Oxford University Press, 2018. — 288 p. It would be easy for the modern reader to conclude that women had no place in the world of early modern espionage, with a few seventeenth-century women spies identified and then relegated to the footnotes of history. If even the espionage carried out by Susan Hyde, sister of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, during the turbulent decades of...
Oxford University Press, 2018. — 288 p. It would be easy for the modern reader to conclude that women had no place in the world of early modern espionage, with a few seventeenth-century women spies identified and then relegated to the footnotes of history. If even the espionage carried out by Susan Hyde, sister of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, during the turbulent decades of...
Harpercollins, 2010. - 688 pages. ISBN: 0007278470, 0007312652. The gripping inside story of the last unknown realm of the British secret service: GCHQ (Government Communication Headquarters). GCHQ is the successor to the famous Bletchley Park wartime code-breaking organisation and is the largest and most secretive intelligence organisation in the country. During the war, it...
Routledge, 1992. — 361 p. The Cold War is often considered to be the quintessential intelligence conflict. Yet secret intelligence remains the `missing dimension' of Britain's Cold War history. This volume offers an authoritative picture of Britain's clandestine role in the development of the Cold War focusing upon the key issues of intelligence and strategy.
London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010. — 634 p. — ISBN: 0007278470, ISBN: 0007312652. The gripping inside story of the last unknown realm of the British secret service: GCHQ (Government Communication Headquarters). GCHQ is the successor to the famous Bletchley Park wartime code-breaking organisation and is the largest and most secretive intelligence organisation in the...
Edinburgh University Press, 2015. — 456 p. For more than half a century, the Joint Intelligence Committee or ‘JIC’ has been a central component of the British Government’s secret machinery. It represents the highest authority in the world of intelligence and acts as a broker between the spy and the policy-maker. From WWII to the War in Iraq, and from the Falklands to the IRA,...
William Collins, 2016. — 624 p. The Black Door’ explores the evolving relationship between successive British prime ministers and the intelligence agencies, from Asquith’s Secret Service Bureau to Cameron’s National Security Council. At the beginning of the 20th Century the British intelligence system was underfunded and lacked influence in government. But as the new millennium...
Atlantic Books, 2021. — 288 p. For the first time, The Secret Royals uncovers the remarkable relationship between the Royal Family and the intelligence community, from the reign of Queen Victoria to the death of Princess Diana. In an enthralling narrative, Richard J. Aldrich and Rory Cormac show how the British secret services grew out of persistent attempts to assassinate...
Hotei Publishing, 2003. — 808 p. The United Kingdom provides a useful model of the effectiveness of counter-terrorism responses in that the same measures were applied to both international and domestic terrorism with differing results. The United Kingdom’s legal responses to the challenge of terrorism constitutes a substantial and far ranging body of executive and legislative...
Bloomsbury Press, 2012. — 416 p. In a Europe aflame with wars of religion and dynastic conflicts, Elizabeth I came to the throne of a realm encircled by menace. To the great Catholic powers of France and Spain, England was a heretic pariah state, a canker to be cut away for the health of the greater body of Christendom. Elizabeth's government, defending God's true Church of...
Harper Collins, 2003. — 324 p. This text aims to shed light on discoveries which claim to reveal the truth about Rudolph Hess' solo flight to Britain in May 1941 and explain the British government's 60-year-long silence as to what the Hess mission was all about. Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain had taken place on the night of Saturday 10 May 1941, 10 months after the Duke of...
Pen and Sword Books, 2021. — 208 p. From a small number of clandestine activities against the German occupation of Denmark in 1940, a sophisticated resistance movement developed which by 1944, with the support of Special Operations Executive, had become a highly effective intelligence gathering and sabotage organisation. Denmark is composed of a mainland and more than 500...
Doubleday, 2013. — 592 p. A thrilling and revelatory narrative of one of the most epic and consequential periods in 20th century history – the Arab Revolt and the secret “great game” to control the Middle East. The Arab Revolt against the Turks in World War One was, in the words of T.E. Lawrence, “a sideshow of a sideshow.” Amidst the slaughter in European trenches, the Western...
Monograph."Alfred Knoph" N.Y., 2009. — 828 p.
The first authorized history of british security service.The german threat,1909-1919:the origins of the secret service bureau.Between the wars:MI5 and its staff.The second world war:the security service and its wartime staff.The early cold war.The later cold war.After the cold war.Conclusion:the first hudred years of the security...
Viking, 1986. — 648 p. This is the first comprehensive study of the emergence of one of the world's major intelligence organizations-a vivacious, witty account with revelations in every chapter, by "the leading unofficial historian of British Intelligence". The vast expansion of British espionage during World War I led to important developments in the inter-war years, and Her...
William Heinemann, 1985. — 880 p. Abbreviations. Victorian Prologue: MID, NID and the Special Branch. Spies and Spy Scares: The Birth of the Secret Service Bureau. Room 40: The Rebirth of British Codebreaking. Secret Intelligence on the Western Front. Counter-Espionage and Counter-Subversion: MI5 and the Special Branch. Adventure and Romance in the Secret Intelligence Service...
Allen Lane, 2009. — 1092 p. To mark the centenary of its foundation, the British Security Service, MI5, has opened its archives to an independent historian. This book reveals the precise role of the Service in twentieth-century British history, since its foundation by Captain Kell of the British Army in October 1909 to root out 'the spies of the Kaiser'. MI5, the British...
Pluto Press, 2010. — 224 p. In January 2003, the British media splashed the news that anti-terror police had disrupted an Al-Qaeda cell, poised to unleash the deadly poison ricin on the capital. Police had reportedly found traces of ricin, as well as a panoply of bomb and poison-making equipment in the cell’s "factory of death" -- a shabby flat in north London. "This danger is...
Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. — 275 p. This book examines the full range of counterinsurgency intelligence during the Malayan Emergency. It explores the involvement of the Security Service, the Joint Intelligence Committee (Far East), the Malayan Security Service, Special Branch and wider police service, and military intelligence, to examine how British and Malayan authorities tackled...
Headline, 2014. — 400 p. Special Ops Heroes tells the extraordinary stories behind Lord Ashcroft's collection of SAS and other Special Forces medals - the largest of its kind in the world. The action-packed stories span some sixty years from the exploits of the newly-formed SAS early in the Second World War to the end of the twentieth century. It features several remarkable...
Aurum Press, 2012. — 420 p. The complete story of the remarkable canoe raid on German ships in Bordeaux Harbour - by the man who himself served in the Special Boat Squadron. In 1942, before El Alamein turned the tide of war, the German merchant fleet was re-supplying its war machine with impunity. So Operation Frankton, a daring and secret raid, was launched by Mountbatten's...
Cassell Military, 2005. — 320 p. In summer 1941 Erwin Rommel was Hitler's favourite general: he had driven the British out of Libya and stood poised to invade Egypt. He seemed unbeatable. So the British decided to have him killed. The British opened their counter-attack with a series of special forces raids, the first ever operation by the newly formed SAS. Rommel was one of the...
Penguin Books, 1999. — 464 p. Lawrence was a brilliant British secret agent, propagandist, rhetorician and manipulator, who deliberately turned his life into a conundrum. But who was the real man behind the masks? Lawrence began the First Great War as a map-clerk and ended it as one of the greatest military heroes of the 20th century. He altered the face of the Middle East, helped...
Endeavour Press, 2014. — 288 p. In Shoot to Kill Michael Asher reveals his own military background: how he joined the elite 2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment and later, the SAS. Told he would fail the arduous training regime, he proved them all wrong and earned his 'wings' and red beret. Asher served in Northern Ireland with the Paras at the height of the IRA campaigns of...
Penguin Books, 2018. — 624 p. On May 4, 1980, seven terrorists holding 21 people captive in the Iranian Embassy in London’s Prince’s Gate executed their first hostage. They threatened to kill another hostage every 30 minutes until their demands were met. Minutes later, armed men in black overalls and balaclavas shimmied down the roof on ropes and burst in through windows and...
Penguin Books, 2021. — 208 p. The thrilling, edge-of-your-seat true story of one soldier's Special Forces operations in the Falklands War. 1982, the British task force sails to liberate the Falkland Islands. Aboard: SAS D Squadron, determined to make their mark. No one more so than Mark 'Splash' Aston. But they have barely seen action when their Sea King helicopter crashes in...
Pen and Sword Military, 2015. — 224 p. When Winston Churchill made his ‘we shall never surrender’ speech in 1940 he was speaking in the knowledge that Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service was planning a civilian British resistance movement to mobilize after the country had been occupied. Britain’s planning for clandestine warfare developed out of a fierce battle between the...
Pen and Sword Military, 2017. — 272 p. When Neville Chamberlain made his famous Peace in Our Time statement in 1938, after the Munich Agreement with Hitler, he may, or may not, have been aware that the new Section D of the Secret Intelligence Service was already making plans to mount an all-out political and sabotage war against Nazi Germany. This was a new form of warfare,...
Penguin Books, 1981. — 216 p. The security services, invisible, unaccountable, surrounded by a mystique of dark glasses and turned-up collars, have grown steadily in size; so too has their expenditure on the most sophisticated techniques of mass surveillance. Their net falls on trade unionists, students, anti-nuclear protesters, Welsh Nationalists, investigative journalists and...
Faber and Faber, 2014. — 454 p. Tells the official history of the war waged by Britain's Special Operations Executive on Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy. This book offers an account of SOE's clandestine efforts to strike at Italy and sever its alliance with Nazi Germany, uncovering missions as remarkable as a plot to assassinate Mussolini and plans to arm the Mafia. British...
Vintage, 2009. — 432 p. In 1943, small teams of elite British soldiers began parachuting into the mountains of Axis-occupied Albania. They were members of Britain's Special Operations Executive, and their task was to find and arm bands of local guerillas and harass the Axis as best they could. None had been to Albania before, or knew what awaited them. Trying to survive in...
McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020. — 279 р. A provocative, rigorously researched study that questions what we think we know about British intelligence. As John le Carré's fictional intelligence men admit, it was the case histories - constructed narratives serving shifting agendas - that shaped the British intelligence machine, rather than their personal experience of secret...
Pegasus Books, 2019. — 496 p. Undersea Warrior: a submarine designed to pursue and attack enemy submarines and surface ships using torpedoes. This will follow the careers of four daring British submarine captains who risked their lives to keep the rest of us safe, their exploits consigned to the shadows until now. Their experiences encompass the span of the Cold War, from voyages...
Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. — 257 p. From fear of sabotage in the London Underground to the first anthrax bomb and the massive outdoor tests, Brian Balmer tells the largely untold history of biological weapons research and policy in Britain. Drawing on recently declassified documents, this book charts the secret history of germ warfare policy from the 1930's to the mid-1960's....
Harper Collins, 2015. — 224 p. Based on the wartime diaries of Allied soldier and saboteur Tom Barnes, this account of thrilling WWII wartime deeds deep behind enemy lines in Greece is based on fact but reads like fiction. A thrilling read of wartime exploits, daring, intrigue and resourcefulness, The Sabotage Diaries is the astonishing true story of Allied engineer Tom Barnes,...
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. — 336 p. Based on 20 years of research, Gianluca Barneschi has uncovered the true story of a real-life James Bond. The debonair Special Operations Executive agent Richard 'Dick' Mallaby was the first Briton to be sent to Italy as an SOE operative, parachuted unceremoniously into Lake Como in August 1943. Arrested and initially tortured by the...
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012. — 384 p. British historian Barr re-examines World War I's a Great Arab Revolt, led by the legendary Lawrence of Arabia in this exhaustively researched and vividly narrated history. Thomas Edward Lawrence was a young British intelligence officer when he undertook to organize Arab resistance to the Ottoman Empire, a German ally. The Turkish (Ottoman)...
Cambridge University Press, 2000. — 307 p. In a penetrating account of the evolution of British intelligence gathering in India, C. A. Bayly shows how networks of Indian spies, runners and political secretaries were recruited by the British to secure information about their subjects. He also examines the social and intellectual origins of these informants, and considers how the...
Cambridge University Press, 2013. — 388 p. — (Cambridge Military Histories). Haig's Intelligence is an important study of Douglas Haig's controversial command during the First World War. Based on extensive new research, it addresses a perennial question about the British army on the Western Front between 1916 and 1918: why did they think they were winning? Jim Beach reveals how...
Seaforth Publishing, 2015. — 295 p. Operational Intelligence Centre was the nerve centre of the British Admiralty in World War II, dedicated to collecting, analyzing and disseminating information from every possible source which could throw light on the intentions and movements of German naval and maritime forces. OIC labored tirelessly, despite early disappointments, to supply...
Harper Collins Canada, 2023. — 224 p. The thrilling true story of Agent A12, the earliest enemy of the Nazis, and the first spy to crack Hitler's deadliest secret code: the framework of the Final Solution. In public life, Dr. Winthrop Bell of Halifax was a Harvard philosophy professor and wealthy businessman. As MI6 secret agent A12, he evaded gunfire and shook off pursuers to...
London: Virgin Books, 1996. — 224 p. Britain's Special Air Service (SAS) is the world's premier elite fighting force. The regiment is home to the most highly trained and deadly soldiers ever to do battle and their reputation is that of ruthless efficiency. Whether operating deep behind enemy lines in a desert or jungle conflict, or tackling terrorism head on, the...
Naval Institute Press, 2014. — 208 p. June 1940. The Italians declared war on the British. Completely unprepared for war, the British had only 35,000 troops to defend Egypt. Opposing them, the Italian army in Libya numbered at least 215,000; in East Africa, the Italians could muster another 200,000 men against a meager 19,000 British and commonwealth troops positioned in the...
Routledge, 2006. — 432 р. The mysterious life and career of Desmond Morton, Intelligence officer and personal adviser to Winston Churchill during the Second World War, is exposed for the first time in this study based on full access to official records. After distinguished service as artillery officer and aide-de-camp to General Haig during the First World War, Morton worked...
Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. — 283 p. This is the first full-length study of the role played by British Intelligence in influencing policy towards Japan from the decline of the Alliance to the outbreak of the Pacific War. Using many previously classified records it describes how the image of Japan generated by Intelligence during this period led Britain to underestimate Japanese...
Frontline Books, 2023. — 184 p. The Armistice of November 1918 ended four years of slaughter that left armies exhausted and populations weary of war – but the fighting was not over. In Russia, civil war and revolution had divided the nation and the Allies sought to intervene on behalf of the ‘White’ Russians against the Bolsheviks and this conflict continued long after the war...
Routledge, 2022. — 315 p. This volume discusses the development of governmental proto-bureaucracy, which led to and was influenced by the inclusion of professional agents and spies in the early modern English government. In the government’s attempts to control religious practices, wage war, and expand their mercantile reach both east and west, spies and agents became essential...
Amberley Publishing, 2017. — 172 p. Through a mix of objects, medals, photographs and documents held in the Military Intelligence Museum, the book tells the story of British military intelligence across the years, moving from its earliest object of the Waterloo medal awarded to the Duke of Wellington’s senior intelligence officer to items recovered from operations in...
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018. — 256 p. When Lottie is summoned to her father's office at the age of eighteen, she is astonished to learn that this aloof, unexciting parent is a spy. Even more perturbing is his view that she should stop drifting around and get a proper job, something patriotic and worthwhile. So Lottie finds herself outside MI5's Mayfair headquarters in a dreary...
Frontline, 2016. — 400 p. Collusion between the British forces and the Loyalist paramilitaries is the last untold story of the Troubles. Killing for Britain - UVF commander 'John Black s' story - confirms both Republican claims that the British ran Loyalist Death Squads , as well as Loyalist claims that their activities were fully supported by the British state. Directed by the...
Orion Publishing, 2012. — 322 p. First in—the official motto of one of the British Army's smallest and most secretive units, 16 Air Assault Brigade's Pathfinder Platoon. Unofficially, they are the bastard son of the SAS. And like their counterparts in Hereford, the job of the Pathfinders is to operate unseen and undetected deep behind enemy lines. When British forces deployed to...
London: Junction Books Ltd, 1983. — 284 p. — ISBN: 0-86322-035-5, ISBN: 0-86245-113-2 "It is a tale of terror, murder, bribery, cheating, lying and torture, wich have been practised in varying combinations from Malaya in the early 1950's to Ireland in the 1980's." lntroduction Intelligence and Covert Action Decolonisation and the Cold War Covert Operations in the Middle East...
Fonthill Media, 2014. — 224 p. The Royal Marines played an important part in freeing the world from Hitler’s regime, but it was not until 1942 that they became involved in forming Commando units as small raiding forces. Army Commandos were already in training following Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s demand for the formation of these specialist forces, and the Admiralty...
The History Press, 2016. — 416 p. Summer 1940. In the desperate fight against Nazi Germany, nothing is considered too outlandish, so the British secret services turn to figures from the occult world to help turn the tide of war. What begins as a mission to understand Hitler's supposed astrological advice soon becomes more bizarre, with often hilarious, unintended consequences....
Pen and Sword Military, 2021. — 361 p. Sunset, 8 June 1982, East Falkland. Eight specially trained Royal Marines infiltrate Goat Ridge, a long rocky hilltop between Mount Harriet and Two Sisters which are occupied by a battalion of 600 Argentine infantry. The next day, from their hiding place just metres away from the enemy, they note and sketch the Argentine positions, then...
Frontline Books, 2016. — 265 p. In the archives of the Special Operations Executive lay a report compiled by a staff officer and former member of SOE's French Section, Major Robert Bourne-Patterson, that until recently could not be published. Because of the highly sensitive nature of the work undertaken by the SOE, the paper was treated as confidential and its circulation was...
The History Press, 2011. — 288 p. The history of the Special Operations Executive during World War II has been the subject of many books down the years. This is a detailed account of the development of equipment and techniques upon which the success of its subversive activities relied. SOE's behind-the-scenes research and development programme ranged from high explosive technology...
Seaforth Publishing, 2020. — 680 p. This major work is the first comprehensive account of how intelligence influenced and sustained British naval power from the late nineteenth century, when the Admiralty first created a dedicated intelligence department, through to the end of the Cold War. It brings a critical new dimension to understanding British naval history in this period...
Pen and Sword, 2005. — 176 p. XD Operations is the first account of the thrilling operations by the Kent Fortress Royal Engineers, a small Territorial Army Unit given the largest demolition program ever undertaken by the Royal Engineers. These took place in May 1940 with the object of destroying all the oil reserves stored in refineries in the ports along the Continental...
Manchester University Press, 2014. — 263 p. This is an unusual book, telling a story which has hitherto remained hidden from history: the surveillance by the British security service MI5 of anti-Nazi refugees who came to Britain fleeing political persecution in Germany and Austria. Based on the personal and organisational files that MI5 kept on political refugees during the 1930s...
Public Record Office, 2001. — 177 p. Britain developed contingency secret plans to assassinate Hitler at Berchtesgaden during World War II. Britain's Public Record Office has recently released all the original plans, including color sketches of the grounds and guard uniforms.
Washington: War Depertament, 1942. — 138 p. Since the decisive outcome of the campaigns in France and the Low Countries left the British Army considerably inferior to the German Army in strength and mat6riel, the British had no choice but to avoid full-scale fighting until new power could be marshalled. Accordingly, shortly after the withdrawal from Dunkirk in June 1940, the...
Reprint ed. — John Blake, 2011. — 310 p. — ISBN 978-1843582731. Paul Bruce was a tough, idealistic young trooper in the SAS when he was dispatched to Northern Ireland at the height of the troubles. His top secret mission was to execute IRA suspects in cold blood. Bruce and his SAS comrades shot down one terrified victim after another, leaving their bodies to be buried in deep,...
Biteback Publishing, 2014. — 408 p. The order came from Churchill himself. The result was the Special Operations Executive - the SOE. Established in 1941 with the aim of supplying Occupied France with a steady stream of highly trained resistance agents, this clandestine Second World War network grew to become a circular part of the Allied arsenal. Ingeniously engineering acts...
Lexington Books, 2015. — 372 p. Espionage in British Fiction and Film Since 1900 traces the history and development of the British spy novel from its emergence in the early twentieth century, through its growth as a popular genre during the Cold War, to its resurgence in the early twenty-first century. Using an innovative structure, the chapters focus on specific categories of...
Plume Books, 2006. — 272 p. Sir Francis Walsingham’s official title was principal secretary to Queen Elizabeth I, but in fact this pious, tight-lipped Puritan was England’s first spymaster. A ruthless, fiercely loyal civil servant, Walsingham worked brilliantly behind the scenes to foil Elizabeth’s rival Mary Queen of Scots and outwit Catholic Spain and France, which had arrayed...
The Mercier Press, 2021. — 320 p. The British government has taken steps to halt the prosecution of soldiers responsible for the deaths of civilians in Northern Ireland, most of whom had no connection to paramilitary activities. These killings were part of a ruthless dirty war that commenced in 1970 when Brigadier Frank Kitson, a counter-insurgency specialist, was sent to...
Pen and Sword Military, 2009. — 176 p. The Second World War spawned a plethora of crack special forces units (Long Range Desert Group, SAS, SBS, Phantom and Commandos) but 30 Assault Unit remains, even today, far more secretive and exclusive than the others. Formed by Ian Fleming, who was working for Naval Intelligence, 30 AU’s mission was to penetrate and operate behind enemy...
Mainstream Publishing, 2000. — 292 p. This fast-paced first person narrative is organized into three sections. Part One covers Tom's early life and military service in the SAS. Part Two recounts Operations Fairfax and Felix, the mission to Afghanistan, and Part Three describes Operation Clover, Tom's activities in the Balkans. Carew's account includes combat action against the...
Merrion Press, 2019. — 280 p. Early one morning in March 1985, as he climbed the six steps of Margaret Thatcher’s prime-ministerial jet on the runway of RAF Aldergrove, little did Willie Carlin know the role Freddie Scappaticci played in saving his life. So began the dramatic extraction of Margaret Thatcher’s key undercover agent in Sinn Féin – Willie Carlin, aka Agent 3007....
Frontline Books, 2017. — 249 p. The true story of Winston Churchill’s fateful decision to side with the Communist Partisans of Yugoslavia in World War II—and seal that nation’s fate. One of Winston Churchill’s most controversial decisions during the Second World War concerned the United Kingdom’s role in Yugoslavia. In 1943, he switched Special Operations Executive support from...
Verso Books, 2022. — 255 p. A gripping history of the Security Service and its covert surveillance on British writers and intellectuals in the twentieth century. In the popular imagination MI5, or the Security Service, is know chiefly as the branch of the British state responsible for chasing down those who pose a threat to the country's national security–from Nazi fifth...
Newton Compton Editori, 2014. — 190 p. Alan Turing ha dato il più grande contributo alla vittoria degli alleati sulla Germania nazista con la sua macchina per decrittare il famigerato codice enigma, il segreto sistema di crittografia con cui i nazisti comunicavano tra di loro. Ma il mondo è altresì in debito con il genio di Turing per molte delle intuizioni che hanno portato...
Second Printing. — Washington: National Archives and Records Administration, 2002. — 392 p. — ISBN: 0-911333-91-6 The National Archives and Records Administration serves many users of this nation's rich documentary heritage, and it supports a wide range of federal and public programs designed to reach a variety of audiences. The National Archives has maintained a special...
