100 Books Like The Cambridge Spies

I doubt there has ever been a more controversial book written about an espionage case than Perjury! For decades, Professor Weinstein’s 1978 book on the Alger Hiss case generated heated arguments between Hiss’s supporters and detractors. I was a participant in that battle and I tell you, it was brutal. Both sides took no prisoners when arguing over the legitimacy of the author’s interpretation of evidence and conclusions. For over 25 years, Hiss cheered his supporters on and went to his grave, still proclaiming his innocence. 

The historian’s task is to separate historical fact from fantasy. I recommend Weinstein’s expanded second edition version because in its pages, he does just that, plus he integrated the provocative evidence from Russian archives that emerged after the first edition was published. 

Bottom line, this book provides the most objective and convincing account of the drama that led to Hiss’s conviction.  

This book is the most comprehensive account of KGB spying in America and two of its authors have studied the subject exhaustively for decades and the third author is a Soviet ex KGB agent with firsthand knowledge of and access to Soviet KGB files.

This is the bible and go-to book for any studied interest in the subject.

I like this book for its thoroughly researched narrative and unbiased conclusion. The authors did what historians worth their salt are required to do: follow the evidence. I consider this book my number one choice out of the dozens upon dozens written about the case over the past six-plus decades. Though dense (it’s over 600 pages long) I found it a real page-turner!

I delved into the details of the Rosenberg espionage prosecution when I was asked to join in a lawsuit against the federal government that sought to unseal the Rosenberg grand jury records. We won and the unsealed grand jury records put to rest a belief held by Rosenberg supporters that Julius and Ethel were mere innocents framed by the government.

The records also conclusively established the reality of the misjustice that was carried out by the government in executing Ethel. Ahh, if only every research endeavor would… show more.

Of all the biographies I’ve ever read, Miranda Carter’s psychological tale chronicling “the lives” of Anthony Blunt is my all-time favorite! When I taught my university espionage history course, my students typically knew nothing about espionage history. I made Carter’s book their first reading assignment as I needed to kick the course off with a quick-paced, enthralling story of a real-life spy. Carter’s book was perfect.

Carter characterizes this treacherous Communist as a “spy with no shame.” So true! In his public life, Blunt wore a mask that allowed him to appear as a renowned art historian who hobnobbed with the Queen. But another mask is evident—that of a conniving spy recruiter who, as a closeted homosexual, seduced and blackmailed undergrad boys into becoming Communists and, in some cases, spies.

In my experience, no other book does a better job of showing readers what it is like to live a… show more.

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.

The writer and academic, Goronwy Rees, was one of Burgess’s closest friends and this volume of memoir best conveys Burgess’s character and charm. The two men saw much of each other during the 1930s, and Rees was one of Burgess’s first recruits, but the relationship foundered when Rees decided during the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939 to stop spying and threatened to betray his friend. After Burgess surfaced in Moscow, Rees penned a series of sensational articles about Burgess’s dissolute private life, probably as a damage limitation exercise, which backfired and led him to losing his academic post but he soon was to have his revenge.

This is a firsthand account of the espionage activities of Julius Rosenberg, Joel Barr, Alfred Sarant, Morton Sobell, and others, by the key agent of the Soviet Union’s Committee for State Security (KGB).

Alexander Feklisov handled and managed their cooperation in sharing weapons secrets with Stalin’s USSR. In addition to his intimate knowledge of these idealists, Alexander Feklisov was fond of them and the purity of their motivations and was sympathetically involved in their domestic and personal lives.

What an eye-opener! I read this book one winter weekend in 2019 while researching early Soviet espionage in America to learn about the plan that Stalin and Soviet spy Stanislav Shumovsky set into motion in the U.S. in the 1930s. It reveals how trained Soviet spies were planted as students at American universities that ranked high in science education–starting with MIT.

As a model, Shumovsky earned a bachelor’s degree at MIT, joined professional societies to mingle with respected scientists, and focused his master’s degree on “high altitude flying,” sending mounds of information back to the USSR. However, it was not only what he sent home that made Shumovsky so important; it was what he set up for future spies who enrolled at MIT as well as Harvard and Columbia.  

This is the story of one of the most difficult, time-consuming, and brilliant decoding projects ever undertaken and successfully completed.

It is about secret information so guarded that while J. Edgar Hoover was aware of it, US presidents and the heads of the CIA were not. Using rare Soviet tradecraft mistakes in the secret telegrams between the KGB in the US and Moscow, the codebreakers were able to uncover a vast network of spies in America.

Giles Whittell’s narrative history tells the true story of three colorful Cold War characters, revealing much about the extraordinary tension and paranoia of that febrile time. William Fisher, aka Rudolf Abel, was a British-born KGB agent arrested in New York City and jailed for his attempt to steal America’s nuclear secrets; Gary Powers was the American pilot captured when his plane was shot down while on a reconnaissance mission over Russia; Frederic Pryor was a young American student in Berlin arrested and held without charge by East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi. Whittell skilfully narrates the interwoven stories of these three men, highlighting the political tensions that brought the United States and the Soviet Union so close to nuclear war.