Intelligence Officer’s Bookshelf—December 2014
Compiled and reviewed by Hayden Peake
Historical
Assassins of the Turquoise Palace, by Roya Hakakian
Britannia and the Bear: The Anglo-Russian Intelligence Wars 1917-1929, by Victor Madeira.
Hoover’s Secret War Against Axis Spies: FBI Counterespionage During World War II, by Raymond J. Batvinis.
Hot Books in the Cold War: The CIA-Funded Secret Western Book Distribution Program Behind the Iron Curtain, by Alfred A. Reisch.
KLOP: Britain’s Most Ingenious Spy, by Peter Day.
The Lawn Road Flats: Spies, Writers and Artists, by David Burke.
MI5 in the Great War, edited by Nigel West
The Official History of the Joint Intelligence Committee – Volume 1: From the Approach of the Second World War to the Suez Crisis, by Michael Goodman.
Spying on the World: The Declassified Documents of the Joint Intelligence Committee, 1936—2013, edited by Richard J. Aldrich, Rory Cormac and Michael Goodman.
On Paper: The Everything of its Two-Thousand-Year History, by Nicholas Basbanes
Russian Roulette: A Deadly Game; How British Spies Thwarted Lenin’s Global Plot, by Giles Milton.
Spies, Patriots, and Traitors: American Intelligence in the Revolutionary War, by Kenneth A. Daigler.
Stalin’s American Spy: Noel Field, Allen Dulles & the East E uropean Show Trials, by Tony Sharp.
Tales from Langley: The CIA from Truman to Obama, by Peter Kross.
The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book, by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée.
Memoirs
Go Spy The Land: Being the Adventures of IK8 of the British Secret Service, by George Alexander Hill.
Good Hunting: An American Spymaster’s Story, by Jack Devine with Vernon Loeb.
Spy Lost: Caught Between the KGB and the FBI, by Kaarlo Tuomi, edited by Sakari Määttänen
Fiction
The Red Cell, by André Le Gallo.
A Spy’s Lonely Path, by Gene Coyle.
Historical
Assassins of the Turquoise Palace, by Roya Hakakian (Grove Press, 2011), 322 pp., sources, bibliography, no index.
While Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then president of Iran, was delivering a message “of reconciliation to the diaspora” (185) on 17 September 1992, two men entered the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin, shot dead four members of the Iranian opposition, and wounded a fifth. The German police reacted swiftly and arrested five suspects—one Iranian and four Lebanese—not associated with the Iranian émigrés. They were not the killers, and the German authorities knew it. The arrests, however, pleased the Iranian government and protected German-Iranian economic relations. In Assassins of the Turquoise Palace, a book only recently brought to our attention, Iranian émigré Roya Hakakian reveals who ordered the assassinations and how the real killers were identified and the accused exonerated.
After seizing power in 1979, writes Hakakian, the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered preparation of a list of “enemies of Islam” who had fled Iran. They were to be hunted down and killed. (36) At the time of the Mykonos killings, at least 60 had already been shot. Hakakian tells two parallel stories of those involved. The first describes the heroic efforts of Bruno Jost, the German prosecutor assigned to the case and who quickly realized the wrong men had been arrested. The second follows an independent investigation conducted by the sole survivor of the attack and a number of journalists. Overcoming attempts by the Iranian minister of intelligence, Ali Fallahian, to influence the German government to convict those originally arrested, Jost used evidence compiled by these journalists, along with the results of his own investigation, to exonerate the innocent and place blame where it belonged.
The investigation and tumultuous trial lasted nearly four years; 176 witnesses were called. (281) The most important was former Iranian president Abulhassan Banisadr, then in exile in Paris; his name appeared on the Ayatollah’s death list. (247) How he was found and persuaded to testify makes for stirring reading.
Assassins of the Turquoise Palace is an important story well told. When the German judge ruled that the “the orders for the crime…came from Iran’s Supreme Leader” (287) the Iranian revolution was placed in proper perspective.
