Бен Макинтайр – лучшие книги

Бен Макинтайр, рассказывает историю Кима Филби, одного из самых успешных двойных агентов в истории. Шаг за шагом он прослеживает его путь от новобранца Британской спецслужбы до руководителя 9-го отдела легендарной МИ-6, а затем, уже после побега — пенсионера, проживающего в Москве, недалеко от метро Курская. Что он читал, что слушал, что смотрел, с кем дружил. И этому последнему аспекту Макинтайр отводит главную роль в своей книге. Ведь урон, нанесенный Филби Великобритании и США, был бы куда меньше, если бы не друзья, не верившие в саму возможность его предательства и покрывавшие его до конца: глава ЦРУ Джеймс Энглтон и высокопоставленный сотрудник МИ-6 Николас Эллиотт. Глава за главой Макинтайр показывает бытовую сторону жизни шпиона. Постоянная мелкая ложь ради одной великой идеи, необходимость предавать самых близких тебе людей, вечная маска на лице и невозможность поговорить по душам даже с тем, кого ты называешь лучшим другом. Что остается в человеке после всего этого? И остается ли хоть что-нибудь?

Олег Гордиевский казался идеальным продуктом системы — его отец работал в НКВД, брат стал нелегалом-разведчиком КГБ, сам он окончил элитарный МГИМО, поступил на службу в Первое главное управление, получил звание полковника КГБ. Однако больше десяти лет он работал на МИ-6 и стал одним из ключевых агентов британской разведки, сыгравшим немалую роль в истории холодной войны. По его словам, делал он это исключительно из идейных соображений. В книге “Шпион и предатель”, основанной в числе прочего на интервью с Гордиевским, британский писатель и историк Бен Макинтайр пытается разобраться, что заставило этого человека, столь глубоко укорененного в системе, восстать против нее.

Начало 1943 года, победоносная германская армия уже потерпела первые крупные поражения - Сталинград и Эль-Аламейн, союзники уже очистили от войск Роммеля Северную Африку. На Восточном фронте противники собирают силы перед решающей схваткой под Курском, на Западном союзники готовятся к вторжению в Европу. Самый прямой путь на континент - через Сицилию. Но это так же хорошо понимает и руководство вермахта. И вот тогда в результате невероятного плана, родившегося в голове писателя-дилетанта, и в осуществлении которого приняли участие гробовщик, разведчик-трансвестит, хорошенькая секретарша и морской волк, на свет появился Человек, Которого…

Ударив шестнадцатилетнюю Урсулу Кучински дубинкой на демонстрации, берлинский полицейский, сам того не зная, определил ее судьбу. Девушка из образованной еврейской семьи, чьи отец и брат исповедовали левые взгляды, стала верной сторонницей коммунизма и двадцать лет занималась шпионажем на Советский Союз.

Агент Соня получила боевое крещение в Шанхае у Рихарда Зорге, прошла разведшколу в Москве, едва не приняла участие в покушении на Гитлера, собственноручно собирала радиопередатчики, в годы Второй мировой передавала в СССР атомные секреты, полученные от ученого-разведчика Клауса Фукса, и ни разу не провалила задания. Общительная и жизнерадостная, она влюблялась и растила детей, заботилась о родителях — и не давала неповоротливым сыщикам из Ми-5 повода заподозрить ее в двойной жизни.

Судьба Урсулы Кучински-Гамбургер-Бертон — удивительный пример того, как можно сохранить верность своим взглядам, не предавая и не будучи преданной, в мире, охваченном катастрофой, где черное и белое меняются местами или сливаются воедино. Вероятно, ее секрет — в способности любить и меняться, не изменяя себе.

