Our list of some of the best Nonfiction Spy books & series in recent years. Get inspired by one or more of the following books.
- The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War (2019)
- The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (2016)
- Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice (2015)
- Wolves at the Door: The True Story Of America’s Greatest Female Spy (2008)
- The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg (1995)
- The Spy’s Son: The True Story of the Highest-Ranking CIA Officer Ever Convicted of Espionage and the Son He Trained to Spy for Russia (2016)
- The Spy Wore Silk (The Romanones Spy Series) (Volume 3) (1991)
- I Spy – Everything!: A Fun Guessing Game for 2-4 Year Olds (2018)
- Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies (2013)
- Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage (2016)
- George Washington’s Secret Six: The Spy Ring That Saved the American Revolution (2016)
- Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century (2011)
- Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI’s Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (2003)
- Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain’s Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (2017)
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The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War (2019)
“The best true spy story I have ever read.”—JOHN LE CARRÉ If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation’s communism as both criminal and philistine.
The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal (2016)
It was the height of the Cold War, and a dangerous time to be stationed in the Soviet Union. One evening, while the chief of the CIA’s Moscow station was filling his gas tank, a stranger approached and dropped a note into the car. The chief, suspicious of a KGB trap, ignored the overture. But the man had made up his mind.
Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice (2015)
“[Red Notice] does for investing in Russia and the former Soviet Union what Liar’s Poker did for our understanding of Salomon Brothers, Wall Street, and the mortgage-backed securities business in the 1980s.
Wolves at the Door: The True Story Of America’s Greatest Female Spy (2008)
Virginia Hall left her Baltimore home in 1931 to enter the Foreign Service and went to work for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) when Hitler was building toward the peak of his power in Europe.
The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg (1995)
Moe Berg is the only major-league baseball player whose baseball card is on display at the headquarters of the CIA. For Berg was much more than a third-string catcher who played on several major league teams between 1923 and 1939.
The Spy’s Son: The True Story of the Highest-Ranking CIA Officer Ever Convicted of Espionage and the Son He Trained to Spy for Russia (2016)
Jim Nicholson earned the nickname “Batman” early in his spy career with the CIA. A talented case officer with a Rolex watch and hand-tailored suits, Jim’s elan and fierce patriotic streak shot him to stardom.
The Spy Wore Silk (The Romanones Spy Series) (Volume 3) (1991)
The Spy Wore Silk America’s most captivating secret agent tells the true story of a Cold War mission into Morocco with William Casey. “For glamor, adventure and intrigue, this is as good as it gets,” wrote Cosmopolitan of The Spy Went Dancing, Aline Romanones’ best selling successor to her memoir of OSS adventures during World War II, The Spy Wore Red.
I Spy – Everything!: A Fun Guessing Game for 2-4 Year Olds (2018)
Can you spot the food that begins with E? How about the furniture that begins with T? You’ll soon discover in this fun game, Each puzzle focuses on a different letter of the alphabet – all you need to do is find the one item that matches, then turn the page and see whether you’ve chosen correctly! A perfect book for little learners.
Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies (2013)
On June 6, 1944, 150,000 Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy and suffered an astonishingly low rate of casualties. D-Day was a stunning military accomplishment, but it was also a masterpiece of trickery. Operation Fortitude, which protected and enabled the invasion, and the Double Cross system, which specialized in turning German spies into double agents, deceived the Nazis into believing that the Allies would attack at Calais and Norway rather than Normandy.
Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage (2016)
Blind Man’s Bluff is an exciting, epic story of adventure, ingenuity, courage, and disaster beneath the sea. This New York Times bestseller reveals previously unknown dramas, such as: A magnificent achievement in investigative reporting, Blind Man’s Bluff reads like a spy thriller, but with one important difference-everything in it is true.
George Washington’s Secret Six: The Spy Ring That Saved the American Revolution (2016)
When George Washington beat a hasty retreat from New York City in August 1776, many thought the American Revolution might soon be over. Instead, Washington rallied—thanks in large part to a little-known, top-secret group called the Culper Spy Ring.
Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century (2011)
1981. Ronald Reagan and François Mitterrand are sworn in as presidents of the Unites States and France, respectively. The tension due to Mitterrand’s French Communist support, however, is immediately defused when he gives Reagan the Farewell Dossier, a file he would later call “one of the greatest spy cases of the twentieth century.” Vladimir Ippolitovitch Vetrov, a promising technical student, joins the KGB to work as a spy.
Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI’s Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (2003)
David Wise, the nation’s leading espionage writer, has called on his unique knowledge and unrivaled intelligence sources to write the definitive, inside story of how Robert Hanssen betrayed his country, and why.
Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain’s Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (2017)
Britain’s Special Air Service—or SAS—was the brainchild of David Stirling, a young, gadabout aristocrat whose aimlessness in early life belied a remarkable strategic mind.
Best Nonfiction Spy Books Reviewed & Ranked
We highly recommend you to buy all paper or e-books in a legal way, for example, on Amazon. But sometimes it might be a need to dig deeper beyond the shiny book cover. Before making a purchase, you can visit resources like Library Genesis and download some nonfiction spy books mentioned below at your own risk. Once again, we do not host any illegal or copyrighted files, but simply give our visitors a choice and hope they will make a wise decision.
The Lady Is a Spy: Virginia Hall, World War II Hero of the French Resistance
Author(s): Don Mitchell
ID: 2347658, Publisher: Scholastic Nonfiction, Year: 2019, Size: 101 Mb, Format: epub
Rebel with a Cause: The Daring Adventure of Dicey Langston, Girl Spy of the American Revolution
Author(s): Kathleen V. Kudlinski
ID: 3620417, Publisher: Capstone, Year: 2015, Size: 22 Mb, Format: epub
Please note that this booklist is not final. Some books are absolutely hot items according to Washington Post, others are written by unknown writers. On top of that, you can always find additional tutorials and courses on Coursera, Udemy or edX, for example. Are there any other relevant links you could recommend? Drop a comment if you have any feedback on the list.