Britannia and the Bear: The Anglo-Russian Intelligence Wars 1917–1929, by Victor Madeira (Boydell Press, 2014), 317 pp., endnotes, bibliography, photos, appendix, index.
Cambridge University (founded in 1209) has a modern reputation as the academic womb of many intelligence officers, spies, and espionage historians. Canadian Victor Madeira of Gonville & Caius College (founded 1348) is a recent example of the latter. Britannia and the Bear, based on his PhD dissertation, presents the first detailed study of a Soviet espionage network that penetrated the English establishment long before the better-known Cambridge Five.
The espionage and subversion in Britannia and the Bear occur in an atmosphere of conflict among political parties, labor unions, and government institutions during a period of dire, post-WW I economic conditions and the emergent perception of a communist threat. The four agencies charged with combating various aspects of that threat—the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, MI5, MI6, and the Government Code & Cipher School (GC&CS)—were themselves engaged in bureaucratic power struggles. Madeira weaves a complicated story while attempting to draw lessons that apply to today’s world.
The principal Soviet agent involved was William Ewer, also a Trinity College graduate and founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, who “in time became a distinguished journalist…[for] the socialist Daily Herald and Tribune, the BBC, and the New York Times.” (39) Ewer used the London office of the Federated Press of America as cover for operations penetrating each of the UK’s security and intelligence organizations. Madeira describes Ewer’s contacts with his Soviet handlers and the agents he recruited in England and abroad; his recruited agents included St. John Philby (Kim’s father), although it is not clear the elder Philby realized Ewer was working for the Soviets. (179) The Federated Press of America operated for at least five years before Ewer’s espionage activities became known to MI5. (187) What happened then is both shocking and unexpected. Madeira does not explain why Ewer was never prosecuted.
Britannia and the Bear is not easy reading. It is chronologically muddled, topically confusing, and saturated with awkward syntax. But it does establish that the Soviets penetrated the British establishment years before the Cambridge Five made their contribution.
Hoover’s Secret War Against Axis Spies: FBI Counterespionage during World War II, by Raymond J. Batvinis (University Press of Kansas, 2014), 334 pp., endnotes, bibliography, photos, maps, index.
During the 1930s, Nazi Germany recruited a number of spies in the United States. By 1940, the FBI had established a domestic counterintelligence capability and a limited foreign intelligence role focused on that threat. Former FBI special agent Ray Batvinis told that story in his first book, The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence.[1] That book did not consider the FBI’s intelligence contribution to WW II, but Hoover’s Secret War Against Axis Spies deals with it at length. In Batvinis’s view, his book is “not a story of international competition,” but it comes close. (3)
For the 18 months preceding 7 December 1941, the FBI’s relationship with British intelligence in America—designated British Security Coordination (BSC)—was fruitfully cooperative. Headed by William Stevenson, the BSC included members of MI6, MI5, and the Special Operations Executive. But as William Donovan worked—with support from Stevenson—to create an independent foreign intelligence service, “a complicated (and poisonous) relationship between Hoover and William Stevenson” developed. One complication was the Bureau’s view that the BSC had begun running unilateral operations in the United States; this was Hoover’s domain, and he reacted aggressively—with mixed results—to limit the BSC to liaison status. (3-4) But once the United States became belligerent, the British recognized “improved sharing relationships with the FBI” (43) would be essential, and Hoover likewise took steps to make the FBI an operational player. Batvinis tells how Hoover did it.
Taking advantage of the FBI’s foreign intelligence responsibilities in Latin America and its domestic counterintelligence mission, Hoover demanded that the British work through the Bureau when their agents entered North or South America. The TRICYCLE double agent case is a good example. When the BSC proved less than responsive to Bureau requests, Hoover sent “legal attachés” to London for direct liaison with MI5, MI6, and Bletchley Park. As a result, “valuable information concerning espionage, sabotage, controlled enemy agents, [and] Double Cross techniques…began flowing to Washington.” (90)
Batvinis covers each of these topics in varying detail. He gives detailed attention to the FBI handling of its own German double agents as part of the British Double Cross deception system and the anticipated operations against Japan. The Bureau had to manage acquisition of the planted information and its communication to the Abwehr. Of equal interest is how the FBI arranged to receive Bletchley Park decrypts—code-named OSTRICH—that mentioned anything in the Western Hemisphere.
