100 Books Like A Spy Among Friends

Tim Powers is best known for his secret histories. Unlike alternate history, a secret history doesn’t change the publicly known facts of the past; instead, it tells a story hidden beneath those facts that may change their meaning.

Powers takes a strict approach to secret history that I admire and try to follow when I can: all the known historical details (who was where and when and what they were doing) must remain the same. His marvelous novel Declare applies this rule to the Kim Philby spy case. Powerful beings that have been dwelling among us provide the hidden motivations for espionage and treason from WWII into the Cold War.

Declare is fun both for its spycraft and occult details. 

This meticulously researched history of the unsung women of the British intelligence services is like a master key that will unlock a vault of quiet heroines who were never known in their lifetimes. Dr Hubbard-Hall explores the world of ‘secretaries’ and administrators who almost always knew as much, if more, as the men of the Secret Service.

I particularly enjoyed learning about Kathleen Pettigrew, who inspired Ian Fleming’s Miss Moneypenny, and the intrepid Rita Winsor and Ena Molesworth, who set up an extraordinary ‘travel agency’ to gain access to Russia, China, and other restricted countries in the 1950s. What makes this book shine is Hubbard-Hall’s ability to tell a rip-roaring story so that the lady spies, with all their quirks and daring, come to glorious life on the page.

This is a non-fiction book but it reads like a novel and explores one of the great mysteries of the spy world: how on earth did Kim Philby manage to betray not only his country but also his friends over so many years? 

A former spy I had the privilege of interviewing described Philby as a shit, so maybe there’s the answer. I think this is a terrific read, and although Macintyre probably isn’t a spy, like Deighton, he knows them. 

Before I started writing my first spy novel, I came across a hardback second-hand copy of The Human Factor in an antique store. On the inside flap, Greene wrote about wanting to write about spies with pensions. The phrase stuck with me.

Greene’s spy lives in a suburban house and commutes to work like any of his neighbours but he is a traitor with his own dark secrets. What an intriguing idea. Greene himself was a spy during WW2 and a friend of one of the greatest traitors in British history – Kim Philby.

Kim Philby’s most personal betrayal was not of Nicholas Elliott, as suggested in Ben McIntyre’s A Spy Among Friends , but his school friend and another MI6 colleague Tim Milne , the nephew of Winnie the Pooh author AA Milne, whom he falsely accused of being a spy in order to deflect attention from himself. Milne’s memoirs were finally permitted to be published four years after his death and provide a fascinating and fresh glimpse into both Philby and Burgess especially Milne’s teenage European travels with Philby and his August 1948 visit to Philby in Turkey where he remembered fellow guest Burgess ‘lolling in a window seat, dirty, unshaven, wearing nothing but an inadequately fastened dressing-gown”, singing on jeep rides into the countryside and  diving into the Bosphorus from a second floor balcony.

British spy rings of the 1930s and 40s fascinate me. Their members appear more colorful and audacious than their American counterparts. I think it rings especially true for the chaps of the “Cambridge Spy Ring.” Their escapades are recounted in dozens of books but I consider Newton’s the best, partly because he does what no other historian had done: chronicle the missing American dimension of the Cambridge Spy Ring saga. 

Newton is a fine historian as well as a grand storyteller, and I love a book that reads like a mystery novel! I also have great respect for writers who possess the knack for projecting a sense of “place” in their books. Newton does this so well that, when I lived in Washington DC, and after completing my evening read of his book, I’d venture out onto gaslit cobblestone streets and wander by the l brick-faced Georgian style residences ever… show more.

The history of the CIA features many fascinating personalities and there are several excellent spy biographies, Thomas Powers on Richard Helms, for example, or Randall Woods on William Colby. But the most complex and compelling of all figures in the Agency’s past must surely be the legendary head of counterintelligence, James Angleton. Again, there are numerous works on Angleton and his obsessive hunt for a top-level Soviet agent in the CIA, but I enjoyed and benefited most from Tom Mangold’s Cold Warrior, an astonishingly detailed and penetrating portrayal of America’s real-life George Smiley.

I used to look forward to receiving Stephen King’s latest novel for Christmas each year, but I haven’t cared for most of his post-2000 books, and my annual excitement had begun to wane…until I found a replacement in Keith Rosson. His writing has all the energy and honesty of early King, but Rosson is an altogether superior author, and this—his first novel—combines grim small-town horror with literary and crime noir sensibilities.

There aren’t many modern-day genre fiction writers whose prose I envy, but I read every page of Rosson’s books in a state of grinding envy and absolute delight.

Anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani wrote Good Muslim, Bad Muslim shortly after the 9/11 attacks. The book is a rebuttal of the U.S. government’s justifications for the War on Terror and military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, which relied heavily on the inaccurate notion that terrorism is a product of anti-modern passions embedded in Islamic culture. Mamdani uses history as a corrective, illustrating how such “culture talk” has deep roots in European imperialism, and how a violent strand of political Islam emerged from modern anticolonial movements in the Middle East and gained global influence amid U.S. covert military operations in the second half of the Cold War, particularly in Afghanistan. I learn something new every time I reread this fantastic book for my U.S. and International Terrorism history course. 

While the argument can be made that Julius Caesar was the original conspiracy thriller, this book set the stage for conspiracy theories in the modern era. With two film adaptations and multiple TV references, there’s a reason the book’s premise has imbedded itself into our popular culture.

A recurring question was constantly popping into my head as I was reading it: How deep does the deep state really go? One thing is for certain, you’ll never look at an election the same way again.