January 1946: Two WACs leave an officers' club in Munich, and four Soviet NKGB agents kidnap them at knifepoint in the parking lot and shove them in the back of an ambulance. That is the agents' first mistake, and their last. One of the WACs, a blond woman improbably named Claudette Colbert, works for the new Directorate of Central Intelligence, and three of the men end up dead and the fourth wounded. The “incident,” however, will send shock waves...

"Special agent James Cronley Jr. finds that fighting both ex-Nazis and the Soviet NKGB can lead to strange bedfellows, in the dramatic new Clandestine Operations novel about the birth of the CIA and the Cold War. A month ago, Cronley managed to capture two notorious Nazi war criminals, but not without leaving some dead bodies and outraged Austrian police in his wake. He's been lying low ever since, but that little vacation is about to end. Somebody--Odessa,...

West Berlin, 1979. Helen Abell oversees the CIA's network of safe houses, rare havens for field agents and case officers amidst the dangerous milieu of a city in the grips of the Cold War. Helen's world is upended when, during her routine inspection of an agency property, she overhears a meeting between two people unfamiliar to her speaking a coded language that hints at shadowy realities far beyond her comprehension. Before the day is out, she witnesses...

In January 1958, the midst of the Cold War, Luke Lucas wakes alone on the ground in a railway station with no idea how he got there--and finds that he must recover lost memories that others are glad he has forgotten if he is to save the launch of Explorer I, America's attempt to top the Soviet Union's Sputnik.

"From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author, a brand-new series about the Cold War-and a different breed of warrior. In the first weeks after World War II, a squeaky-clean new second lieutenant named James D. Cronley Jr. is spotted and recruited for a new enterprise that will eventually be transformed into something called the CIA. One war may have ended, but another one has already begun, against an enemy that is bigger, smarter, and more vicious:...

Did the Soviet Union want a world revolution? Why did the USSR send missiles to Cuba? What made the Cold War last as long as it did? The end of the Cold War makes it possible, for the first time, to begin writing its history from a truly international perspective. Based on the latest findings of Cold War historians and extensive research in American archives as well as the recently opened archives in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and China,...

In 1948 Berlin, Sara Sturm, a German woman working for the U.S. Department of Public Affairs, is dispatched to investigate a store vandalized with swastikas and helps two Jewish Holocaust survivors track down a Nazi nuclear scientist whose knowledge may determine the course of countless wars to come.

A Cold War attack by Soviet helicopters on an Afghan village. A knife-edge CIA operation that goes wrong. And a vengeful mujahideen tribesman, armed with Stinger missiles. When CIA officer Joe Johnson is handed the tough task by his boss of capturing a Soviet helicopter and forging better contacts among the mujahideen, he unknowingly finds himself up against a sinister KGB rival who wants him dead.But after coming under fire, Johnson comes to suspect...

In what Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times called "the plot of plots," Robert Littell has created the CIA "legends" Francis and Carroll, dubbed "The Sisters Death and Night" by their cohorts. But few know what these enigmatic and extremely dangerous operatives do. They plot-and they're plotting the perfect crime. They've located the perfect pawn-the Potter, the exiled ex-head of the KGB sleeper school-and, with artful deception, the Sisters...