Hoover’s Secret War Against Axis Spies adds a new dimension of operational detail to the FBI’s role in WW II, but he does not cover Soviet espionage in wartime America. That will be the subject of Batvinis’s next study.
Hot Books in the Cold War: The CIA-Funded Secret Western Book Distribution Program behind the Iron Curtain, by Alfred A. Reisch (Central European University Press, 2013), 549 pp., footnotes, bibliography, photos, indices.
The late Dr. Alfred Reisch was a political scientist and historian specializing in international relations. He held many prestigious academic and government positions in the United States and Europe, including 12 years with Radio Free Europe (RFE). He also participated over a 15-year period in the CIA-run “surreptitious distribution of books in Hungary” (xii). Hot Books in the Cold War tells that story.
Hot Books is an important contribution for two main reasons: it is the first detailed study of a CIA political warfare program that remained secret during its operational life during 1956–91, and it has a valuable introduction by Dr. Mark Kramer, Director of the Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University and an expert in East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies. Kramer identifies areas that are, for various reasons, excluded from Reisch’s account, and he analyzes the book’s objectives and the distribution criteria Reisch describes.
Reisch documents the origins of this clandestine program; most of the data available covers the period through 1973. He also describes the principal players, the various cover organizations, and the numerous administrative issues that arose during the program’s implementation. The program targeted the “news eager masses,” (45) “the thinking elites and students of Eastern Europe,” (50) plus libraries, research organizations, and universities. Propaganda was scrupulously avoided. The program’s purpose was to stimulate thought, not violent revolution.
The target countries were in the Soviet Bloc; a pilot project directed at China was attempted and then stopped. (79) Unlike RFE and Radio Liberty (RL), the book distribution program was controlled from the United States, and although West European publishers participated, the CIA’s role was kept secret through the use of cover organizations. Reisch discusses the distribution methods used—mainly direct mail—and provides, by country and individuals, data on books mailed and received. Five chapters of letters from readers in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria illustrate the program’s value. There is a separate chapter on efforts aimed at the Soviet Union and non-satellite countries. But for reasons not explained, Reisch does not mention the Zhivago project.
Hot Books in the Cold War is a meticulously documented study of a successful CIA covert action program that has received little scholarly attention until now. A very valuable contribution to the intelligence literature.
Klop: Britain’s Most Ingenious Spy, by Peter Day (Biteback, 2014), 352 pp., photos, index.
In his book My Russia, British polymath Sir Peter Ustinov wrote, “it is difficult for me to understand how anybody can become a spy.”[2] Coming from the son of one of Britain’s most valued and respected secret agents, this is a curious comment. Known to his friends as “Klop” (Russian for “bedbug,” a nickname given to him by his wife, according to author Day), Jona von Ustinov served both MI5 and MI6 before, during, and after WW II. Of Russian, Armenian, German, Polish, Jewish, and Ethiopian noble descent, the multilingual Klop was admired professionally by all with whom he served.
British journalist Peter Day is not the first to write a biography of Klop Ustinov. Ustinov’s wife, Nadia, a successful artist in her own right, published Klop and the Ustinov Family in 1973. She wrote mainly of their social life in Britain, Klop’s hobby of collecting paintings, his love of the good life, and his extramarital affairs, which she tolerated with grace. Although Klop was nominally a journalist, she acknowledged that he worked for a ministry and his “job was a ‘hush-hush’ one and I am not going to tell more.”[3]
Day’s account provides the “more” Nadia left out. He describes the complex Ustinov family origins and how Klop came to serve Germany in WW I, both in the trenches and as a Luftwaffe pilot. Day also explains Klop’s recruitment as a German spy and his assignments, first to Russia and then to England under journalistic cover. Klop’s allegiance to Germany rapidly diminished as Nazi propaganda attacked the Jews. When questioned about his own Jewish background, he severed his links to Germany with a cable to his superior, stating, “If Herr Goebbels would like to prove his ancestry, then I will do the same.” (76) Klop was sacked and promptly “applied for British citizenship.” (79) His application was facilitated by Robert Vansittart, a high Foreign Office official under whom Klop had served as an unofficial agent. Klop’s recruitment by MI5 followed in 1935.
