One of the most dramatic spy stories of the Cold War, superbly told by a real authority on the subject. Steve Vogel draws on his family background and reportorial expertise to recreate the paranoid atmosphere of divided Berlin and the wall that symbolized the superpower standoff.  With a cast of characters that could have come straight out of a  John le Carre novel, this is a “mole versus mole” espionage tale like no other.

- Michael Dobbs, author of One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War.

This is the best spy book I have ever read.  It is the true story of the most daring Allied operation of the Cold War - the successful construction in the early 1950s of a tunnel into East Berlin to tap and record KGB and Soviet military communications and the compromise of that operation by British traitor George Blake.  Steve Vogel is a talented and gifted writer who brings the personalities and idiosyncrasies of every participant in this operation to life.  His research is vast, varied, and full of detail.  It is truly one of those rare books you can't put down.

- Sandra "Sandy" Grimes, retired twenty six year veteran of CIA's Clandestine Service and co-author of Circle of Treason - A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed

Betrayal in Berlin has everything a great spy story needs: fascinating characters, plenty of dramatic action, atmospheric backdrops, and world-changing consequences. Yet it has quite a lot more than that, too. Through fresh interviews with principal participants and extensive archival research, Steve Vogel has made the story of the Berlin Tunnel new again. I was riveted to the narrative from start to finish.

- Monte Reel, author of A Brotherhood of Spies: The U-2 and the CIA’s Secret War

It’s a spy thriller that kept me up all night – and it’s all true!  Magnificent story-telling, always clear, every episode meticulously researched.  It’s also a fascinating commentary on the height of the Cold War with Eisenhower, Kennedy and Khrushchev intimately involved in the skullduggery in Berlin.

- Peter Snow, author of When Britain Burned the White House

Betrayal in Berlin has everything a great spy story needs: fascinating characters, plenty of dramatic action, atmospheric backdrops, and world-changing consequences. Yet it has quite a lot more than that, too. Through fresh interviews with principal participants and extensive archival research, Steve Vogel has made the story of the Berlin Tunnel new again. I was riveted to the narrative from start to finish.

- Monte Reel, author of A Brotherhood of Spies: The U-2 and the CIA’s Secret War

A crackling Cold War espionage story, Betrayal in Berlin takes you to the peaks of spying ambition and the depths of betrayal. Vogel takes you deep into the wilderness of mirrors.

- David E. Hoffman, author of The Billion Dollar Spy

It's spy vs. spy in Khrushchev-era Berlin, and countless lives are in the balance. As the Cold War began to grind its way through the 1950s, notes former Washington Post military reporter Vogel (Through the Perilous Fight: Six Weeks That Saved the Nation, 2013, etc.), British and American intelligence agencies began to look for ways to intercept Soviet signals. The telephone was obvious, and British agents had already used the tunnel network of Vienna to tap into Soviet lines. But Berlin was the better locale: "Just as all roads led to Rome, all calls—including to and from Moscow—were routed through Berlin." Thus, an ambitious tunneling project was put into motion only for the Allies to be thwarted when the Soviets learned of the tunnel, a discovery that afforded the possibility of "a big propaganda splash" when Khrushchev made a state visit to London. Why hadn't the tap been detected when it was first made? "Everyone must have been quite drunk," commented an East German technician after taking a look at the alien cables. For all that, Khrushchev kept mum, knowing that if he revealed that the Soviets knew about the tunnel, they would provide clues as to who had made them aware of the project—that source being an overly confident British double agent named George Blake. In time, Blake was discovered and jailed only to break out of prison and make his way across the Iron Curtain in a daring escape. Combing through declassified documents and intelligence archives and drawing on interviews with Blake, Vogel delivers a swiftly moving, richly detailed, and sometimes improbable narrative, surpassing an earlier study of the tunnel affair, David Stafford's Spies Beneath Berlin (2003). As well paced as a le Carré novel, with deep insight into the tangled world of Cold War espionage.

- Kirkus Review