hero’s welcome, carrying a dark secret: while in a communist prison camp in North Korea, he had secretly switched sides to the KGB after reading Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. As a Soviet double agent, Blake betrayed uncounted western spying operations—including the storied Berlin Tunnel, the most expensive covert project ever undertaken by the CIA and MI6. Blake exposed hundreds of western agents, forty of whom were likely executed. After his unmasking and arrest, he received, for that time, the longest sentence in modern British history—only to make a dramatic escape to the Soviet Union in 1966, five years into his forty-two-year sentence. He left his wife, three children, and a stunned country behind. Much of Blake’s career existed inside the hall of mirrors that was the Cold War, especially following his sensational escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison. Veteran journalist Simon Kuper tracked Blake to his dacha outside Moscow, where the aging spy agreed to be interviewed for this unprecedented account of Cold War espionage. Following the master spy’s death in Moscow at age ninety-eight on December 26, 2020, Kuper is finally able to set the record straight.