Alexander Rose - Böcker

From the New York Times bestselling author of Washington’s Spies, the thrilling story of the Confederate spy who came to Britain to turn the tide of the Civil War—and the Union agent resolved to stop him.“Entertaining and deeply researched…with a rich cast of spies, crooks, bent businessmen and drunken sailors…Rose relates the tale with gusto.” -The New York Times In 1861, soon after the outbreak of the Civil War, two secret agents—one a Confederate, the other his Union rival—were dispatched to neutral Britain, each entrusted with a vital mission.The South’s James Bulloch, charming and devious, was to acquire a cutting-edge clandestine fleet intended to break President Lincoln’s blockade of Confederate ports, sink Northern merchant vessels, and drown the U.S. Navy’s mightiest ships at sea. The profits from gunrunning and smuggling cotton—Dixie’s notorious “white gold”—would finance the scheme. Opposing him was Thomas Dudley, a resolute Quaker lawyer and abolitionist. He was determined to stop Bulloch by any means necessary in a spy-versus-spy game of move and countermove, gambit and sacrifice, intrigue and betrayal. If Dudley failed, Britain would ally with the South and imperil a Northern victory. The battleground was the Dickensian port of Liverpool, whose dockyards built more ships each year than the rest of the world combined, whose warehouses stored more cotton than anywhere else on earth, and whose merchant princes, said one observer, were “addicted to Southern proclivities, foreign slave trade, and domestic bribery.”From master of historical espionage Alexander Rose, The Lion and the Fox is the astonishing, untold tale of two implacable foes and their twilight struggle for the highest stakes. Based on declassified documents and forgotten letters, this gripping true story reveals: Clandestine Operations: Follow Confederate agent James Bulloch and his Union rival Thomas Dudley in a relentless contest of intrigue, gambit, and betrayal on the streets of Liverpool.The Secret Plot to Build a Navy: Uncover Bulloch’s audacious plan to use British shipyards to construct a fleet of commerce raiders and ironclads designed to shatter the Union blockade.King Cotton Diplomacy: Discover how the Confederacy planned to leverage Britain’s dependence on Southern cotton—so-called "white gold"—to finance its secret navy and draw the world’s greatest empire into the war.A Vivid, Forgotten Theater of War: Experience the squalor and intrigue of Dickensian Liverpool, the unlikely battleground where corrupt merchants, drunken sailors, and secret agents decided the fate of the American Civil War.

The thrilling, untold story of one of the greatest heists in history: the clandestine capture of a Nazi U-boat at the climax of World War II, an incredible feat that helped paved the way for the Allied invasion liberation of Europe.Shortly before noon on June 4, 1944, the sonar operator on a destroyer prowling off the coast of West Africa heard a sharp, metallic ping. The sound could mean only one thing: the German U-boat that their hunter-killer group had long been tracking, U-505, was lurking somewhere in the darkness beneath them. The ensuing fight between exhausted hunter and venomous prey would make history when American sailors boarded an enemy warship at sea for the first time since the War of 1812.That day's victory was the culmination of a tireless campaign against the Nazi submarine threat by "Tenth Fleet"-a mysterious unit possessing the oracular ability to predict the locations and movement of Hitler's U-boats. Run by Commander Kenneth Knowles, Tenth Fleet had guided Captain Dan Gallery to U-505 and to repay the favor Gallery was going to steal an Enigma machine for him. Now all they had to do was to make a U-boat, its crew, and its secrets vanish into thin air . . .In this swashbuckling adventure story, bestselling historian Alexander Rose draws on long-classified encrypted documents and intercepted German transmissions to unravel, for the first time, the astounding tale of a daring heist cooked up by an owlish egghead and a glory-seeking buccaneer to score the richest prize on the high seas.