
Ben Macintyre is a writer-at-large for The Times (U.K.) and the bestselling author of The Spy and the Traitor, A Spy Among Friends, Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and Rogue Heroes, among other books. Macintyre has also written and presented BBC documentaries of his work.
by Ben Macintyre
Rating: 4.5 ⭐
• 6 recommendations ❤️
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.
by Ben Macintyre
Rating: 4.4 ⭐
• 2 recommendations ❤️
Kim Philby is perhaps the most notorious British defector in history. Agent, double agent, charmer and traitor, he betrayed every secret of Allied operations to the Russians in the early years of the cold War. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Philby, Nicholas Elliottt and James Jesus Angleton were rising stars in the intelligence world and shared every secret. Elliott and Angleton thought they knew Philby better than anyone - and then discovered they had not known him at all.This is a story of loyalty, trust and treachery, class and conscience.... of male friendships forged and then systematically betrayed. With access to newly released MI5 files and previously unseen papers. 'A Spy Among Friends' unlocks what is perhaps the last great secret of the Cold War.
by Ben Macintyre
Rating: 4.0 ⭐
In 1943, from a windowless London basement office, two intelligence officers conceived a plan that was both simple & complicated—Operation Mincemeat. Purpose? To deceive the Nazis into thinking the Allies were planning to attack Europe by way of Greece or Sardinia, rather than Sicily, as the Nazis had assumed & the Allies ultimately chose. Charles Cholmondeley of MI5 and the British naval intelligence officer Ewen Montagu were very different. Cholmondeley was a dreamer seeking adventure. Montagu was an aristocratic, detail-oriented barrister. A perfect team, they created an ingenious plan: equip a corpse with secret (but false) papers concerning the invasion, then drop it off the coast of Spain where German spies would hopefully take the bait. The idea was approved by British intelligence officials, including Ian Fleming (007's creator). Winston Churchill believed it might ring true to the Axis & help bring victory.Filled with spies, double agents, rogues, heroes & a corpse, the story of Operation Mincemeat reads like an international thriller. Unveiling never-before-released material, Macintyre goes into the minds of intelligence officers, their moles & spies, & the German Abwehr agents who suffered the “twin frailties of wishfulness & yesmanship.” He weaves together the eccentric personalities of Cholmondeley & Montagu & their improbable feats into an adventure that saved thousands & paved the way for the conquest of Sicily.
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. For the next four years, Chapman worked as a double agent, a lone British spy at the heart of the German Secret Service who at one time volunteered to assassinate Hitler for his countrymen. Crisscrossing Europe under different names, all the while weaving plans, spreading disinformation, and, miraculously, keeping his stories straight under intense interrogation, he even managed to gain some profit and seduce beautiful women along the way.The Nazis feted Chapman as a hero and awarded him the Iron Cross. In Britain, he was pardoned for his crimes, becoming the only wartime agent to be thus rewarded. Both countries provided for the mother of his child and his mistress. Sixty years after the end of the war, and ten years after Chapman’s death, MI5 has now declassified all of Chapman’s files, releasing more than 1,800 pages of top secret material and allowing the full story of Agent Zigzag to be told for the first time.A gripping story of loyalty, love, and treachery, Agent Zigzag offers a unique glimpse into the psychology of espionage, with its thin and shifting line between fidelity and betrayal.
Kui üks elegantne koduperenaine 1942. aastal vaikses Inglise linnakeses kodust väljus, teadsid naabrid, et pr Burton võiks minna näiteks perele toitu ostma. Tegelikult oli ta aga üks ajaloo suurimaid naisspioone, sünnipäraselt Ursula Kuczynski, koodnimega Sonja. Saksamaa juut, veendunud kommunist, Punaarmee polkovnik ja ülimalt osav luuraja, kes osales mitmes 20. sajandi ohtlikumas operatsioonis Mandžuuriast Šveitsini.„Agent Sonja” on põnev ülevaade ühe naise elust, mis liikus samas rütmis kommunismi tõusu ja langusega. Tunnustatud ajaloolase Ben Macintyre’i sulest on varem eesti keeles ilmunud „Spioon ja reetur”.
by Ben Macintyre
Rating: 4.3 ⭐
In the summer of 1941, at the height of the war in the Western Desert, a bored and eccentric young officer, David Stirling, came up with a plan that was radical and entirely against the rules: a small undercover unit that would inflict mayhem behind enemy lines.Despite intense opposition, Winston Churchill personally gave Stirling permission to recruit the toughest, brightest and most ruthless soldiers he could find. So began the most celebrated and mysterious military organisation in the world: the SAS.Now, 75 years later, the SAS has finally decided to tell its astonishing story. It has opened its secret archives for the first time, granting historian Ben Macintyre full access to a treasure trove of unseen reports, memos, diaries, letters, maps and photographs, as well as free rein to interview surviving Originals and those who knew them.The result is an exhilarating tale of fearlessness and heroism, recklessness and tragedy; of extraordinary men who were willing to take monumental risks. It is a story about the meaning of courage.
