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Ben Macintyre

Biography

Ben Macintyre

Ben Macintyre is a writer-at-large for The Times (UK) and the bestselling author of THE SPY AND THE TRAITOR, A SPY AMONG FRIENDS, DOUBLE CROSS, OPERATION MINCEMEAT, AGENT ZIGZAG and ROGUE HEROES, among other books. Macintyre has also written and presented BBC documentaries of his work.

Ben Macintyre

Books by Ben Macintyre

by Ben Macintyre - History, Nonfiction

During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend. But as Ben Macintyre shows, the story of Colditz was about much more than escape. Its population represented a society in miniature, full of heroes and traitors, class conflicts and secret alliances, and the full range of human joy and despair. PRISONERS OF THE CASTLE traces the war’s arc from within Colditz’s stone walls, where the stakes rose as Hitler’s war machine faltered and the men feared that liberation would not come soon enough to spare them a grisly fate at the hands of the Nazis.

by Ben Macintyre - History, Nonfiction

In 1942, in a quiet village in the leafy English Cotswolds, a thin, elegant woman lived in a small cottage with her three children and her husband, who worked as a machinist nearby. Ursula Burton was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a slight foreign accent. By all accounts, she seemed to be living a simple, unassuming life. Her neighbors in the village knew little about her. They didn’t know that she was a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer. They didn’t know that her husband was also a spy, or that she was running powerful agents across Europe. Behind the facade of her picturesque life, Burton was a dedicated Communist, a Soviet colonel and a veteran agent, gathering the scientific secrets that would enable the Soviet Union to build the bomb.

by Ben Macintyre - History, Nonfiction

The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Oleg 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.

by Ben Macintyre - History, Nonfiction

Britain’s Special Air Service was the brainchild of David Stirling, a young, gadabout aristocrat whose aimlessness in early life belied a remarkable strategic mind. Where most of his colleagues looked at a battlefield map of World War II’s African theater and saw a protracted struggle with Rommel’s desert forces, Stirling saw an opportunity: given a small number of elite, well-trained men, he could parachute behind enemy lines and sabotage their airplanes and war material. Paired with his constitutional opposite, the disciplined martinet Jock Lewes, Stirling assembled a revolutionary fighting force that would upend not just the balance of the war, but the nature of combat itself.

by Ben Macintyre - History, Nonfiction

Kim Philby’s story is not a tale of one spy, but of three: Philby, his fellow Englishman Nicholas Elliott, and the American James Jesus Angleton. These men supposedly served the same cause, but Philby was channeling all of their confidences to his Soviet handlers. As the web of suspicion closed around him, Elliott and Angleton never abandoned him. When the truth was revealed, it would have profound consequences on those who thought they knew him best.

by Ben Macintyre - History, Nonfiction

In AGENT ZIGZAG and OPERATION MINCEMEAT, Ben Macintyre told the dazzling true stories of a remarkable World War II double agent and of how the Allies employed a corpse to fool the Nazis and assure a decisive victory. In DOUBLE CROSS, Macintyre returns with the untold story of the grand final deception of the war and of the extraordinary spies who achieved it.