Reviews, Forthcoming, New Releases, Overlooked
Director: Various: Season 1, 5 episodes : 27 April 2026
A British intelligence officer races against time to uncover a UK politician's potential ties with the Kremlin, risking her reputation and family, as a murder and election loom.
Soren Finley | PENNOCLE | 17 May 2026
Simon Wiesenthal, who spent decades working with and against every major intelligence service on earth, once described the Vatican's intelligence apparatus as the best he had ever encountered. That remark tends to surprise people. It shouldn't. The Holy Alliance has been running continuously since 1566 — which makes it older than the CIA, the KGB, MI6, the DGSE, and every other national service currently in operation.
Altars and Spies takes that observation as a starting point and follows it across five thousand years and six continents. The result is a history of how religious institutions — temples, monasteries, missions, confessionals, pilgrim routes, diaspora communities — have functioned as intelligence networks, often long before anything resembling a modern state existed.
Among the topics covered:
Drawing on declassified archives, the Mitrokhin and Stasi records, Vatican sources, and recent international scholarship, the book treats religious institutions as organisations — not as targets for admiration or attack. The argument is structural: geographic reach, trusted networks, ideological motivation, and plausible cover are exactly what effective intelligence requires, and religious organisations have always had all four.
Part of the Espionage series.
Timothy Ashby | Scotland Street Press | 30 March 2022
The only biography of William Ashby, an Elizabethan intelligence agent and diplomat who served as ambassador to Scotland during the Spanish Armada crisis.
Focusing on the Anglo-Scottish geo-political relationship during the decade of 1580-1590, with its machinations and bizarre background stories, it provides fresh social, political and foreign policy insight from the perspective of a gentleman spy who took part in some of the most important events of his time. Prior to Ashby’s ambassadorial appointment, he served as a senior ‘intelligencer’ for Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spymaster.
Lynne Olson | Random House | 5 March 2019
In 1941 a thirty-one-year-old Frenchwoman, a young mother born to privilege and known for her beauty and glamour, became the leader of a vast intelligence organization—the only woman to serve as a chef de résistance during the war. Strong-willed, independent, and a lifelong rebel against her country’s conservative, patriarchal society, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was temperamentally made for the job. Her group’s name was Alliance, but the Gestapo dubbed it Noah’s Ark because its agents used the names of animals as their aliases. The name Marie-Madeleine chose for herself was Hedgehog: a tough little animal, unthreatening in appearance, that, as a colleague of hers put it, “even a lion would hesitate to bite.”
No other French spy network lasted as long or supplied as much crucial intelligence—including providing American and British military commanders with a 55-foot-long map of the beaches and roads on which the Allies would land on D-Day—as Alliance. The Gestapo pursued them relentlessly, capturing, torturing, and executing hundreds of its three thousand agents, including Fourcade’s own lover and many of her key spies. Although Fourcade, the mother of two young children, moved her headquarters every few weeks, constantly changing her hair color, clothing, and identity, she was captured twice by the Nazis. Both times she managed to escape—once by slipping naked through the bars of her jail cell—and continued to hold her network together even as it repeatedly threatened to crumble around her.
Now, in this dramatic account of the war that split France in two and forced its people to live side by side with their hated German occupiers, Lynne Olson tells the fascinating story of a woman who stood up for her nation, her fellow citizens, and herself.