In his celebrated bestsellers Agent Zigzag and Operation Mincemeat, Ben Macintyre told the dazzling true stories of a remarkable WWII double agent and of how the Allies employed a corpse to fool the Nazis and assure a decisive victory. In Double Cross, Macintyre returns with the untold story of the grand final deception of the war and of the extraordinary spies who achieved it. On June 6, 1944, 150,000 Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy and suffered an astonishingly low rate of casualties. D-Day was a stunning military accomplishment, but 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, deceived the Nazis into believing that the Allies would attack at Calais and Norway rather than Normandy. It was the most sophisticated and successful deception operation ever carried out, ensuring that Hitler kept an entire army awaiting a fake invasion, saving thousands of lives, and securing an Allied victory at the most critical juncture in the war. The story of D-Day has been told from the point of view of the soldiers who fought in it, the tacticians who planned it, and the generals who led it. But this epic event in world history has never before been told from the perspectives of the key individuals in the Double Cross System. These include its director (a brilliant, urbane intelligence officer), a colorful assortment of MI5 handlers (as well as their counterparts in Nazi intelligence), and the five spies who formed Double Cross’s nucleus: a dashing Serbian playboy, a Polish fighter-pilot, a bisexual Peruvian party girl, a deeply eccentric Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming and a volatile Frenchwoman, whose obsessive love for her pet dog very nearly wrecked the entire plan. The D-Day spies were, without question, one of the oddest military units ever assembled, and their success depended on the delicate, dubious relationship between spy and spymaster, both German and British. Their enterprise was saved from catastrophe by a shadowy sixth spy whose heroic sacrifice is revealed here for the first time. With the same depth of research, eye for the absurd and masterful storytelling that have made Ben Macintyre an international bestseller, Double Cross is a captivating narrative of the spies who wove a web so intricate it ensnared Hitler’s army and carried thousands of D-Day troops across the Channel in safety.
by Ben Macintyre
Rating: 4.2 ⭐
The definitive and surprising true story of one of history’s most notorious prisons—and the remarkable cast of POWs who tried relentlessly to escape their captors, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Spy and the TraitorIn this gripping narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend.But as Macintyre shows, the story of Colditz was about much more than escape. Its population represented a society in miniature, full of heroes and traitors, class conflicts and secret alliances, and the full range of human joy and despair. In Macintyre’s telling, Colditz’s most famous names—like the indomitable Pat Reid—share glory with lesser known but equally remarkable characters like Indian doctor Birendranath Mazumdar whose ill treatment, hunger strike, and eventual escape read like fiction; Florimond Duke, America’s oldest paratrooper and least successful secret agent; and Christopher Clayton Hutton, the brilliant inventor employed by British intelligence to manufacture covert escape aids for POWs.Prisoners of the Castle traces the war’s arc from within Colditz’s stone walls, where the stakes rose as Hitler’s war machine faltered and the men feared that liberation would not come soon enough to spare them a grisly fate at the hands of the Nazis. Bringing together the wartime intrigue of his acclaimed Operation Mincemeat and keen psychological portraits of his bestselling true-life spy stories, Macintyre has breathed new life into one of the greatest war stories ever told.