Pen and Sword Books, 2014. — 256 p. Between 8 and 12 December of 1962, world attention focused on a surprise rebel uprising that sprang up in northern Borneo, where hostages were taken and threatened with execution. The small river town of Limbang, administrative center of the Fifth Division of the British Crown colony of Sarawak, was the pivot of the confrontation that Harold...
Silvertail Books, 2021. — 417 p. When Singapore fell to the Japanese in December 1941, Captain Freddie Spencer Chapman chose to take the fight to the enemy. Trekking deep behind enemy lines into the jungle, this veteran explorer turned special forces operative unleashed a one-man commando campaign of such destructive power and lethal ferocity that the Japanese deployed a...
Charles River Editors Books, 2018. — 45 p. — ISBN 10 1984225383. — ISBN 13 978-1984225382. Dealing with the Italians was one thing, but the British faced an entirely different monster in North Africa when Erwin Rommel, a German general who had gained much fame for his role in the invasions of Poland and France, was sent to North Africa in February 1941. For the next two years,...
Charles River Editors, 2018. — 90 p. The fighting in North Africa during World War II is commonly overlooked, aside from the famous battle at El Alamein that pitted the British under General Bernard Montgomery against the legendary “Desert Fox,” Erwin Rommel. But while the Second Battle of El Alamein would be the pivotal action in North Africa, the conflict in North Africa...
Charles River Editors, 2018. — 54 p. Europe’s attempts to appease Adolf Hitler, most notably at Munich in 1938, failed, as Nazi Germany swallowed up Austria and Czechoslovakia by 1939. Italy was on the march as well, invading Albania in April of 1939. The straw that broke the camel's back, however, was Germany's invasion of Poland on September 1 of that year. Two days later,...
Casemate, 2022. — 255 p. The narrative surrounding Britain’s anti-invasion forces has often centered on ‘Dad’s Army’-like characters running around with pitchforks, on unpreparedness and sense of inevitability of invasion and defeat. The truth, however, is very different. Top-secret, highly trained and ruthless civilian volunteers were being recruited as early as the summer of...
Routledge, 2013. — 250 p. Why did Britain come to play such a prominent role in the war on terror and why did the military instrument come to be the dominant theme in the British prosecution of what was an ideological and political struggle? This book is an analysis of Britain’s war against Al Qaeda and the phenomenon of international terrorism which marked a paradigm shift in...
Hachette Headline, 2023. — 224 p. When the history of British codebreaking is told, the story is often a men-only preserve (for example, of the top fourteen listed actors in Bletchley Park-set The Imitation Game, only one is a woman). That perception completely ignores the fact that the vast majority of codebreakers were in fact women; and foremost among them was one who is...
The History Press, 2013. — 340 p. During World War II, Hitlers engineers had pioneered an incredible array of futuristic secret weapons, from the Me 262, the first operational jet fighter, to the deadly V2 intercontinental ballistic missile. With the Third Reich shattered and lying in ruins, in the summer of 1945, the Allies launched a frantic race to grab what they saw as the...
Pen and Sword, 2013. — 272 p. This book tells the tale of the illustrious Royal Air Force career of Tom Clark, a World War Two gunner and post-war signaller in action during some of the most pivotal events of the twentieth century. Lovingly penned by his son, it provides an authentic insight into this dynamic period of world history. From work as an air gunner, involved in the...
Pegasus Books, 2019. — 448 p. Between two assassination attempts—in 1800 and 1804—on Napoleon Bonaparte, the British government launched a propaganda campaign of unprecedented scope and intensity to persuade George III’s reluctant subjects to fight the Napoleonic War, a war to the death against one man: the Corsican usurper and tyrant. The Secret War Against Napoleon tells the...
Pen and Sword, 2005. — 306 p. Roy Close's wartime experiences make breathtaking reading. Mobilized in 1939 he became part of the BEF and was fortunate to avoid death or captivity during the German blitzkrieg and escape through Dunkirk. Sent to North Africa, he joined the Paras and, from there, to the SAS. In 1944 he operated behind enemy lines with the Maquis in France, who were...
Frontline Books, 2017. — 208 p. On Friday, April 9, 1982, a British task force set sail for the Falkland Islands. Three months later, after a short but brutal campaign, it had successfully completed its mission of ejecting the Argentinean occupying forces from the islands. With 3 Para to the Falklands is the full story of that dramatic struggle from the point of view of a...
Hodder and Stoughton, 2011. — 302 p. How many are they?" The reply came in the finest traditions of accurate situation reporting, four hundreds of them!" Mirbat, South Oman, July 19, 1972 is one of the least-known yet most crucial battles of modern times. SAS Operation Storm is the inside story—told by those who took part—of the greatest secret war in SAS history. The tipping...
Collins, 2015. — 374 p. Baptism of Fire, is the astonishing true story of one man's spiritual journey from membership of the world's most respected elite fighting force to ordination in the Church of England. From a life of petty teenage crime and poverty in the backstreets of Newcastle, Frank joined the army and set his heart on the highest prize, membership of the SAS. After...
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1951. — 234 p. Was Canaris - Hitler’s Chief of Intelligence, who spent five years in Hitler’s Germany as a British foreign correspondent, was probably the first man outside the British Secret Service to discover the identity and aims of Admiral Canaris, Chief of the German Intelligence Service and the most persistent secret enemy of Hitler, who was...
Melbourne University Publishing, 2017. — 324 p. Light and Shadow is the incredible story of a father waging a secret war against communism during the Cold War, while his son comes of age as a journalist and embarks on the risky career of a foreign correspondent. Mark covered local and global events for the ABC for more than four decades, reporting on wars, royal weddings and...
Simon and Schuster, 2009 — 393 p. When Roald Dahl, a dashing young wounded RAF pilot, took up his post at the British Embassy in Washington in 1942, his assignment was to use his good looks, wit, and considerable charm to gain access to the most powerful figures in American political life. A patriot eager to do his part to save his country from a Nazi invasion, he invaded the...
Golden Springs Publishing, 2014. — 102 p. This paper examines the role of British intelligence operations during the American Revolutionary War as they apply to the British defeat at Yorktown. It begins with a brief history of British intelligence prior to the war, discusses strategic collection against the burgeoning French-American alliance, examines preconceptions during the...
Pen and Sword Military, 2017. — 176 p. Between the First and Second World Wars, there was a growth of fascism in Britain and anxiety about revolution was in the air. Concerns of a possible Fascist attempt to overthrow the established order were high, not to mention the rise of Hitler and the threat of invasion. With secret clubs and clandestine meetings now a threat, the...
Lume Books, 2016. — 574 p. Between the onset of peace and persistent opposition in certain circles, in the autumn of 1945 the original SAS was disbanded. Less than two years later the Malayan Emergency exposed how unprepared the British Army was not only for jungle warfare, but for unconventional warfare in general. It was a niche that needed filling, and so Mike Calvert – the...
Tempus, 2004. — 368 p. Sidney Reilly influenced world history through acts of extraordinary courage and sheer audacity. He was a master spy, a brilliant con man, a charmer, and a cad who lived on his wits and thrived on danger, using women shamelessly and killing where necessary and unnecessary. Sidney Reilly is one of the most fascinating spies of the 20th century, yet he remains...
The History Press, 2011. — 491 p. This is the amazing true story of the real 'M', William Melville, MI5's founding father and the inspiration for Ian Flemings's character in "James Bond". Melville was one of the most influential counterespionage figures of the twentieth century. From a tiny outfit based in Victoria Street, London, the counterintelligence organisation that...
The History Press, 2011. — 491 p. This is the amazing true story of the real 'M', William Melville, MI5's founding father and the inspiration for Ian Flemings's character in "James Bond". Melville was one of the most influential counterespionage figures of the twentieth century. From a tiny outfit based in Victoria Street, London, the counterintelligence organisation that...
Pen and Sword, 2004. — 182 p. The author of Falklands Hero follows the Third Parachute Battalion through a ferocious battle to secure a key strategic position during the Falklands War. This, the first in a series on Special Operations, tells the story of Three Para and the often-neglected struggle for Mount Longdon. It was a battle that tested the discipline, comradeship, and...
Pen and Sword Military, 2005. — 128 p. — (Elite Forces Operations Series). By March 1942, mainland France had been under German occupation for almost two years. Every month that passed saw Germany bolster her defenses against an expected allied invasion. Every month that passed saw Germany tighten her grip on Britain's transatlantic lifeline; menacing allied shipping from the...
Pegasus Books, 2014. — 384 p. A "superb" portrait of the Tudor-age spymaster that "paints a John le Carre-like world of double-dealing and intrigue". Elizabeth I came to the throne at a time of insecurity and unrest. Rivals threatened her reign; England was a Protestant island, isolated in a sea of Catholic countries. Spain plotted an invasion, but Elizabeth's Secretary, Sir...
William Collins, 2018. — 315 p. Between 1941 and 1944, sixteen thousand plucky homing pigeons were dropped in an arc from Bordeaux to Copenhagen as part of 'Columba' – a secret British operation to bring back intelligence from those living under Nazi occupation. The messages flooded back written on tiny pieces of rice paper tucked into canisters and tied to the legs of the birds....
Pegasus, 2013. — 528 p. From Berlin to the Congo, from Moscow to the back streets of London, these are the stories of the agents on the front lines of British intelligence. And the truth is often more remarkable than fiction. MI6 has been cloaked in secrecy and shrouded in myth since it was created a hundred years ago. Our understanding of what it is to be a spy has been largely...
Amazon Publishing, 2018. — 65 p. Gordon Lonsdale arrived in London in 1955. A successful Canadian businessman and lover of the high life, he charmed everyone he met in his adopted country. But Gordon Lonsdale was an elaborate lie. In reality he was Konon Molody, a celebrated Russian spy working for the KGB. Lonsdale was an illegal, an elite brand of undercover agent whose identity...
Oxford University Press, 2014. — 256 p. Moving the debate beyond the place of tactical intelligence in counterinsurgency warfare, Confronting the Colonies considers the view from Whitehall, where the biggest decisions were made. It reveals the evolving impact of strategic intelligence upon government understandings of, and policy responses to, insurgent threats. Confronting the...
Oxford University Press, 2018. — 407 p. British leaders use spies and Special Forces to interfere in the affairs of others discreetly and deniably. Since 1945, MI6 has spread misinformation designed to divide and discredit targets from the Middle East to Eastern Europe and Northern Ireland. It has instigated whispering campaigns and planted false evidence on officials working...
Chicago Review Press, 2013. — 154 p. Pearl Witherington Cornioley, one of the most celebrated female World War II resistance fighters, shares her remarkable story in this firsthand account of her experience as a special agent for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). Told through a series of reminiscences—from a difficult childhood spent in the shadow of World War I and...
William Collins Sons, 1988. — 718 p. Exploding the myths that surround Anthony Blunt this book reveals that he was not the fourth man but the first: the "managing director" of a network of spies that penetrated the very highest echelons of the American as well as the British establishments. By using newly discovered and top-secret British and American reports and cross-checking...
Pen and Sword, 2011. — 208 p. In the dark and uncertain days of 1941 and 1942, when Rommels Afrika Korps was sweeping towards Egypt and the Suez Canal, a small group of daring raiders made history for the Allies. They operated deep behind the German lines, driving hundreds of miles through the deserts of North Africa. They hid by day and struck by night, destroying aircraft,...
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. — 182 p. The Israeli government was persuaded at the last minute not to enter the Gulf War when they were told that it was the SAS who were hunting for Scud missiles and disrupting Iraqi communications. The SAS forces inside Iraq comprised two half-squadrons (30 men each with vehicles) and three much smaller foot patrols, one of which had the call...
Osprey Publishing, 2013. — 344 p. During the Second World War the Allies controlled every active German agent in Britain. This placed Allied Intelligence services in a unique position. The Allies were able to feed spurious information back to Germany which mixed scraps of truthful information with misleading details in a believable mix of information. Out of this process of...
Pen and Sword Books, 2005. — 162 p. Considering the number of books that have been written about SOE, very little has been revealed abut the most frequently mentioned of its training establishments, the Finishing School on Lord Montagu's estate at Beaulieu in Hampshire. So secret were the activities that even the Montagu family whose home was in the middle of the school complex,...
Pen and Sword Books, 2002. — 224 p. Very few men have a more exciting and dramatic story of their wartime activities to tell than Patrick Dalzel-Job. In 1940 using his special knowledge of North Norway's coast line he landed and moved over 10,000 Allied soldiers in local boats without the loss of a single life. Acting against specific orders he evacuated civilians from Narvik just...
Harper Collins Publishers, 2021. — 224 p. Britain's SBS – or Special Boat Service – was the world's first maritime special operations unit. Founded in the dark days of 1940, it started as a small and inexperienced outfit that leaned heavily on volunteers' raw courage and boyish enthusiasm. It went on to change the course of the Second World War – and has served as a model for...
Sirlliwirk & Jeckson, 1998. — 124 p. — ISBN 0 243 06 26 2. To join the British Special Air Service, soldiers must have a minimum of three years' service with the armed forces, and have a good grounding in basic military skills. Recruits are normally aged in their early to mid-twenties, yet the regiment will accept soldiers much older. The qualities needed for SAS selection are...
Mainstream Digital, 2011. — 240 p. This explosive book reveals the conspiracy between British Military Intelligence and the gunman of the UDA who targeted and killed both Republican terrorists and ordinary Catholics. The secret partnership was sanctioned at the highest level of the British government and full details of planned operations, including killings, were passed...
Routledge, 2004. — 409 p. Philip H. J. Davies is one of a growing number of British academic scholars of intelligence, but the only academic to approach the subject in terms of political science rather than history. He wrote his PhD at the University of Reading on the topic 'Organisational Development of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1979', and has published...
Routledge, 2019. — 411 p. This book is the first history of UK economic intelligence and offers a new perspective on the evolution of Britain's national intelligence machinery and how it worked during the Cold War. British economic intelligence has a longer pedigree than the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) and was the vanguard of intelligence coordination in Whitehall, yet...
Routledge, 2004. — 412 p. Most of the common knowledge about the British Secret Intelligence Service aka MI-6 comes from revelations of things like the breaking of the Enigma codes during World War II. This book goes into much greater depth than these, not on specific incidents, but on the organization of MI-6 and how it has attempted to provide its customers (other Government...
Pen and Sword Military, 2015. — 281 p. Peter Davis was the youngest officer to serve in the SAS during the Second World War. In this autobiographical account, he reveals the naïve enthusiasm he felt when he joined the newly formed special force unit, his fears and trepidation during training, and the horror and drama of his experiences during operations in Sicily and Italy....
Crown, 2013. — 352 p. The incredible true story of the World War II spies, including Patrick Leigh Fermor and John Pendlebury, who fought to save Crete and block Hitler's march to the East. In the bleakest years of World War II, when it appeared that nothing could slow the German army, Hitler set his sights on the Mediterranean island of Crete, the ideal staging ground for...
Biteback Publishing, 2014. — 503 p. Klop Ustinov was Britain's most ingenious secret agent, but he wasn't authorised to kill. Instead, he was authorised to tell tall tales, bemusing and beguiling his enemies into revealing their deepest, darkest secrets. From the Russian Revolution to the Cold War, he bluffed and tricked his way into the confidence of everyone from Soviet...
Frederick Muller, 1968. — 335 p. John Dee was an authority on mathematics, navigation, astronomy and optics, as well as being Astrologer Royal to Elizabeth I. In the eyes of many of his contemporaries he was also a charlatan, imposter and dabbler in Black Magic. Here, Richard Deacon tries to balance the record by revealing the many gifts of this remarkable scholar and the...
Oneworld Publications, 2018. — 432 p. As one of al-Qaeda's most respected scholars and bomb-makers, Aimen Dean rubbed shoulders with the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden himself. His job was already one of the most dangerous in the world. But what the others didn't know was that he was working undercover for MI6. This is the story of a...
Oneworld Publications, 2018. — 432 p. As one of al-Qaeda's most respected scholars and bomb-makers, Aimen Dean rubbed shoulders with the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden himself. His job was already one of the most dangerous in the world. But what the others didn't know was that he was working undercover for MI6. This is the story of a...
Pen and Sword Books, 2010. — 224 p. It is indeed remarkable, since the archives of the Second World War must have been pillaged, ransacked, burrowed into, and turned over almost as thoroughly as Monte Cassino itself, that no book has been written about one of the strangest units created during that or any other conflict. The unit was called Ten Commando - and the shroud of...
Routledge, 2007. — 300 p. — (Studies in Intelligence). In the Cold War battle for hearts and minds Britain was the first country to formulate a coordinated global response to communist propaganda. In January 1948, the British government launched a new propaganda policy designed to 'oppose the inroads of communism' by taking the offensive against it.' A small section in the...
Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. — 282 p. British Clandestine Activities in Romania during the Second World War is the first monograph to examine the activity throughout the entire war of SOE and MI6. It was generally believed in Britain's War Office, after Hitler's occupation of Austria in March 1938, that Germany would seek to impose its will on South-East Europe before turning its...
Hurst and Company, 2018. — 256 p. In early summer 1982--winter in the South Atlantic--Argentina's military junta invades the Falklands. Within days, a Royal Navy Task Force is assembled and dispatched. This is the story of D Squadron, 22 SAS, commanded by Cedric Delves. The relentless tempo of events defies belief. Raging seas, inhospitable glaciers, hurricane-force winds,...
Sapere Books, 2021. — 135 p. On the morning of 9 April 1940, German forces occupied Denmark and invaded Norway, leaving Sweden as the only neutral country in Scandinavia. It was to this country, surrounded by Axis forces, that Captain H. M. Denham was posted as Naval Attaché, arriving after evading capture by the Nazi Wehrmacht in the summer of 1940. Over the course of the next...
Allen and Unwin, 2006. — 264 p. During the night of 11 April 1945, eight Australian Z Special commandos landed on Japanese-held Muschu Island, off the coast of New Guinea. Their mission was to reconnoiter the island's defenses and confirm the location of two concealed naval guns that commanded the approaches to Wewak Harbour. But the secret mission suddenly went horribly wrong....
Random House Digital, 2015. — 400 p. Between the Confederacy and recognition by Great Britain stood one unlikely Englishman who hated the slave trade. His actions helped determine the fate of a nation. When Robert Bunch arrived in Charleston to take up the post of British consul in 1853, he was young and full of ambition, but even he couldn’t have imagined the incredible role he...
Cloudshill Press, 2018. — 232 p. In July 1940, a desperately weakened Britain licks her wounds after the humiliating retreat from Dunkirk. How can the fight be taken to the enemy? New Prime Minister Winston Churchill orders the creation of the Special Operations Executive, to 'set Europe ablaze' through subversion and sabotage. But this most secret of agencies must be kept...
Cloudshill Press, 2020. — 298 p. It was Christmas 1942. Eleven young women braved the attentions of Nazi U-Boats in the deep Atlantic on their way to North Africa. About to play their part in defeating Hitler, they called themselves the First Eleven. According to Winston Churchill, the Mediterranean was the key to defeating the Third Reich. And a crucial part of undermining...
Pen and Sword Military, 2009. — 478 p. The St. Nazaire Raid (in March 1942) has not been covered in the detail warranted by its role in the evolution of special warfare tactics. James Dorrian has drawn on interviews with over 100 survivors, both British and German, to present this remarkable account. All aspects of the engagement are covered, including the final ironic incident...
Fourth Estate, 2001. — 932 p. The first comprehensive history of the UK government overseas intelligence service, MI6, by an acknowledged expert and author of the highly acclaimed Smear! Epitomised in the public imagination by James Bond, MI6’s svelte and glamorous image has been peeled away by Dorril’s searching investigations to reveal a less savoury truth. Here is the story of...
Free Press, 2000. — 924 p. Concentrates on the postwar activities of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), more commonly known as MI6. The public's view of MI6 has been distorted by the Establishment's and media's obsession with the activities of traitors and the Security Service's (MI5's) hunt for moles. The book attempts to restore some balance by focusing on what the Service...
William Heinemann, 1993. — 559 p. This is the first book to study the reorganisation of the security services following the end of the Cold War. Dorril analyses how they began to change direction in the 1980s and are reacting to a post- glasnost KGB. He debates the role of MI5 as it faces a decline in domestic subversion and international terrorism, and asks whether it should be...
Digital edition first. — London: Amber Books Ltd, 2012. — 269 p. — ISBN: 978 1 909160 38 5 When we first opened this book we had high hopes due to the large amount of well illustrated pictures that appeared to show how to perform the various tasks of sniping. Unfortunately as we began to read the book we discovered that the book was very superficial and showed only the basic...
Little, Brown Book Group, 2013. — 417 p. The loss of British bombers over Occupied Europe began to reach alarming levels in 1941. Could it be that the Germans were using a sophisticated form of radar to direct their night fighters and anti-aircraft guns at the British bombers? British aerial reconnaissance discovered what seemed to be a rotating radar tower on a clifftop at...
I.B. Tauris, 2017. — 314 p. In the mountains and jungles of occupied Burma during World War II, British special forces launched a series of secret operations, assisted by parts of the Burmese population. The men of the SOE, trained in sabotage and guerrilla warfare, worked in the jungle, deep behind enemy lines, to frustrate the puppet Burmese government of Ba Maw and continue...
Warszawa: Bellona, 2010. — 192 s. — ISBN 978-83-11-11707-5 W chwili wybuchu II wojny światowej w Europie w 1939 roku zarówno armia niemiecka jak i główne armie alianckie miały duże doświadczenie w szkoleniu i używaniu jednostek specjalnych. Żadne z nich, co zostało udowodnione w czasie wojny, nie miały większego potencjału i nie były skuteczniejsze od brytyjskich komandosów i...
Routledge, 2009. — 288 p. A biography of William Wickham (1761-1840), Britain's master spy on the Continent for more than five years during the French Revolutionary wars. It follows Wickham's brilliant and useful career to narrate the rise and fall of his secret service hidden community.
Oxford University Press, 2014. — 257 p. During the Second World War British intelligence provided politicians and soldiers with invaluable knowledge. Britain was determined to maintain this advantage following victory, but the wartime machinery was uneconomical, unwieldy, and unsuitable for peace. Drawing on oral testimony, international archives, and private papers, Defence...
Poolbeg Press, 1999. — 315 p. On March 6, 1988, acting on Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s authority, members of Britain’s Special Air Service shot dead three unarmed Irish Republican Army operatives in Gibraltar. Their deaths set off a chain reaction of violence in Belfast that ultimately claimed eight lives and left three young men serving life sentences in prison for...
Merrion Press, 2021. — 320 p. Recruited by British Intelligence to infiltrate the IRA and Sinn Féin during the height of the Northern Ireland Troubles, they were ‘agents of influence’. With codenames like INFLICTION, STAKEKNIFE, 3007 and CAROL, these spies played a pivotal role in the fight against Irish republicanism. Now, for the first time, some of these agents have emerged...
Mainstream Digital, 2014. — 352 p. Aden, 20 June 1967: two army Land Rovers burn ferociously in the midday sun. The bodies of British soldiers litter the road. Thick black smoke bellows above Crater town, home to insurgents who are fighting the British-backed Federation government. Crater had come to symbolise Arab nationalist defiance in the face of the world’s most powerful...
The History Press, 2015. — 224 p. After a tragic childhood among the Great War cemeteries of Flanders Fields, a troubled young woman searches for love and meaning in war-ravaged Europe. Elaine Madden's quest takes her from occupied Belgium through the chaos of Dunkirk, where she flees disguised as a British soldier, into the London Blitz, where she finally begins to discover...
