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Corona: The Secret Spy Satellites That Watched the Cold War
In August 1960, months after a Soviet missile brought down an American U-2 spy plane and ended the era of manned overflights of the USSR, the United States achieved something that would prove far more important: it retrieved, from a capsule that had been ejected from a satellite in orbit and parachuted down over the Pacific to be snatched from the air by a passing aircraft, a roll of film containing photographs of the Soviet Union. That single mission photographed more Soviet territory than all the U-2 flights combined. It was the first success of Corona, a top-secret American reconnaissance-satellite program run jointly by the CIA and the Air Force and hidden behind a cover story about a scientific satellite called Discoverer. Over the following twelve years, Corona satellites would photograph the Soviet Union, China, and other closed societies from orbit, returning their film to Earth in a series of astonishing mid-air recoveries, and would transform the ability of the United States to see inside its adversaries. In doing so, Corona did more than gather secrets: by letting each superpower verify the true size of the other's forces, it punctured dangerous myths, made arms-control treaties possible, and, in its quiet way, helped stabilize the terrifying balance of the nuclear age. Classified for decades, its existence was revealed only in 1995. This is the story of Corona — the secret eyes that America put in the sky, and how they changed the Cold War.
The Cuban Missile Crisis: Thirteen Days on the Nuclear Brink
In October 1962, the Cold War came within a hair's breadth of becoming a nuclear one. For thirteen days that month, the United States and the Soviet Union confronted each other over the discovery that the Soviets had secretly installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, ninety miles from the American coast, capable of striking much of the United States within minutes. American reconnaissance had caught the deployment while the missile sites were still being built; President John F. Kennedy imposed a naval blockade of the island and demanded the missiles' removal; and for the better part of two weeks the world held its breath as the two superpowers, each armed with the power to destroy the other and much of humanity, edged toward the abyss. It was, and remains, the closest the world has ever come to full-scale nuclear war — closer, it later emerged, than even the participants understood at the time, with more than one moment in which a single decision, or a single frightened officer, might have triggered catastrophe. That it ended not in annihilation but in a negotiated settlement was the product of nerve, restraint, back-channel diplomacy, a secret deal, and no small amount of luck. This is the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis — the secret deployment, the discovery, the standoff, the near-catastrophes, and the fragile bargain that saved the world.
The Umbrella Murder: The Poisoning of Georgi Markov
On the afternoon of 7 September 1978, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian émigré writer, was waiting at a bus stop on Waterloo Bridge in London, on his way to his job at the BBC World Service, when he felt a sudden sharp sting in the back of his right thigh. Turning, he saw a man behind him bending to pick up a dropped umbrella; the man apologised in a foreign accent, hurried across the road, and got into a taxi. Markov thought little of it at first, but by that evening he had developed a high fever, and over the next three days his condition collapsed catastrophically. He died on 11 September, aged forty-nine. A post-mortem examination found, embedded in his thigh, a tiny metal pellet no larger than a pinhead, drilled with minuscule cavities that had held a dose of ricin — one of the deadliest toxins known, and one for which there is no antidote. Markov had been assassinated in broad daylight on a London street, murdered for the crime of broadcasting the truth about the communist regime in his homeland. The method — a poison pellet delivered, it is believed, by a specially engineered umbrella — became one of the most infamous images of Cold War espionage, and the killing itself one of its clearest examples of a state reaching across borders to silence a dissident. This is the story of the umbrella murder.
The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko: Polonium in a London Teapot
On 1 November 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of Russia's FSB security service who had defected to Britain and become one of the Kremlin's most outspoken critics, met two Russian contacts for tea at the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in London's Mayfair. Within hours he was violently ill; over the following three weeks he wasted away in a hospital bed, his hair falling out, his organs failing, as doctors struggled to identify what was killing him. Only as he lay dying did they discover the cause: polonium-210, a rare and extraordinarily radioactive isotope, which had been slipped into his teapot. He died on 23 November 2006, aged forty-four, but not before dictating a statement accusing President Vladimir Putin directly of ordering his murder. The polonium had left a faint radioactive trail across London — through the hotel, restaurants, offices, and aircraft — which investigators followed to two Russian men, and, they concluded, back to the Russian state itself. A decade later, a British public inquiry found that Litvinenko had been killed in an operation carried out by the FSB and 'probably approved' by Putin himself. It was an assassination by radiation on the streets of a Western capital, and one of the most brazen acts of state murder of the twenty-first century. This is the story of the polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko.
Project Azorian: The CIA's Secret Salvage of a Soviet Submarine
In 1968, a Soviet ballistic-missile submarine, the K-129, sank in the Pacific Ocean north of Hawaii, carrying its crew, its nuclear missiles, and its secrets to the bottom, nearly three miles down. The Soviets searched and failed to find it; the United States, using its network of undersea listening posts, located the wreck. And then the CIA conceived one of the boldest schemes in the history of espionage: to raise the submarine — or a large part of it — from a depth of some 4,900 meters, a feat of deep-sea salvage far beyond anything ever attempted, in order to seize the Soviet nuclear missiles, warheads, and, most tantalizingly, the code machines and cryptographic materials aboard. To do it in secret, the agency built a purpose-designed salvage ship equipped with an enormous mechanical claw, and hid the entire enterprise behind an elaborate cover story: that the vessel, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, belonged to the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes and was mining valuable metals from the sea floor. In the summer of 1974, the ship attempted the impossible. It succeeded in lifting the submarine partway to the surface — before a portion broke off and fell back into the abyss. Exactly what was recovered remains, in part, classified to this day. And when journalists exposed the operation, the CIA's refusal to comment gave the world a phrase that has been with it ever since: that it could 'neither confirm nor deny.' This is the story of Project Azorian.
The Rosenberg Case: Atomic Spies and a Contested Execution
On 19 June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison in New York, convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. They were the only two American civilians ever put to death for spying during the Cold War, and they left behind two young sons. Their case had become, by the time of their deaths, one of the most bitterly divisive in American history: to their defenders, they were innocent victims of anti-communist hysteria, framed and killed to feed the Red Scare; to the prosecution and much of the public, they were traitors who had handed Stalin the atomic bomb and deserved to die. For decades the truth was fiercely contested, the two camps talking past each other. Then, in 1995, the United States released the Venona decrypts — intercepted Soviet intelligence cables — and, with the later opening of Soviet archives, the picture finally came clear, and it satisfied neither side. Julius Rosenberg had, in fact, been a Soviet spy, running a significant espionage ring. But Ethel's guilt was another matter entirely: the testimony that sent her to the chair was later admitted to be a lie, and she appears to have been, at most, a knowing bystander, executed to pressure her husband. This is the story of the Rosenberg case — of real espionage, real injustice, and the hard truth that lies between the two myths that grew up around it.
The U-2 Incident: The Spy Plane That Wrecked a Summit
On the morning of 1 May 1960, an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft — a strange, glider-winged spy plane built to fly higher than any fighter could reach — was cruising at some 70,000 feet over the heart of the Soviet Union, its cameras photographing military installations, when a Soviet surface-to-air missile exploded near it and sent it spinning out of the sky. The pilot, a CIA contract flyer named Francis Gary Powers, parachuted to earth and was captured alive near the city of Sverdlovsk. What followed was one of the most humiliating episodes in the history of American Cold War diplomacy. Believing the pilot dead and the plane destroyed, the United States put out a cover story: that a NASA 'weather research' plane had strayed off course after its pilot reported oxygen trouble. Then the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sprang his trap, revealing that the pilot was alive, had confessed, and that the wreckage — cameras, film, and all — was in Soviet hands. President Eisenhower was exposed in a lie before the world, and, breaking with precedent, ultimately acknowledged that the United States had been conducting espionage overflights. The incident detonated days before a long-planned summit in Paris, which it duly destroyed, ending a fragile thaw and plunging the Cold War back into deep freeze. This is the story of the U-2 incident — the secret program, the shootdown, the collapsing lie, and the summit it took down with it.
The Assassination of Franz Ferdinand: The Shot That Lit the World
On the morning of 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary, rode through the streets of Sarajevo with his wife Sophie in an open car. Waiting along the route were members of a group of young Bosnian Serb nationalists, armed and trained by a secret society with links to Serbian military intelligence, who had come to kill him. The first attempt failed: a bomb was thrown and bounced away, wounding others but not the Archduke. It should have ended there. But a series of small mistakes — a change of route not passed to the drivers, a wrong turn, a car stopped to reverse at the worst possible spot — brought Franz Ferdinand's stalled vehicle to a halt a few feet from one of the assassins, Gavrilo Princip, who had given up and drifted away from his post. He stepped forward and fired twice. The Archduke and his wife were dead within minutes. What followed was not merely a tragedy for two people and their orphaned children but a catastrophe for the world: over the next six weeks, a tangle of alliances, ultimatums, and mobilisations turned a political murder in the Balkans into the First World War, which would kill some twenty million people and destroy four empires. This is the story of the shot that lit the world — and of how very nearly it was never fired.
The Assassination of Trotsky: Stalin's Ice Axe in Mexico
Leon Trotsky had once stood at the very summit of the Russian Revolution — the organiser of the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, the founder and commander of the Red Army, the man many expected to succeed Lenin. Instead he lost the struggle for power to Joseph Stalin, and became the most hunted political exile on Earth. Expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929, he wandered from Turkey to France to Norway before Mexico granted him asylum, and everywhere he went the long arm of Stalin's secret police followed. One by one, his collaborators, his secretaries, and his own children were killed or died in suspicious circumstances, until Trotsky, living behind the high walls and watchtowers of a fortress-like house in the Coyoacán district of Mexico City, was almost the last of his circle left alive. On 20 August 1940, a young man he believed to be a devoted follower came to show him an article. As Trotsky bent over his desk to read it, the visitor drew a mountaineer's ice axe from beneath his coat and drove it into the old revolutionary's skull. Trotsky died the next day. The killer was an agent of Stalin's NKVD, and the operation had been approved at the very top of the Soviet state. Unlike so many political murders shrouded in doubt, this one is documented down to its code name. This is the story of how Stalin finally killed Leon Trotsky.
Project Blue Book: The Air Force's Long Study of UFOs
In the years after 1947, when the sighting by Kenneth Arnold and the events at Roswell launched the modern UFO era, the United States Air Force found itself confronting a steady stream of reports of unidentified objects in the sky — some from credible witnesses, some tracked on radar, all demanding some kind of official response in the anxious atmosphere of the early Cold War. The Air Force's answer was a series of official investigations, culminating in the longest and most famous of them: Project Blue Book, which ran from 1952 until 1969 and became the definitive government study of UFOs of its era. Over those seventeen years, Blue Book collected and examined more than twelve thousand reported sightings, seeking to determine what people were seeing and whether any of it threatened national security or represented technology beyond human capability. Its investigators concluded that the overwhelming majority of sightings had ordinary explanations — misidentified aircraft, weather balloons, stars and planets, atmospheric effects, and hoaxes — and that none of the cases provided evidence of extraterrestrial vehicles. Yet Blue Book also left behind a residue of several hundred cases that it could not explain, and it became the focus of a lasting controversy: was it a serious scientific effort that reached an honest, if unexciting, conclusion, or was it, as critics including its own scientific consultant came to argue, more a public-relations exercise designed to explain sightings away and reassure the public than to study them seriously? This is the story of Project Blue Book, of what it found and what it did not, and of the argument over how a government should investigate the unknown.
Heaven's Gate: The UFO Cult That Died to Reach the Comet
In late March 1997, in a quiet, affluent suburb north of San Diego, thirty-nine members of a group called Heaven's Gate died together in a rented mansion, in one of the most methodical mass deaths in modern history. They were not coerced at gunpoint, and there were no children among them; they were adults, aged from their twenties to their seventies, who shared a belief so complete that they went to their deaths calmly and by their own choice. That belief, strange as it was, had an internal logic. Heaven's Gate held that the human body was merely a temporary 'vehicle' or 'container' for the soul, and that a higher extraterrestrial realm — the 'Next Level,' the 'Evolutionary Level Above Human' — awaited those who were ready to graduate to it. When the bright comet Hale-Bopp appeared in the skies of early 1997, amid rumors that a spacecraft was following hidden in its tail, the group's leader, Marshall Applewhite, concluded that the sign they had awaited for two decades had finally come: a craft had arrived to carry them home. To board it, they believed, they had to shed their earthly bodies. Over three days, in carefully organized shifts, the thirty-nine ended their lives, each dressed identically, each with a small bag packed as if for a journey. They left behind videos and a website explaining, serenely, that they were simply 'exiting their vehicles.' The deaths shocked the world and became a defining case of what a totalizing belief can lead rational people to do. This is the story of Heaven's Gate — not a mockery of the dead, but an attempt to understand how thirty-nine human beings came to believe that dying was the way home.
Jonestown: How a Dream of Justice Became a Massacre
The Peoples Temple did not begin as a death cult. It began, in the 1950s and 1960s, as a church that preached racial integration and social justice at a time when both were radical, that fed the poor and cared for the addicted and the elderly, and that drew to it thousands of idealistic people — many of them Black, many of them poor, many of them sincere seekers of a better and fairer world. At its head was Jim Jones, a charismatic preacher who could speak movingly of equality and who built real influence in California, courted by politicians and admired by progressives. But behind the movement's humane public face, Jones was constructing something else: a system of total control, sustained by manipulation, humiliation, sexual and physical abuse, financial exploitation, and a deepening, drug-fueled paranoia. As scrutiny closed in, he moved his followers to a remote agricultural settlement carved out of the Guyanese jungle — Jonestown — where, cut off from the outside world and utterly under his power, some thousand people lived in isolation and fear. When a United States congressman flew in to investigate reports of abuse, Jones had him murdered at a nearby airstrip. And that same day, 18 November 1978, he set in motion the final act he had long rehearsed: the deaths of everyone in Jonestown. More than nine hundred people died, poisoned with cyanide — many of them forced, many coerced, and more than three hundred of them children who could not consent at all. It was not, for most of the victims, a suicide. It was a massacre. This is the story of how a dream of justice became one of the worst atrocities of its kind in modern history — and of the people who died in it.