by Ben Macintyre
Rating: 4.3 ⭐
A thrilling tick-tock recounting one of the most harrowing hostage situations and daring rescue attempts of our time—from true-life espionage master and New York Times bestselling author of Operation Mincemeat and The Spy and the Traitor Ben Macintyre.As the American hostage crisis in Iran boiled into its seventh month in the spring of 1980, six heavily armed gunman barged into the Iranian embassy in London, taking twenty-six hostages. What followed over the next six days was an increasingly tense standoff, one that threatened at any moment to spill into a bloodbath. Policeman Trevor Lock was supposed to have gone to the theater that night. Instead, he found himself overpowered and whisked into the embassy. The terrorists never noticed the gun hidden in his jacket. The drama that ensued would force him to find reserves of courage he didn’t know he had. The gunmen themselves were hardly one-dimensional—all Arabs, some highly educated, who hoped to force Britain to take their side in their independence battle against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. Behind the scenes lurked the brutal Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who had bankrolled the whole affair as a salvo against Iran.As police negotiators pressed the gunmen, rival protestors clashed violently outside the embassy, and as MI6 and the CIA scrambled for intelligence, Britain’s special forces strike team, the SAS, laid plans for a dangerous rescue mission. Inside, Lock and his fellow hostages used all the cunning they possessed to outwit and outflank their captors. Finally, on the sixth day, after the terrorists executed the embassy press attaché and dumped his body on the front doorstep, the SAS raid began, sparking a deadly high-stakes climax.A story of ordinary men and women under immense pressure, The Siege takes readers minute-by-thrilling-minute through an event that would echo across the next two decades and provide a direct historical link to the tragedy on 9/11. Drawing on exclusive interviews and a wealth of never-before-seen files, Macintyre brilliantly reconstructs a week in which every day minted a new hero and every second spelled the potential for doom.
He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson.He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city.He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. . . .--Sherlock Holmes on Professor Moriarty in The Final ProblemThe Victorian era's most infamous thief, Adam Worth was the original Napoleon of crime. Suave, cunning Worth learned early that the best way to succeed was to steal. And steal he did.Following a strict code of honor, Worth won the respect of Victorian society. He also aroused its fear by becoming a chilling phantom, mingling undetected with the upper classes, whose valuables he brazenly stole. His most celebrated heist: Gainsborough's grand portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire--ancestor of Diana, Princess of Wales--a painting Worth adored and often slept with for twenty years.With a brilliant gang that included "Piano" Charley, a jewel thief, train robber, and playboy, and "the Scratch" Becker, master forger, Worth secretly ran operations from New York to London, Paris, and South Africa--until betrayal and a Pinkerton man finally brought him down.In a decadent age, Worth was an icon. His biography is a grand, dazzling tour into the gaslit underworld of the last century. . . and into the doomed genius of a criminal mastermind.
by Ben Macintyre
Rating: 3.7 ⭐
In the first terrifying days of World War I, four British soldiers found themselves trapped behind enemy lines on the western front. They were forced to hide in the tiny French village of Villeret, whose inhabitants made the courageous decision to shelter the fugitives until they could pass as Picard peasants.The Englishman’s Daughter is the never-before-told story of these extraordinary men, their protectors, and of the haunting love affair between Private Robert Digby and Claire Dessenne, the most beautiful woman in Villeret. Their passion would result in the birth of a child known as “The Englishman’s Daughter,” and in an act of unspeakable betrayal, a tragic legacy that would haunt the village for generations to come.Through the testimonies of the villagers and the last letters of the soldiers, acclaimed journalist Ben Macintyre has pieced together a harrowing account of how life was lived behind enemy lines during the Great War, and offers a compelling solution to a gripping mystery that reverberates to this day.
Published to coincide with the 2008 Imperial War Museum exhibition of the same name, this is a thrilling stand-alone book that looks into the entwined worlds of James Bond and Ian Fleming. The book and exhibition will explore how Fleming's 007 emerged against the background of the Second World War and the Cold War, and how Bond's world was based on the realities (and fantasies) of Fleming's life as a wartime spy-master and peacetime bon viveur. They will show how the film version of Bond evolved for a later age, and answer a question that has obsessed generations of Bond fans over the where does the world of Ian Fleming end, and that of James Bond begin? Stylishly illustrated, For Your Eyes Only will incorporate a treasure-trove of gadgets, costumes, props, and storyboards from the films - Daniel Craig's blood-stained shirt from Casino Royale, the Aston Martin DB5, complete with weaponry - as well as memorabilia from Fleming's personal his smoking jacket, the manuscript for Casino Royale, his golden typewriter, his guns, and much more. Alongside this array of extraordinary visuals, Ben Macintyre tells the story of how Fleming created the most popular legend of all time. On the centenary of Fleming's birth, he looks at the real people on whom the writer based his fictional creations - friends, colleagues, lovers, and of course, the notorious villains. Exploring the tradition of spy fiction past and present - with specific attention to the Cold War - Macintyre explains the astonishing legacy of the Bond books and the enduring appeal of a fictional secret agent who not only lived twice, but proved to be immortal.