История Эдди Чапмена - самого известного двойного агента Второй мировой войны. Фоном для этой головокружительной биографии послужили драматические и кровавые события середины ХХ века, невероятные успехи и обескураживающие ошибки спецслужб Британской империи и Третьего рейха, "тихая война" математиков и контрразведчиков за секретные шифры противника, невозможное сплетение судеб - словом все то, что мы привыкли видеть в лихо закрученных шпионских романах. Разница в том, что "Агент Зигзаг" Бена Макинтайра - хоть и увлекательное по форме, но серьезное по масштабу проделанной работы биографическое исследование, базирующееся на недавно открытых для историков архивных документах британской контрразведки МИ-5.

Вашему вниманию предлагается книга "Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War II".

‘I am going to write the spy story to end all spy stories' One morning in February 1952, a journalist called Ian Fleming sat down at his desk and set about creating a fictional secret agent. James Bond was born and would go on to become one of the most successful, enduring and lucrative creations in literature. But Bond's world of glamour and romance, gadgets and cocktails, espionage and villainy wasn't entirely drawn from imagination: Fleming's background and his experiences as an intelligence officer during the Second World War were all formative parts in the creation of the world's most famous spy. Packed with astonishing detail and written in Macintyre's inimitable style, For Your Eyes Only is the most enlightening, enlivening book on the creator of the spy who not only lived twice, but proved to be immortal.

One December night in 1942, a Nazi parachutist landed in a Cambridgeshire field. His mission: to sabotage the British war effort.
His name was Eddie Chapman, but he would shortly become MI5's Agent Zigzag. Dashing and suave, courageous and unpredictable, Chapman was by turns a traitor, a hero, a villain and a man of conscience. But, as his spymasters and many lovers often wondered, who was the real Eddie Chapman?
Ben Macintyre weaves together diaries, letters, photographs, memories and top-secret MI5 files to create an exhilarating account of Britain's most sensational double agent.

In the summer of 1941, at the height of the war in the Western Desert, a bored and eccentric young officer, David Stirling, has a vision for a new kind of war: attacking the enemy where they least expect it - from behind their own lines.

Despite the intense opposition of many in British High Command, Winston Churchill personally gives Stirling permission to recruit the toughest, brightest and most ruthless soldiers he can find. And so begins the most celebrated and mysterious military organisation in the world: the SAS.

With unprecedented access to the SAS secret files, unseen footage and exclusive interviews with its founder members, SAS: Rogue Heroes tells the remarkable story behind an extraordinary fighting force, and the immense cost of making it a reality.

In his celebrated bestsellers Agent Zigzag and Operation Mincemeat, Ben Macintyre told the dazzling true stories of a remarkable WWII 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.

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. It was the most sophisticated and successful deception operation ever carried out, ensuring that Hitler kept an entire army awaiting a fake invasion, saving thousands of lives, and securing an Allied victory at the most critical juncture in the war.

The story of D-Day has been told from the point of view of the soldiers who fought in it, the tacticians who planned it, and the generals who led it. But this epic event in world history has never before been told from the perspectives of the key individuals in the Double Cross System. These include its director (a brilliant, urbane intelligence officer), a colorful assortment of MI5 handlers (as well as their counterparts in Nazi intelligence), and the five spies who formed Double Cross’s nucleus: a dashing Serbian playboy, a Polish fighter-pilot, a bisexual Peruvian party girl, a deeply eccentric Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming and a volatile Frenchwoman, whose obsessive love for her pet dog very nearly wrecked the entire plan. The D-Day spies were, without question, one of the oddest military units ever assembled, and their success depended on the delicate, dubious relationship between spy and spymaster, both German and British. Their enterprise was saved from catastrophe by a shadowy sixth spy whose heroic sacrifice is revealed here for the first time.

With the same depth of research, eye for the absurd and masterful storytelling that have made Ben Macintyre an international bestseller, Double Cross is a captivating narrative of the spies who wove a web so intricate it ensnared Hitler’s army and carried thousands of D-Day troops across the Channel in safety.