MI5 used Klop in a variety of operations that drew on his language and interrogation skills. At one point, MI6 co-opted him to go on a mission to Lisbon for Kim Philby. Day includes long descriptions of several well-known operations—the Venlo Incident, the Rote Kapelle network, and the Noel Field case—where Klop’s involvement was peripheral at best. His postwar services included debriefing Germans and fostering ties to Moura Budberg, a suspected Soviet agent and friend from his days in Russia, who was by then living in England. Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt had attended her parties, and in 1951, she told Klop that Blunt was a member of the Communist Party. Day writes that this information was not added to Blunt’s file, but he provides no source for that claim.
Klop Ustinov retired in 1957, and Day describes his partially successful attempts to rebuild his family life and adjust to a lack of activity and deteriorating health. He died in 1962, on the eve of his 70th birthday. Klop is the story of a dedicated agent who served his adopted country with distinction.
The Lawn Road Flats: Spies, Writers and Artists, by David Burke (Boydell Press, 2014), 270 pp., endnotes, bibliography, photos, index.
A recent article in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians[4] celebrated the 1934 opening of the “fearlessly modern and conspicuous…Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, London.” The author, Jill Pearlman, a senior lecturer at Bowdoin College, noted that an “illustrious roster of tenants took up residence…among them artists, architects, writers, critics, academics, journalists.”[5] But the central to her essay were four lesser-known tenants, each a Soviet spy, who came to live in “the Flats.” In The Lawn Road Flats, historian David Burke expands on this, naming seven Soviet agents and one retired OSS officer—Charles Fenn—who lived there between 1934 and the late 1940s. Burke also includes many of their colleagues who lived nearby or visited during that period.
The best-known Soviet agent in the mix was Arnold Deutsch—the principal recruiter of the Cambridge Five—who lived in #7 with his wife during 1935–38, not far from the flat later owned by Agatha Christie (a resident during 1941–47), who wrote her only spy novel there. (2) By far, the largest group of communist agents linked to the Flats was the 10-member Kuczynski family. Jürgen Kuczynski was instrumental in recruiting atom spy Klaus Fuchs. Jürgen’s sister, Ursula Kuczynski—better known as SONJA—was a frequent visitor; she later handled Klaus Fuchs and Melita Norwood for the GRU. Norwood’s mother had suggested the Flats to the Kuczynskis. Four family members lived in the Flats, some resided across the street, and others regularly visited.
Prominent among other visitors was the communist photographer and Soviet agent Edith Tudor-Hart. She took publicity photos for the Flats when the owners, Jack and Molly Pritchard, advertised its opening. For all of the agents he identifies, Burke includes background data on personal relationships and espionage activities. In Tudor-Hart’s case, he tells how she met Kim Philby in Vienna and later introduced him to Arnold Deutsch in London.
In addition to the spy tales, Burke discusses the Flats’ modernist architectural significance and weaves in stories about many other tenants, some famous, like Nicholas Monsarrat, author of The Cruel Sea.
With presumably unintentional irony, The Lawn Road Flats shows how dedicated communist agents lived well among the upscale bourgeois as they recruited traitors in their midst.
MI5 in the Great War, edited by Nigel West (Biteback, 2014), 320 pp., bibliography, index.
