ESPIONAGE is a is a multi-volume series exploring the global history of spying, secrecy, and betrayal, spanning more than three thousand years. Rather than tell this history as a single continuous account, each volume approaches it from a different angle: the ancient world’s earliest known spies; the women whose work in intelligence was for centuries left out of the historical record; the religious institutions that built some of history’s first intelligence networks; the double agents who served two masters at once; industrial and economic espionage, and the theft of trade secrets and technology; deception, disinformation, and psychological warfare as weapons in their own right; the tools and tradecraft of the profession, from codebreaking to surveillance technology; the assassinations and lethal risks that have shadowed the profession; and its enduring afterlife in literature, film, and popular culture.

Every book in the ESPIONAGE series is written to stand entirely on its own. There is no required reading order, no continuing plot, and no need to read — or own — the rest of the series to follow any single volume. Each is a complete, self-contained history.

Because the record of espionage rarely sorts itself into clean, separate categories, a number of spies, operations, and turning points appear in more than one volume — each time examined through the lens specific to that book’s subject. A woman who spent her career as a double agent, for instance, might be discussed in one volume for what her story reveals about the deceptions of espionage, in another for her place in the history of women in intelligence work, and in a third for the betrayal at the center of her career. 

This is a deliberate feature of how the series is built, not an oversight: the same history can answer several different questions, and ESPIONAGE is structured to ask them one at a time rather than force a single, tidy account of a subject that has never been tidy.

Drawing on historical sources, published scholarship, and research from multiple countries and languages, the ESPIONAGE series is written for curious general readers — no specialist background required — and follows PENNOCLE’s editorial standard of keeping documented history clearly separated from legend, rumor, and the embellishments that have long surrounded the world of spies.