The riveting story that inspired Kipling's classic tale and a John Huston movieThe true story of Josiah Harlan, a Pennsylvania Quaker and the first American ever to enter Afghanistan, has never been told before. Soldier, spy, doctor, naturalist, traveler and writer, Josiah Harlan wanted to be a king, with all the imperialist hubris of his times. In an amazing twenty-year journey around Central Asia, he was variously employed as surgeon to the Maharaja of Punjab, revolutionary agent for the exiled Afghan King, and then commander-in-chief of the Afghan armies. In 1838, he set off in the footsteps of Alexander the Great across the Hindu Kush and forged his own kingdom, only to be ejected from Afghanistan a few months later by the invading British.Using a trove of newly-discovered documents, Harlan's own unpublished journals, and with a revised Preface detailing the unexpected discovery of Harlan's descendents, Ben Macintyre's The Man Who Would Be King tells the astonishing tale of the man who would be the first and last American king.
Macintyre describes his 1991 journey to the Paraguayan site where Elisabeth Nietzsche and her husband founded a utopian Aryan colony in 1886. He also traces her return to Europe in 1889 to care for her sick brother, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and her orchestration of his rise to fame.
by Ben Macintyre
Rating: 4.3 ⭐
Agent Zigzag: One December night in 1942, a Nazi parachutist landed in a Cambridgeshire field. His mission: to sabotage the British war effort. His name was Eddie Chapman, but he would shortly become MI5's Agent Zigzag. Dashing and louche, courageous and unpredictable, inside the traitor was a hero, inside the villain, a man of conscience: the problem for Chapman, his many lovers and his spymasters, was knowing where one ended and the other began. Ben Macintyre weaves together diaries, letters, photographs, memories and top-secret MI5 files to create the exhilarating account of Britain's most sensational double agent.Operation Mincemeat:One overcast April morning in 1943, a fisherman notices a corpse floating in the sea off the coast of Spain. When the body is brought ashore, he is identified as a British soldier, Major William Martin of the Royal Marines. A leather attaché case, secured to his belt, reveals an intelligence goldmine: top-secret documents Allied invasion plans. But Major William Martin never existed. The body is that of a dead Welsh tramp and every single document is fake. Operation Mincemeat is the incredible true story of the most extraordinary deception ever planned by Churchill's spies - an outrageous lie that travelled from a Whitehall basement, all the way to Hitler's desk. Double Cross:D-Day, 6 June 1944, the turning point of the Second World War, was a victory of arms. But it was also a triumph for a different kind of operation: one of deceit... At the heart of the deception was the 'Double Cross System', a team of double agents whose bravery, treachery, greed and inspiration succeeded in convincing the Nazis that Calais and Norway, not Normandy, were the targets of the 150,000-strong Allied invasion force. These were not conventional warriors, but their masterpiece of deceit saved thousands of lives. Their codenames were Bronx, Brutus, Treasure, Tricycle and Garbo. This is their story.
A collection of delicious morsels that celebrate the richness, ridiculousness and resilience of language.
by Ben Macintyre
Rating: 4.3 ⭐
Ben Macintyre’s two bestselling accounts of World War II espionage are now available together exclusively as an ebook with an excerpt from the New York Times bestseller, Double Cross. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Agent Zigzag is the story of Eddie Chapman, a charmer, a criminal, a con man, and one of the most remarkable double agents in all of British history. Deemed “brilliant and almost absurdly entertaining” by Malcolm Gladwell, Operation Mincemeat unveils top secret material directly from the officers, spies, and masterminds of World War II. Each true tale is told through the vantage point of covert officials as they unravel webs of espionage and deception to yield Allied success. Macintyre’s are words that read, according to Entertainment Weekly, “like something by Ian Fleming.”
This Ben Macintyre Collection 2 Books Set 1. The Spy and the The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War 9781101904213 2. A Spy Among Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal 9780804136655
Em 30 de abril de 1980, seis homens fortemente armados irromperam na embaixada iraniana em Londres. Aí fizeram 26 reféns, incluindo funcionários da embaixada, visitantes e três cidadãos britânicos.Seguiu-se um tenso cerco de seis dias, enquanto milhões de pessoas se reuniam em torno dos ecrãs em todo o mundo para assistirem ao noticiário mais longo da história da televisão britânica, no qual negociadores da polícia e psiquiatras procuravam pôr um fim ao impasse sem derramamento de sangue. Enquanto isso, o SAS – até então uma organização envolta em secretismo – planeava uma ousada missão de a Operação Nimrod.Com base em fontes inéditas, entrevistas exclusivas com o SAS e depoimentos de testemunhas – incluindo reféns, negociadores, agentes dos serviços secretos e o psiquiatra que se encontrava no local –, o historiador Ben Macintyre conduz os leitores numa viagem emocionante, desde os anos e semanas de preparação de ambos os lados, até ao relato, minuto a minuto, do cerco e do salvamento.Recriando as conversas dramáticas entre os negociadores e os reféns, o trabalho vital dos serviços secretos nos bastidores e o frenesim dos meios de comunicação social em torno deste momento de importância internacional, O Cerco é a história notável do que realmente aconteceu naqueles seis dias fatídicos e o primeiro relato completo de um momento que mudou para sempre a forma como a opinião pública encarava as forças especiais.
