Why do people betray? In the world of intelligence, the answer comes down to four letters: M.I.C.E. — Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego. Those four motives drove the greatest spies of the 20th century. This book makes them the connecting thread of a plunge into the secret history of the world.

Sixteen true espionage cases, from the Second World War to the end of the Cold War: the defector Farewell, who handed the KGB's secrets to the West; Eli Cohen, embedded at the very top of the Damascus regime; Operation Mincemeat and the corpse that fooled Hitler; the Soviet submarine K-129, salvaged from the middle of the Pacific; the Gladio networks lying dormant across Europe… Sixteen documented dossiers, sixteen fates, sixteen ways of crossing the line.

An illustrated book in which Didier Rancher tells the story and Stéphane Benedetti gives it images: each case becomes a graphic dossier, somewhere between a declassified archive and a work of art. The real spy novel — the one History wrote.