Book Lists

Thousands of Nazis -- from concentration camp guards to high-level officers in the Third Reich -- came to the United States after World War II and quietly settled into new lives. With scant scrutiny, many gained entry on their own as self-styled war "refugees," their pasts easily disguised and their war crimes soon forgotten. But some had help and protection from the U.S. government. The CIA, the FBI, and the military all put Hitler's minions to work as spies, intelligence assets, and leading scientists and engineers, whitewashing their histories. For the first time, once-secret government records and interviews tell the full story not only of the Nazi scientists brought to America, but of the German spies and con men who followed them and lived for decades as ordinary citizens.

A joint biography of John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, who led the United States into foreign adventures that decisively shaped today's world as the Cold War was at its peak.

Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security. For sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Now Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA, based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence.

What happens when German spies collaborate to unleash a campaign of terror upon America at the start of World War I? Dark Invasion tells the remarkable true story of Tom Tunney and his pivotal role in discovering, and delivering to justice, a ruthless ring of German terrorists determined to annihilate the United States.

Recounts the story of the six double agents--Bronx, Brutus, Treasure, Tricycle, Garbo, and a shadowy sixth spy whose heroic sacrifice is revealed here for the first time--who would weave a web of deception so intricate that it ensnared Hitler's army and helped to carry thousands of troops across the Channel in safety on 6 June 1944, D-Day.

Details how the U.S. government embarked on a covert operation to recruit and employ Nazi scientists in the years following World War II in an effort to prevent their knowledge and expertise from falling into the hands of the Soviet Union.

Here is the fascinating story of the four thousand women who made up one-fifth of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, told by one of their own.

The never-before-told story of four real-life women who risked everything to take on a life of espionage during the Civil War.

The book pieces together how Coco Chanel became a German intelligence operative; how and why she was enlisted in a number of spy missions; how she escaped arrest in France after the war, despite her activities being known to the Gaullist intelligence network; how she fled to Switzerland for a nine-year exile with her lover Dincklage. And how, despite the French court's opening a case concerning Chanel's espionage activities during the war, she was able to return to Paris at age seventy and triumphantly resurrect and reinvent herself--and rebuild what has become the iconic House of Chanel.

A counterterrorism spy describes his leadership of the campaign that routed al Qaeda and the Taliban in the weeks after the September 11 attacks, offering insight into the ways in which the Afghanistan campaign changed American warfare.