First appearing nearly thirty-five years ago in the pages of The Hunt For Red October, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan is arguably the closest thing to an American James Bond. Not only with a highly successful series of novels but also a trilogy of successful films in the early 1990s. Recently, however, the CIA analyst has...

My recent viewing of the film The Good Shepherd and my reading of the CIA History Staff's 2007 critique of the film left me curious about the fact behind the Hollywood fiction. Hitting upon a recommendation from that analysis and the film's archived website, I bought a book that had been sitting for months already...

  I am quite fond of the saying that “truth is stranger than fiction.” As those of us who read spy fact (and those fiction works which blur the boundaries between the two) know, it is often the case. The film The Good Shepherd, directed by Robert De Niro and released by Universal Pictures in...

The True Story of Oleg Penkovsky with Author Jeremy Duns   Thrilling, evocative and hugely controversial, Codename: Hero blows apart the myths surrounding one of the Cold War's greatest spy operations and potentially it's greatest spy Oleg Penkovsky   In the late 1950s the USSR appeared to be winning the arms race: their 1949 nuclear...

Today is Memorial Day in America. Most of us will take a moment to think about those who lost their lives fighting for our freedom. Memorial Day got me thinking though, what about our brave men and women in the clandestine services? Shouldn't we spare a moment to think about them as well? So this...

Spybrary Brush Pass: The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton Spybrarian Matthew Kresal shares his brush pass review on The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton by Jefferson Morley which has recently been published. According to Tim Weiner, author of Legacy of Ashes -The History of the...