This is the true story behind General Alexander Orlov, the man who never was, now revealed in full for the first time: Stalinist henchman, Soviet spy, celebrated defector to the West, and central character in the greatest KGB deception ever.

A primary source examination of the infiltration of Stalin's Soviet intelligence network by members of the American government during World War II reveals the dictator's dubious partnerships with such top-level figures as Vice President Henry Wallace andchief advisor Harry Hopkins.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE PUSHKIN HOUSE PRIZE 'The most formidable spy in history' IAN FLEMING 'His work was impeccable' KIM PHILBY 'The spy to end spies' JOHN LE CARRÉ Born of a German father and a Russian mother, Richard Sorge moved in a world of shifting alliances and infinite possibility. In the years leading up to and during the Second World War, he became a fanatical communist – and the Soviet Union's most formidable spy. Combining charm with ruthless manipulation, he infiltrated and influenced the highest echelons of German, Chinese and Japanese society. His intelligence proved pivotal to the Soviet counter-offensive in the Battle of Moscow, which in turn determined the outcome of the war itself. Drawing on a wealth of declassified Soviet archives, this is a major biography of one of the greatest spies who ever lived.

Living a life that seems incredible even for a spy novel, Dmitri Bystrolyotov was a sailor, doctor, lawyer, and writer, fluent in many languages, whose success as a spy hinged on the fact that he was a charming, handsome, and very adept at seducing women. He stole military secrets from Germany and Italy and fed Stalin information from all over Europe, with his conquests including a French embassy employee, the wife of a British official, and a disfigured Gestapo officer. His story took an unexpected turn when at the height of Stalin's purges he was arrested, tortured, and sentenced to hard labor in the Gulag, where he risked further punishment by documenting how the regime he once served fully and unquestioningly had descended into a monstrous legacy of crimes against humanity.

Stalin's American Spy tells the remarkable story of Noel Field, a Soviet agent in the US State Department in the mid-1930s. Lured to Prague in May 1949, he was kidnapped and handed over to the Hungarian secret police. Tortured by them and interrogated too by their Soviet superiors, Field's forced 'confessions' were manipulated by Stalin and his East European satraps to launch a devastating series of show-trials that led to the imprisonment and judicial murder of numerous Czechoslovak, German, Polish and Hungarian party members. Yet there were other events in his very strange career that could give rise to the suspicion that Field was an American spy who had infiltrated the Communist movement at the behest of Allen Dulles, the wartime OSS chief in Switzerland who later headed the CIA. Never tried, Field and his wife were imprisoned in Budapest until 1954, then granted political asylum in Hungary, where they lived out their sterile last years. This new biography takes a fresh look at Field's relationship with Dulles, and his role in the Alger Hiss affair. It sheds fresh light upon Soviet espionage in the United States and Field's relationship with Hede Massing, Ignace Reiss and Walter Krivitsky. It also reassesses how the increasingly anti-Semitic East European show-trials were staged and dissects the 'lessons which Stalin sought to convey through them.