In his now-classic history of British intelligence, In Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Cambridge professor Christopher Andrew described the establishment of Britain’s modern intelligence services amidst “invasion and spy scares [and] a public mood bordering on mass hysteria.” Many popular fiction writers and public figures demanded action to “awake a sleeping nation to a nonexistent peril… imaginary invaders and imaginary spies.”[6] (37) The irony, of course, was that there were some German spies operating in Britain at the time, just not the “50,000 waiters” functioning as secret agents. (43) And by the start of the war, most of the real peacetime agents had been arrested. But the Kaiser sent more, and many of those wartime agents have since come to light in various works. In Spies of the Kaiser, Thomas Boghardt discussed German agents involved in naval espionage.[7] Andrew’s 2009 authorized history of MI5 took a broader view and added more cases.[8] Nigel West’s recent study of WW I intelligence (part of the Historical Dictionary series) included still more cases not mentioned by the others.[9] MI5 in the Great War summarizes the original 10 volume official assessment of the Security Service’s WW I operations, which was the major source for all three of these works.
The original study was written by Dr. Lucy E. Farrer at the request of then MI5 Director-General Colonel Vernon Kell. Farrer was a historian who worked for MI5 during the war. Kell had been instructed to include all important material relative to G Branch (the investigative element of MI5) so that the voluminous files could be destroyed, and that is what happened. Thus her report, often referred to as “the G report” or by its British National Archive file designations KV 1/39 and KV 1/44, doesn’t refer to any sources. After brief comments on G branch organization and methodology—mainly monitoring agents’ mail—Farrer’s narrative describes cases chronologically from the prewar period up until 1918.
In editing Farrer’s work, West has selected many of Farrer’s interesting accounts. Farrer’s version provides in-depth treatment of cases that other published studies have only briefly summarized. For example, Andrew covers the Hentschel-Parrott case in three pages,[10] while Farrer’s account requires 24 pages (32-56) and includes agents Andrew omitted. Likewise, Boghardt only briefly mentions Norwegian spy Alfred Hagn,[11] while Farrer provides a more comprehensive story (380–89). She explains how spies operated and were finally caught instead of just saying that they were arrested.
While MI5 in the Great War presents many new cases and much new data, it suffers a major deficiency: no index. Readers wishing to find a particular case must scan the entire book or rely on the Kindle edition. But this work does reveal the magnitude of MI5 WW I security operations like no other source.
The Official History of the Joint Intelligence Committee – Volume 1: From the Approach of the Second World War to the Suez Crisis, by Michael Goodman (Routledge, 2014), 471 pp., end-of-chapter notes, bibliography, appendices, index.
The controversial “September Dossier,” which justified the British decision to join the United States in war against Iraq, was produced by the Joint Intelligence Committee. (JIC) Until then, the JIC was “one of the less talked about and least understood of Whitehall committees.” (1) As a first step in remedying this circumstance, King’s College professor Michael Goodman was appointed Cabinet Office historian and tasked with preparing The Official History of the Joint Intelligence Committee – Volume 1.
For this first volume in what is expected to be a multi-volume effort, Goodman was given access to the JIC archives. The result is an extensively documented account of the JIC, from its origins as a military subcommittee before WW II to its performance in the Suez Crisis. The level of detail is impressive compared to the relatively brief account found in Spying on the World, which Goodman coedited. (See following review.) In this more in-depth treatment, Goodman covers the need for the JIC, its organizational evolution, the personnel involved in its management and the assessments produced, and the impact of important international events on its development. Of particular interest are its prewar performance—influenced by the Spanish Civil War—its role in WW II, and the organizational changes that followed.
By the end of WW II, the JIC had attained “elder statesmen” status in the British intelligence community, and the British hoped it would be adopted as a model in other nations, especially the United States. (205) Goodman writes, that “to the British, the great originator and purveyor of modern intelligence…it was desirable to educate the United States departments in our views.” And he goes on to explain how “the backbone of the Anglo-American intelligence partnership was forged” by passing information to elements of the emerging US intelligence community—sometimes resulting in controversy—and to other allies. (207)
Goodman covers the role of the JIC during the Cold War in detail, with special emphasis on the effectiveness of Soviet agents and Allied intelligence service efforts to identify and diminish the damage. The Soviet Union was not the only adversary of interest. Goodman discusses JIC performance—deficient in certain respects—during the Korean War and during what he terms “the Asian Cold War” as the communist threat there increased. At the same time, events in the Middle East—Iranian nationalism and the Palestinian conflict—were of growing concern to policymakers. There is a separate chapter on the JIC performance in the Suez Crisis, which strained US-UK political relations. But, Goodman shows, “more positive messages were emerging from the CIA … [due] to Dulles’ willingness to continue to cooperate with us on the intelligence side.” (406)
In his conclusions, Goodman notes the JIC “was responsible for the invention of the all-source intelligence assessment…and the development of intelligence analysis as a function government as a whole,” not just the military. (429) And he emphasizes the importance of “liaison,” which “can be best demonstrated by the turbulent relationship with the US intelligence community.” (429)
For those interested in the Anglo-American intelligence relationship, this official history will be a valuable source.