Please Note That The Following Individual Books As Per Original ISBN and Cover Image In this Listing shall be Dispatched The Spy and the Traitor, The Splendid and the Vile, Range 3 Books Collection The Spy and the On a warm July evening in 1985, a middle-aged man stood on the pavement of a busy avenue in the heart of Moscow, holding a plastic carrier bag. In his grey suit and tie, he looked like any other Soviet citizen. The bag alone was mildly conspicuous, printed with the red logo of Safeway, the British supermarket.The man was a spy. A senior KGB officer, for more than a decade he had supplied his British spymasters with a stream of priceless secrets from deep within the Soviet intelligence machine. No spy had done more to damage the KGB.The Splendid and the In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson gives a new and brilliantly cinematic account of how Britain’s most iconic leader set about unifying the nation at its most vulnerable moment, and teaching ‘the art of being fearless.’Drawing on once-secret intelligence reports and diaries, #1 bestselling author Larson takes readers from the shelled streets of London to Churchill’s own chambers, giving a vivid vision of true leadership, when – in the face of unrelenting horror – a leader of eloquence.In this landmark book, David Epstein shows you that the way to succeed is by sampling widely, gaining a breadth of experiences, taking detours, experimenting relentlessly, juggling many interests - in other words, by developing range.Studying the world's most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors and scientists, Epstein demonstrates why in most fields - especially those that are complex and unpredictable - generalists, not specialists are primed to excel.
Ben Macintyre 4 Books The True Story Collection Pack Set,(Double Cross Operation Mincemeat Agent Zigzag A Foreign Field)
by Ben Macintyre
Rating: 3.8 ⭐
Double CrossOn June 6, 1944, 150,000 Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy and suffered an astonishingly low rate of casualties. D-Day was a stunning military accomplishment, but 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, deceived the Nazis into believing that the Allies would attack at Calais and Norway rather than Normandy. It was the most sophisticated and successful deception operation ever carried out, ensuring that Hitler kept an entire army awaiting a fake invasion, saving thousands of lives, and securing an Allied victory at the most critical juncture in the war. The story of D-Day has been told from the point of view of the soldiers who fought in it, the tacticians who planned it, and the generals who led it. But this epic event in world history has never before been told from the perspectives of the key individuals in the Double Cross System. These include its director (a brilliant, urbane intelligence officer), a colorful assortment of MI5 handlers (as well as their counterparts in Nazi intelligence), and the five spies who formed Double Cross’s nucleus: a dashing Serbian playboy, a Polish fighter-pilot, a bisexual Peruvian party girl, a deeply eccentric Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming and a volatile Frenchwoman, whose obsessive love for her pet dog very nearly wrecked the entire plan. The D-Day spies were, without question, one of the oddest military units ever assembled, and their success depended on the delicate, dubious relationship between spy and spymaster, both German and British. Their enterprise was saved from catastrophe by a shadowy sixth spy whose heroic sacrifice is revealed here for the first time.A Spy Among FriendsKim Philby was the greatest spy in history, a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain’s counterintelligence against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War—while he was secretly working for the enemy. And nobody thought he knew Philby like Nicholas Elliott, Philby’s best friend and fellow officer in MI6. The two men had gone to the same schools, belonged to the same exclusive clubs, grown close through the crucible of wartime intelligence work and long nights of drink and revelry. It was madness for one to think the other might be a communist spy, bent on subverting Western values and the power of the free world.But Philby was secretly betraying his friend. Every word Elliott breathed to Philby was transmitted back to Moscow—and not just Elliott’s words, for in America, Philby had made another powerful friend: James Jesus Angleton, the crafty, paranoid head of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton's and Elliott’s unwitting disclosures helped Philby sink almost every important Anglo-American spy operation for twenty years, leading countless operatives to their doom. Even as the web of suspicion closed around him, and Philby was driven to greater lies to protect his cover, his two friends never abandoned him—until it was too late. The stunning truth of his betrayal would have devastating consequences on the two men who thought they knew him best, and on the intelligence services he left crippled in his wake.
by Ben Macintyre
Rating: 4.3 ⭐
by Ben Macintyre
Rating: 4.0 ⭐
La extraordinaria operación de rescate llevada a cabo en la embajada iraní de Londres en 1980, un evento histórico que marcó un hito en las operaciones de fuerzas especiales y capturó la atención mundial.El 30 de abril de 1980, seis hombres armados irrumpieron en la embajada iraní en Princes Gate, delante del Hyde Park de Londres. Allí tomaron como rehenes a 26 personas, incluyendo al personal de la embajada, visitantes y tres ciudadanos británicos. Luego siguió un tenso asedio de seis días retransmitido en directo y visto por millones de espectadores en lo que se convirtió en el boletín de noticias más largo en la historia de la televisión británica, Negociadores y psiquiatras buscaron una solución pacífica al enfrentamiento, mientras que el SAS – hasta entonces una organización envuelta en secreto – planeaba una audaz misión de la operación Nimrod.Basándose en material de fuentes inéditas, entrevistas exclusivas con el SAS y testimonios de rehenes, negociadores, oficiales de inteligencia y el psiquiatra en el lugar, el historiador superventas Ben Macintyre lleva a los lectores en un apasionante viaje que comienza en las semanas o años, anteriores de preparación de ambos lados, hasta el relato minuto a minuto del asedio y del rescate.Recreando las dramáticas conversaciones entre negociadores y rehenes, el trabajo de inteligencia de vanguardia que ocurría entre bastidores y la frenética cobertura mediática alrededor de este momento de importancia internacional, El asedio es la historia de lo que realmente sucedió en esos fatídicos seis días y el primer relato completo de un episodio que conmovió al mundo.
Bloomsbury presents Forgotten Fatherland, written and read by Ben Macintyre'Startling, dark and absorbing' Independent'Excellent travel vivid, sympathetic, humorous' Guardian'Fascinating, provocative and highly eccentric' New York Times_______________________In 1886 Elisabeth Nietzsche, the philosopher Friedrich's bigoted, imperious sister, founded a 'racially pure' colony in Paraguay together with a band of blond-haired fellow Germans. Over a century later, Ben Macintyre sought out the survivors of Nueva Germania to discover the remains of this bizarre colony. Forgotten Fatherland vividly recounts his arduous adventure locating the survivors, while also tracing the colorful history of Elisabeth's return to Europe, where she inspired the mythical cult of her brother's philosophy and later became a mentor to Hitler. Brilliantly researched and mordantly funny, this is an illuminating portrait of a forgotten people and of a woman whose deep influence on the twentieth century can only now be fully understood.
by Ben Macintyre
Rating: 5.0 ⭐
by Ben Macintyre
Please Note The individual books included in this listing will be dispatched as per the original UK ISBN and UK edition cover image shown—are included in the SAS Rogue Heroes, The Spy and the Traitor & Agent Sonya 3 Books Collection Set By Ben 📚 Books in This SAS Rogue Heroes The Spy and the Traitor Agent Sonya SAS Rogue In the summer of 1941, at the height of the war in the Western Desert, a bored and eccentric young officer, David Stirling, has a vision for a new kind of attacking the enemy where they least expect it - from behind their own lines.Despite the intense opposition of many in British High Command, Winston Churchill personally gives Stirling permission to recruit the toughest, brightest and most ruthless soldiers he can find.The Spy and the On a warm July evening in 1985, a middle-aged man stood on the pavement of a busy avenue in the heart of Moscow, holding a plastic carrier bag. In his grey suit and tie, he looked like any other Soviet citizen. The bag alone was mildly conspicuous, printed with the red logo of Safeway, the British supermarket.The man was a spy. A senior KGB officer, for more than a decade he had supplied his British spymasters with a stream of priceless secrets from deep within the Soviet intelligence machine.Agent From planning an assassination attempt on Hitler in Switzerland, to spying on the Japanese in Manchuria, to preventing nuclear war (or so she believed) by stealing the science of atomic weaponry from Britain to give to Moscow, Ursula Kuczynski Burton conducted some of the most dangerous espionage operations of the twentieth century.