The best books about Russian espionage

There is no better spy yarn than the story of Kim Philby—the Cambridge-educated senior British intelligence official who for decades betrayed his colleagues by running a spy ring that stole reams of sensitive secrets for the Soviet Union. The ability of Philby to hoodwink British and U.S. counter-intelligence sleuths is amazing and Macintyre tells the story brilliantly. My favorite is his accounts of Philby’s booze-filled lunches with James Jesus Angleton of the CIA in which America’s premier mole hunter divulged all sorts of classified secrets to his British counterpart, resulting in anti-Communist guerillas being rolled up by the Soviets throughout Eastern Europe. When Angleton learned the truth, he turned into a paranoid fanatic convinced there were moles under every bed, resulting in a years-long obsession that terrorized the CIA.

This classic novel is a psychological masterpiece—a thinly veiled fictional account of Stalin’s purges, told through the eyes of a longtime loyal Bolshevik, Rubashov, who under relentless interrogation finally confesses his supposed “crimes,” and point the finger at alleged collaborators, thereby placing the demands of the Party above his personal dignity and the truth. Who prompts a proud man to act in such an abject fashion? It is a book that brilliantly anticipates George Orwell’s better-known 1984, but the themes are eerily similar. 

For a generation of liberals and progressives, it was an article of faith that Alger Hiss, a Harvard-educated New Dealer who accompanied Franklin Roosevelt to Yalta, was railroaded by the McCarthyite tactics of the anti-Communist right when was accused – and convicted—about his past as a Communist spy. But Weinstein, who started out his book as a Hiss sympathizer, conducted a thoroughgoing re-evaluation of one of the Cold War’s most celebrated trials and concluded, on the basis of a mountain of evidence, that Hiss was in fact guilty as charged. I devoured this book when it first came out because it stands as a case study of the need to confront hard facts even when they are politically inconvenient. 

No book exposed the horrors of Josef Stalin’s purges more graphically and with greater power than Robert Conquest’s epic, The Great Terror. The book chronicled how a paranoid Stalin, convinced his power was threatened by his rival Leon Trotsky and his allies, unleashed a wave of terror by his country’s NKVD—a forerunner of the KGB--  that decimated the Soviet leadership and its military with millions of Russians executed or marched to Siberian prison camps. While Stalin’s henchmen staged mock “trials” in Moscow, marked by phony confessions, extracted by torture, liberal apologists in the West sought to justify Stalin’s lunatic crackdown. I read this book in college and it has stayed with me for years-- providing an eye-opening lesson in the willingness of those of all political stripes to turn a blind eye to the evils of totalitarianism.

Kalugin was a major general in the KGB, dispatched to America as a spy under the cover of being a journalist for Radio Moscow. His account of his role in Soviet disinformation and “active measures”—forging letters, planting stories, concocting conspiracy theories—provides a rare insider look into how the KGB did business for decades. Perhaps most chilling is his description of how one of his bosses, former KGB chief turned Soviet premier Yuri Andropov—was guided by Lenin’s words: “We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing the truth. There are no morals in politics. There is only expedience.”