List of Top Ten Best Espionage Documentaries Top Picks 2023 Reviews

Warner Bros. Continued it's one-studio war against Hitler and his minions by following the sensational Confessions of a Nazi Spy with this crackling dramatic thriller starring Joel McCrea and new discovery Brenda Marshall. McCrea plays U.S. State Department diplomat Barry Corvall, who becomes a one-man counterspy agency in the dawning days of World War II. After Barry discovers that his new bride, refugee Brenda Ballard (Marshall), has been coerced into acting as an agent for Nazi Germany, he is expelled from the Foreign Service. Recruited by an Assistant Secretary of State, Barry goes undercover as a disgraced ex-diplomat, besotted by his Mata Hari wife. Journeying to Geneva, Barry and Brenda put themselves in harm's way in a desperate bid to uncover the secrets of the Nazi spy ring operating inside the United States. While Brenda continues to pose as a spy, Barry finds the proof he needs. This action-romance pulls no punches.

"While getting into his car on the evening of February 16, 1978, the chief of the CIA's Moscow station was handed an envelope by an unknown Russian. Its contents stunned the Americans: details of top-secret Soviet research and development in military technology that was totally unknown to the United States. From 1979 to 1985, Adolf Tolkachev, an engineer at a military research center, cracked open the secret Soviet military research establishment, using his access to hand over tens of thousands of pages of material about the latest advances in aviation technology, alerting the Americans to possible developments years in the future. He was one of the most productive and valuable spies ever to work for the United States in the four decades of global confrontation with the Soviet Union. Tolkachev took enormous personal risks, but so did his CIA handlers. Moscow station was a dangerous posting to the KGB's backyard. The CIA had long struggled to recruit and run agents in Moscow, and Tolkachev became a singular breakthrough. With hidden cameras and secret codes, and in face-to-face meetings with CIA case officers in parks and on street corners, Tolkachev and the CIA worked to elude the feared KGB. Drawing on previously secret documents obtained from the CIA, as well as interviews with participants, Hoffman reveals how the depredations of the Soviet state motivated one man to master the craft of spying against his own nation until he was betrayed to the KGB by a disgruntled former CIA trainee. No one has ever told this story before in such detail, and Hoffman's deep knowledge of spycraft, the Cold War, and military technology makes him uniquely qualified to bring readers this real-life espionage thriller"--Provided by publisher. NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year - Drawing on previously classified CIA documents and on interviews with firsthand participants, The Billion Dollar Spy is a brilliant feat of reporting and a riveting true story of intrigue in the final years of the Cold War. 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. His attempts to establish contact with the CIA would be rebuffed four times before he thrust upon them an envelope whose contents would stun U.S. intelligence. In the years that followed, that man, Adolf Tolkachev, became one of the most valuable spies ever for the U.S. But these activities posed an enormous personal threat to Tolkachev and his American handlers. They had clandestine meetings in parks and on street corners, and used spy cameras, props, and private codes, eluding the ever-present KGB in its own backyard--until a shocking betrayal put them all at risk.

An informant sells the same tip to competing Paris news bureaus, triggering a cross-continental rivalry between a newswoman and a novelist that sees them feigning marriage, fighting spies and falling in love. International arms dealer Anton Kronsky (Paul Lukas) is planning to depart from France in the dead of night aboard the Orient Express. His mission: unknown. Star reporter Patricia Booth (Madge Evans), determined to get the story, steals her editor's "husband and wife" passport to make the trip, as her fiery reporting has made her persona non grata in multiple European states. Meanwhile, novelist Kenneth Stevens (Edmund Lowe), recruited to cover the story by a rival news bureau, loses his passport to a pickpocket. The quick-thinking Stevens passes himself off as the husband half of Booth's passport, much to her chagrin. But while the feuding writers play at newlyweds, their fellow passengers are playing cloak-and-dagger...with murderous intent.

Two investigative reporters and a researcher tell the epic story of American espionage from the early Cold War Years to the Clinton Administration, showing how the Navy and CIA have used submarines to gather intelligence and launch covert operations. 8-page photo insert. Stretching from the years immediately after World War II to the spy operations of the Clinton administration, the authors present extraordinary revelations about undersea conflict between the US and British submarines and the Soviet fleet in an unseen intelligence war.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The celebrated author of Double Cross and Rogue Heroes returns with a thrilling Americans-era tale of Oleg Gordievsky, the Russian whose secret work helped hasten the end of the Cold War. "The best true spy story I have ever read."--JOHN LE CARRÉ Named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist - Shortlisted for the Bailie Giffords Prize in Nonfiction 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. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union's top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6. For nearly a decade, as the Cold War reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West turn the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots, as the Soviet leadership grew increasingly paranoid at the United States's nuclear first-strike capabilities and brought the world closer to the brink of war. Desperate to keep the circle of trust close, MI6 never revealed Gordievsky's name to its counterparts in the CIA, which in turn grew obsessed with figuring out the identity of Britain's obviously top-level source. Their obsession ultimately doomed Gordievsky: the CIA officer assigned to identify him was none other than Aldrich Ames, the man who would become infamous for secretly spying for the Soviets. Unfolding the delicious three-way gamesmanship between America, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and culminating in the gripping cinematic beat-by-beat of Gordievsky's nail-biting escape from Moscow in 1985, Ben Macintyre's latest may be his best yet. Like the greatest novels of John le Carré, it brings readers deep into a world of treachery and betrayal, where the lines bleed between the personal and the professional, and one man's hatred of communism had the power to change the future of nations.

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Billion Dollar Spy : A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal

As D-Day nears, Hitler approves a desperate scheme to derail the invasion. The Allied Naval Command's headquarters at Dover Castle is vulnerable. Three neophytes at MI5 sniff the plot but London ignores their warnings, unable to admit a flaw in their vaunted Double-cross spy cadre. With time running out, the trio must find a way to stop the Nazis and prevent the Normandy Landings from collapsing in disarray.

Hans Rudolf Berndorff (1895-1963) was born in Düsseldorf, Germany. From a young age was a journalist with an interest in the bizarre and adventurous, including shipwrecks and piracy. During the Nazi era he published a number of popular novels that steered away from controversy and avoided political repercussions. He used both his own his own name as well as writing as Rudolf van Wehrt and Hans Rudolf. Joseph Goebbels liked his adventurous tales and thought they contributed to public entertainment and thus helped the war effort. This did not damage his career after the war; he continued his writing without any break and was used by the British in rebuilding the German press services. He had also written movie scripts during the Nazi era but because of its wartime origins, the most famous of them, Shiva and the Gallows Flower, was only released in 1993. Espionage! was his first book. Hanne Hieber, in the Journal of Intelligence History, describes the work as the most influential fiction text in its subject area, praising its originality: "Besides the usual (male and female) suspects like Alfred Redl, Edith Cavell and Mata Hari, he had two chapters on Mademoiselle Docteur, 'the greatest German spy.'" She adds, "In 1936, G.W. Pabst made a movie with two different casts in France and Britain. The French version was not shown before the end of the German occupation. The British version was distributed to the United States in the early 1940s." The full story of Berndorff's ability to remain untouched by a war that destroyed so many writers has never been fully told.

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