An 'Irish Cuba' - on Britain's doorstep? This book studies perceptions of the Soviets' influence over Irish revolutionaries during the Cold War. The Dublin authorities did not allow the Irish state's non-aligned status to prevent them joining the West's crusade against communism. Leading officials, such as Colonel Dan Bryan in G2, the Irish army intelligence directorate, argued that Ireland should assist the NATO powers. These officials believed Irish communists were directed by the British communist party, the CPGB. If communists in Belfast and Dublin were too isolated to pose a threat in either Irish jurisdiction, the republican movement was a different matter. The authorities, north and south, saw that a communist-influenced IRA had potential appeal. This Cold War nightmare arrived with the civil rights agitation in Northern Ireland in the 1960s. Did the left-wing republican movement constitute a security threat? Whitehall feared Dublin could become a Russian espionage hub, with the Marxist-led Official IRA acting as a Soviet proxy. To what extent was the Official IRA's political creation, the Workers' Party, useful to the Soviets' Cold War agenda, in a militarily neutral state? With a parliamentary presence in the Irish state, the party warned against Ireland's incorporation into NATO and denounced the modernization of the Western alliance's nuclear arsenal. This book offers a valuable new perspective on a much-studied period of Irish and British history.

The Sword and the Shield is based on one of the most extraordinary intelligence coups of recent times: a secret archive of top-level KGB documents smuggled out of the Soviet Union which the FBI has described, after close examination, as the "most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source." Its presence in the West represents a catastrophic hemorrhage of the KGB's secrets and reveals for the first time the full extent of its worldwide network. Vasili Mitrokhin, a secret dissident who worked in the KGB archive, smuggled out copies of its most highly classified files every day for twelve years. In 1992, a U.S. ally succeeded in exfiltrating the KGB officer and his entire archive out of Moscow. The archive covers the entire period from the Bolshevik Revolution to the 1980s and includes revelations concerning almost every country in the world. But the KGB's main target, of course, was the United States. Though there is top-secret material on almost every country in the world, the United States is at the top of the list. As well as containing many fascinating revelations, this is a major contribution to the secret history of the twentieth century. Among the topics and revelations explored are: The KGB's covert operations in the United States and throughout the West, some of which remain dangerous today. KGB files on Oswald and the JFK assassination that Boris Yeltsin almost certainly has no intention of showing President Clinton. The KGB's attempts to discredit civil rights leader in the 1960s, including its infiltration of the inner circle of a key leader. The KGB's use of radio intercept posts in New York and Washington, D.C., in the 1970s to intercept high-level U.S. government communications. The KGB's attempts to steal technological secrets from major U.S. aerospace and technology corporations. KGB covert operations against former President Ronald Reagan, which began five years before he became president. KGB spies who successfully posed as U.S. citizens under a series of ingenious disguises, including several who attained access to the upper echelons of New York society.

A second edition of this famous survey has been eagerly awaited. When the first edition appeared Brezhnev was still in power, Gorbachev did not make it to the index, and the USSR was a superpower. Today the Soviet experiment is over and the USSR no longer exists. How? Why? Martin McCauley has reworked and greatly expanded his book to answer these questions, and to provide a complete account of the Soviet years. Essential reading to an appreciation of recent history -- and to a better understanding of whatever happens next.

The reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev have brought tumultuous change to political, social and economic life in the Soviet Union. But how have these changes affected Soviet press and television reporting? Glasnost, Perestroika and the Soviet Media examines the changing role of Soviet journalism from its theoretical origins in the writings of Marx and Lenin to the new freedoms of the Gorbachev era. The book includes detailed analysis of contemporary Soviet media output, as well as interviews with Soviet journalists.

The second volume of The Cambridge History of Communism explores the rise of Communist states and movements after World War II. Leading experts analyze archival sources from formerly Communist states to re-examine the limits to Moscow's control of its satellites; the de-Stalinization of 1956; Communist reform movements; the rise and fall of the Sino-Soviet alliance; the growth of Communism in Asia, Africa and Latin America; and the effects of the Sino-Soviet split on world Communism. Chapters explore the cultures of Communism in the United States, Western Europe and China, and the conflicts engendered by nationalism and the continued need for support from Moscow. With the danger of a new Cold War developing between former and current Communist states and the West, this account of the roots, development and dissolution of the socialist bloc is essential reading.