The History Press, 2011. — 152 p. This book traces the Park's early history and provides a guide to the key secret wartime buildings and what went on behind the scenes. In this fully revised new edition, Enever describes the Bletchley Park Trust's battle to acquire the Park and thus preserve this historic site for the nation.
Biteback Publishing, 2011. — 495 p. Bletchley Park was the site of Britain's main decryption center, the Government Code and Cypher School. This extraordinary book includes essays by some of Britain’s foremost historians and academics and traces the legacy of Bletchley Park from the innovative work which led to the breaking of Enigma and other wartime codes to the invention of...
The History Press, 2010. — 224 p. Britain's war in the shadows of male spies and subterfuge in the heart of occupied France is a story well known, but what of the women who also risked their lives for Britain and the liberation of France? In 1942 a desperate need for new recruits, saw SOE turn to a previously overlooked group – women. These extraordinary women came from...
Faber and Faber, 2013. — 346 p. The gripping stories of a group of police spies - written by the award-winning investigative journalists who exposed the Mark Kennedy scandal - and the uncovering of forty years of state espionage. This was an undercover operation so secret that some of our most senior police officers had no idea it existed. The job of the clandestine unit was to...
Pen and Sword Military, 2018. — 184 p. Pat Evans parachuted into German-occupied Northern Greece in September 1943. His mission as a SOE operative was to support the Greek resistance movement, carry out sabotage and commando operations and gather military intelligence. By this time Greece was not only a country ravaged by a brutal occupation but being torn apart by fending...
Third edition. — London: Hutchinson, 1920. — 320 p. There is something so mysterious and thrilling about Secret Service that the subject must inevitably appeal to the public, and especially to the more imaginative section of it. Secret Service is the theme of Mr. Nicholas Everitt's book, in which he describes the exciting adventures that he met with whilst in quest of...
Zed Press, 1983. — 257 p. Britain's Military Strategy in Ireland is a detailed survey of Britain's military confrontation with the I.R.A. Drawing on intelligence sources, personal knowledge and experience of Ireland, as well as contacts with the political forces involved, the author assesses the strategy of the British Army and secret services. The implementation of General...
Pen and Sword Military, 2008. — 147 p. Guardsman and Commando is Cyril Feebery's memoir of his service with the British Army between 1937 and 1945.Feebery served with the Grenadier Guards in the British Expeditionary Force, was evacuated wounded from Dunkirk, completed Commando training in Scotland an joined the Middle East Commando (Layforce). On the disbandment of Layforce,...
Icon Books Ltd., 2015. — 467 p. July 1945. Eighteen daring young British, Australian and New Zealand special forces from a top-secret underwater warfare unit prepare to undertake three simultaneous and incredibly risky missions against the Japanese. Using four brilliantly conceived XE-craft midget submarines, the raiders will creep deep behind Japanese lines to sink two huge...
The Overlook Press, 2009. — 368 p. In May 1919, mere months after the guns of World War I had fallen silent, the Russian Revolution was roaring and the Bolsheviks' Red Army had begun to take the upper hand against the U.S. and British-backed White Army. Paul Dukes - a 30-year-old concert pianist, master of disguise dubbed 'The Man with a Hundred Faces,' and the only English spy in...
New York Review Books, 2015. — 240 p. One of the most daring feats in Patrick Leigh Fermor's daring life was the kidnapping of General Kreipe, the German commander in Crete, on April 26, 1944. Abducting a General, now published for the first time in the United States, is Leigh Fermor's own account of the kidnapping. Written in his inimitable prose, and introduced by the...
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. — 848 p. For a hundred years GCHQ – Government Communications Headquarters – has been at the forefront of British secret statecraft. Born out of the need to support military operations in the First World War, and fought over ever since, today it is the UK's biggest intelligence, security and cyber agency and a powerful tool of the British state....
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. — 368 p. Since 1922, English-language readers have been able to take this leap with him thanks to translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff, who wrestled with Proust's seven-volume masterpiece―published as Remembrance of Things Past―until his death in 1930. While Scott Moncrieff's work has shaped our understanding of one of the finest novels of the...
Osprey Publishing, 2015. — 242 p. This is the unforgettable chronicle of Rusty's combat experiences, transporting the reader back to the cutting edge of the SAS's deadly covert missions during the crises of the 80s and 90s. But even more fascinating is his intimate portrayal of what the service was actually like to live and work in. Having served as a paramedic, a demolitions...
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. — 281 p. Counterterrorism laws and policies have become a normalized fixture of security agendas across the globe. How do 'us/them' identity constructions contribute to the legitimizing strategies surrounding this development? The British case provides a historically-situated illustration which is of ongoing significance for security and insecurity today.
Pluto Press, 2020. — 218 p. Privatising Justice takes a broad historical view of the role of the private sector in the British state, from private policing and mercenaries in the eighteenth century to the modern rise of the private security industry in armed conflict, policing and the penal system. The development of the welfare state is seen as central to the decline of what...
Forgotten Books, 2017. — 428 p. The present volume is humbly offered as a companion to the two great works just alluded to. But it will also prove useful to readers of the Wellington, Castlereagh, Cornwallis, and Colchester Correspondence. These books abound in passages which, without explanation, are unintelligible. The matter now presented forms but a small part of the notes...
Potomac Books, 2012. — 224 p. No spy drama has ever matched The Sandbaggers, which featured a tiny, covert intelligence unit based in London during the Cold War. The show that the New York Times called the “best spy series in television history” was the vision of Ian MacKintosh, who was among the first writers to present espionage realistically—as a sordid series of political...
Frank Cass, 2004. — 583 p. SOE in France was first published in 1966, followed by a second impression with amendments in 1968. Since these editions were published, other material on SOE has become available. It was, therefore, agreed in 2000 that Professor Foot should produce a revised version. In so doing, in addition to the material in the first edition, the author has had...
Biteback Publishing, 2020. — 416 p. Many of the most famous escapes in history took place during the Second World War. These daring flights from Nazi-occupied Europe would never have been possible but for the assistance of a hitherto secret British service: MI9. This small, dedicated and endlessly inventive team gave hope to the men who had fallen into enemy hands, and aid to...
Pen and Sword Books, 2009. — 224 p. Michael (MRD) Foot enjoys the rare distinction of being the only person referred to by his real name in a John Le Carre novel. A highly significant tribute to the man entrusted with writing the official record of the Special Operations Executive. He authored first (1966) the History of SOE in France and twenty years later the highly sensitive...
Random House, 2014. — 401 p. SOE, the Special Operations Executive, was a small, tough British secret service, a dirty tricks department established in July 1940 and encouraged by Churchill to 'set Europe ablaze'. Recruited from remarkably diverse callings, the men and women who were members of this most secret agency lived in great and constant danger. Their job - as...
Routledge, 2006. — 272 p. — (Studies in Intelligence). A new look at how Britain’s defence establishment learned to engage Japan’s armed forces as the Pacific War progressed. Douglas Ford reveals that, prior to Japan’s invasion of Southeast Asia in December 1941, the British held a contemptuous view of Japanese military prowess. He shows that the situation was not helped by the...
Routledge, 2006. — 272 p. — (Studies in Intelligence). A new look at how Britain’s defence establishment learned to engage Japan’s armed forces as the Pacific War progressed. Douglas Ford reveals that, prior to Japan’s invasion of Southeast Asia in December 1941, the British held a contemptuous view of Japanese military prowess. He shows that the situation was not helped by the...
Oxford University Press, 2012. — 294 p. The claim by the Ministry of Defence in 2001 that 'the experience of numerous small wars has provided the British Army with a unique insight into this demanding form of conflict' unravelled spectacularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. One important reason for that, David French suggests, was because contemporary British counter-insurgency...
Yale University Press, 2020. — 320 p. A thrilling history of MI9-the WWII organisation that engineered the escape of Allied forces from behind enemy lines. When Allied fighters were trapped behind enemy lines, one branch of military intelligence helped them escape: MI9. The organisation set up clandestine routes that zig-zagged across Nazi-occupied Europe, enabling soldiers and...
Yale University Press, 2020. — 320 p. A thrilling history of MI9-the WWII organisation that engineered the escape of Allied forces from behind enemy lines. When Allied fighters were trapped behind enemy lines, one branch of military intelligence helped them escape: MI9. The organisation set up clandestine routes that zig-zagged across Nazi-occupied Europe, enabling soldiers and...
Yale University Press, 2021. — 359 p. The dramatic story of a man who stood at the center of British intelligence operations, the ultimate spymaster of World War Two: Thomas Kendrick. Thomas Kendrick (1881–1972) was central to the British Secret Service from its beginnings through to the Second World War. Under the guise of "British Passport Officer," he ran spy networks across...
Yale University Press, 2017. — 256 p. Behind the locked doors of three mansions in London’s exclusive Kensington Palace Gardens neighborhood, the British Secret Service established a highly secret prison in 1940: the London Cage. Here recalcitrant German prisoners of war were subjected to “special intelligence treatment.” The stakes were high: the war’s outcome could hinge on...
Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown and Company. 1954. — 240 p. This book (1954) is an apologia for the actions of a captured SOE agent who helped the Germans while a prisoner in Paris, she revealed that the Germans had played back captured British wireless sets and that the SOE had sent several agents straight into German hands. Double Webs (1958) made public the fact that one of...
Columbia University Press, 2019. — 352 p. Early on a Saturday morning in August 1998, a car was parked in Omagh's high street. By the afternoon, the pavements had filled with shoppers, and then explosives packed inside the vehicle detonated. The force of the blast blew babies across the street, and tore the limbs from children. One body was identified only by its fingerprints....
Atlantic Books, 2007. — 592 p. Gannon's book contains a mass of utterly fascinating and largely unknown material about an immensely important wartime project, and is very welcome indeed. In 1940, almost a year after the outbreak of the Second World war, Allied radio operators at an interception station in South London began picking up messages in a strange new code. Using...
Biteback Publishing Ltd., 2014. — 288 p. Garbo was the British codename of Juan Pujol Garcia, perhaps the most influential spy of the Second World War. By feeding false information to the Germans on the eve of the D-Day landings he ensured Hitler held troops back that might otherwise have defeated the Normandy landings. This allowed the Allied push against the Nazis in Europe to...
Brookings Institution Press, 2020. — 198 p. Using the UK as a case study, this book provides the first systematic exploration of how intelligence professionals view their role, what they feel keeps them honest, and to what extent external overseers influence their work. Moving beyond the conventional focus on oversight, the book examines how accountability works in the...
The History Press, 2011. — 208 p. BRIXMIS (British Commander-in-Chief's Mission to the Group Soviet Forces of Occupation in Germany) is one of the most covert elite units of the British Army. They were dropped in behind 'enemy lines' ten months after the Second World War had ended and continued with their intelligence-gathering missions until the fall of the Berlin Wall in...
Routledge, 1994. — 384 p. — (Studies in Intelligence). Numerous allegations of abuse of power have been made against the domestic security intelligence agencies in the United Kingdom such as police special branches and MI5. These include the improper surveillance of trade unionists and peace activists, campaigns of mis-information against elected politicians and even the...
Penguin Books, 2018. — 288 p. From the bestselling author of Americans in Paris and The Deserters, the astounding story of Britain's Special Operations Executive, one of World War II's most important secret fighting forces. As far as the public knew, Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) did not exist. After the defeat of the French Army and Britain's retreat from the...
Andrews UK, 2017. — 152 p. Anne Glyn-Jones opens up the secret world of the interceptors of German Morse Code signals during World War II. Leaving her girls' boarding school with romantic ideas about joining the navy as a Wren, Anne had no idea that she would be working for the mysterious 'Station X', which we now know to be Bletchley Park. Round the clock shifts, bed bugs,...
Pen and Sword, 2017. — 192 p. John Goldsmith’s wartime exploits are all the more remarkable considering that at first his services were consistently refused due to his being over 30. Not easily deterred he eventually became a tank driving instructor in the ranks. In 1942 accidental circumstances saw his recruitment into Buckmaster’s F Section of the Special Operations...
Nouveau monde Éditions, 2017. — 490 p. Le MI-5 et le MI-6 comptent parmi les plus anciens des services secrets modernes; seuls les espions du Vatican et ceux du service secret de renseignement chinois ont une plus longue histoire. Bien entendu, ils gardent tous leurs secrets mais il y en a désormais qui, sans pour autant révéler d'informations dangereuses pour la sécurité...
Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. — 314 p. This book offers the first in-depth intellectual and cultural history of British subversive propaganda during the Second World War. Focussing on the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), it tells the story of British efforts to undermine German morale and promote resistance against Nazi hegemony. Staffed by civil servants, journalists, academics...
Pen and Sword Military, 2019. — 208 p. This gripping action-packed book is the eagerly awaited sequel to the best-selling Secret SAS Missions in Africa. C Squadron SAS, comprising dedicated battle-hardened veterans, operated against ruthless terrorist groups, trained and equipped by the Chinese and Russians between 1968 and 1980. The author, who rose to be the Squadron...
Pen and Sword Military, 2017. — 208 p. This fascinating book is the first to cover the little known C Squadron of the Special Air Service. Operating in East Africa, the Squadron was involved in almost continuous counter communist terrorist operations over the period 1968 to 1980. In the unstable final stages of British colonial and white rule, the Squadron was never short of...
Gallery Books, 1989. — 200 p. Shrouded in secrecy, MI5 and MI6 have been responsible for the security and secret intelligence of Great Britain. How has this been done? What have been their successes and failures? This looks in detail at these questions and provides a remarkably objective and lucid account of the history of these two famous organizations.
Grub Street Publishers, 2017. — 336 p. Some of the individuals who played key roles in the success of Bletchley Park in reading the secret communications of Britain’s enemies during the Second World War have become well-known figures. However, the man who created and led the organization based there, from its inception in 1919 until 1942, has, surprisingly, been...
Pen and Sword, 2012. — 272 p. The Special Operations Executive was one of the most secretive organizations of the Second World War, its activities cloaked in mystery and intrigue. The fate, therefore, of many of its agents was not revealed to the general public other than the bare details carved with pride upon the headstones and memorials of those courageous individuals. Then...
Pen and Sword, 2012. — 272 p. The Special Operations Executive was one of the most secretive organizations of the Second World War, its activities cloaked in mystery and intrigue. The fate, therefore, of many of its agents was not revealed to the general public other than the bare details carved with pride upon the headstones and memorials of those courageous individuals. Then in...
Frontline Books, 2016. — 336 p. The Special Operations Executive developed a vast network of agents across Occupied Europe which played a vital role in developing and sustaining Resistance movements that persistently sought to subvert German control of their territories. The culmination of their efforts was seen when the Allied armies landed at Normandy in June 1944, with the...
Cambridge University Press, 2012. — 340 p. How was Bletchley Park made as an organization? How was signals intelligence constructed as a field? What was Bletchley Park's culture and how was its work co-ordinated? Bletchley Park was not just the home of geniuses such as Alan Turing, it was also the workplace of thousands of other people, mostly women, and their organization was...
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. — 269 p. In his exploration of the use of intelligence in Ireland by the British government from the onset of the Ulster Crisis in 1912 to the end of the Irish War of Independence in 1921, Grob-Fitzgibbon analyzes the role that intelligence played during those critical nine years. He argues that within that period, the British government lost power in...
The History Press, 2011. — 224 p. Commander Lioinel 'Buster' Crabb was Ian Fleming's inspiration for James Bond. A British naval frogman, Crabb disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1957 following a secret dive beneath a Russian warship which brought Soviet leaders Khrushchev and Bulganin to Britain. Fifty years after the event, award-winning investigative journalist...
Routledge, 2020. — 275 p. At the end of the Second World War, Germany lay at the mercy of its occupiers, all of whom launched programmes of scientific and technological exploitation. Each occupying nation sought to bolster their own armouries and industries with the spoils of war, and Britain was no exception. Shrouded in secrecy yet directed at the top levels of government and...
Pen and Sword History, 2021. — 257 p. The life story of Madge Addy, a working-class Manchester woman who volunteered to fight Fascism and Nazism in two major wars, is a truly remarkable one. Madge left her job and her husband to serve in the Spanish Civil War as a nurse with the Republican medical services. In Spain she was wounded in a bombing raid, fell in love with another...
The History Press, 2015. — 256 p. In this first biography of Theodore Paleologus, new documentary evidence exposes him as a hardened mercenary and killer in the pay of the wicked Earl of Lincoln but also supports his imperial pretensions -- long dismissed by historians. Yet despite his black record, memorial services are still conducted with imperial honours at Theodore's grave...
The History Press, 2017. — 225 p. In 1933 the Admiralty banned ‘Blinker’ Hall from publishing his autobiography, but here, for the first time, those chapters that survived are presented in full. See what the renowned spymaster had to say about the British Naval Intelligence – the pinnacle of the world’s secret intelligence services. He explores the function of secret...
FNZ Books, 2006. — 568 p. This is the most comprehensive and honest Hitler Biography, offering a whole new and unique look at all the old chestnuts surrounding Adolf Hitler's rise to power. The author uses the personal assistance of a Spymaster in marshalling much new material surrounding Hitler's origins, his sexuality, and his British Training, long hidden by a conspiracy of...
Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, 2013. — 81 p. The author studies the military special and covert role of the British semi-state Mercenaries at the counter-insurgency operations and actions in the Middle East during 1960s and 1970s years. Also Halliday describes the counter-insurgency campaign in Oman as the bright case.
Random House, 2022. — 352 p. The Royal Marine Commandos have become a byword for elite raiding skills and cutting-edge military operations. They are globally renowned, yet shrouded in mystery. With unique insight and authority, Commando captures the essence and heart of this revered military unit then and now, exploring their role patrolling the high seas and policing...
Routledge, 1999. — 214 p. This is a study of the British military intelligence operations during the Crimean War 1854-1856. It details the beginnings of the intelligence operations as a result of the British Commander, Lord Raglan's, need for information on the enemy, and traces the subsequent development of the system. This is the first scholarly work to focus purely on...
Cork University Press, 2002. — 132 p. Though the Irish revolution of 1920-1921 ended in military and political stalemate, republican Intelligence under Michael Collins has long been credited with humiliating its British rivals. This judgement is challenged by the recent release of two confidential self-assessments prepared for the army and police in 1922. The second report, by...
Random House, 2011. — 382 p. Tells the fascinating story of a secret war fought by British mercenaries in the Yemen in the early 1960s. In a covert operation organised over whisky and sodas in the clubs of Chelsea and Mayfair, a group of former SAS officers - led by the irrepressible Colonel Jim Johnson - arranged for a squadron of British mercenaries to travel to the remote...
Edinburgh University Press, 2017. — 304 p. Reveals Britain’s secret counter-subversive policies and security measures implemented in the post-war Middle East. This book reveals, for the first time, a hitherto unexplored dimension of Britain’s engagement with the post-war Middle East: the counter-subversive policies and measures conducted by the British Intelligence and Security...
The Overlook Press, 2016. — The true story of Daphne Park, the female British secret intelligence officer who rose through the male-dominated ranks to become the Queen of Spies. From living in a tin-roofed shack north of Dar-es-Salaam to becoming Baroness Park of Monmouth, Daphne Park led a most unusual life—one that consisted of a lifelong love affair with the world of...
The History Press, 2007. — 288 p. Walsingham, Elizabeth's chief spymaster had established an extensive spy network the world had ever seen, placing secret agents throughout Europe, especially in the Catholic courts of Spain, Italy, and France, to ferret out Catholic plots against Elizabeth. Yet Elizabeth ignored her spymaster. Walsingham, distrusted for being too powerful. For...
Orion, 2015. — 320 p. For three decades one of the most secretive units in the British military has been a mystery force known as X Platoon. Officially there was no X Platoon. The forty men in its elite number were specially selected from across the Armed Forces, at which point they simply ceased to exist. X Platoon had no budget, no weaponry, no vehicles and no kit - apart...
The History Press, 2011. — 224 p. Orford Ness was so secret a place that most people have never heard of it. The role it played in inventing and testing weapons over the course of the twentieth century was far more significant and much longer than that of Bletchley Park. Nestled on a remote part of the Suffolk coast, Orford Ness operated for over eighty years as a highly...
Anchor Books, 2008. — 460 p. From an award-winning journalist comes this real-life cloak-and-dagger tale of Vera Atkins, one of Britain’s premiere secret agents during World War II. As the head of the French Section of the British Special Operations Executive, Vera Atkins recruited, trained, and mentored special operatives whose job was to organize and arm the resistance in...
Public Affairs, 2019. — 384 p. The fascinating, improbable true story of Maxwell Knight — the great MI5 spymaster and inspiration for the James Bond character M. Maxwell Knight was perhaps the greatest spymaster in history. He did more than anyone in his era to combat the rising threat of fascism in Britain during World War II, in spite of his own history inside this movement. He...
Public Affairs, 2019. — 400 p. As World War II raged into its second year, Britain sought a powerful ally to join its cause--but the American public was sharply divided on the subject. The Canadian-born MI6 officer William Stephenson, with his knowledge and influence in North America, was chosen to change their minds by any means necessary. In this extraordinary tale of foreign...
Omnia Veritas, 2015. — 127 p. In the book, a British spy code-named Hempher, working in the early 1700s, tells of disguising himself as a Muslim and infiltrating the Ottoman Empire with the goal of weakening it to destroy Islam once and for all. He tells his readers: "when the unity of Muslims is broken and the common sympathy among them is impaired, their forces will be...
Penguin Books, 2014. — 528 p. Peter Hennessy's The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst 1945-2010 is the story of secret government plans for combatting attacks on Britain, from the Cold War to modern counter-terrorism. Now completely revised and updated, Peter Hennessy's acclaimed account of the secret state includes material from a host of recently declassified documents, to...
I.B. Tauris, 2021. — 392 p. Between 1940 and 1945, Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) carried out sabotage and organised resistance across occupied Europe. Over 5 years, SOE sent over 500 agents into Norway to carry out a range of operations from sabotage and assassination to attempts to organise an underground guerrilla army. This book is the first multi-archival,...
Biteback, 2014. — 320 p. Colonel Richard Heslop, alias Xavier, was one of Britain's Greatest Special Operations agents in France. Ingeniously orchestrating resistance groups and ruthlessly sabotaging German operations, Xavier played a crucial role in Allied espionage during the war, from late 1942 right through to D-Day. Sent to France in the middle of the conflict, he delicately...
Pen and Sword Military, 2011. — 255 p. In 1970 at the height of the Cold War, the young Sandhurst-trained Sultan Qaboes of Oman, with secret British military backing, took on the communist rebels in a fierce but little known war. Along with regular British Army and ‘contract’ officers, the SAS played a key role in this bitterly fought but ultimately successful campaign. The...
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998. — 641 p. This book is an abridgement of the official history, British Intelligence in the Second World War, which was published by HMSO in five volumes between 1979 and 1990. Although the emphasis was placed in those volumes on the use made of intelligence, considerable space was devoted to technical and administrative matters, notably...
London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1979. — 472 p. In carrying out our brief, which was to produce an account of the influence of British intelligence on strategy and operations during the Second World War, we have encountered two problems of presentation. The first was how to furnish the strategic and operational context without retelling the history of the war in all its...
New York: Cambrige University Press, 1988. — 408 p. During World War II, signals intelligence was always and increasingly the most valuable of Great Britain's intelligence sources. The Poles first solved the German Enigma cipher machine. Britain, which first solved the general Luftwaffe key in May 1940 and a naval Enigma key in June 1941, exploited these and other keys, though...
New York: Cambrige University Press, 1988. — 617 p. During World War II, signals intelligence was always and increasingly the most valuable of Great Britain's intelligence sources. The Poles first solved the German Enigma cipher machine. Britain, which first solved the general Luftwaffe key in May 1940 and a naval Enigma key in June 1941, exploited these and other keys, though...
New York: Cambrige University Press, 1988. — 212 p. During World War II, signals intelligence was always and increasingly the most valuable of Great Britain's intelligence sources. The Poles first solved the German Enigma cipher machine. Britain, which first solved the general Luftwaffe key in May 1940 and a naval Enigma key in June 1941, exploited these and other keys, though...
New York: Cambrige University Press, 1988. — 408 p. The first three volumes of the series dealt with the influence of intelligence on strategy and operations. Volume 4 analyzes the contribution made by intelligence to the work of the authorities responsible for countering the threats of subversion, sabotage and intelligence gathering by the enemy in the United Kingdom and British...
Potomac Books, 2011. — 320 p. As leader of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and then the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Michael Collins developed a bold, new strategy to use against the British administration of Ireland in the early twentieth century. His goal was to attack its well-established system of spies and informers, wear down British forces with a sustained guerrilla...
Pen and Sword Military, 2019. — 272 p. For all its successes, the future of the Special Air Service was uncertain after the Second World War. Resurrected as 22 SAS Regiment for the Malayan Emergency, after a shaky start it evolved into an important tool in the struggle against terrorism. Credit for this renaissance in the 1950s must go to a small group of highly motivated...
Harper Collins Publishers, 2005. — 400 p. A thrilling account of treachery, loyalty and martyrdom in Elizabethan England from an exceptional new writer. As darkness fell on the evening of Friday, 28 October 1588, just weeks after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, two young Englishmen landed in secret on a Norfolk beach. They were Jesuit priests. Their aim was to achieve by...
Oxford University Press, 2005. — 440 p. One of the great playwrights of his age, second only to Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe was also a British secret agent as well as the central figure in a murder mystery. Now, Park Honan offers the most thoroughly researched and detailed biography of Marlowe to appear in over fifty years. Honan, a biographer of Shakespeare, takes us from...
Random House, 2020. — 272 p. In the summer of 1705, a masked woman knocked on the door of David Edwards’s London workshop. She did not leave her name, only a package and a coded means of identifying her courier. Edwards was a Welsh printer working in the dark confines of Nevill’s Alley, outside the city walls. The package was an illegal, anonymous pamphlet: The Memorial of the...
Greenhill Books, 2021. — 239 p. The World War II codebreaking station at Bletchley is well known and its activities documented in detail. Its decryption capabilities were vital to the war effort, significantly aiding Allied victory. But where did the messages being deciphered come from in the first place? This is the extraordinary untold story of the Y-Service, a secret even...
Allen and Unwin, 2010. — 356 p. The SAS is a disciplined and elite force. The men in this force are trained to operate deep behind enemy lines to conduct surveillance and reconnaissance operations, usually in very close proximity to the enemy and are often involved in violent actions with that enemy. The SAS first went into action in Borneo in 1963 and saw further action in...
Cassell, 2002. — 255 p. Rob Horsfall shot and killed the terrorist commander inside the Iranian Embassy when the SAS stormed the building. He served with the SAS during the Falklands war and on subsequent counter-terrorist operations. He tells his personal odyssey from boy-soldier to paratrooper with insight and wisdom. His enemies were not just terrorists: he fought the...
Pen and Sword Military, 2021. — 208 p. Tony Hough's war started with ski training in the Alps in early 1940 preparing for winter warfare in Finland. Nothing came of that. Later that year, now an officer with 9th Battalion The Rifle Brigade, he sailed for North Africa. In March 1941, his under-gunned Battalion suffered a catastrophic baptism of fire in Libya from 15,000 troops...
Pen and Sword, 2003. — 194 p. Memoirs of SOE agents have always been rare ETH so many were either killed in action or executed ETH and today they are almost unheard of. But Sydney Hudson's story, which he has waited nearly sixty years to tell, is just about as dramatic and thrilling as any to have appeared. The Author was captured and escaped into Spain, to return to fight with...
Amberley Publishing, 2016. — 328 p. From the far-flung battlefields of Europe and Asia to the famous naval encounters on the high seas, the global conflict between Britain and Revolutionary France has long captured the popular imagination. What has been lost to history, however, is that behind the curtain of political show and public perception, a parallel shadow war was being...
Pen and Sword, 2014. — 224 p. The Brighton bombing in 1984 was the most audacious terrorist attack ever on the British Government. Certainly it was the most ambitious since the Gunpowder plot of 1605. The Provisional I.R.A. detonated a bomb at the Grand Hotel on 12th October 1984. Most of the Government were staying at the hotel at the time. The Conservative party was holding...
Routledge, 2013. — 254 p. This edited collection examines the British ‘way’ in counter-insurgency. It brings together and consolidates new scholarship on the counter-insurgency associated with the end of empire, foregrounding a dark and violent history of British imperial rule, one that stretched back to the nineteenth century and continued until the final collapse of the...
University of Wales Press, 2012. — 288 p. Throughout World War II, the loyalties of Welsh nationalists frequently came into question—and it’s long been thought that key figures collaborated with Hitler and the Nazis. In Spying for Hitler, John Humphries sets the record straight, showing that in fact Welsh nationalists deliberately infiltrated German military intelligence—and were...
Pen and Sword Books, 2008. — 224 p. As a Commando helicopter pilot, the author served with 846 Naval Air Squadron in the Falklands War and was decorated for gallantry (DSC). The author relives his part in operations, in particular Special Forces intelligence gathering and direct action missions, including the Pebble Island raid. Events are described in detail including the...
St. Martin’s Press, 2019. — 336 p. June 1940: Europe has fallen to Adolf Hitler's army, and Britain is his next target. Winston Churchill exhorts the country to resist the Nazis, and the nation seems to rally behind him. But in secret, some British citizens are plotting to hasten an invasion.Agent Jack tells the incredible true story of Eric Roberts, a seemingly inconsequential...
Pickle Partners Publishing, 2016. — 192 p. The story of the British Intelligence Center in New York during World War II. With headquarters in New York at 630 Fifth Avenue, Room 3603, the organization known as the British Security Coordination, or B.S.C., was the keystone of the successful Anglo-American partnership in the field of secret intelligence, counterespionage and...
Pen and Sword, 2010. — 146 p. X Flight was designated the task of giving close air support to the desert army formed and commanded by Lawrence of Arabia. It flew from advanced desert landing grounds on reconnaissance, liaison, bombing and ground attack missions. The existence and deeds of the flight were kept secret, so much so that even the RFC Paymaster was unaware of their...
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. — 265 p. An explosive exposé of how British military intelligence really works-from the inside. This book presents the stories of two undercover agents: Brian Nelson, who worked for the Force Research Unit (FRU), aiding loyalist terrorists and murderers in their bloody work; and the man known as Stakeknife, deputy head of the IRA's infamous...
Biteback Publishing, 2019. — 464 p. In this extraordinary book, historian Tony Insall reveals how some of the most striking achievements of the Norwegian resistance were the detailed reports produced by intelligence agents living in the dangerous conditions of the country's desolate wilderness. A definitive appraisal of Anglo-Norwegian WWII cooperation,Secret Alliances provides...
Hachette Books, 2017. — 336 p. John Amery is a drunk and a fanatic, an exiled playboy whose frail body is riven by contradictions. Harold Cole is a cynical, murderous conman who desperately wants to be seen as an officer and a gentleman. Eric Pleasants is an iron-willed former wrestler; he is also a pacifist, and will not be forced into fighting other men's battles. William...
Pen and Sword Books, 2014. — 252 p. Of German stock dating back to 1530 in Saxony, Eric George Ackermann GM was born on the Isle of Wight in 1919 and became a leading figure in the world of signals and electronic intelligence. As a Junior Scientific Officer at the Telecommunication Research Establishment, Boscombe Down, with an honorary commission in the Royal Air Force, he...
The History Press, 2012. — 279 p. The British system of interrogation has always been distinctly different from other countries. Subtler, quieter and far more devious than its contemporaries, it has been admired by those who have inadvertently succumbed to it. So much so that the Nazis adopted some of the British methods in their own intelligence operations. During the Second...
The History Press, 2011. — 224 p. A revealing biography of Edward Yeo-Thomas GC, the man who inspired Ian Fleming's James Bond. Edward Yeo-Thomas GC was one of the bravest of the brave. A fluent French-speaker, he joined SOE and was parachuted into occupied France three times to work with the Resistance. Appalled by the lack of help the British were providing, he managed to...
Pen and Sword Military, 2015. — 217 p. During the summer of 1940, as Britain was fighting alone for its survival, the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, instructed the newly formed and clandestine Special Operations Executive to “set Europe ablaze.” From that moment on the S.O.E. took its own war to Nazi-occupied Europe by conducting a mix of espionage, sabotage and...
Frontline Books, 2015. — 352 p. A gripping memoir of life in the SAS. A remarkable account of the Western Desert campaign featuring extensive World War II action. Malcolm James served as a medical officer with the SAS throughout 1942 and 1943, and Born of the Desert is his atmospheric account of his life in the North African desert, the bitter fighting against German and...
London: Bloomsbury, 2010. — 437 p. The book is the first independent and authoritative volume on the history of the SIS's first forty years.During this time,MI6 developed from a small, Europe-focused organisation into a worldwide professional Service ready to take an important role in the Cold War.
Penguin, 2010
The authorized history of the world's oldest foreign intelligence service, drawing on hitherto secret documents. Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) was born a century ago amid fears of the rising power of other countries, especially Germany. The next 40 years saw MI6 taking an increasingly important & largely hidden role in shaping history. This...
Penguin, 2010
The authorized history of the world's oldest foreign intelligence service, drawing on hitherto secret documents. Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) was born a century ago amid fears of the rising power of other countries, especially Germany. The next 40 years saw MI6 taking an increasingly important & largely hidden role in shaping history. This...
Penguin, 2010
The authorized history of the world's oldest foreign intelligence service, drawing on hitherto secret documents. Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) was born a century ago amid fears of the rising power of other countries, especially Germany. The next 40 years saw MI6 taking an increasingly important & largely hidden role in shaping history. This...
Penguin Books, 2011. — 832 p. The authorized history of the world's oldest and most storied foreign intelligence service, drawing extensively on hitherto secret documents. Britain's Special Intelligence Service, commonly called MI6, is not only the oldest and most storied foreign intelligence unit in the world - it is also the only one to open its archives to an outside...
Pickle Partners Publishing, 2015. — 106 p. Authors and historians have made the words Market-Garden and intelligence failure virtually synonymous. Is this really the case? Operation Market-Garden, the plan envisioned by Field Marshal Montgomery, would open the gate into Germany and simultaneously force General Eisenhower to abandon his broad-front strategy in favor of his...
Pen and Sword Military, 2021. — 336 p. George Jellicoe, son of Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, commander of the British Grand Fleet at Jutland, was never compromised by his privileged upbringing. In this insightful biography, his son describes a life of action, drama, public service and controversy. George’s exploits with the newly formed SAS, as David Stirling’s second-in-command,...
Penguin Books, 2009. — 608 p. Reginald Jones was nothing less than a genius. And his appointment to the Intelligence Section of Britain's Air Ministry in 1939 led to some of the most astonishing scientific and technological breakthroughs of the Second World War. In "Most Secret War" he details how Britain stealthily stole the war from under the Germans' noses by outsmarting...
Pen and Sword Books, 2018. — 224 p. Britain's elite Special Air Service Regiment, the SAS, is one of the most revered - and feared - special-ops units in the world. Its high-profile operations include the spectacular storming of the Iranian Embassy in London on 5 May 1980 and the hunt for Osama bin Laden in southern Afghanistan following 9/11. The regiment has become a byword...
I.B. Tauris, 2005. — 225 p. The covert, clandestine operations of the Special Air Service Regiment (SAS), from the jungles of Malaya, Borneo and Brunei to the deserts and mountains of the Middle East, have been widely documented. There has always been intense fascination in the SAS, stoked by the regiment's "closed" organization and secretive activities. But no period of activity...
The History Press, 2014. — 255 p. They were Britain's Second World War 'Band of Brothers', a secret army of fifty handpicked, cross-Channel raiders who carried the fight to the enemy shore long before D-Day. Created after the fall of Dunkirk, they commandeered a Brixham fishing boat and planned clandestine attacks on German warships in the Channel. But not all their enemies...
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017. — 224 p. The United Kingdom's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency, most commonly known as MI5, was founded in 1909 by Sir Vernon Kell KBE. Kell ('K' within the agency) not only founded MI5 but was also its Director for 31 years, the longest tenure of any head of a British government department during the twentieth century. Kell was...
Mystery Grove Publishing, 2020. — 272 p. Europe, 1940. Years of rising tension have finally given way to a global catastrophe. Millions mobilize for what would become the most massive and devastating conflict in human history. Great Britain, with a sprawling Empire to protect against the seemingly-unstoppable Axis Powers, is on the defensive. Returning to his home country just...
Pen and Sword Military, 2016. — 304 p. The exceptional exploits, courage and leadership of British SOE Agent Trotobas have long been recognized in France but not in his own country despite being recommended for the Victoria Cross. Captured on his first mission, Trotobas led a mass break-out from Mauzac Internment Camp and eventually returned to England. He immediately...
Yale University Press, 2019. — 320 p. The untold story of Bletchley Park's key role in the success of the Normandy campaign. Since the secret of Bletchley Park was revealed in the 1970s, the work of its codebreakers has become one of the most famous stories of the Second World War. But cracking the Nazis’ codes was only the start of the process. Thousands of secret intelligence...
Knox Press, 2022. — 224 p. From the author of Triage and Searching for Augusta, comes a history of love, hate, jealousy, and revenge between brothers and sisters during times of war through the ages. Journey back through time to discover remarkable accounts of parents who waved off their sons and daughters, never knowing if they would ever see them again. One mother saw no less...
Pen and Sword, 2021. — 239 p. It is little known today that, in January 1939, the IRA launched a bombing campaign, codenamed The S - or Sabotage - Plan on mainland England. With cynical self-justification, they announced that it was not their intention to harm human life but in just over a year, more than 300 explosive devices resulted in 10 deaths, 96 injuries and widespread...
Pen and Sword, 2018. — 197 p. In the summer of 1978, rumours emerged from the underworld that huge sums of money had been paid to the City of London Police to water-down evidence and arrange bail in cases of armed robbery. Then it was suggested that Scotland Yard's Flying squad was also involved. The Home Secretary appointed the Dorset Police to investigate but it became clear...
Pen and Sword, 2011. — 239 p. When the Second World War ended, England was bombed-out and starving, with practically every saleable commodity rationed. It was the age of austerity and criminal opportunity. Thieves broke into warehouses, hijacked trucks and ransacked rail yards to feed the black market; others stole, recycled or forged ration coupons. Scotland Yard was 6,000 men...
Pen and Sword Books, 2011. — 224 p. The ten Scotland Yard detectives, featured in The Guvnors, are unique. Such a group of intrepid crime-busters will never exist again. They possessed only the most rudimentary education; none had a degree. Intuition and knowledge of their manor counted for more than DNA and databases. They worked tirelessly in the pursuit of criminals, used...
Pen and Sword History, 2020. — 258 p. During the 1930s, the British Intelligence agencies became increasingly concerned about Communist influence in the country. They reacted by spying on thousands of ordinary British citizens. Amongst them were many artists and writers who, in tune with ‘the spirit of the times’, had become sympathetic to left-wing causes, most notably the...
Oxford University Press, 2021. — 375 p. When Japanese signals were decoded at Bletchley Park, who translated them into English? When Japanese soldiers were taken as prisoners of war, who interrogated them? When Japanese maps and plans were captured on the battlefield, who deciphered them for Britain? When Great Britain found itself at war with Japan in December 1941, there was...
Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza, 1950. — 108+[3] s. Śliwiński Władysław (1921-1951) — porucznik pilot Polskich Sił Powietrznych w Wielkiej Brytanii, kawaler Krzyża Srebrnego Orderu Wojennego Virtuti Militari. Syn Antoniego i Katarzyny z domu Mączyńskiej. W 1924 roku jego rodzina przeprowadziła się do Warszawy, gdzie uczęszczał do szkoły powszechnej a w maju 1939 roku zdał egzamin...
Collins, 2005. — 648 p. Her Majesty’s Royal Marines have served their Sovereign and country with courage and distinction since 1664. From spearheading the recovery of the Falklands to supporting the efforts of the UN, the Corps is an essential component of the British Armed Forces, steeped in proud service and tradition. Between 1919 and 1997 the Corps experienced a period of...
Collins, 1999. — 646 p. The Royal Marines Commandos are respected all over the world as one of the truly elite fighting forces. Researched with active co-operation of the Royal Marines, this text is the official history of the corps from the end of World War I to the present day. The main campaigns are illustrated with maps and there is a comprehensive list of orders of battle...
Simon and Schuster, 2013. — 255 p. Novelists, historians, and theorists have often toyed with the question: what would have happened if the Germans had occupied Britain in 1940? Based on years of persistent detective work, The Last Ditch investigates the German plans and the countermeasures undertaken through the specially formed British Resistance Organization. The very...
Pen and Sword Books, 2016. — 248 p. "Gentlemen, we are going to capture Tobruk and destroy it."'Operation Agreement' started as a fairly simple plan to destroy Rommel's bomb-proof oil-storage tanks at Tobruk on the eve of Alamein. But, catching the imagination of GHQ, the plan snowballed alarmingly. As well as a commando unit led by the plan's originator, Colonel Haselden, it...
Pen and Sword Books, 2016. — 224 p. The dramatic true story of the heroic Danish World War II soldier who received Britain's highest military honor. The story of Anders Lassen is one of the most amazing of the Second World War—indeed in the history of the British armed services. From the day he stalked and killed a stag armed only with a knife, Lassen had been recognized as...
Cambridge University Press, 2021. — 444 р. With Britain by late 1916 facing the prospect of an economic crisis and increasingly dependent on the US, rival factions in Asquith's government battled over whether or not to seek a negotiated end to the First World War. In this riveting new account, Daniel Larsen tells the full story for the first time of how Asquith and his...
Sutton Publishers, 1999. — 223 p. The Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD) was set up under the Labour Government in 1948 and clandestinely financed from the Secret Intelligence Service budget. A large organisation with close links to MI6 ( with whom it shared many personnel) it waged a vigorous covert propaganda campaign against Eastern Bloc Communism for...
Sutton Publishers, 1998. — 225 p. The Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD) was set up under the Labour Government in 1948 and clandestinely financed from the Secret Intelligence Service budget. A large organisation with close links to MI6 ( with whom it shared many personnel) it waged a vigorous covert propaganda campaign against Eastern Bloc Communism for...
Edinburgh University Press, 2020. — 311 p. Combining his expertise as a national security correspondent and research academic, Paul Lashmar reveals how and why the media became more critical in its reporting of the Secret State. He explores a series of major case studies including Snowden, WikiLeaks, Spycatcher, rendition and torture, and MI5's vetting of the BBC - most of...
Cambridge University Press, 2020. — 352 p. The exposure of two senior republicans as informers for British intelligence in 2005 led to a popular perception that the IRA had 'lost' the intelligence war and was pressurised into peace. In this first in-depth study across the entire conflict, Thomas Leahy re-evaluates the successes and failures of Britain's intelligence activities...
Skyhorse Publishing, 2017. — 255 p. The Royal Naval Commandos had one of the most dangerous and the most important tasks of any in World War II - they were first onto the invasion beaches and they were the last to leave. Formed in 1941 as the Royal Naval Beach Parties, many lost their lives in the Dieppe raid. After Dieppe they became fully fledged fighting commandos with their...
The History Press, 2017. — 224 p. Operation Basalt was carried out by British commandos on the island of Sark on the night of 3/4 October 1942, intended to serve several purposes. The raid itself was a tactical success: a German prisoner was captured, several more were killed, and all British soldiers returned safely to base. It is remembered because of Hitler's reaction. He...
John Blake, 2018. — 352 p. This unique insight into RAF Reaper operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria is based on unprecedented research access to the Reaper squadrons and personnel at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire and Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. The author has observed lethal missile strikes against Islamic State jihadists in Syria and Iraq alongside the crews...
Harper Collins, 2007. — 336 p. Twelve months after the September 11 attacks shook the world, Martin 'Jock' Wallace was awarded the nation's third highest military honour for bravery - the Medal of Gallantry - for his actions in the war against terror in south-eastern Afghanistan. At the age of 32 and a signalman with the elite Special Air Service Regiment, Wallace's courage...
Haus Publishing, 2013. — 123 p. In the early summer of 1914 Sir Edgar Speyer and his wife Leonora stood at the center of London society, an era made famous by the television series Downton Abbey. He was the "King of the Underground" and patron of the arts, she a famous violinist and poetess. Yet within weeks of the outbreak of war, they became pariahs, objects of suspicion and...
Pen and Sword Military, 2018. — 128 p. It is, of course, no secret that undercover Special Forces and intelligence agencies operated in Northern Ireland and the Republic throughout the troubles, from 1969 to 2001 and beyond. What is less well known is how these units were recruited, how they operated, what their mandate was and what they actually did. This is the first account...
Pen and Sword Military, 2005. — 211 p. This is the previously untold story of the remarkable relationship between a young British diplomat and Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia from the latter's Coronation in 1930 until his murder in 1975. Based on Chapman-Andrew s diary, the core of the book describes the extraordinary SOE operation in 1940 to re-instate the Emperor on his...
Pen and Sword, 2012. — 240 p. This is a true story of a force of ‘licensed to kill’ secret agents, commanded by a real war time secret service chief code names M, with whom Ian Fleming worked, and upon whom his James Bond stories were based. Brigadier Colin Gubbins was M, the Special Operations Executive was his Secret Service, Professor Dudley Newitt was Q and Captain Gus...
Pen and Sword, 2012. — 240 p. This is a true story of a force of ‘licensed to kill’ secret agents, commanded by a real war time secret service chief code names M, with whom Ian Fleming worked, and upon whom his James Bond stories were based. Brigadier Colin Gubbins was M, the Special Operations Executive was his Secret Service, Professor Dudley Newitt was Q and Captain Gus...
Pen and Sword Military, 2011. — 256 p. While always dangerous and daring, SAS operations are by no means invariably successful and when they go wrong, they do so very badly. This point is well made in SAS in Tuscany 1943-1945 which describes three such operations in enemy-occupied Italy during the latter half of the Second World War.SPEEDWELL 2, the first of the three, saw six...
Pen and Sword Books, 2014. — 216 p. The Small Scale Raiding Force (SSRF) was formed in February 1942 by Gus March Phillips with Major General Gubbins SOE European chief s approval. March-Phillips and his Maid of Honor Force had just had complete success with their operation (POSTMASTER) off West Africa. Equipped with a specially adapted motor torpedo boat, the SSRF immediately...
Public Affairs, 2022. — 592 p. Singer. Actress. Beauty. Spy. During WWII, Josephine Baker, the world's richest and most glamorous entertainer, was an Allied spy in Occupied France. Prior to World War II, Josephine Baker was a music-hall diva renowned for her singing and dancing, her beauty and sexuality; she was the highest-paid female performer in Europe. When the Nazis seized...