The amazing tale of a resourceful and unscrupulous early-19th-century American adventurer who forges his own kingdom in the wilds of Afghanistan.
In the year 1838, a young adventurer, surrounded by his native troops and mounted on an elephant, raised the American flag on the summit of the Hindu Kush and declared himself Prince of Ghor, the heir to Alexander the Great.
Josiah Harlan, the first American to set foot in Afghanistan, would become the model for Kipling’s ‘The Man Who Would be King’, but the true story of his life is stranger than fiction. A soldier, spy, doctor, naturalist and writer, Harlan set off into the wilds of Central Asia after a failed love affair in 1820. Following a brief stint as a surgeon in the East India Company’s army, he joined the court of the deposed Afghan monarch Shah Shujah, and then slipped into Kabul disguised as a Muslim priest to foment rebellion. For the next two decades he would play a pivotal role in the bloody politics of the region.
Using a trove of newly discovered documents, including Harlan’s long-lost journals, Ben Macintyre has followed Harlan’s footsteps to uncover an astonishing, untold chapter in the history of the Great Game. If you enjoyed William Dalrymple’s ‘Return of a King’, ‘Josiah the Great’ should be on your reading list.

'I am going to write the spy story to end all spy stories.'
One morning in February 1952, a journalist called Ian Fleming sat down at his desk and set about creating a fictional secret agent. James Bond was born and would go on to become one of the most successful, enduring and lucrative creations in literature. But Bond's world of glamour and romance, gadgets and cocktails, espionage and villainy wasn't entirely drawn from imagination: Fleming's background and his experiences as an intelligence officer during the Second World War were all formative parts in the creation of the world's most famous spy.
Packed with astonishing detail and written in Macintyre's inimitable style, For Your Eyes Only is the most enlightening, enlivening book on the creator of the spy who not only lived twice, but proved to be immortal.

One December night in 1942, a Nazi parachutist landed in a Cambridgeshire field. His mission: to sabotage the British war effort. His name was Eddie Chapman, but he would shortly become MI5's Agent Zigzag. Dashing and louche, courageous and unpredictable, the traitor was a patriot inside, and the villain a hero. The problem for Chapman, his many lovers and his spymasters was knowing who he was. Ben Macintyre weaves together diaries, letters, photographs, memories and top-secret MI5 files to create the exhilarating account of Britain's most sensational double agent.

He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson.
He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city.
He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. . . .
--Sherlock Holmes on Professor Moriarty in The Final Problem

The Victorian era's most infamous thief, Adam Worth was the original Napoleon of crime. Suave, cunning Worth learned early that the best way to succeed was to steal. And steal he did.

Following a strict code of honor, Worth won the respect of Victorian society. He also aroused its fear by becoming a chilling phantom, mingling undetected with the upper classes, whose valuables he brazenly stole. His most celebrated heist: Gainsborough's grand portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire--ancestor of Diana, Princess of Wales--a painting Worth adored and often slept with for twenty years.

With a brilliant gang that included "Piano" Charley, a jewel thief, train robber, and playboy, and "the Scratch" Becker, master forger, Worth secretly ran operations from New York to London, Paris, and South Africa--until betrayal and a Pinkerton man finally brought him down.

In a decadent age, Worth was an icon. His biography is a grand, dazzling tour into the gaslit underworld of the last century. . . and into the doomed genius of a criminal mastermind

The incredible untold story of WWII’s greatest secret fighting force, as told by our great modern master of wartime intrigue

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. 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. He faced no little resistance from those who found his tactics ungentlemanly or beyond the pale, but in the SAS’s remarkable exploits facing the Nazis in the Africa and then on the Continent can be found the seeds of nearly all special forces units that would follow.

Bringing his keen eye for psychological detail to a riveting wartime narrative, Ben Macintyre uses his unprecedented access to SAS archives to shine a light inside a legendary unit long shrouded in secrecy. The result is not just a tremendous war story, but a fascinating group portrait of men of whom history and country asked the most.