Some guidelines: I'm going to take a baseline of books that would be appropriate for an undergrad class on the history of espionage - having academic merit, well-researched, well-referenced, and assuming no more than a basic high school knowledge of US or world history. I'll emphasize the big names in the field, so that if you like something, you can probably find more valuable stuff just by punching the author into Amazon / AbeBooks / whatever bookstore. I'm also going to emphasize readability - nothing here should be full of academic jargon or any more difficult to get through than, say, a David McCullough airport book (which is not meant as a stab at McCullough, by the way, whose work I really enjoy). Finally, I'm going to limit myself to just the bare minimum. Often, too many choices can mean no choice at all, so I'll pick for you. Yes, there is a lot of other great work out there - please feel free to point out any favorites I've missed in the comments.
With that said, let's get started.
1. Christopher Andrew, For The President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (1995).
As close to a textbook as this field gets, but in a good way! Andrew is one of the great names of the history of espionage, and For the President's Eyes Only goes president by president through American history, charting its on-again, off-again (currently VERY on-again) relationship with spying.
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2. Jeffery Richelson, A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the 20th Century (1995).
A Century of Spies takes a broader view than FtPEO over a shorter period, looking at espionage on the world scale across the twentieth century. Richelson has also written a few great books on the technological side of espionage - a history of spy satellites, a history of the CIA's office of science and technology, and all the efforts used to gain nuclear intelligence about other nations - so anyone on this blog should definitely explore his bibliography.
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3. John Earl Haynes, Hervey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (2010).
After the end of the Soviet Union, the KGB found itself with some serious pension funding problems. They struck a deal with a Western publisher to allow a team of historians - one Russian researcher paired up with Western historians of espionage - to research the history of the KGB, using its own archives with nearly unlimited access, in exchange for some serious money to flesh out retirement plans. As the research went on, the political mood turned sour, then dangerous, and the researcher - Alexander Vassiliev - fled with his notebooks of archival notes. This book builds from his notebooks, documenting the history of KGB espionage in the US.
It's a shocking, fascinating set of discoveries. More than a few myths are busted for those more deeply into the field, but the biggest take-away for everyone is the enormity of Soviet infiltration in America, especially in the 1930s and 1940s. McCarthy was a dangerous egomaniac who had no idea what he was talking about in terms of Soviet spying, but spy they did, and this lengthy book documents the cutting edge of what we know. It may well be all we know for a very long time, at least until the Putin regime ends and Soviet archives begin opening up again.
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4. James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization (1983) / The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping of America (2008).
These books are actually part of a trilogy, and I've left out the middle book, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, not because it's in any way bad, but simply because you can probably afford to skip it if you read the others. Puzzle Palace will take you through the origins and development of the NSA, today one of the largest and most important aspects of our intelligence/surveillance apparatus, while Shadow Factory will bring you up to the present.
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5. Sergei Kostin and Eric Raynaud. Farewell: the Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century (2011).
For most people, history is at its most memorable and interesting when it's on the human scale, so I've added this one to put a more human face on Cold War espionage. Agent 'Farewell' was Vladimir Ippolitovitch Vetrov, a KGB agent who decided to pass information to France, and this book does a fantastic job of telling his story as fully as we can currently hope, using sources from the KGB, France, and the United States.
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Bonus choices: Where to start on spy fiction! Here, I'm even less of a true expert than with academic issues, but some choice entry points:
- John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
- The Americans, Season 1.
- Notorious (1946).
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