Spyflights

Spyflights reveals how American and British secret services joined forces during the Cold War in a covert alliance to map the USSR and establish its long range nuclear bomb capacity.

It's hard to imagine today, but no reliable maps of the USSR existed after World War Two, and the US and UK were desperate to know the extent of Russian nuclear programme, in an era when the threat of nuclear war was very real.

With the pace of a thriller, Tom Whipple brings this vital era of Cold War history vividly to life. Starting with the allied troops hunting down Russian maps in abandoned German outposts in 1945; to the balloons and secret overflights used to take aerial photographs of Russian sites while under enemy fire; and to Gary Powers being shot down and imprisoned by the Russians as a spy in 1960 which brought an end to these secret missions, this is the page-turning true story of the joint US-UK air force mission that became a CIA, quasi-civilian, secret operation.