Citadel Press, 2021. — 400 p. On the night of June 13th, 1944, a twelve-man SAS unit parachuted into occupied France. Their objective: hit German forces deep behind the lines, cutting the rail-tracks linking Central France to the northern coastline. In a country crawling with enemy troops, their mission was to prevent Hitler from rushing his Panzer divisions to the D-Day...
Citadel Press, 2020. — 400 p. An impossible mission in wartime Italy: the next explosive bestseller from Damien Lewis. In the hard-fought winter of 1944 the Allies advanced northwards through Italy, but stalled on the fearsome mountainous defences of the Gothic Line. Two men were parachuted in, in an effort to break the deadlock. Their mission: to penetrate deep into enemy...
Quercus Publishing, 2014. — 352 p. In the bleak moments after defeat on mainland Europe in winter 1939, Winston Churchill knew that Britain had to strike back hard. So Britain's wartime leader called for the lightning development of a completely new kind of warfare, recruiting a band of eccentric free-thinking warriors to become the first 'deniable' secret operatives to strike...
Citadel Press, 2020. — 416 p. The incredible story of the radar wars: Britain's most secret battle. In the winter of 1941 an alien-seeming object was captured in a death-defying dash by an RAF reconnaissance pilot flying a lone unarmed Spitfire across the French coast. Balanced upon the cliffs near Le Havre was what appeared to be a giant convex dish, directed across the...
Random House, 2018. — 658 p. This book chronicles the story of the single most daring Special Forces operation since World War Two - Operation Barras; the attempted rescue by the SAS of the British Forces who were being held captive by guerrilla gang the West Side Boys in the Sierra Leone jungle. The West Side Boys were a strange-looking bunch, wearing pink shades, shower caps,...
Open Road Media, 2018. — 233 p. An amazing account of Britain's most audacious act of subterfuge in WWII: an undercover raid of Rommel's stronghold in Tobruk. On a scorching September day in 1942, the Special Air Service (SAS), a special forces unit of the British Army, pulled off one of the most daring, top-secret ruses of the Second World War. The plan (sanctioned by...
Hachette UK, 2021. — 352 p. SAS Great Escapes tells the story of seven of the most dramatic and daring escapes executed during WWII by what is arguably the world's most famous military fighting force - the SAS. With each story comes a nail-biting, rollercoaster ride in classic Damien Lewis style - readers join individual escapees and experience events through their own words,...
Quercus, 2015. — 224 р. From the award-winning historian, war reporter, and author Damien Lewis (Zero Six Bravo, Judy) comes the incredible true story of the top-secret "butcher-and-bolt" black ops units Prime Minister Winston Churchill assigned the task of stopping the unstoppable German war machine. Criminals, rogues, and survivalists, the brutal tactics and grit of these...
Quercus, 2015. — 425 p. The Nazi Hunters is the incredible, hitherto untold story of the most secret chapter in the SAS's history. Officially, the world's most elite special forces unit was dissolved at the end of the Second World War, and not reactivated until the 1950s. Among their last actions was a disastrous commando raid into occupied France in 1944, which ended in the...
Pen and Sword Military, 2022. — 250 p. In recent years, the work of the Bletchley Park codebreakers has caught the public’s imagination with books and films. While men such as Alan Turing and Dilly Knox have been recognized, Brigadier John Tiltman has been hardly mentioned. This overdue biography reveals that ‘The Brig’, as he was known, played a key role. After distinguished...
Palgrave Pivot, 2018. — 123 p. This book evaluates the prosecution of British counter-insurgency operations during the Cyprus Revolt of 1955-1959. Historians have typically cast the Cyprus Revolt as a failure, situating it within the larger pattern of the post-1945 failure of conventional armies to deal with insurgencies. By analyzing the reminiscences of British policemen,...
Pen and Sword, 2009. — 238 p. In a campaign known for many Special warfare units, the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) became one of the greatest legends of the North African Campaign in World War II. This classic insider's account has been updated and supplemented with rare photographs from the LRDG collection in the Imperial War Museum. The Long Range Desert Group was formed by...
Endeavour Press, 2017. — 206 p. In 1878 the Criminal Investigation Department replaced Scotland Yard's corrupt and discredited Detective Branch. In this classic story of the early days of detection, Joan Lock tells the fascinating story of the creation of the CID, the scandal which preceded it, and the successes and failures of the new organization, including early cases such...
Frontline Books, 2011. — 356 p. When first published in 1932, this memoir was an immediate classic, both as a unique eyewitness account of Revolutionary Russia and as one man's story of struggle, and tragedy set against the background of great events. Aged 25, Lockhart became the British Vice-Consul to Moscow in 1912. With revolution in the air, it was dangerous, decadent...
Manchester University Press, 2017. — 297 p. Drawing extensively on recently released documents and private papers, this is the first book-length study to examine the intimate relationship between the Attlee government and Britain's intelligence and security services. Often praised for the formation of the modern-day welfare state, Attlee's government also played a significant...
Quercus, 2012. — 352 p. During the Second World War, it is hard to imagine a situation where the British High Command could think that one of the only ways they could attack Hitler was to send ten canoeists with limpet mines to paddle one hundred miles up the Gironde estuary, in the middle of winter, in an attempt to sink German blockade ships in Bordeaux harbour. Yet this is...
Lewes, GB: The Book Guild Ltd, 2005. — 387 p. — ISBN: 1-85776-952-X. In this book (2nd printing), Annie Machon makes serious allegations against the British state's intelligence services, MI5 and MI6. Ms Machon and her partner David Shayler are former high-ranking MI5 officers, both now retired from the service. The book's allegations derive from their experiences and deserve...
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012. — 185 p. This book is exactly what it claims to be: The author says, “It is not a biography of Ian Fleming… nor is it a biography of James Bond… rather, it is a personal investigation into the intersection of two lives of the British Secret Agents, one real and one fictional.” It is not a coffee table book that outlines every Bond movie, and it is...
Broadway Books, 2010. — 264 p. London Times writer-at-large Macintyre (Agent Zigzag) offers a solid and entertaining updating of WWII's best-known human intelligence operation. In 1943, British intelligence conceived a spectacular con trick to draw German attention away from the Allies obvious next objective, Sicily. The bait was a briefcase full of carefully forged documents...
Crown, 2016. — 400 p. The incredible untold story of WWII’s greatest secret fighting force, as told by our great modern master of wartime intrigue. 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...
Dundurn, 2012. — 208 p. The name James FitzGibbon struck terror in the hearts of U.S. soldiers and this is the dramatic story of his life and his daring exploits. Irish-born James FitzGibbon came to Canada with the 49th Regiment to serve under his hero, Major-General Sir Isaac Brock. After the death of Brock at Queenston Heights and the capture of Fort George in the War of...
Macmillan, 2019. — 320 p. One of the most successful MI5 undercover surveillance officers of his time. Tom Marcus spent years of his life working covertly against those who want to do us harm. Now, for the first time, he tells the full story of what it is like to live your life in the shadows and who you need to become to survive. First published in 2016, Soldier Spy was a series...
Free Press, 2000. — 451 p. In 1942, with a black-market chicken tucked under his arm by his mother, Leo Marks left his father's famous bookshop, 84 Charing Cross Road, and went off to fight the war. He was twenty-two. Soon recognized as a cryptographer of genius, he became head of communications at the Special Operations Executive (SOE), where he revolutionized the code-making...
Manchester University Press, 2023. — 277 p. This ambitious and important book is a richly detailed account of the ideas and activities in the early-modern 'secret state' and its agencies, spies, informers and intelligencers, under the English Republic and the Cromwellian protectorate. The book investigates the meanings this early-modern Republican state acquired to express...
Cambridge University Press, 1994. — 353 p. This is the first history and analysis of the intelligence and espionage activities of the regime of Charles II (1660-85). It is concerned with the mechanics, activities and philosophy of the intelligence system which developed under the auspices of the office of the Secretary of State and which emerged in the face of the problems of...
Harper Collins Publishers, 1988. — 328 p. The story of secret service treachery in the Second World War. It describes how the head of MI6, piqued by Chruchill's setting up of SOE as a rival sabotage and intelligence organization, devised a trap, using a double agent, Henri Dericourt, to destroy the whole of SOE's intelligence network in France. As a result nearly 1,000 men and...
The History Press, 2016. — 256 p. St. Ermin’s Hotel has been synonymous with British espionage since the 1930s, when the SIS (MI6) was situated nearby at 54 Broadway. Bristling with intelligence officers such as Ian Fleming and Nöel Coward, the hotel was initially revealed by the notorious double agent Arthur Owens, code named SNOW, to be a covert base for the Secret Intelligence...
BBNC Uitgevers, 2012. — 192 p. Op zeventienjarige leeftijd verliet Kenneth McAlpine zijn school om zich aan te sluiten bij Churchills nieuwe elitetroepen, de commando's van de Koninklijke Marine. Als jongste lid van dit korps streed hij drie maanden later al op de stranden van Normandië. In Schone laarzen, vuile handen vertelt McAlpine zijn unieke verhaal over de Tweede...
John Blake, 2020. — 304 p. When British troops first deployed to Northern Ireland in 1969 to keep apart rioting factions of loyalists and nationalists, they could not have known that they were being drawn into the longest campaign in the British Army's history, a battle against the threat of a new rising force - the Provisional Irish Republican Army. While patrols, vehicle...
John Blake, 2020. — 304 p. When British troops first deployed to Northern Ireland in 1969 to keep apart rioting factions of loyalists and nationalists, they could not have known that they were being drawn into the longest campaign in the British Army's history, a battle against the threat of a new rising force - the Provisional Irish Republican Army. While patrols, vehicle...
Welbeck Publishing, 2021. — 352 p. Specializing in covert reconnaissance, counter-terrorism and hostage rescue, the SAS is one of the world's most famous, feared and respected elite fighting forces. This book tells the full, fascinating story of the regiment, from formation in the sand dunes of Africa during World War II to present action in the Middle East, and incorporates...
Pen and Sword, 2013. — 224 p. Amedee Maingard was a young Mauritian studying in London in 1939 who volunteered for the British Army. After a frustrating spell in the infantry, Maingard joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), He parachuted into occupied France in 1943 to join the 'Stationer' circuit, initially as radio operator but soon was second-in-command in the...
Pen and Sword, 2013. — 224 p. Amedee Maingard was a young Mauritian studying in London in 1939 who volunteered for the British Army. After a frustrating spell in the infantry, Maingard joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), He parachuted into occupied France in 1943 to join the 'Stationer' circuit, initially as radio operator but soon was second-in-command in the circuit,...
Manchester University Press, 2019. — 216 p. On 23 February 1820 a group of radicals were arrested in Cato Street off the Edgware Road in London. They were within sixty minutes of setting out to assassinate the British cabinet. Five of the conspirators were subsequently executed and another five were transported for life to Australia. The plotters were a mixture of English,...
Pluto Press, 2019. — 257 p. Collusion by British state forces in killings perpetrated by loyalist paramilitaries was a dubious hallmark of the ‘dirty war’ in the north of Ireland. Now, more than twenty years since the Good Friday Agreement, the story of collusion remains one of the most enduring and contentious legacies of the conflict, a shadow that trails British...
Pen and Sword, 2006. — 272 p. Intelligence was just as important in the Napoleonic Wars as it is today. Then there was only one way of obtaining it - by spies and informers. The Author uses first hand accounts of three of Wellington's most daring and successful Intelligence Officers. The three men, all of Scottish descent, were very different in character. One was killed in...
Aurum Press, 2013. — 192 p. The huge success of Sinclair’s The Secret Life of Bletchley Park – a quarter of a million copies sold to date – has been symptomatic of a similarly dramatic increase in visitors to Bletchley Park itself, the Victorian mansion in Buckinghamshire now open as an engrossing museum of wartime codebreaking. Aurum is publishing the first comprehensive...
Aurum Press, 2011. — 368 p. Bletchley Park in the Buckinghamshire countryside was home to Britain's most brilliant mathematical brains and the scene of immense advances in technology, like the birth of modern computing. This book tells the story of what it was like to work there during the war. The military codes deciphered there were instrumental in turning both the Battle of...
Aurum Press, 2011. — 368 p. — ISBN 978-1-84513-683-3. Until the mid-seventies Bletchley Park remained a secret. At a rambling Victorian house in the Buckinghamshire countryside, thousands of young people decoded and translated intercepted messages, whilst some of Britain's most brilliant minds effectively invented modern computing. Their greatest collective achievement was the...
Aurum Press, 2017. — 352 p. Following on from the enormous success of his bestseller, The Secret Life of Bletchley Park, Sinclair McKay now uncovers the story of what happened after the Second World War was over. Many of the men and women who had worked at Bletchley Park moved on to GCHQ, the British government's new facility established to fight a new foe - Stalin's KGB. McKay...
Corgi, 2008. — 412 p. Bravo Two Zero is the radio call sign for a British SAS patrol dropped off behind enemy lines during the Gulf War. Their mission was to destroy Iraq Scud missile sites that threatened Israel. They are compromised and have to attempt to make it seventy-five miles through the desert to Syria. Some are killed, one makes it, and the rest are captured. Author...
Dell, 1996. — 459 p. He is one of the most highly decorated soldiers alive. He is also the first to break the code of silence about the most elite fighting force in the world. What Andy McNab has to say is so explosive that the British government tried to stop him. A street fighter, a hard case, and a flawless soldier, Andy McNab became one of the elite fighting men in ''the...
The History Press, 2012. — 208 p. In late 1940 a group of five young Australian soldiers set out on a secret mission: one of the Second World War's most daring operations and the first for Britain's legendary Special Operations Executive. Leading a small force of Ethiopian freedom fighters on an epic trek across the harsh African bush from the Sudan, the small incursion force...
Harper Collins Publishers, 2016. — 448 p. — ISBN-10 0008168970. — ISBN-13 978-0008168971. The definitive and thrilling history of those who wore the famous green beret. Commandos is the definitive history of the units raised to answer Winston Churchill’s call to arms: ‘Enterprises much be prepared with specially trained troops of the hunter class, who can develop a reign of...
Doubleday and Company, 1975. — 254 p. Recounts the 1942 British commando raid on the German-occupied French coast near Le Havre to dismantle and return to England with a secret German radar device. The Bruneval Raid tells the story of a British raid against a German radar installation on the French coast. The aim was effectively a 'hit and run' effort with the intention of...
St. Martin's Press, 2011. — 336 p. When Sgt. Dan Mills and the rest of the 1st Battalion, The Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment flew into Iraq in April, 2004, they were supposed to be winning hearts and minds. They were soon fighting for their lives. Within hours of their arrival in Iraq, a grenade bounced off one of the battalion's Land Rovers, rolled underneath and...
Picador, 2017. — 356 p. Six gentlemen, one goal: the destruction of Hitler's war machine. In the spring of 1939, a top-secret organization was founded in London: its purpose was to plot the destruction of Hitler's war machine through spectacular acts of sabotage. The guerrilla campaign that followed was every bit as extraordinary as the six men who directed it. One of them,...
Hodder, 2013. — 400 p. 1917, post-Russian Revolution, an unlikely and eccentric band of British spies are smuggled into newly Soviet Russia to thwart Lenin's plan to destroy British rule in India, as a precursor to toppling the democracies of the West. The spies, under Mansfield Cumming, were the unsung founders of the present-day MI6. Russian Roulette tells the story of the first...
Oxford University Press, 2015. — 256 p. Dubbed an "agent of British imperialism" by Joseph Stalin, Reginald Teague-Jones (1889- 1988) was the quintessential English spy whose exceptional story is recounted in this new biography. He studied in St Petersburg, participated in the 1905 Revolution and spent the rest of his life working for various branches of British secret...
Palgrave Macmillan, 1990. — 210 p. This book traces the tactical development of the principles of the British approach to counterinsurgency between 1919 and 1960. It discusses the policies arising from these principles as applied by police, soldiers, special units and colonial administrators.
New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994. — 282 p. For Modin was the professional KGB officer who ran the five Cambridge spies: Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, Cairncross. They were Modin's agents, and thus'Friends', in the special sense implied by the spy trade jargon with which John le Carre has made us so familiar. Modin was initially the Five's deskman in Moscow Centre during...
Allen and Unwin, 2021. — 384 p. Anthony 'Harry' Moffitt spent more than 20 years in the SAS. His decades of service and his multiple tours in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan made him one of the regiment's most experienced and respected figures. Alongside the SAS, Harry's other lifetime love is cricket. An improvised game of backyard cricket was often the circuit-breaker Harry...
Naval Institute Press, 2001. — 160 p. As plans got under way for the Allied invasion of Sicily in June 1943, British counter-intelligence agent Ewen Montagu masterminded a scheme to mislead the Germans into thinking the next landing would occur in Greece. The innovative plot was so successful that the Germans moved some of their forces away from Sicily, and two weeks into the real...
Pen and Sword Military, 2023. — 255 p. The existence of German-speaking units fighting for the Allied cause during WW2 has remained largely a well-kept secret. But seventy-five years on these units’ contribution to victory needs to be fully acknowledged. Prime Minister Winston Churchill had no qualms about using native German speakers from Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and of...
Cambridge University Press, 2013. — 467 p. Classified is a fascinating account of the British state's long obsession with secrecy and the ways it sought to prevent information about its secret activities from entering the public domain. Drawing on recently declassified documents, unpublished correspondence and exclusive interviews with key officials and journalists, Christopher...
The History Press, 2012. — 256 p. The story of the SAS's finest moments in World War II, updated with new, previously unpublished SAS stories and interviews. Thirty vivid stories, supported by an updated selection of rare archive and action photographs, explore the larger-than-life escapades of the Special Air Service in World War II. From an SAS Jeep patrol in France,...
Yale University Press, 2022. — 208 p. Sidney Reilly (c. 1873–1925) is one of the most colorful and best-known spies of the twentieth century. Emerging from humble beginnings in southern Russia, Reilly was an inventive multilingual businessman and conman who enjoyed espionage as a sideline. By the early twentieth century he was working as an agent for Scotland Yard, spying on...
Osprey Publishing, 2012. — 304 p. In this new book, Gavin Mortimer reveals the 12 legendary Special Forces commanders of World War II. Prior to the war, the concept of ‘special forces’ simply didn’t exist, but thanks to visionary leaders like David Stirling and Charles Hunter, our very concept of how wars can be fought and won has totally changed. These 12 men not only reshaped...
Hachette UK, 2015. — 224 p. Established in June 1940, the Long Range Desert Group was the inspiration of scientist and soldier Major Ralph Bagnold, a contemporary of T.E Lawrence who, in the inter-war years, explored the North African desert in a Model T Ford automobile. Mortimer takes us from the founding of the LRDG, through their treacherous journey across the Egyptian Sand...
Pen and Sword Military, 2021. — 216 p. Second volume of a highly illustrated history of 2 SAS’s operations in 1944 in support of the Allied invasion of German-occupied France. In the world of military history there is no brand as potent as that of the SAS. They burst into global prominence in 1980 with their spectacular storming of the Iranian Embassy, and there have been...
Osprey Publishing, 2013. — 256 p. The Special Boat Squadron (SBS) was Britain's most exclusive Special Forces unit during World War II. Highly trained, totally secretive, and utterly ruthless, the SBS was established as an entity in its own right in early 1943, having previously operated under the auspices of the SAS during the war in North Africa. Unlike its sister unit, which...
Osprey Publishing, 2022. — 240 p. Based on recently released wartime files, interviews with surviving veterans and previously unpublished private papers, this is the incredible story of the origins and operations of a wartime special forces unit that defied the odds. Z Special Unit, one of the most intrepid but arguably the most unsung of Allied Special Forces of the Second...
Osprey Publishing, 2022. — 240 p. Based on recently released wartime files, interviews with surviving veterans and previously unpublished private papers, this is the incredible story of the origins and operations of a wartime special forces unit that defied the odds. Z Special Unit, one of the most intrepid but arguably the most unsung of Allied Special Forces of the Second...
Routledge, 2011. — 217 p. This book examines the complex practice of counter-insurgency warfare through the prism of British military experiences in the post-war era and endeavours to unpack their performance. During the twentieth century counter-insurgency assumed the status of one of the British military’s fortes. A wealth of asymmetric warfare experience was accumulated...
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. — 265 p. Security and Special Operations offers the first comprehensive history of the Security Section of the Special Operations Executive and its relationship with MI5 during the Second World War. The book makes extensive use of recently declassified files in order to examine the development of liaison between the two organizations. It explores SOE's...
Mercier Press, 1990. — 528 p. The SAS in Ireland traces the history of the British Army Special Air Services Regiment, the SAS, in Ireland over the past twenty years. It details their activities — intelligence gathering and surveillance, their links with British Intelligence, notably MI5 and MI6, their connection with sectarian murders and many other deaths. Raymond Murray is a...
Pen and Sword Military, 2017. — 192 p. On 1 April 1982 the Argentinian junta invaded the Falkland Islands, while the 2nd Battalion the Parachute Regiment was on leave. Recalled to barracks, it joined the hastily assembled task force to recover the Islands. No parachutes – instead a journey of 8000 miles on a North Sea ferry to deliver the battalion into battle. Philip Neame...
Pen and Sword Books, 2010. — 224 p. The author of Flames of Calais details life in the top-secret department of Britain's War Office during World War II in this military memoir. Airey Neave, who in the last two years of the war was the chief organizer at MI.9, gives his inside story of the underground escape lines in occupied North-West Europe, which returned over 4,000 Allied...
Pen and Sword, 2004. — 432 p. This is the story of a fighting force. In the words of the marines themselves, Robin Neillands, formerly of 45 Commando RM, describes what it is really like to wear the legendary green beret, in peace and in war. This vivid account charts the story of the Royal Marine Commandos from their bloody baptism on the beaches of Dieppe to the final yomp...
McFarland, 2009. — 212 p. Here are the wartime diaries of Wayne Nelson, an OSS officer who served in North Africa and Europe during World War II. A prewar colleague of Allan Dulles, Nelson joined an infant OSS after failing to join the Navy because of a vision disability, and he went on to serve in North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, Italy, Corsica, and mainland France. Erudite and a...
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. — 296 p. For many years, the British Army was considered to have a particular expertise at counterinsurgency campaigning. John Newsinger's British Counterinsurgency challenges this view. The book examines the post-1945 special military campaigns in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, South Yemen, Dhofar, Northern Ireland and most recently in Iraq and...
Pen and Sword, 1994. — 214 p. This is the story of Roger Landes - "Aristide" of F Section, Special Operations Executive - who was born in Paris of British parents and came to London in 1938, to work in the LCC's Architects Department. After being trained as a wireless operator in the Royal Signals, he was recruited into SOE, where he trained with figures such as Claude de...
Tattered Flag, 2015. — 295 p. The years 1909-1918 can be regarded as formative for MI5, an era in which it developed from a small counterespionage bureau into an established security intelligence agency. MI5 had two main roles during this period; counterespionage, and advising the War Office on how to deal with the police and the civilian population, particularly foreign...
I.B. Tauris, 2020. — 353 p. Richard Norton-Taylor reveals the secrets of his forty-year career as a journalist covering the world of spies and their masters in Whitehall. Early in his career, Norton-Taylor successfully campaigned against official secrecy, gaining a reputation inside the Whitehall establishment and the outside world alike for his relentless determination to...
