Vintage paperback

On assignment to restore a 13th-century German chapel, Blackford Oakes learns that its owner is far more than a charming aristocrat. The charismatic Wintergrin is rousing his countrymen to reunite Germany. Now, Oakes must either pull the fatal switch on his friend, or find a way to change the rules. From the bestselling author of Tucker's Last Stand.

The celebrated author of Tucker's Last Stand and Stained Glass offers a chilling story set against the backdrop of the cold war space race. Blackford Oakes heads a mission to kidnap a pair of extraordinary Russian scientists who can put the U.S. ahead in the race for space, unaware that KGB spymaster Bolgin is hot on his trail.

Master of espionage fiction and National Book Award winner William F. Buckley Jr. brings us another in his best-selling series starring the intrepid CIA agent Blackford Oakes. When a shadowy Russian mole threatens to undermine the free world's defenses by infiltrating President Eisenhower's National Security Counsel, CIA super-secret agent Blackford Oakes is called in to unmask the imposter. Then, Oakes turns the tables on the Communists by piloting a U-2 spy plane on a Gary Powers-style one-way mission behind the Iron Curtain. Sentenced to death and trapped in the depths of the Lubyanka prison, Oakes may have turned his last trick. Or has he?

In the summer of 1961 just as the Berlin Wall is about to slam shut the last escape route out of Eastern Europe, President Kennedy needs to know what the Soviets are up to, and Blackford Oakes is sent to Germany to get the answers. When Oakes' contact, Henri Tod, turns up missing, Blackford locks horns with East Germany's unscrupulous communist boss.

The year is 1961, the setting Havana. CIA super-secret agent Blackford Oakes is sent there on a mission only to find himself in the eye of an international political hurricane. President Kennedy, who has selected Oakes to meet with the Che Guevara inside Castro's Cuba, has contrived a daring plan—dubbed Operation Alligator—that will hopefully bring about an era of detente in East-West relations. The communists, however, have another a double-cross that has terrifying consequences. Soon Oakes is trapped in Cuba, and the heat is on. Warming the climate greatly is the sultry beauty Catalina. The weather betrayal, power politics, and sudden death.

The year is 1954, and Joseph Stalin is dead. As the ruthless Laurenti Beria, head of the KGB, plots to succeed him, another drama is taking place in a distant part of the Soviet empire. United States and British commandoes have begun a mission to overthrow the Soviet-controlled government of Albania, but it is doomed to failure from the outset—jinxed by a traitor. In the aftermath of the disaster, CIA super spy Blackford Oakes pursues his adversary from a covert camp for training murderers to Buckingham Palace, from a KGB hideout in Stockholm to the very doors of the Kremlin. The result is a satisfying tale that brings this episode in the conflict between the West and the Soviet Bloc to a summary conclusion.

Set during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, this eighth Blackford Oakes novel places the urbane CIA agent at the heart of America's anti-Castro operations

The year is 1964. Lyndon Baines Johnson and Barry Goldwater are vying for the presidency, and CIA master spy Blackford Oakes has been sent to South Vietnam to halt its infiltration by men and materiel coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Working out of Saigon with Tucker Montana, a shadowy Texan who designs a brilliant system for breaking the North's supply route, Blackford Oakes is caught up in the ambiguity and confusion generated as America's involvement in the conflict escalates. As Tucker's murky past, his torrid romance with the seductive Lao Dai, and the growing menace of global war come into focus, Oakes―and Tucker―find their loyalty called into question. Both men are forced to make a decisive move that will have consequences neither man can foresee.

In his latest installment in the Blackford Oakes series William F. Buckley, Jr., continues to astonish and delight. The year is 1995, and an energetic senator wants to disarm, perhaps even eliminate, the CIA. To accumulate the evidence necessary to persuade the Senate, he needs the cooperation of Blackford Oakes, now retired. He wants from Oakes an account of his covert activity ten years earlier, when Oakes served as chief of covert activities for the CIA. One such activity, as sensitive a secret as any member of the government ever husbanded, had to do with a plot by young veterans of the Soviet war against Afghanistan to assassinate the man who had just assumed the reins of government in Mikhail Gorbachev. President Reagan was in the White House in 1985. What was his reaction when apprised of a plot by non-Americans to assassinate a man commonly acknowledged as a tyrant? What will the frustrated senator do to compel cooperation from Blackford Oakes? A Very Private Plot takes the reader inside the Kremlin, exhibiting a detailed knowledge and savoir faire characteristic of the author. And inside the Reagan White House, known well to the author, and inside the Clinton White House as well. The forces unleashed in 1985 threaten any resolution between the United States and the Soviet Union and threaten the lives of a very small unit of young Russians who remain in the memory as the tale reaches a climax. A Very Private Plot caps the ten novels that began when, at age twenty-four, Blackford Oakes was seduced by the Queen of England, launching him and American readers on travels unrivaled in cold war fiction for wit and imagination.

Over twenty years ago William F. Buckley Jr. launched the dashing character of Blackford Oakes like a missile over the literary landscape. This newly minted CIA agent—brainy, bold, and complex—began his career by saving the queen of England and quickly took his place in the pantheon of master spies drawn up by Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, and John LeCarre. Against the backdrop of sinister Cold War intrigue, in this his eleventh outing, Oakes crosses paths—and swords—with Kim Philby, perhaps the highest-ranking in the parade of defectors to the Soviet Union. Oakes is now himself a master spy, working out of the agency and around agency rules. His romance with an able and worldly Soviet doctor provides consolation for the death of his beloved Sally. But after his return to Washington he receives dismaying news. It is inevitable that the great Soviet spy and the renowned American agent will meet again—this time, with deadly consequences.

It all started when editor Sam Vaughan asked William F. Buckley, "Why don't you try a novel?" To which America's most renowned conservative replied, "Sam, why don't you play a trumpet concerto?" Vaughan didn't take up this musical challenge, but he did send Buckley a book contract the next morning, and therein lies the origin of the Blackford Oakes novels, ten stories of international intrigue with Oakes, a distinctly American CIA agent, serving as a protagonist. The Blackford Oakes Reader is a collection of the character studies that lie at the heart of these novels. As Buckley explains in his introduction, "In the first novel I guess it is correct to say that I got the idea that it should frame one person (primarily). That person's character and experiences should illuminate the story." Oakes himself is the focus of the first book, Saving the Queen. Subsequently, Buckley would examine an aristocrat trying to exert his will on post-Hitler Germany, a pair of scientists dealing with life in the Soviet Union after confinement in the Gulag, a Spaniard serving as a pawn for the Party in Communist Cuba, and eight other diverse characters, all of whom find their lives entangled in the web of international espionage. Through his characters, Buckley gives a personal perspective to the most important and intriguing world events of the past 50 years. And his original introduction to the Blackford Oakes Reader, outlining the genesis of the novels, is in itself a treasure for Blackford Oakes fans.