The Spies Who Changed the Century: A Choral History of Cold War Intelligence
HISTORY 360
Sep 2026 · M. Muñoz
Ebook
184
Pages
Tools
info
family_home
Eligible
info
About this ebook
The Cold War was a war that, for the most part, was never fought—no army of the United States ever met an army of the Soviet Union on a European battlefield. And yet for nearly half a century the two superpowers waged an unrelenting struggle in another medium entirely: in safe houses and embassies, in the dead-drops under park benches and the decrypts of intercepted cables, in the minds of men and women who lived double lives and often died for secrets. The Spies Who Changed the Century tells the history of the Cold War through that struggle. Conceived as a choral history rather than a single biography, across eighteen chapters a great cast moves through the shadows: the Cambridge Five, who served Moscow from the heart of the British establishment; the atomic spies—Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, the young prodigy Theodore Hall—who handed the Soviet Union the bomb; the colonels Penkovsky and Gordievsky, whose intelligence may twice have helped keep a nuclear war from beginning; the moles Ames and Hanssen, who burrowed into the CIA and the FBI and sent loyal agents to their deaths; the codebreakers of Venona, the pilots of the U-2, the defectors who poisoned their own services with suspicion, and the women the histories too often left in the margins. Written with the pace of a nonfiction thriller but resting on declassified files, memoirs, and the verdicts of historians, it is always alert to the gray zones, moral and epistemic, that define this subject—where much of what is ‘known’ is contested, and where the hardest questions about loyalty, betrayal, and the price of secrecy are held open rather than falsely resolved. To follow the spies is to follow the century itself, from its hidden side.
The Cold War was a war that, for the most part, was never fought—no army of the United States ever met an army of the Soviet Union on a European battlefield. And yet for nearly half a century the two superpowers waged an unrelenting struggle in another medium entirely: in safe houses and embassie...
Rate this ebook
Tell us what you think.
Reading information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.