Spying on the World: The Declassified Documents of the Joint Intelligence Committee, 1936–2013, edited by Richard J. Aldrich, Rory Cormac and Michael Goodman (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 448 pp., end-of-chapter notes, bibliography, appendices, index.
Richard J. Aldrich (Warwick University), Rory Cormac (University of Nottingham) and Michael Goodman (King’s College London and the Cabinet Office) have done more than edit this work. In addition to valuable introductory and summary chapters, they have contributed documented prefatory analysis to each of the 20 chapters that examine the functions of the JIC since its origin in 1936.
Why is the JIC history of interest to the US Intelligence Community? The authors advance one reason: “It represents the highest authority in the world of intelligence.” (1) But there are other possible reasons why the US community might be interested. The United States had a JIC during WW II that is “the least studied of the US wartime intelligence organizations.”[12] So useful comparisons would be possible, should this shortcoming be addressed by historians. Then there is the issue of American representation on the British JIC, another seldom-examined topic.[13] Finally, the close relationship between the US and UK intelligence communities requires that each understands the organization and functions of the other. Spying on the World provides a basis for improving that understanding.
The JIC assigns requirements and produces the final assessment of the British intelligence community to policymakers on any given topic. After a discussion of JIC origins before WW II, the book’s chapters provide examples of JIC products up through 2013. These include assessments that were right and some that weren’t. It is important to note that, unlike US National Intelligence Estimates, in which dissenting views are noted, British JIC products are “defined by a quest for consensus.” The authors recognize that this leaves the JIC open to charges “of ‘lowest common denominator’ assessments” but it works for them. (3)
Examples of the topics assessed are SIGINT targeting, the Berlin Blockade, Chinese entry into the Korean War, Soviet capabilities, the Suez Crisis, international terrorism, and the war in Iraq. The editors note, “The British government refused to release for this volume any JIC document related to the end of the Cold War.” (381) To partially fill that gap, they include a parliamentary committee report.
When the current British government was formed in 2010, it created a National Security Council. Besides adding another layer of bureaucracy, the NSC modified the JIC’s operations. The authors discuss these changes and their implications.
Spying on the World provides essential background and insight for those seeking a better understanding of the British intelligence role in the complex “special relationship” with the United States.
On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History, by Nicholas Basbanes (Knopf, 2013), 430 pp., endnotes, bibliography, photos, index.
Journalist, bibliophile, and author Nicholas Basbanes ranks paper alongside the wheel, gunpowder, the magnetic compass, and printing as singular revolutionary technological breakthroughs. He has written On Paper to make his point, beginning with two basic questions: who invented it, and how did it become the ubiquitous product that is so much a part of everyday life?
The short answer to the first question can be found on Wikipedia: paper was invented in China by Cai Lun in AD 105. But Basbanes wanted to know how it was discovered and made. So he went to China, where ancient papermaking practices are still employed. After describing the Chinese processes, he traces its slow evolution and application throughout the Arabic world, Europe, and the New World. For background, On Paper also explains other methods of recording history—stone, clay tablets, papyrus—and how paper gradually assumed the dominant position.
What does this have to do with intelligence? After discussing the uses of paper for passports and security documents, Basbanes notes that the paper-based “ingenious utensils of espionage in general have been the stuff of awe and amazement.” (158) He reached this conclusion after a visit to the CIA Museum, where he viewed “some of the more imaginative tools of this highly specialized trade…. What I found informative was evidence indicating how so much of what has been done to support various clandestine activities over the years has relied on paper.” (159)
In addition to one-time-pads and edible paper, Basbanes discusses the paper documents used in establishing cover and legends for operatives. While studying the OSS exhibit, he learned that the first task undertaken by Stanley Lovell, Donovan’s director of research and development, “was the organization of a plant for documentation” to produce the papers necessary for operations behind enemy lines.[14]
Basbanes then reviews the extensive use of paper in WW II propaganda and deception operations, including Operation Mincemeat, which was popularized in The Man Who Never Was.[15] (160) He goes on to discuss a ‘special version’ of Laotian currency printed for propaganda purposes during the Vietnam War. There is also a lengthy review of techniques used by CIA officers Tony and Jonna Mendez. These include “splitting paper to put in a microdot,” (164) and, as they did during Operation ARGO, producing false identity documents.
Basbanes goes on to provide a detailed examination of the importance of archival paper in preserving history. Examples include Beethoven manuscripts, Thomas Edison notebooks, Nuremberg war crime trial evidence, Katyn massacre documents, the CIA MKUltra project records, the Pentagon Papers, and the WikiLeaks disclosures. He also discusses the extensive use of paper by the Stasi for domestic security and how NSA uses paper before committing its work to the digital domain.
On Paper concludes with numerous examples of how paper is currently used in in every phase of daily life. He adds, “[as] a student at Harvard…I took paper for granted.” (352) Few who read this book will do the same.
Russian Roulette: A Deadly Game; How British Spies Thwarted Lenin’s Global Plot, by Giles Milton (Bloomsbury, 2014), 378 pp., endnotes, bibliography, photos, index.
If the Russian Nagant revolver is not held vertically when the cylinder is spun, the chamber with the bullet will come to rest at the bottom, thus minimizing risk when playing Russian Roulette. When Vladimir Lenin assumed power in 1917, he acted quickly to minimize the chance of counterrevolution, make peace with Germany, and spread the revolution throughout the world. Great Britain and the other Western powers worked to keep Russia fighting, and when that failed, to overthrow or constrain the new government. The story of their efforts has been told before in biographies and memoirs of the principal agents involved—Sidney Reilly (“Ace of Spies”), Paul Dukes, George Hill, and Arthur Ransome.[16] Likewise, the postwar British-American military support for anti-Bolshevik forces and the actions to counter the spread of communism to India are the subject of separate studies.[17] In Russian Roulette, historian Giles Milton has, for the first time, tied them all together in a geo-intelligence version of the notorious game.
From the moment of the Czar’s abdication, Mansfield Cumming, the first head of the Secret Intelligence Service, was pressed by the Foreign Office to find out what was going on. Milton tells how Cumming accomplished the task with inexperienced agents, several of whom he personally recruited. Their operations in Russia required complicated covers, disguises, and communications channels using couriers to Sweden. They provided the intelligence needed and protected their agents—and their mistresses—all the while under suspicion by Felix Dzerzhinsky’s secret police, the Cheka. Only when Reilly and Hill decided to try to overthrow the government, in what became known as the Lockhart Plot, were their efforts compromised—by a French journalist—and they were forced to make daring escapes. Cumming reacted by sending in Dukes and recruiting Ransome. Both spoke Russian well and were productive. Ransome, a left-wing journalist not popular in London, maintained especially close contacts with the Russians; Trotsky’s secret personal secretary was his mistress.
Cumming then sent Reilly and Hill to Southern Russia to determine whether the anti-Bolshevik forces would be able to defeat the Red Army. Despite their reports indicating the poor capabilities of the anti-Bolshevik forces, Churchill advocated continued support. Milton, citing an Imperial War Museum article, then records a seldom-mentioned event: to accomplish his military goals, he writes, Churchill “took the highly controversial decision to sanction the use of chemical weapons against the Bolsheviks,” (250) and some so-called “M Devices” were used. (252–55)
At the same time, Cumming ran operations in the Tashkent region of Russia. Lenin had annulled the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, which had established borders along Afghanistan and Persia as a safeguard for British interests in India. When Frederick Bailey, the SIS officer in Tashkent, reported that “the Bolshevik plans…were to start disturbances by any means possible…in India and Afghanistan and compel them to adopt Communism,” the British government took effective action. (255ff) Milton describes the difficult consequences for Bailey.
