The Cold War wasn’t a shooting conflict, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t casualties. Nor does it mean that the United States and the Soviet Union didn’t use every resource at their disposal to learn as much as possible about each other’s military capabilities. Josh Dean’s “The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History” is an absorbing, suspenseful chronicle of a remarkable Cold War episode.

On Feb. 24, 1968, the Soviet submarine K-129, 328 feet...