Five books that expose the closed world of espionage

Luke Harding is a journalist, writer, and awardwinning correspondent with the Guardian. He has reported from Delhi, Berlin, and Moscow, and covered wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Between 2007 and 2011, he was the Guardian’s Moscow bureau chief. In February 2011, the Kremlin deported him from the country in the first case of its kind since the Cold War. He is the author of several books, including Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem, and Russia's Remaking of the West and Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.

In 2018 he tagged five "books [that] take you inside the closed world of espionage," including:

Putin spent the late 1980s in the GDR in Dresden. His more talented foreign intelligence co-worker, Yuri Shvets, was sent to the US. Shvets’s memoir, Washington Station, is a disillusioning account of his life as a KGB spy abroad and his attempts to recruit a US mole. His cover job as a correspondent for the Russian news agency Tass is more enjoyable than his espionage work. Meanwhile, his bosses back home are gerontocratic fools. Recalled to Moscow, Shvets visits the KGB’s legendary poisons factory, from where novichok, the deadly nerve agent used on Skripal, may have come. Tellingly, the KGB plotters who tried to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 met in the secret lab.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue