Forthcoming, New Releases, Overlooked
Directors: Peter Kosminsky, Paul McGuigan | 2022, 2026 (TV Series, 2 seasons, 6 episodes in 2022, 6 episodes in 2026)
A leading team of analysts are buried in the heart of GCHQ, secretly working to neutralise threats against Britain.
Nicholas Reynolds, Katie Sanders | Harper Horizon | 25 August 2026
The untold story of the Allies’ secret weapon in occupied France.
Peter J. Ortiz’s path to becoming the most battle-decorated member of America’s first spy agency—and one of the most decorated Marines of World War II—was unlike any other. Born in New York and raised between California and France, he would have stints as a merchant seaman, dude ranch manager, race car driver, lion tamer, circus performer, and Hollywood stuntman and actor. As a teenager, Ortiz ran away from boarding school in France to join the French Foreign Legion. He first experienced combat in North Africa against tribesmen in the Sahara. Fighting on the front lines against the Germans in 1940, he was badly wounded and captured. He repeatedly escaped, one time fleeing a hospital train after assuming the identity of a dead soldier.
Docking in the US the day after Pearl Harbor, Ortiz enlisted in the Marine Corps. As someone who could speak French like a native--and get by in Arabic, German, and Spanish--the dashing former Legionnaire immediately stood out. Instead of being deployed to the Pacific like the majority of Marines, Ortiz was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—America’s World War II forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency—for special operations in North Africa and Europe.
In 1944, Ortiz parachuted into France on two top-secret inter-Allied missions. Operating deep behind enemy lines, he traveled throughout Southeastern France—at times donning his Marine uniform—arming and training the Maquis, blowing up Nazi infrastructure, and aiding downed Allied airmen. Rotating his many covers—including as a fashion designer and minor Vichy government official—he infiltrated Nazi gatherings and funneled intelligence about German positions back to OSS London ahead of D-Day. By the time he escaped across the Pyrenees, he was among the Gestapo’s most wanted.
Two months after the Normandy landings, Ortiz jumped back into the French Alps, this time with a team of Americans he recruited for “Le Grand Parachutage,” a drop that sent more than 150 tons of supplies raining down to the Maquis to fight the Axis. When his six-man patrol was surrounded by more than one hundred Germans at the village of Centron, Ortiz faced a choice: fight the enemy or save the village from Nazi annihilation.
A rare Marine in the European Theater, he received two Navy Crosses. Ortiz’s story—an untold corner of World War II history—is one of extraordinary courage, resistance, and self-sacrifice.
Shane McNeil | Sentinel Publishing | 2 August 2026
Guarding the Republic argues that America is not merely a set of borders or institutions, but a philosophical proposition first articulated by the nation's founders and worth defending in exactly those terms. Dr. Shane McNeil, who served as a counterintelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency and as a counterintelligence policy advisor on the Joint Staff before leaving government service, writes now as an independent scholar of statecraft and national security. The judgments in this book are his own, offered in his academic and personal capacity rather than as any official U.S. government position.
Dr. McNeil's central claim is that the Chinese Communist Party represents the most comprehensive strategic threat that founding idea has faced, and that counterintelligence, properly reconceived, stands as one of the nation's primary institutional defenses of it. Drawing on his doctoral research in statecraft and national security, Dr. McNeil traces American counterintelligence from its Revolutionary War origins through its Cold War apex and post-Cold War fragmentation, then builds the case for CIPHER, a proposed national CI architecture equal to a threat that spans espionage, influence operations, and strategic competition across every instrument of national power. Part history, part doctrine, part reform agenda, this book is written for the practitioners, policymakers, and citizens who will decide whether the republic's defenses match the idea they exist to protect.
Peter Finn, Petra Couvée | Pantheon | 17 June 2014
In Soviet Russia in 1956, Boris Pasternak's novel Dr Zhivago was seen as an assault on the 1917 Revolution. The manuscript was taken out of the USSR and published first in Italy, then around the world. It was also published in Russian by the CIA and smuggled back into the Soviet Union. Pasternak became not only a Nobel Laureate, but the first of Russia's great writer-dissidents. Drawing on recently declassified files, this is the dramatic story of how Dr Zhivago became a secret weapon in an ideological war.