Five great Cold War thrillers

Owen Matthews reported on conflicts in Bosnia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq and Ukraine and was Newsweek’s Bureau Chief in Moscow from 2006-2016. He is the author of several nonfiction books including Stalin’s Children, Glorious Misadventures and An Impeccable Spy.

Matthews's debut novel is Black Sun.

At CrimeReads he tagged five favorite Cold War thrillers, including:

The Innocent by Ian McEwan (1990)

Based on the true story of Soviet spy George Blake who betrayed a secret tunnel bored under the Berlin Wall by the CIA to intercept Soviet telephone cables, the Innocent is an exquisitely written portrait of a young man caught in a moral maze. Leonard Marnham is a young British Post Office telephone engineer who is employed by the Americans to install monitoring equipment in the secret tunnel. Post-war Berlin, still half-ruined, represents the wreck of the old world. Bob Glass, a CIA officer who befriends Marnham, represents the new world of the Cold War—paranoid, self-righteous, obsessed with security for its own sake. The innocent Leonard discovers love, sex, and death, but never finds any kind of righteousness in his own side’s cause beyond his own unthinking childish patriotism. The superb plot winds the life and fate of ordinary, frightened, loving humans through the politics and subterfuge of the Cold War—and in the end Leonard finds a way to save himself and his lover by using the pervasive culture of secrecy to his own, intensely personal ends.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Innocent is among Malcolm Burgess's ten best books set in Berlin and Suzanne Munshower's top ten books about the Berlin Wall.

--Marshal Zeringue