The coverage of The Cold War in Germany: Overview, Origins, and Intelligence Wars is indicated in the subtitle. The "overview," like the "origins," concentrates primarily on the historical development of the Cold War. But the "overview" concentrates more heavily on World War II in terms of background while the "origins" goes back in time to the beginning of the modern era in Western Society. The book also deals with the various "wildcards" of the postwar era including Eurocommunism and the developments of terrorist activity in the 1970s.

Author Otis C. Mitchell, who served as an Army intelligence operative in North Germany, interweaves his counterintelligence experiences with newly declassified documentary evidence (particularly those of the C.I.A. operation in "battleground" Berlin called Base of Operations Berlin, or BOB). Combining these two sources, Mitchell paints a broad picture of the West and East German intelligence and counterintelligence services. He shows that the Cold War had, by the time of the building of the infamous Berlin Wall, already established basic patterns that lasted until its end and beyond. This system became anachronistic after the end of that long struggle, and was not adequate to face the challenge of Islamic fundamentalism as it developed in the 1990s and the early twenty first century.