McReynolds, R., & Robbins, L. S. (2009). The librarian spies: Philip and Mary Jane Keeney and Cold War espionage. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International.
How does the FBI investigate individuals they’ve identified as potential spies? What roles did Sen. Joseph McCarthy as well as the infamous House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) play in the efforts to ferret out suspected communist actors in government? Answers to these questions and many others can be found in The Librarian Spies, an examination of the events surrounding librarians Philip and Mary Jane Keeney in the early years of the Cold War. Their story effectively elucidates an enduring tension that exists between the obligation to uphold the principles outlined in the U.S. Constitution and the commitment to defending the nation against attempts to subvert it from within.
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Haslam, J. (2015). Near and distant neighbors: A new history of Soviet intelligence. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
It’s a bit counterintuitive that as the number of years separating the present from the Cold War era grows, our picture of that increasingly distant period comes ever more into focus. In other words, our understanding of that time increases as our proximity to it decreases. The special nature of state-level intelligence dictates that sensitive matters of national security have a shelf life—as the importance of keeping a given state secret wanes, so does the incentive to allocate the resources necessary to do so. Jonathan Haslam’s Near and Distant Neighbors is a great example of how the latest research can reveal a significant amount of new information. He focuses solely on providing an unprecedented level of detail to the intelligence capabilities and practices of the Soviet Union. Relying on exclusive firsthand accounts and contemporary research, Near and Distant Neighbors stands as the definitive work of its kind.
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Wallace, R., Melton, H. K., & Schlesinger, H. R. (2009). Spycraft: The secret history of the CIA’s spytechs, from communism to Al-Qaeda. New York: Plume.
Spycraft tells the history of U.S. espionage operations during the Cold War with particular attention given to tracing the evolution of research and development efforts by first the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) then the CIA. It was written by former CIA agents, entailing it was, prior to hitting bookshelves, submitted to the agency’s Publications Review Board to be sanitized of any classified material. The illustrations are precise and descriptive, providing the perfect supplement to the text. Since its publication in 2009, it has gained status as an essential work on this subject.
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Hughes-Wilson, J. (2017). The secret state: A history of intelligence and espionage. New York, NY: Pegasus Books.
Former British Army Col. John Hughes-Wilson’s The Secret State: A History of Intelligence and Espionage is an interesting analytical work that is at times critical of certain individuals and agencies of particular eras. Hughes-Wilson is also a novelist, which may help explain the occasional and unnecessary melodramatic flair in an otherwise worthwhile read. Its more recent date of publication allows for the inclusion of events like 9/11 and Wikileaks as well as critical analysis of associated leaders and groups.
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Macintyre, B. (2014). A spy among friends: Kim Philby and the great betrayal. New York, NY: Crown.
Kim Philby was an esteemed British intelligence officer who, it was eventually discovered, was a double agent working for the KGB. Of the infamous “Cambridge Five” spy ring, he’s the member usually considered to have done the most damage to Britain and the Allied forces during World War II. Much has been written about Philby, but journalist Ben Macintyre’s A Spy Among Friends tells the true history in the novel format with compelling results.
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A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare. (2008, July 07). Retrieved from https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/a-cold-war-conundrum/source.htm
This stunning and revealing work (available online for free through the URL above) is a detailed examination of the events, attitudes and postures of the United States and Soviet Union during the (roughly) three years that constitute what many experts now consider a point in Cold War tensions so dire as to be on par with that of the Cuban Missile Crisis. From about 1980 until the end of 1983, for a variety of quite legitimate reasons, the USSR became increasingly convinced the U.S. was planning to launch a surprise, full-scale attack against them. Author Benjamin B. Fischer explains the many interwoven factors—including bad intelligence, inadvertent and unintentionally aggressive signaling by the U.S. as well as the inescapable tone of uncertainty and apprehension that besets each facet and phase of intelligence gathering operations—which, in concert, led to multiple extremely perilous close calls, each of which saw the world’s population, often through nothing more than dumb luck, narrowly avoid a cataclysmic nuclear exchange.
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MacEachin, D. J. (1996). CIA assessment of the Soviet Union. Center for the Study of Intelligence,96(001), 57-65. Retrieved March 3, 2019.
This magnificent resource is essential to understanding what the US intelligence community knew (and thought they knew) about the Soviet Union during the various phases of the Cold War. Career CIA analyst Douglas J. MacEachin examines the methods used by the CIA during the Cold War and appraises the efficacy of the agency’s various approaches to intelligence analysis over those decades. As explained in the book’s forward, one of the Center for the Study of Intelligence’s goals in publishing it was to address numerous persistent misconceptions among both civilians and foreign governments regarding how aware the US government was of the USSR’s decline and imminent collapse during the latter years of the Cold War. In terms of detailing the material intelligence the US had on the USSR at any given point along the Cold War timeline, this monograph should be considered the last word.
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Kuhns, W. J. (Ed.). (2008, July 07). Assessing the Soviet Threat. Retrieved from https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/assessing-the-soviet-threat-the-early-cold-war-years/
This is a collection of historical documents—several hundred historical documents—from Truman administration intelligence officials on the subject of assessing the Soviet Union’s capabilities. Reading the forward, preface and chronology sections is almost prerequisite if one is at all inclined to peruse the mountain of documentation in this collection, though it should be noted they are important and enlightening components of the resource and are really quite engaging reads unto themselves.
Cold War Espionage 