Cottage Grove Editions, 2021. — 403 p. There is an enduring fascination with the secret history of the two world wars. This follow-up to Castaways of the Kriegsmarine examines the genesis of prisoner interrogation as an intelligence resource. We see how British naval intelligence officers were the first in the world to notice and exploit a loophole in the Hague Convention. We...
Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. — 352 p. This book provides the first ever intelligence history of Iraq from 1941 to 1945, and is the third and final volume of a trilogy on regional intelligence and counterintelligence operations that includes Nazi Secret Warfare in Occupied Persia (Iran) (2014), and Espionage and Counterintelligence in Occupied Persia (Iran) (2015). This account of...
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. — 322 p. The sequel to Nazi Secret Warfare , which portrayed the catastrophic failure of Germany's clandestine services in Persia (Iran) during the Second World War. By contrast but based on equally solid archival evidence, this companion volume tells the other side of the same fascinating story, introducing us to spies, spycatchers, and spymasters.
Pen and Sword Military, 2020. — 224 p. The Long Range Desert Group has a strong claim to the first Special Forces unit in the British Army. This superbly illustrated history follows the LRDG from its July 1940 formation as the Long Range Patrol in North Africa, tasked with intelligence gathering, mapping and reconnaissance deep behind enemy lines. Manned initially by New...
Pen and Sword, 2020. — 310 p. Shortly after the invasion of Sicily and to distract German attention from the Italian campaign, Churchill ordered the occupation of the Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean.The Long Range Desert Group, retraining in Lebanon, were now part of Raiding Forces, Middle East, along with the Special Boat Service and No 30 Commando. In support of 3,000...
Amberley Publishing, 2015. — 232 p. Very Special Agent Fifi was described as ‘one of the most expert liars in the world’. Employed by the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Churchill’s wartime spook organisation, her job was to entrap trainee agents and test their mettle in the field. Kept secret for seventy-five years, her existence long treated as a myth, Fifi’s files were...
Amberley Publishing, 2012. — 264 p. The life and poignant death of one of Britain’s bravest women. Eileen Nearne, or Agent Rose, was one of forty women sent into France during World War Two by the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Churchill’s top secret wartime ‘spooks’ organisation.
Amberley Publishing, 2012. — 328 p. Over 60 female agents were sent out by Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. These women - as well as others from clandestine Allied organisations - were flown out and parachuted or landed into occupied Europe on vital and highly dangerous missions: their job was to work with resistance movements both...
Amberley Publishing, 2013. — 224 p. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Guy Burgess, an officer in Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, convinced his superiors that a special school be opened to teach sabotage. Although his suggestion that it be called 'Guy Fawkes' School' was turned down, Brickendonbury Manor, near Hertford, was chosen and named 'Station XVII'....
Bloomsbury, 2020. — 480 p. Master of Deception is a biography of Peter Fleming, elder brother of Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond. Peter Fleming worked as a travel writer and journalist, serving with distinction throughout World War II and played a crucial role in British intelligence operations in the Far East. This biography ranges from the personal life of Fleming such as...
Pen and Sword Military, 2010. — 284 p. Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia were all German allies in the Second World War, unlike the other countries of Europe which had either been forcibly occupied by the Nazis or remained neutral. SOE Missions mounted within their borders were thus doubly hazardous for they were conducted in enemy-populated territory, heavily policed by...
Oxford University Press, 2008. — 358 p. Irish neutrality during the Second World War presented Britain with significant challenges to its security. Exploring how British agencies identified and addressed these problems, this book reveals how Britain simultaneously planned sabotage in and spied on Ireland, and at times sought to damage the neutral state's reputation internationally...
Icon Books, 2020. — 496 p. In less than six hours in August 1942, nearly 1,000 British, Canadian and American commandos died in the French port of Dieppe in an operation that for decades seemed to have no real purpose. Was it a dry-run for D-Day, or perhaps a gesture by the Allies to placate Stalin’s impatience for a second front in the west? Canadian historian David O’Keefe...
Pen and Sword Military, 2012. — 268 p. Operation Frankton is a story of how a handful of determined and resourceful men, using flimsy canoes, achieved what thousands could not by conventional means. The volunteers had enlisted for Hostilities Only and, except for their leader, none had been in a canoe before. However, with a few months training they carried out what one German...
Harper Collins Publishers, 2019. — 224 p. Two sisters. Two special agents. One War. Sisters and Spies is the incredible true story of British special agents Eileen and Jacqueline Nearne, two sisters who risked everything to fight for our freedom during the Second World War. The death of an eccentric recluse is rarely an event to be given more than a few lines in a local...
Mirror Books, 2020. — 128 p. Two sisters, one war and an extraordinary family secret from 1939. In the nation's hour of need, brave sisters Patricia and Jean Owtram answered the call of duty. With their fierce intelligence and steely determination, these remarkable young women would stop at nothing to help crack the Enigma code, support Allied troops, and defeat the Nazis....
No Ordinary Family, 2017. — 344 p. During the bloody civil war of Sierra Leone during the late 1990s and early 2000, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) had splintered from the regular Sierra Leone Army. The RUF committed numerous atrocities across the country, maiming men, women and children with amputations, capturing children to use as soldiers and women whom they would...
Headline Books, 1997. — 317 p. Parker was granted unprecedented help by the SBS for this account of the most secret of Britain's armed services which concentrates on the personalities and their heroic actions. This book starts with the precursors of the SBS in WWII and traces their early development, successes and failures in a thorough and entertaining way illustrated by tales...
Cerberus Publishers, 2003. — 340 p. This is the story of perhaps one of the British Armys least known regiments of World War Two The General Headquarters Liaison Regiment, code-named Phantom. Every commander in the field or at rear headquarters needs to have up to the minute information on the progress of the battle to enable him to plan his strategy. Communication, or lack...
The History Press, 2022. — 288 p. In the darkest days of the Second World War, as Europe fell under Nazi domination and Britain faced invasion, Louis de Wohl, a 36-year-old refugee from Germany, made a curious offer to British Intelligence. Based on the widely held belief that Hitler’s every action was guided by his horoscope, de Wohl claimed he could reveal precisely what...
Pen and Sword Military, 2011. — 256 p. Intelligence about the enemy is a fundamental part of any war or battle; knowledge of the enemy’s strength, dispositions and intentions are essential for success. This book reveals that for 250 years the British Army resolutely failed to prepare for war by refusing to establish a nucleus of soldiers in peace, trained to obtain intelligence...
Pen and Sword Military, 2011. — 256 p. Intelligence about the enemy is a fundamental part of any war or battle; knowledge of the enemy’s strength, dispositions and intentions are essential for success. This book reveals that for 250 years the British Army resolutely failed to prepare for war by refusing to establish a nucleus of soldiers in peace, trained to obtain intelligence...
Greenhill Books, 2020. — 255 р. Lawrence Paterson’s groundbreaking new book is a detailed account of the now legendary Operation Colossus, the first British airborne raid of the Second World War, which took place in Basilicata, Italy on 10 February 1941. Britain was one of the last major powers of the Second World War to establish an airborne arm of service. Formed by a...
Manchester University Press, 2007. — 255 p. Behind enemy lines is an examination of gender relations in wartime using the Special Operations Executive as a case study. Drawing on personal testimonies, in particular oral history and autobiography, as well as official records and film, it explores the extraordinary experiences of male and female agents who were recruited and...
Bantam Press, 2016. — 400 p. Sir Maurice Oldfield was one of the most important British spies of the Cold War era. A farmer's son from a provincial grammar school who found himself accidentally plunged into the world of espionage, Sir Maurice was the first Chief of MI6 who didn't come to the role via the traditional public school and Oxbridge route. Oldfield was the voice of...
Pen and Sword, 2004. — 255 p. This is the inspiring story of the airborne battalion commanded by the redoubtable Lieutenant Colonel John Frost. Formed in late 1941, as part of the new First parachute Brigade, the battalion was in almost constant action until its legendary stand at the Arnhem bridge in September 1944. After that action not one single officer was evacuated; all...
Hardie Grant Books, 2014. — 304 p. As a captain in the Georgian Navy Arthur Phillip's integrity, intelligence and persistence made him perfectly suited to the role that history and circumstance presented to him in 1788, but landing the First Fleet at Botany Bay was only one of many achievements in a captivating life. His is a story of political intrigue, eighteenth-century...
University of Buckingham Press, 2017. — 380 p. When, early in 1940, an important Soviet defector provided hints to British Intelligence about spies within the country's institutions, MI5's report was intercepted by a Soviet agent in the Home Office... She alerted her lover, Isaiah Berlin, and Berlin's friend, Guy Burgess, whereupon the pair initiated a rapid counter-attack....
De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022. — 387 p. This is the first biography in English of a World War II heroine of the Greek resistance, who joined the British secret intelligence services (SIS) shortly after the German occupation of Athens and was betrayed, arrested and executed one month before the Germans’ departure. She was a prosperous housewife with seven children, who had no...
Pen and Sword, 2009. — 240 p. One of the most determined and courageous secret agents of the Second World War, Harry Peulevé joined the BEF in 1940 before volunteering for F Section of the Special Operations Executive. On his first mission to occupied France to set up the SCIENTIST circuit, he broke his leg on landing and, after numerous close calls, made an heroic crossing of the...
Allen and Unwin, 2014. — 376 p. The intensely revealing and entertaining account of a great royal secret and hidden love story - an unbuttoned history of Queen Victoria's loves and intrigues. Long before her successful marriage to Prince Albert, Princess Victoria had an affair with the dashing Scottish 13th Lord Elphinstone. After the liaison was exposed, Elphinstone was...
Sapere Books, 2021. — 364 p. A vivid account of the famous St Nazaire Raid that demonstrates the sheer bravery of the British Commandos and the Royal Navy. An essential read for fans of James Holland, Ant Middleton and Cornelius Ryan. St Nazaire, 1.22 a.m. 28 March 1942. HMS Cambeltown, supported by seventeen wooden motor launches, approached the German-held port intending to...
Granta Books, 2017. — 320 p. Espionage and counter-espionage between the Soviets and the British during London's Roaring Twenties. At the height of the hedonistic Jazz Age, many in British society became convinced that they were under attack from the new Soviet state. Still reeling from the Russian revolution of 1917, disturbed by the development of militant workers movements...
Pen and Sword Military, 2018. — 252 p. During the Second World War, thousands of sites across Britain were requisitioned to support the war efforts. Additionally countless others were built from scratch regardless of cost. Often the purpose of these locations was concealed even from those living close by.The author of Secret Wartime Britain has compiled a fascinating collection...
Hamlyn Paperbacks, 1985. — 241 p. It is February 1942 and the war in the Atlantic looks grim for the Allied convoys. The 'Great Blackout' has started, leaving the spy centre of Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire at a loss as to what the Nazis are planning. U-boat Command has changed the Hydra cipher. The Enigma cannot be broken. Cipher experts can no longer eavesdrop on Nazi...
Routledge, 1995. — 364 p. This is the first book to appear on British intelligence operations based in both India and London, which defended the Indian Empire against subversion during the first two decades of the twentieth century. It is concerned with the threat to the British Raj posed by the Indian revolutionary movement, the resulting development of the imperial...
Routledge, 2016. — 290 p. Britain’s secret state exists to protect her from ‘enemies within’. It has always aroused controversy; on the one hand it is credited with preventing wars, revolutions and terrorism and on the other it is accused of subverting democratically elected governments and luring innocents to death. What is the true story? The book, first published in 1992,...
Knopf, 2021. — 255 p. The dramatic, untold story of the brilliant team whose feats of innovation and engineering created the world’s first digital electronic computer—decrypting the Nazis’ toughest code, helping bring an end to WWII, and ushering in the information age. Planning the invasion of Normandy, the Allies knew that decoding the communications of the Nazi high command...
Collins Books, 2018. — 372 p. There is no crime in detecting and destroying in wartime the spy and informer. I have paid them back in their own coin. Michael Collins Michael Collins' development of a formidable intelligence network transformed, for the first time in history, the military fortunes of the Irish against the British. The Dublin Brigade of the IRA was pivotal to...
New York University Press, 2003. — 223 p. When the Germans invaded her small Belgian village in 1914, Marthe Cnockaert’s home was burned and her family separated. After getting a job at a German hospital, and winning the Iron Cross for her service to the Reich, she was approached by a neighbor and invited to become an intelligence agent for the British. Not without trepidation,...
Pluto Press, 2012. — 254 p. The period in Northern Ireland known as 'the Troubles' (1968-1998) seemed to have been conclusively ended by the official peace process. But recent violence from dissident Republicans shows that tensions from the past remain unresolved. State Violence, Collusion and the Troubles reveals disturbing unanswered questions about the use of state violence...
Boydell and Brewer, 2014. — 286 p. The methods developed by British intelligence in the early twentieth century continue to resonate today. Much like now, the intelligence activity of the British in the pre-Second World War era focused on immediate threats posed by subversive, clandestine networks against a backdrop of shifting great power politics. Even though the First World...
EQ Publishing, 2020. — 89 p. In 1949 Noor Inayat Khan was awarded the George Cross posthumously. How did this young lady from a noble upbringing with a pacifist belief have the desire, dedication and willingness to risk everything to become one of the bravest and courageous agents during World War II? Starting her career with the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, Noor soon wanted to...
Mainstream Publishing, 2014. — 208 p. In 1945, John Randall was the first Allied officer to enter Bergen-Belsen – the concentration camp that would reveal the horrors of the Holocaust to the world. Randall was one of that league of extraordinary gentlemen handpicked for suicidally dangerous missions behind enemy lines in North Africa, Italy, France and Germany throughout the...
Faber and Faber, 2011. — 397 p. In 1942, Lieutenant-Commander Ian Fleming was personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence - the dynamic figure behind James Bond's fictional chief, 'M'. Here, Fleming had a brilliant idea: why not set up a unit of authorised looters, men who would go in hard with the front-line troops and steal enemy intelligence? Known as '30 Assault...
Michael O'Mara, 2019. — 464 p. Peter Ratcliffe served in the SAS for twenty-five years. Blooded in Oman in the 1970s, he also saw action in Northern Ireland, in the Falklands War, and in the Gulf campaign. From his early days in the Paras to his time as Regimental Sergeant-Major in the Gulf, he has lived and fought by the motto 'Who Dares Wins'. Eye of the Storm is his...
Harper Collins Publishers, 2013. — 35 p. This is Mike Sadler’s story, one of five true-life recollections from the Second World War in Tales From The Special Forces Club. The Special Forces Club is a fabled gentlemen’s club, based in the heart of London. It has a closely guarded secret: you have to be a genuine hero to be a member. Mike Sadler was in Rhodesia working on a farm...
The History Press, 2020. — 224 p. Major Ronnie Reed was case officer for the infamous Agent Zigzag and the face behind Operation Mincemeat. But how did this young BBC radio operator, with no money and qualifications to speak of, reach such an important position in his twenties? Why did Agent Zigzag (Eddie Chapman) give Ronnie his Iron Cross, awarded to Zigzag by Hitler himself?...
Dialogue, 2015. — 297 p. In September 1925, Sidney Reilly journeyed across the Russian frontier on a mission to overthrow the Bolsheviks and restore the Czar. He vanished without a trace. The circumstances surrounding his death remain a mystery. This classic autobiography reveals the intriguing adventures and exploits of the man widely credited as being the original...
Pen and Sword Military, 2014. — 258 p. Few outside the security services have heard of 14 Company. As deadly as the SAS yet more secret, the Operators of 14 Company are Britain's most effective weapon against international terrorism. For every bomb that goes off 14 Company prevent twelve. The selection process is the most physically, intellectually and emotionally demanding...
Frontline Books, 2022. — 182 p. Most strongly associated with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, it is often stated that Britain’s policy of appeasement was instituted in the 1930s in the hope of avoiding war with Hitler’s Nazi Germany. At the time, appeasement was viewed by many as a popular and seemingly pragmatic policy. In this book the author sets out to show how...
Pen and Sword, 2021. — 288 p. The Battle of Britain was fought between two airborne military elites and was a classic example of pure attack against pure defence. Though it was essentially a ‘war of attrition’, it was an engagement in which the gathering, assessment and reaction to intelligence played a significant role on both sides. In some respects, both the RAF and the...
The History Press, 2011. — 227 p. During the Second World War, Britain's top secret Special Operations Executive plotted to assassinate Hitler. A small department of SOE known as Section X had the tantalizingly complex task of investigating how, when and where their plan could be executed. The section also plotted the killing of Goebbels, Himmler and other selected members of...
Pan Macmillan, 2013. — 336 p. My mother thought I was working for the Ministry of Ag. and Fish.' So begins Noreen Riols' compelling memoir of her time as a member of Churchill's 'secret army', the Special Operations Executive. It was 1943, just before her eighteenth birthday, Noreen received her call-up papers, and was faced with either working in a munitions factory or joining...
Pen and Sword, 2008. — 272 p. After the S.A.S., 16 Air Brigade is the most high profile formation in the British Army but to date there has been no complete history of its operations and activities. The aim of this book is to produce a history of Britain’s Elite Rapid Reaction Force 16 Air Assault Brigade. It will provide a historical narrative of 16 Brigade’s operations since...
Casemate Publishers, 2019. — 224 p. This biography of Britain's spy chief during the Revolutionary War sheds new light on his conspiracy with Benedict Arnold—and his mysterious capture. John André was head of the British Army's Secret Service in North America as the Revolutionary War entered its most decisive phase. In 1780, he masterminded the defection of the high-ranking...
The History Press, 2011. — 320 p. An Irish solicitor and international rugby player, Blair 'Paddy' Mayne became one of the most outstanding soldiers and leaders of the Second World War. After seeing action in Syria with the Commandos, he joined the new unit that David Stirling was establishing, the Special Air Service. The raids Mayne led in the Western Desert destroyed over...
Pen and Sword, 1988. — 239 p. The special F-Section of the British SOE was a department that stood for French Section, whose job it was to carry out Churchill's famous command to 'set Europe alight' during Second World War. This is the story of F-Section.
Lion Books, 2014. — 264 p. The story of the World War 2 de-coders of Bletchley Park continues to fascinate. How did Mair Thomas, a musician brought up in the Welsh valleys, find herself in the rarefied atmosphere of Hut Six, surrounded by hundreds of others, all desperately trying to break the German Enigma Code? Sworn to secrecy and working in cramped and uncomfortable...
Casemate, 2015. — 232 p. The origins of most of the west’s Special Forces can be traced back to the Long Range Desert Group which operated across the limitless expanses of the Libyan Desert, an area the size of India, during the whole of the Desert War from 1940 – 1943. After the defeat of the Axis in North Africa they adapted to serve in the Mediterranean, the Greek islands,...
Frontline Books, 2018. — 288 p. The Second World War had been won, but relationships between the Western allies and the Soviet Union were becoming increasingly strained, as the nuclear arms race made world peace precarious. It was vital that Britain knew the Soviets’ intentions and military capabilities, both offensive and defensive. As a Military Attaché in Sofia, and...
Oxford University Press, 2008. — 473 p. At the dawn of the twentieth century, British intelligence agents began to venture in increasing numbers to the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire, a region of crucial geopolitical importance spanning present-day Iraq, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. They were drawn by the twin objectives of securing the land route to India and finding...
Lucknow Books, 2016. — 336 p. An excellent reprinted book for anyone who has been in the military as a parachute jumper. It covers a lot of useful information in regard to the training of British Paratroopers by personell of the Royal Air Force. The people who completed their jumping course during the war years or the years after when the Parachute School was still part of the...
Oxford University Press, 2020. — 400 p. In the desert sands of southern Jordan lies a once-hidden conflict landscape along the Hejaz Railway. Built at the beginning of the twentieth-century, this narrow-gauge 1,320 km track stretched from Damascus to Medina and served to facilitate participation in the annual Muslim Hajj to Mecca. The discovery and archaeological investigation...
Bantam, 2011. — 368 p. Reclaiming T. E. Lawrence from hype and legend, James J. Schneider offers a startling reexamination of this leader’s critical role in shaping the modern Middle East. Just how did this obscure British junior intelligence officer, unschooled in the art of war, become “Lawrence of Arabia” and inspire a loosely affiliated cluster of desert tribes to band...
Osprey Publishing, 2011. — 352 p. From World War II to Iraq the British SAS has been at the forefront of armed conflict, though most people wouldn't realise it was even there. Universally acknowledged as the best special forces in the world, every member of the Regiment is a hero in his own right. However, even amongst these remarkable soldiers there are those who stand out....
Osprey Publishing, 2009. — 352 p. From WWII to Iraq the British SAS has been at the forefront of armed conflict, though most people wouldn't realise it was even there. Universally acknowledged as the best special forces in the world, every member of the Regiment is a hero in his own right. However, even amongst these remarkable soldiers there are those who stand out. SAS Heroes...
Pen and Sword Military, 2011. — 223 p. Early in the Second World War, Peter Wand-Tetley volunteered for 'special service'. He saw action first with the newly formed Commandos raiding the North African coast and then in the fierce fighting on Crete. Operations with the LRDG in the Western Desert were followed by SAS actions as Rommel retreated to Tunis. Remarkably he then...
Oxford University Press, 2006. — 287 p. Why did the British government declare war on Germany in August 1914? Was it because Germany posed a threat to British national security? Today many prominent historians would argue that this was not the case and that a million British citizens died needlessly for a misguided cause. This book counters such revisionist arguments. Matthew...
Sussex Academic Press, 2017. — 207 p. This book reveals the development, strategy and extraordinary success of Britains secret services in Francos Spain during the Second World War. The main claim of this study is that British pressure, exercised above all through their intelligence services, led Franco to distance himself from the Axis cause and eventually embrace that of the...
Hodder and Stoughton, 2013. — 432 p. On the night of the 22 September 1943 Pearl Witherington, a twenty-nine-year-old British secretary and agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), was parachuted from a Halifax bomber into Occupied France. Like Sebastian Faulks' heroine, Charlotte Gray, Pearl had a dual mission: to fight for her beloved, broken France and to find her...
Frontline Books, 2016. — 180 p. Throughout the fighting in North Africa in WWII, the Long Range Desert Group excelled in the role of special forces. Shaw served as an Intelligence Officer with this remarkable British unit, and in this classic account relates their daring exploits in special missions against Rommel's Afrika Korps. During the two-and-a-half years’ fighting in the...
Frontline Books, 2016. — 180 p. Throughout the fighting in North Africa in WWII, the Long Range Desert Group excelled in the role of special forces. Shaw served as an Intelligence Officer with this remarkable British unit, and in this classic account relates their daring exploits in special missions against Rommel's Afrika Korps. During the two-and-a-half years’ fighting in the...
Routledge, 1998. — 400 p. Shortly after the end of the First World War, General Sir George Macdonagh, wartime director of British Military Intelligence, revealed that Lord Allenby's victory in Palestine had never been in doubt because of the success of his intelligence service. Seventy-five years later this book explains Macdonagh's statement. Sheffy also adopts a novel approach...
Pen and Sword, 2012. — 351 p. Now back in print, one of the scarcest and most sought after works on military shooting. The author was a sniper instructor with the British Army as it moved through Europe in 1944-1945 and wrote this classic hands-on, nuts and bolts, how-to sniping book. Chapters include: British Weapons and Equipment, All Sniping, Pistols, Machine Guns, Foreign...
