The Tunnels

Reviews / Votes

A story with so much inherent drama it sounds far-fetched even for a Hollywood thriller... Mitchell tells a kaleidoscopic cold war story from 1962, recreating a world seemingly on the edge of a third world war. * The Guardian * This book serves as a stark reminder that barriers can never cut people off entirely but only succeed in driving them underground. * New York Times * The Tunnels is one of the great untold stories of the Cold War. Brilliantly researched and told with great flair, Greg Mitchell's non-fiction narrative reads like the best spy thriller, something le Carre might have imagined. Easily the best book I've read all year. Every hour of my year in East Berlin - 1963/64 - the escape tunnels beneath our feet were being dug. This is their story: those who dug them, those who used them and those who betrayed them to the Stasi. Fascinating - and it is all true. A fascinating and complex picture of the interplay between politics and media in the Cold War era. * The Washington Post * I was stunned by the tunnelling exploits detailed by Greg Mitchell. This intricately detailed account was eye-opening and an exhilarating read. Not knowing who made it out of the East, and who was arrested, or worse, kept me glued to this book until the last page. [An] important work. -- Antonio Mendez, author of <i>Argo An extraordinarily revealing political thriller... Mitchell presents us with a radically changed perspective on one of the Cold War's most dramatic episodes. His book is both priceless as history and just about impossible to beat for sheer narrative grip. -- Frederick Taylor, author of <i>The Berlin Wall Greg Mitchell's The Tunnels uncovers an unexplored underworld of Cold War intrigue. As nuclear tensions grip Berlin, a whole realm of heroes and villains, of plot and counterplot, unfolds beneath the surface of the city. True historical drama. -- Ron Rosenbaum, author of <i>Explaining Hitler and How The End Begins When you have read the last page of Greg Mitchell's The Tunnels you will close the book. But not until then. -- Alan Furst, author of <i>A Hero of France and Night Soldiers Greg Mitchell is the best kind of historian, a true storyteller. The Tunnels is a gripping tale about heroic individuals defying an authoritarian state at a critical moment in the Cold War. A brilliantly told thriller-but all true. -- Kai Bird, author of <i>The Good Spy