Steerforth Press, 2013. — 384 p. In this thrillingly entertaining book, Nicola Shulman interweaves the bloody events of Henry VIII's reign with the story of English love poetry and the life of its first master, Henry VIII's most glamorous and enigmatic subject: Sir Thomas Wyatt. Learned divines despised it, sober heads ignored it, but for Henry, the beau ideal of chivalry,...
Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. — 364 p. This book examines the development of imperial intelligence and policing directed against revolutionaries in the Indian province of Bengal from the first decade of the twentieth century through the beginning of the Second World War. Colonial anxieties about the 'Bengali terrorist' led to the growth of an extensive intelligence apparatus within...
Casemate, 2018. — 256 p. This book tells the story of the various Allied operations and schemes instigated to keep Spain and Portugal out of WWII, which included the widespread bribery of high ranking Spanish officials and the duplicity of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr. Ian Fleming and Alan Hillgarth were the architects of Operation Golden Eye, the sabotage and...
The History Press, 2022. — 208 p. In 1953, Ian Fleming's literary sensation James Bond emerged onto the world's stage. Nearly seven decades later, he has become a multi-billion-pound film franchise, now equipped with all the gizmos of the modern world. Yet Fleming's creation, who battled his way through the fourteen novels from 1953 to 1966, was a maverick – a man out of place....
Pen and Sword Military, 2021. — 352 p. What would it be like to keep a secret for fifty years? Never telling your parents, your children, or even your husband?” Codebreaker Girls: A Secret Life at Bletchley Park tells the true story of Daisy Lawrence. Following extensive research, the author uses snippets of information, unpublished photographs and her own recollections to...
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. — 245 p. This book is a 'hidden' history of Bletchley Park during the Second World War, which explores the agency from a social and gendered perspective. It examines themes such as: the experience of wartime staff members; the town in which the agency was situated; and the cultural influences on the wartime evolution of the agency.
The History Press, 2020. — 256 p. In July 1964, the Sunday Mirror ran a front-page story headlined: Peer and a Gangster. While the article withheld the names of the subjects, the newspaper reported that the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police had ordered an investigation into an alleged homosexual relationship between 'a household name' from the House of Lords and a leading...
Ashgate, 2016. — 245 p. Between 1640 and 1660 the British Isles witnessed a power struggle between king and parliament of a scale and intensity never witnessed, either before or since. Although often characterised as a straight fight between royalists and parliamentarians, recent scholarship has highlighted the complex and fluid nature of the conflict, showing how it was waged...
Cambridge University Press, 2013. — 228 p. Britain's domestic intelligence agencies maintained secret records on many left-wing writers after the First World War. Drawing on recently declassified material from 1930 to 1960, this revealing study examines how leading figures in Britain's literary scene fell under MI5 and Special Branch surveillance, and the surprising extent to...
Aurum Press, 2015. — 304 p. For Winston Churchill the men and women at Bletchley Park were `the geese the laid the golden eggs', providing important intelligence that led to the Allied victory in the Second World War. At the peak of Bletchley's success, a total of twelve thousand people worked there of whom more than eight thousand were women. These included a former ballerina...
Boydell and Brewer, 2021. — 359 p. Examines the formation of state surveillance and the emergence of institutionalized political policing in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. This book deals with the formation of state surveillance and the emergence of institutionalized political policing in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Little has been written on this early...
Pen and Sword Books, 2014. — 344 p. This is a revelatory account of three untabulated special forces operations, Plum Duff, Mikado and Kettledrum, that failed to destroy Argentina’s Exocet missiles during the 1982 Falkland’s campaign. In that context alone this book is of international military importance. Using previously unknown material and through interviewing key players...
Pen and Sword, 2002. — 146 p. One of only two survivors of the famous Cockleshell Hero raid, Bill Sparks' war and postwar career has never before been told in full. In this gripping book, he describes not only his part in Operation FRANKTON, the daring Gironde raid, and his escape back to Britain, but how he fought with the Greek Sacred Squadron thereafter. Operating in small...
Pegasus Books, 2022. — 520 p. Coffee with Hitler tells the astounding story of how a handful of amateur British intelligence agents wined, dined, and befriended the leading National Socialists between the wars. With support from royalty, aristocracy, politicians, and businessmen, they hoped to use the recently founded Anglo-German Fellowship as a vehicle to civilize and...
The Overlook Press, 1999. — 420 p. Featuring absorbing information about the secret world of agents, this groundbreaking work includes details from Churchill's days as a member of the Cabinet that established the Secret Service.
Random House, 2011. — 392 p. A complete and authoritative account of Britain's secret war in Italy during World War II—a potent mix of military history and clandestine derring-do behind enemy lines. Based on recently released official files, documents retrieved from other agencies, diaries, memoirs, and personal interviews, this book provides the definitive account of Britain's...
The History Press, 2009. — 208 p. Odette Brailly entered the nation's consciousness in the 1950s when her remarkable - and romantic - exploits as an SOE agent first came to light. She had been the first woman to be awarded the GC, as well as the Legion d'Honneur, and in 1950 the release of a film about her life made her the darling of the British popular press. But others...
Casemate, 2019. — 128 p. A highly illustrated overview of Operation Chariot, the famous St Nazaire raid, in 1942. At the beginning of 1942, the Tirpitz, the heaviest battleship ever built by a European navy and sister ship of the Bismarck, was on the cusp of breaking out into the north Atlantic. The prospect of the huge German battleship patrolling the Atlantic posed a huge...
Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. — 211 p. This book traces the activities of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS/MI6) and the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) during the Suez Crisis, one of the most infamous episodes of British foreign policy. In doing so it identifies broader lessons not only about the events of 1956, but about the place of intelligence in strategy itself. It...
Big Sky Publishing, 2022. — 228 p. Bill Adlam's hair-raising escape from Dunkirk, his dramatic commando raids and his storming the D-Day beaches reads like fiction. It all happened. Bill escaped the Dunkirk disaster via a bayonet charge into Nazi machine guns. He was presented with the Military Medal 'for gallantry under fire' by King George VI. Bill volunteered for commandos:...
Casemate Publishers, 2018. — 304 p. Striking where the enemy is weakest and melting away into the darkness before he can react. Never confronting a stronger force directly, but willing to use audacity and surprise to confound and demoralize an opponent. Operations driven by good intelligence, area knowledge, mobility, speed, firepower, and detailed planning and executed by a...
Helion and Company, 2016. — 137 p. Following the surrender of France in June 1940 Britain prepared to defend itself against a potential German invasion. In great secrecy a decision was taken to establish an elite bodyguard to protect the British Royal Family. Led initially by Major Jimmy Coats, a Coldstream Guards officer and celebrated winter sportsman, it was given the...
Allen and Unwin, 2017. — 224 p. It was arguably the greatest fighting force in the entirety of the Great War. They were the very best: hardened, fearless, decorated, cocky fighting men, all veterans of Gallipoli and the Western Front. Yet this elite force secretly assembled in London in late 1917 remains an enigma even today. Barry Stone tells the story of these Australian,...
Simon and Schuster, 2017. — 295 p. A fascinating, superbly researched and revelatory book – told with tremendous pace and excitement ’ William Boyd 'This compelling and complete account of the extraordinarily courageous women of SOE is at turns enthralling, edge-of-smart exciting and also heart-breaking. The way in which they were sent into Nazi-occupied Europe and left to face...
The History Press, 2014. — 224 p. In May 1940 Francis Suttill was commissioned into the East Surrey regiment of the British Army. He was later recruited by the SOE, and after being trained during the summer of 1942, Suttill was chosen to create a new resistance network in northern France, based in Paris, with the operational name Physician. His code name was Prosper and his...
Helion and Company, 2014. — 331 p. Made up of members of the Coldstream and Scots Guards, British Yeomanry cavalry regiments, New Zealanders, South Africans, and Indian Army men, the Long Range Desert Group was perhaps the most effective of all the "special forces" established by the Allies during the Second World War. It was able to go thousands of miles into enemy territory,...
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023. — 224 p. On the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, Peter Taylor tells for the first time the gripping story of Operation Chiffon, the top-secret intelligence operation that helped bring peace to Ireland. ‘A gripping exploration of how MI5 and MI6 worked for a ceasefire with the IRA – and how one meeting changed everything’ Telegraph 'An...
JR Books, 2009. — 320 p. 100 years old in August 2009, this is a complete and up-to-date account of the two oldest and still the most powerful, secretive intelligence services in the world: MI5, the security service, and MI6, the secret intelligence service. This is a story of spectacular triumphs, treachery, their frigid relationship, their untold work with the CIA, Mossad and...
St. Martin’s Griffin, 2010. — 448 p. Gordon Thomas, a leading expert on the intelligence community, returns in Secret Wars to provide the definitive history of the famed MI5 and MI6. Thomas's wide-sweeping history of two of the oldest and most powerful agencies in the world chronicles a century of both triumphs and failures. He recounts the roles that British intelligence played...
Routledge, 2016. — 324 p. This prize-winning book, first published in 1991, provides a detailed legal account of the development of the UK Official Secrets Acts 1911-1989. In particular, the Espionage section (s.1) of this criminal law is analysed carefully, illustrated by leading cases of UK spies prosecuted under this section, particularly during the 1980’s — including MI5...
Pen and Sword Books, 1989. — 228 p. When Robert Thompson left Cambridge to join the Malayan Civil Service in 1938 the sun still shone on the British Empire for 24 hours a day. The outbreak of war in the Pacific found him in Hong Kong from which he was obliged to make a hurried and dramatic exit. From that point most of his working life was spent in military and political...
The History Press, 2011. — 224 p. On 2 April 1982 Argentina launched Operation Rosario, the invasion of the Falklands. The British, caught off guard, responded with Operation Corporate. Deployed alongside the rest of the British Army was a small specialist intelligence unit, whose very existence was unknown to many commanders and whose activities were cloaked in the Official...
Pen and Sword Books, 2009. — 192 p. Did you have a spy in the family, an ancestor who was involved in espionage at home or abroad? If you have ever had any suspicions about the secret activities of your relatives, or are curious about the long hidden history of Britain's secret services and those who served in them, this is the book for you. Phil Tomaselli's fascinating guide...
Global Press, 2001. — 243 p. Richard Tomlinson was recruited by MI6, the British foreign intelligence service, during his senior year at Cambridge University. He quickly gained the trust and confidence of one of the world's most effective intelligence organisations. MI6 relied on Tomlinson to smuggle nuclear secrets out of Moscow, to run an undercover operation in Sarajevo...
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. — 336 p. As a British Intelligence Officer during World War II, Hugh Trevor-Roper was expressly forbidden from keeping a diary due to the sensitive and confidential nature of his work. However, he confided a record of his thoughts in a series of slender notebooks inscribed OHMS (On His Majesty's Service). The Wartime Journals reveal the voice and...
I.B. Tauris, 2020. — 329 p. — ISBN-10 1350160792. — ISBN-13 978-1350160798. During World War II, Britain enjoyed spectacular success in the secret war between hostile intelligence services, enabling a substantial and successful expansion of British counter-espionage which continued to grow in the Cold War era. Hugh Trevor-Roper's experiences working in the Secret Intelligence...
I.B. Tauris, 2014. — 320 p. During World War II, Britain enjoyed spectacular success in the secret war between hostile intelligence services, enabling a substantial and successful expansion of British counter-espionage which continued to grow in the Cold War era. Hugh Trevor-Roper's experiences working in the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) during the war left a profound...
Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2017. — 179 p. A Sly and Dangerous Fellow chronicles the life and adventures of Thomas Violet, an Englishman who lived from 1609-1662. During the course of his tumultuous life Violet was a goldsmith, a spy, a prisoner of war during the English Civil War, a traitor to both sides, a major economic theorist, an anti-Semite who nearly drove the...
Arcturus Digital, 2020. — 255 p. At Bletchley Park, some of Britain's most talented mathematicians, linguists, and intellectuals were assembled to break Nazi codes. Kept secret for nearly thirty years, we have now come to realize the crucial role that these codebreakers played in the Allied victory in World War II. Written by Dermot Turing - the nephew of famous codebreaker...
The History Press, 2011. — 256 p. The full story of Aston House in the Second World War has never been told before. Its activities were top secret and as important to the Allied war effort as those of Bletchley Park, but in a different way. Situated near Stevenage, Aston House was one of many British country houses requisitioned during the Second World War by the Special...
Osprey Publishing, 2018. — 224 p. Spies claim that theirs is the second oldest profession. Secret agents across time have had the same key tasks: looking and listening, getting the information they need and smuggling it back home. Over the course of human history, some amazingly complex and imaginative tools have been created to help those working under the cloak of supreme...
Columbia University Press, 2013. — 248 p. Long considered the masters of counterinsurgency, the British military encountered significant problems in Iraq and Afghanistan when confronted with insurgent violence. In their effort to apply the principles and doctrines of past campaigns, they failed to prevent Basra and Helmand from descending into lawlessness, criminality, and...
Columbia University Press, 2014. — 248 p. Long considered the masters of counterinsurgency, the British military encountered significant problems in Iraq and Afghanistan when confronted with insurgent violence. In their effort to apply the principles and doctrines of past campaigns, they failed to prevent Basra and Helmand from descending into lawlessness, criminality, and...
Faber and Faber Ltd., 1992. — 265 p. In this book, defence specialist and war correspondent Mark Urban explores covert operations against the IRA from the mid-1970s to the Loughgall shooting in 1987. Drawing on interviews with people who have served at the heart of intelligence and special operations in Ulster, as well as with members of paramilitary groups, this book examines the...
Faber and Faber, 2001. — 354 p. This work gives a compelling account of the officer who waged the intelligence battle against Napoleon's army, a forerunner to the great code-breakers of the 20th century. The French army, during the Peninsular War, used a code of unrivalled complexity - the "Great Paris Cipher". Major George Scovell used a network of Spanish guerillas to capture...
Frontline Books, 2018. — 255 p. — ISBN-10 1526734168, ISBN-13 978-1526734167. Ernest Van Maurik, known to all simply as Van, joined the illustrious Artists Rifles regiment in the Territorial Army in 1936, but when war broke out he was commissioned into the Wiltshire Regiment. In the summer of 1940 the regiment was posted at Folkestone to defend the South Coast in the event of...
Yale University Press, 2021. — 328 p. The full story of the thirty-nine female SOE agents who went undercover in France. Formed in 1940, Special Operations Executive was to coordinate Resistance work overseas. The organization’s F section sent more than four hundred agents into France, thirty-nine of whom were women. But while some are widely known—Violette Szabo, Odette...
Pen and Sword Military, 2011. — 256 p. The Anglo-Zulu War may be best remembered for the military blundering that led to the astonishing British defeat at Isandlwana, but as Stephen Wade shows in this book, military action throughout the war was supplemented by the actions of spies and explorers in the field, and was often heavily influenced by the decisions made by diplomats....
Cornell University Press, 2019. — 336 p. Wagner crafts a superb story of espionage and clandestine policy-making, showing how the British pitted individual communities against each other at particular times, and why. Britain’s Wartime Policies: Perceptions of Jewish Power and Arab Conspiracy. Intelligence, Policy, and the Emerging Modern Middle East.
Pen and Sword, 2014. — 352 p. During the early 1960s the Cold War reached its climax. Britain's dwindling power in the Middle East was under siege from Arab nationalism, the Communist bloc and from American designs in the region. Aden, with its strategic military base and old Protectorate buffer zone, was soon the main battleground. The 1962 Egyptian-inspired coup in the...
The History Press, 2010. — 335 p. Poland was the 'tripwire' that brought Britain in the Second World War but neither Britain, nor Poland's older ally, France, had the material means to prevent Poland being overrun. The broadcast, 'Poland is no longer alone' had a distinctly hollow ring. During the next four years the Polish Government in exile and armed forces made a...
Amberley, 2015. — 238 p. Espionage is one of the world’s oldest professions, and it played an integral role in Allied successes and failures during the Second World War. Equal to men in both their bravery and in the sacrifices they made, the female undercover operatives of the Second World War deserve to have their incredible stories told. The Women Who Spied for Britain traces...
Milo Books, 2018. — 405 p. Drug War is a landmark modern history: the first ever full account of the United Kingdom’s fight against the illegal importation of drugs. Packed with remarkable revelations and thrilling anecdotes, it tells for the first time the story of the high-level traffickers who drugged Britain, and the secretive organisation that tried to stop them: the...
Abrams Press, 2014. — 589 p. The renowned espionage historian offers “a gripping account of British intelligence during the last days of empire. Drawing on a wealth of newly declassified records and hitherto overlooked personal papers, intelligence expert Calder Walton offers a compelling and authoritative history of Britain’s espionage activities after World War II. A major...
Cornell University Press, 1986. — 304 p. How realistically did the British government assess the threat from Nazi Germany during the 1930s? How accurate was British intelligence's understanding of Hitler's aims and Germany's military and industrial capabilities? In The Ultimate Enemy, Wesley K. Wark catalogues the many mis-perceptions about Nazi Germany that were often fostered...
Pen and Sword Books, 1990. — 224 p. The story of the shadowy special reconnaissance unit whose intelligence helped the Allies win World War II. It operated in Italy, Sicily, Austria, France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany. It was at Dieppe with the Commandos, in France with the SAS, at Arnhem with Airborne, and in Germany until the surrender. Phantom—aka GHQ Liaison Regiment—was...
Frontline Books, 2013. — 229 p. An intriguing page-turning and personal account of that most secretive of wartime institutions, Bletchley Park, and of the often eccentric people who helped to win the war. Bletchley Park, or 'Station X', was home to the most famous code breakers of the Second World War. The 19th-century mansion was the key center for cracking German, Italian and...
Casemate Publishers, 2020. — 257 p. Few people are as uniquely well equipped as Anthony Wells to write an account of these close and special relationships. His penetrating and informed analysis offers us all hope for the continuance of an alliance which makes the world a safer place. The Naval Review UK-US intelligence and the wider Five Eyes community of Canada, Australia and...
Frontline Books, 2016. — 224 p. On the night of 5/6 June 1944, D-Day, a Lockheed Hudson dropped a small group of parachutists into the mountainous Morvan area of central France. Their mission was to operate as an advance reconnaissance party 400 miles behind the German lines and to make contact with the French Resistance. One of the team, later to become its commander, was Ian...
Frontline Books, 2020. — 248 p. With the SAS: Across the Rhine is the story of the latter part of Captain Ian Wellsted’s military career with the Special Air Service, the first part of which was detailed in his well-received SAS: With the Maquis. This is a very personal account, revealing the many emotional as well as physical strains placed upon men in the fighting line. The...
The Scarecrow Press, 2005. — 716 p. Launches a new series of Historical Dictionaries of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence that examines the shadowy world of spies - providing the most detailed, comprehensive, and accurate information available on a topic that has proved notoriously difficult to research. This Dictionary offers insight into the history and operations of British...
Routledge, 2005. — 348 p. This is the first volume of Nigel West's acclaimed presentation of these fascinating diaries from the heart of Britain's Second World War intelligence operations. WALLFLOWERS is the codename given to one of the Security Service's most treasured possessions, the daily journal dictated from August 1939 to June 1945 by MI5's Director of Counter Espionage,...
Routledge, 2009. — 336 p. The daily journal dictated from August 1939 to June 1945 by MI5's Director of Counter-Espionage, Guy Liddell, to his secretary, Margo Huggins. The document was considered so highly classified that it was retained in the safe of successive Directors-General, and special permission was required to read it. Liddell was one of three brothers who all won...
Naval Institute Press, 2006. — 320 p. This is the only history that exists of the famed British secret intelligence agency, MI6, the service responsible for gathering intelligence overseas. Chapters focus on each of the reigning MI6 chiefs, beginning with Sir Mansfield Cumming, and describe clandestine operations that took place during each chief's tenure through 2004. Made...
The History Press, 2018. — 464 p. — ISBN: 978-0-750985-49-6. World War II saw the role of espionage, secret agents, and spy services increase exponentially as the world was thrown into a conflict quite unlike any that had gone before it. At this time, no one in government was really aware of what MI5 and its brethren did. But with Churchill at the country’s helm, it was decided...
Frontline Book, 2018. — 288 p. Guy Liddell was the Director of MI5’s counter-espionage B Division throughout the Second World War, during which he wrote a confidential personal diary. Within its pages details of virtually every important event that had any intelligence significance during the conflict were recorded. Those recently declassified diaries, which were edited by...
Pen and Sword Books, 2020. — 272 p. Signal intelligence is the most secret, and most misunderstood, weapon in the modern espionage arsenal. As a reliable source of information, it is unequaled, which is why Government Communications Headquarters, almost universally known as GCHQ, is several times larger than the two smaller, but more familiar, organizations, MI5 and MI6....
Routledge, 2005. — 336 p. MI5’s dramatic interception of secret signals to Moscow from a hidden base in Wimbledon uncovered the true extent of Soviet espionage in Britain. Intelligence expert Nigel West reveals how MASK, the codename for one of the most secretive sources ever run by British intelligence, enabled Stanley Baldwin and his cabinet to monitor the activities of the...
Biteback, 2014. — 464 p. In 1921, MI5 commissioned a comprehensive, top-secret review of the organisation's operations during the First World War. Never intended for circulation outside of the government, all seven volumes of this fascinating and unique document remained locked away in MI5's registry - until now. Recently declassified and published here for the first time, MI5 in...
Stein and Day, 1982. — 336 p. MI5 is arguably the most secret and misunderstood of all the British government departments. Its enigmatic title – much more than its proper name, the Security Service – stands in the public mind for the dark world of the secret services in general. In reality it has a very specific brief: counterintelligence. Its object is to combat espionage and...
Pen and Sword Books, 2020. — 312 p. The author of GCHG describes covert missions that are worthy of spy fiction, but the entire book is utterly fascinating and informative. Written by the renowned expert Nigel West, this book exposes the operations of Britain’s overseas intelligence-gathering organization, the famed Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and traces its origins back...
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983. — 444 p. Acknowledgements. Abbreviations. The Wartime Organization of the Secret Intelligence Service. Part: 1909-1940. Early Days: 1909-14. The Great War: 1914-18. Sir Mansfield Cumming: 1918-23. Hugh Sinclair: 1924-38. Anschluss: 1938-9. Stewart Menzies: 1939. War: 1940. Part: 1940-1945. European Developments: 1940. Overseas Developments....
W. Morrow, 1989. — 254 р. Written by an acknowledged expert in the intelligence field, Molehunt is an intriguing story of how MI5 tried to pinpoint the moles within the inner sanctum of British counterintelligence. 8 pages of photos.
Scarecrow Press, 2009. — 618 p. — (The A to Z Guide Series). The A to Z of British Intelligence offers insight into the history and operations of British Intelligence through its more than 1,800 entries, covering a vast and varied cast of characters: the spies and their handlers, the moles and defectors, the political leaders, the top brass, the techniques and jargon, and the many...
Select Magazines, 1984. — 316 p. Nigel West is a pen name for Rupert Allason, who has written quite a number of books on espionage. A member of parliament from 1987-1997, he has lectured at both the CIA and, ironically, the KGB. If you weren't an adult during the years that the Cambridge Five spy ring was seeping into the headlines, this book will send you off to Wikipedia...
Westintel Research Ltd, 1988. — 216 p. The British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) has been in continuous existence, under various guises, since its inception on 1 October 1909. Originally it was designated the Foreign Section of the Secret Service Bureau, but during the First World War'it adopted the military intelligence cover of MI 1. Thereafter it became known as MI6, and...
Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. — 352 p. During World War II, the British formed a secret division, the 'SOE' or Special Operations Executive, in order to support resistance organisations in occupied Europe. It also engaged in 'targeted killing' - the assassination of enemy political and military leaders. The unit is famous for equipping its agents with tools for use behind enemy...
Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. — 272 p. During World War II, the British formed a secret division, the 'SOE' or Special Operations Executive, in order to support resistance organisations in occupied Europe. It also engaged in 'targeted killing' - the assassination of enemy political and military leaders. The unit is famous for equipping its agents with tools for use behind enemy...
Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. — 272 p. This is the first detailed study of Britain's open source intelligence (OSINT) operations during the Second World War, showing how accurate and influential OSINT could be and ultimately how those who analysed this intelligence would shape British post-war policy towards the Soviet Union. Following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June...
Pen and Sword History, 2016. — 224 p. Sue Wilkes uncovers the hidden histories of Regency spies and the men they hunted. Eavesdrop on the secret meetings of Britain's underground political societies of the 1790s and early 1800s. Discover the true stories behind the riots, rebellions, and treason trials in late Georgian Britain.Regency Spies explores the plots, intrigues and...
Pen and Sword Military, 2010. — 254 p. General Colin Gubbins was in charge of SOE during World War Two. This is the first biography of a man who was destined to live his life in the shadows. A biography of General Colin Gubbins, who was in charge of SOE during World War II. Gubbins was destined, by the nature of his profession, to live a secretive life, and the book, which...
I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2002. — 263 p. The undercover campaign of the Special Operations Executive in the Balkans during World War II was of great significance to the Allies. The campaign involved constant movement and activity, severe hardship and privation, and ever-present danger from the Axis troops as the SOE established relations with partisan forces and sought to establish...
Pen and Sword, 2009. — 224 p. For most people, climbing a ladder to clear the gutters is a challenge. Jack Williams and his colleagues in the specialist signals unit supporting the SAS in Northern Ireland had to climb towers and maintain vital communications - often in full view and under fire from terrorists. This is the gripping insider story of the tension, fear and...
Leo Cooper, 2009. — 224 p. For most people, climbing a ladder to clear the gutters is a challenge. Jack Williams and his colleagues in the specialist signals unit supporting the SAS in Northern Ireland had to climb towers and maintain vital communications - often in full view and under fire from terrorists. This is the gripping insider story of the tension, fear and comradeship...
Austin Macauley Publishers, 2019. — 210 p. A testimonial to Bill Tutte and his codebreaking discovery in 1942 at Bletchley Park. Bill Tutte was a young, gauche PhD student, yet his remarkable breakthrough and continuing endeavour against a German cipher machine more complex than Enigma led to the development of the world's first programmable computer, Colossus. Colossus allowed...
McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022. — 252 p. In the mid-nineteenth century a group of Irish revolutionaries, known as the Fenians, set out to destroy Britain's North American empire. Between 1866 and 1871 they launched a series of armed raids into Canadian territory. In Canadian Spy Story David Wilson takes readers into a dark and dangerous world of betrayal and deception,...
McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022. — 252 p. In the mid-nineteenth century a group of Irish revolutionaries, known as the Fenians, set out to destroy Britain's North American empire. Between 1866 and 1871 they launched a series of armed raids into Canadian territory. In Canadian Spy Story David Wilson takes readers into a dark and dangerous world of betrayal and deception,...
Biteback Publishing, 2015. — 432 p. Initially tasked with combatting the threat of Irish republican terrorists in the reign of Queen Victoria, the Metropolitan Police Special Branch went on to play a major role in the defence of the realm for over 120 years. Over time, the Branch, as it came to be known, assumed a much wider role, and was held responsible for monitoring the...
Casemate Publishers, 2011. — 304 p. This remarkable story of Jim Almonds (Gentleman Jim) is set in wartime England, the western desert, Italy and France, and recounts his formative role in the birth of the SAS. Against a dramatic background of love, courage and high-risk adventure, it captures for the first time the real spirit of the young soldiers in the newly emerging...
Osprey Publishing, 2010. — 408 p. No publicity, no media. We move in silently, do our job, and melt away into the background. If you have the stamina, the willpower and the guts, we’ll welcome you with open arms and you one of us. And if you haven’t, then it’s been very nice knowing you. Eighteen years in the SAS saw Pete Winner, codenamed Soldier ‘I’, survive the savage battle...
Osprey Publishing, 2010. — 408 p. No publicity, no media. We move in silently, do our job, and melt away into the background. If you have the stamina, the willpower and the guts, we’ll welcome you with open arms and you one of us. And if you haven’t, then it’s been very nice knowing you. Eighteen years in the SAS saw Pete Winner, codenamed Soldier ‘I’, survive the savage battle...
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012. — 432 p. Published for the very first time, the top secret report Some Weaknesses in German Strategy and Organisation, 1933-1945 was prepared by Whitehall's highest intelligence body, the Joint Intelligence Committee, and presented to Britain's Chiefs of Staff in 1946 to 'set down certain aspects of the War whilst there are still sources available...
Casemate, 2021. — 225 p. The official document Amphibious Warfare Handbook No. 10a: The Organisation, Employment and Training of Commandos is a unique piece of postwar Royal Marines Commando doctrine, never before published, or quoted at length. Prepared in 1951 at the height of the Korean War by the Chief of Amphibious Warfare and the Commandant General Royal Marines, this...
Pen and Sword, 2017. — 295 p. This personal biography reveals the incredible true story of the British secret agent who posed as a Nazi spy during WWII. With Britain braced for a German invasion, MI5 recruited Walter Dicketts, a former officer of the Royal Naval Air Force—and a known con artist—as a double agent. Code-named Celery, Dicketts was sent to Lisbon with the mission...
Vintage Books, 2011. — 275 p. Duke Wolff was a flawless specimen of the American clubman -- a product of Yale and the spy agent of OSS, a one-time fighter pilot turned aviation engineer. Duke Wolff was a failure who flunked out of a series of undistinguished schools, was passed up for military service, and supported himself with desperately improvised scams, exploiting...
Casemate Publishers, 2012. — 311 p. In 2004, the world was first introduced to The Filthy Thirteen, a book describing the most notorious squad of fighting men in the 101st Airborne Division—and the inspiration for the movie The Dirty Dozen. Now, Jack Womer—one of the squad’s integral members and probably its best soldier—delivers his long-awaited memoir. Originally a member of...
Routledge, 2006. — 225 p. This fascinating new collection of essays on Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) explores the ‘non-military’ aspects of British special operations in the Second World War. It details how SOE was established in the summer of 1940 to ‘set Europe ablaze’, as Churchill memorably put it. This was a task it was meant to achieve by detonating popular...
Ebury Press, 2016. — 352 p. While battalions hunkered down in the mud of western France, anti-aircraft guns took aim at zeppelins floating over the capital, and Atlantic convoys tried desperately to evade German U-boats, another, more secret battle was underway. Down gloomy Whitehall corridors a team of eccentric and pioneering codebreakers were fighting for information that...
Pen and Sword Books, 2020. — 192 p. When the military aspect of the Second World War is discussed, especially regarding how the war was won, people tend to talk about, Winston Churchill, D-Day, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the Dam Busters, the Allied bombing of German cities, Montgomery and the North Africa campaign, etc. However, there is one aspect, rarely...
Pen and Sword Military, 2022. — 217 р. The raid on St Nazaire has gone down in history as one of the most daring commando raids of all time. Given the code name of Operation Chariot, it took place in the early hours of Saturday, 28 March 1942, and was a joint undertaking by the Royal Navy and British Commando units. The port at St Nazaire, which sits on the Loire estuary and...
Naval Institute Press, 2014. — 352 p. In 1943 the U.S. Army Air Forces created what would become the Air Commandos, a unit that marked a milestone in tactical operations in support of British ground forces invading Burma. William T. Y'Blood tells the story of how these daring American aviators trained and went into combat using unconventional hit-and-run tactics to confuse the...
Перевод с французского В. Крюков. — Киев: 2007. — 289 с. Оригинал: Hector Charles Bywater and Hubert Cecil Ferraby «Strange Intelligence. Memoirs of Naval Secret Service». Constable, London, 1931. Перевод с французского издания: «Intelligence Service. Souvenirs du Service Secret de lґAmirautй Britannique», Payot, Paris, 1932 (перевод на французский язык капитана третьего ранга...
Пер. с англ. С.Т. Логинова.— М.: Прогресс, 1981. — 334 с. Редакция и предисловие к русскому изданию контр-адмирала Б.Д. Яшина. Предлагаемая вниманию читателей книга, написанная английским автором и опубликованная в Лондоне в 1977 г., дополняет широкий и известный в СССР перечень изданных на Западе и частично переведенных на русский язык книг, относящихся к истории Второй мировой...
Оригинал: Beesly P., Very Special Intelligence. The Story of the Admiralty's Operational Intelligence Centre 1939-1945. — London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977 г. Пер. с англ. С.Т. Логинова.— М.: Прогресс, 1981. — 334 с. Редакция и предисловие к русскому изданию контр-адмирала, доцента, канд. военно-морских наук Б.Д. Яшина. Предлагаемая вниманию советских читателей книга «Разведка особого...
Москва: Политиздат, 1987. — 237 с. Террористические акты, подкуп, шантаж, связь с преступным миром — вот далеко не полный перечень средств из арсенала «рыцарей плаща и кинжала» британских спецслужб. В вышедшей в Ирландии книге местные журналисты на большом фактическом материале разоблачают тайные операции британской разведки после второй мировой войны — внедрение агентуры в...
Москва: Политиздат, 1987. — 237 с. Террористические акты, подкуп, шантаж, связь с преступным миром — вот далеко не полный перечень средств из арсенала «рыцарей плаща и кинжала» британских спецслужб. В вышедшей в Ирландии книге местные журналисты на большом фактическом материале разоблачают тайные операции британской разведки после второй мировой войны — внедрение агентуры в...
Orion Publishing, 2013. — 287 с. — ISBN 140-9-129-020. Мемуары капитана парашютно-десантного полка Дэвида Блейкли об его участии в составе взвода Следопытов в Иракской кампании 2003 года Первый в деле — официальный девиз одного из самых маленьких и секретных подразделений британской армии, взвода следопытов 16-й воздушно-штурмовой бригады. Неофициально, они незаконнорожденные...
Orion Publishing, 2013. — 287 с. — ISBN 140-9-129-020. Мемуары капитана парашютно-десантного полка Дэвида Блейкли об его участии в составе взвода Следопытов в Иракской кампании 2003 года Первый в деле — официальный девиз одного из самых маленьких и секретных подразделений британской армии, взвода следопытов 16-й воздушно-штурмовой бригады. Неофициально, они незаконнорожденные...
Перевод с французского. — Москва: Воениздат НКО СССР, 1938. — 13 с. В книге рассказывается о похищении германского дипломатического кода, с помощью которого английская контрразведка сумела расшифровать пресловутые телеграммы германского правительства, подготовлявшего нападение на США в мировую войну 1914–1918 годов, и о деятельности одного из французских агентов секретной...
М.: Политиздат, 1965. — 246 с. 27 мая 1942 г. в Праге был убит гитлеровский гаулейтер Чехословакии Рейнгард Гейдрих. Кем и как готовилось покушение на Гейдриха? Кто подстерегал его автомашину с автоматом и бомбой в руках? Какую роль играл Гейдрих в гитлеровском рейхе? Как переплелись судьбы двух безвестных ротмистров Кубиша и Габчика, жителей селения Лидице и тысяч участников...
М.: Политиздат, 1965. — 246 с. 27 мая 1942 г. в Праге был убит гитлеровский гаулейтер Чехословакии Рейнгард Гейдрих. Кем и как готовилось покушение на Гейдриха? Кто подстерегал его автомашину с автоматом и бомбой в руках? Какую роль играл Гейдрих в гитлеровском рейхе? Как переплелись судьбы двух безвестных ротмистров Кубиша и Габчика, жителей селения Лидице и тысяч участников...
Любительский перевод. — С оригинала: Palgrave Macmilligan, 2016. — 257 c. Это первая монография, в которой исследуется деятельность SОЕ и МИ-6 на протяжении всей 2 Мировой войны в Румынии . В британском военном министерстве обычно считали, что после оккупации Гитлером Австрии в марте 1938 года Германия будет стремиться навязать свою волю Юго-Восточной Европе, прежде чем...
М.: Международные отношения, 1987. — 304 с. — ISBN 5-7133-0145-1. Книга посвящена событиям второй мировой войны. В форме воспоминаний свидетелей в ней рассказывается о том, как чехословацкие патриоты и участники Сопротивления, подготовили и осуществили операцию против гитлеровского наместника в «протекторате Чехия и Моравия» Рейнхарда Гейдриха, проводившего в ряде стран...
М.: Международные отношения, 1987. — 304 с. — ISBN 5-7133-0145-1. Книга посвящена событиям второй мировой войны. В форме воспоминаний свидетелей в ней рассказывается о том, как чехословацкие патриоты и участники Сопротивления, подготовили и осуществили операцию против гитлеровского наместника в «протекторате Чехия и Моравия» Рейнхарда Гейдриха, проводившего в ряде стран...
М.: Международные отношения, 1987. — 304 с. — ISBN 5-7133-0145-1. Книга посвящена событиям второй мировой войны. В форме воспоминаний свидетелей в ней рассказывается о том, как чехословацкие патриоты и участники Сопротивления, подготовили и осуществили операцию против гитлеровского наместника в «протекторате Чехия и Моравия» Рейнхарда Гейдриха, проводившего в ряде стран...
М.: Алгоритм, 2017. — 416 с. — (Разведка и контрразведка). — ISBN: 978-5-906979-97-1. Английского разведчика Сиднея Рейли, который в первой четверти XX века действовал в России, на Дальнем и Ближнем Востоке, одни называют "королем шпионов", а другие - великим авантюристом. Кем же на самом деле был один из прототипов Джеймса Бонда? Почему он скрывал подробности своей биографии?...
М.: Алгоритм, 2017. — 416 с. — (Разведка и контрразведка). — ISBN: 978-5-906979-97-1. Английского разведчика Сиднея Рейли, который в первой четверти XX века действовал в России, на Дальнем и Ближнем Востоке, одни называют "королем шпионов", а другие - великим авантюристом. Кем же на самом деле был один из прототипов Джеймса Бонда? Почему он скрывал подробности своей биографии?...
М.: Алгоритм, 2017. — 416 с. — (Разведка и контрразведка). — ISBN: 978-5-906979-97-1. Английского разведчика Сиднея Рейли, который в первой четверти XX века действовал в России, на Дальнем и Ближнем Востоке, одни называют "королем шпионов", а другие - великим авантюристом. Кем же на самом деле был один из прототипов Джеймса Бонда? Почему он скрывал подробности своей биографии?...
М.: Военное издательство Министерства обороны СССР, 1959. — 157 с. Книга английского журналиста Е. Х. Кукриджа посвящена истории борьбы английской контрразведки против нацистского шпионажа в период второй мировой войны. Использован обширный фактический и документальный материал. Борьба английских контрразведчиков против немецких шпионов в Англии, деятельность гитлеровской...
М.: Военное издательство Министерства обороны СССР, 1959. — 157 с.
Книга английского журналиста Е. Х. Кукриджа посвящена истории борьбы английской контрразведки против нацистского шпионажа в период второй мировой войны. Использован обширный фактический и документальный материал. Борьба английских контрразведчиков против немецких шпионов в Англии, деятельность гитлеровской...
М.: Военное издательство Министерства обороны СССР, 1959. — 157 с. Книга английского журналиста Е. Х. Кукриджа посвящена истории борьбы английской контрразведки против нацистского шпионажа в период второй мировой войны. Использован обширный фактический и документальный материал. Борьба английских контрразведчиков против немецких шпионов в Англии, деятельность гитлеровской...
Книга английского журналиста Эдварда Кукриджа посвящена истории созданной в 1940 году британской секретной спецслужбы. Организация агентурных сетей, обучение агентов, контакты с группами Сопротивления на территории Франции, Голландии, Дании, Норвегии и других европейских стран, диверсии, саботаж – вот далеко не полный перечень деятельности Управления специальных операций (SOE).
Лимбус Пресс, Издательство К. Тублина, 2020. — 527 c. Документальная книга Клэр Малли «Шпионаж и любовь» рассказывает историю одной удивительной женщины – авантюрную историю шпионских закулисных интриг, разворачивающуюся на фоне величайших страданий, в которые ввергла народы Европы нацистская Германия. Дочь польского графа и наследницы еврейского банкирского дома Кристина...
Москва: Алисторус, 2024. — 335 с. — (Искусство разведки) — ISBN 978-5-00222-479-1. В 1941 года французский инженер Мишель Оллар (1898–1993) тайно пересек франко-швейцарскую границу и предложил свои услуги британскому атташе — сотруднику английской разведки. Он организовал шпионскую группу Reseau AGIR. Добываемая ей информация была высочайшего качества. Оллар стал считаться...
Москва: Алисторус, 2024. — 335 с. — (Искусство разведки) — ISBN 978-5-00222-479-1. В 1941 года французский инженер Мишель Оллар (1898–1993) тайно пересек франко-швейцарскую границу и предложил свои услуги британскому атташе — сотруднику английской разведки. Он организовал шпионскую группу Reseau AGIR. Добываемая ей информация была высочайшего качества. Оллар стал считаться...
М.: Родина, 2024. — 335 с.: ил. — (Искусство разведки). — ISBN 978-5-00222-479-1. В 1941 года французский инженер Мишель Оллар (1898–1993) тайно пересек франко-швейцарскую границу и предложил свои услуги британскому атташе — сотруднику английской разведки. Он организовал шпионскую группу Reseau AGIR. Добываемая ей информация была высочайшего качества. Оллар стал считаться одним...
М.: Родина, 2024. — 335 с.: ил. — (Искусство разведки). — ISBN 978-5-00222-479-1. В 1941 года французский инженер Мишель Оллар (1898–1993) тайно пересек франко-швейцарскую границу и предложил свои услуги британскому атташе — сотруднику английской разведки. Он организовал шпионскую группу Reseau AGIR. Добываемая ей информация была высочайшего качества. Оллар стал считаться одним...
Москва: Воениздат, 1938. — 176 с. Воспоминания английского офицера-разведчика, выполнявшего в 1914-1918 гг. сложнейшие задания английской разведки по ту сторону фронта. Он был в ближайшем окружении высшего немецкого командования. Первая часть мемуаров рассказывает о проведенном им диверсионном акте, вторая о службе в качестве немецкого офицера сначала в разведывательном, а...
М.: Воениздат, 1938. — 176 с. Воспоминания английского офицера-разведчика, выполнявшего в 1914-1918 гг. сложнейшие задания английской разведки по ту сторону фронта. Он был в ближайшем окружении высшего немецкого командования. Первая часть мемуаров рассказывает о проведенном им диверсионном акте, вторая о службе в качестве немецкого офицера сначала в разведывательном, а потом и...
М. : Родина, 2022. — 350 с. — ISBN 978-5-00180-781-0. Апрель 56-го. Первый после смерти Сталина визит кремлевского руководства на Запад, в Англию. В компании Никиты Хрущева и Николая Булганина – отец советской атомной бомбы академик Игорь Курчатов и создатель стратегической авиации страны Андрей Туполев. КГБ получает агентурную информацию о готовящейся секретной операции...
М. : Родина, 2022. — 350 с. — ISBN 978-5-00180-781-0. Апрель 56-го. Первый после смерти Сталина визит кремлевского руководства на Запад, в Англию. В компании Никиты Хрущева и Николая Булганина – отец советской атомной бомбы академик Игорь Курчатов и создатель стратегической авиации страны Андрей Туполев. КГБ получает агентурную информацию о готовящейся секретной операции...
М. : Родина, 2022. — 350 с. — ISBN 978-5-00180-781-0. Апрель 56-го. Первый после смерти Сталина визит кремлевского руководства на Запад, в Англию. В компании Никиты Хрущева и Николая Булганина – отец советской атомной бомбы академик Игорь Курчатов и создатель стратегической авиации страны Андрей Туполев. КГБ получает агентурную информацию о готовящейся секретной операции...
М. : Родина, 2022. — 350 с. — (Документальный триллер). — ISBN 978-5-00180-781-0. Апрель 56-го. Первый после смерти Сталина визит кремлевского руководства на Запад, в Англию. В компании Никиты Хрущева и Николая Булганина – отец советской атомной бомбы академик Игорь Курчатов и создатель стратегической авиации страны Андрей Туполев. КГБ получает агентурную информацию о...
Самиздат, 2021. — 135 с. Книга рассказывает о подготовке снайперов САС Великобритании. Это десятая книга из серии "Школа специальной войны". Введение Критерии отбора личного состава Обязанности снайпера и наблюдателя Техника ведения огня снайперской командой Вооружение Боеприпасы Прицельные приспособления снайпера Дополнительное снаряжение Средства связи Основы меткой стрельбы...
Самиздат, 2021. — 135 с. Книга рассказывает о подготовке снайперов САС Великобритании. Это десятая книга из серии "Школа специальной войны". Введение Критерии отбора личного состава Обязанности снайпера и наблюдателя Техника ведения огня снайперской командой Вооружение Боеприпасы Прицельные приспособления снайпера Дополнительное снаряжение Средства связи Основы меткой стрельбы...
Самиздат, 2021. — 135 с. Книга рассказывает о подготовке снайперов САС Великобритании. Это десятая книга из серии "Школа специальной войны". Введение Критерии отбора личного состава Обязанности снайпера и наблюдателя Техника ведения огня снайперской командой Вооружение Боеприпасы Прицельные приспособления снайпера Дополнительное снаряжение Средства связи Основы меткой стрельбы...
М.: Алисторус, 2016. — 225 с. — ISBN 978-5-04-005328-5. История британских спецслужб – тема неисчерпаемая, а взаимосвязь последних с судьбой и деятельностью британских политиков с репутацией мировых лидеров (к которым, бесспорно, относится и У. Черчилля) – еще и познавательна и поучительна. Для читателя этой книги быть может «крамольными» предстанут рассуждения английских...
М.: Международные отношения, 1967. — 312 с. (отсутствуют стр. 60-61, 64-65). Книга М. Хайда «Комната 3603» о деятельности Английской службы координации безопасности в Нью-Йорке. Глава этой службы Вильям С. Стефенсон, «тихий канадец» - колоритная личность в системе английских разведывательных служб. Человек, близкий к Черчиллю и лорду Бивербруку, крупный и удачливый...
Пер. с англ. — М.: Международные отношения, 1967. — 314 с. В публикациях, посвященных работе разведок, немалое место на западном книжном рынке занимают издания авторов, которые имеют или имели отношение к деятельности секретных служб. Сюда относятся различного рода воспоминания или обработанные рассказы, а иногда и исследования разведчиков и контрразведчиков, вроде «Искусство...
Любительский перевод. London: Cassell Military, 2012. — ISBN: 978-0304365548. «Браво-два-ноль» — самая известная операция в истории британского спецназа. Она состоялась в январе 1991 года и получила большую известность благодаря книгам, изданным двумя участниками событий. Это «Браво-два-ноль» (Bravo Two Zero) побывавшего в плену командира патруля, который издался под...
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