Aside from entertaining readers with exciting, well-told spy stories, Russian Roulette documents the coming of age of the fledgling British secret service. The government had found its product absolutely essential and thus its future was secure.
Spies, Patriots, and Traitors: American Intelligence in the Revolutionary War, by Kenneth A. Daigler (Georgetown University Press, 2014), 317 pp., endnotes, bibliography, appendix, glossary, index.
Before CIA operations officer Ken Daigler retired, he wrote a pamphlet, The Founding Fathers of American Intelligence,[18] which was provided to visiting dignitaries and other guests who were unfamiliar with the roots of American intelligence. Spies, Patriots, and Traitors is a major expansion of that work but is not the first book to cover the topic. Historian Carl Van Doren’s Secret History of the American Revolution[19] and John Bakeless’s Turncoats, Traitors and Heroes are two of the best, though both are out of print. Daigler adds a new perspective—that of an intelligence officer.
After explaining how George Washington learned the value of intelligence the hard way as a young British officer, Daigler considers the role of the Sons of Liberty, the Committees of Correspondence, and the Mechanics in influencing the decision to go to war and in early battles that followed. He also addresses covert efforts in Europe that supplied much-needed gunpowder and other materials. On the home front, he reviews the contribution of intelligence to key battles, the Christmas Eve attack on Trenton being an important example. Daigler challenges two other historians on their interpretation of a key point in the preparation for that battle: Was John Honeyman a spy who provided General Washington data on the Hessian garrison at Trenton? One of those other historians, David Hackett Fischer, does not mention Honeyman in his description of events.[20] The other historian, Alexander Rose, argues Honeyman was not a spy.[21] Daigler makes a good case that he was.
Daigler goes on to discuss the significance of the Nathan Hale mission and Benedict Arnold’s defection. He also assesses the importance in New York of the Culper Ring, the key contribution of intelligence and deception operations throughout the war, and the intelligence roles played by African Americans. He places special emphasis on Washington’s intuitively skillful use of tradecraft.
Determining the tactical or strategic value of intelligence is a subjective matter, but Daigler does not hesitate to render his judgments in the final chapter. What may surprise some is his conclusion that the “most important intelligence activity undertaken by Washington” didn’t involve his agents, although they were of value. It was the offensive use of “his assets mixed with his military deception activities” that made the biggest difference.
Spies, Patriots, and Traitors provides a good review of intelligence in the Revolutionary War as viewed by a professional.
Stalin’s American Spy: Noel Field, Allen Dulles & the East European Show Trials, by Tony Sharp (Hurst, 2014), 410 pp., endnotes, bibliography, index.
Noel Field was born in England in 1904—his father was an American Quaker, and his mother was English. He grew up in Switzerland, came to the United States with his mother after his father died, and attended Harvard. After graduation, he joined the State Department, eventually drifted into communism, and was recruited as a spy. He left the State Department in 1938 and found work at the League of Nations in Europe. During 1941–47 he worked as the head of the American Unitarian Service Committee in France and Switzerland, where he sought to aid leftist groups during and immediately after the war.
In 1949, Field and those close to him disappeared, one by one. That May, Field went to Czechoslovakia seeking new work. When his wife, Herta, then in Geneva, sent him telegrams, they went unanswered. Herta and Noel’s brother Hermann went to Prague to find him. When they failed, Hermann went to Warsaw on planned business, while Herta stayed in Prague. On 22 August, Hermann was dropped off at Warsaw’s airport for his return flight to Prague, but he never arrived at his destination. Herta called Hermann’s wife, Kate, in London, but she had not heard from him. A few days later when Kate tried to contact Herta, she, too, had disappeared. Kate’s call to the Fields’s foster daughter, Erica Wallach, a communist herself who spied while in the OSS, did not initially raise concern; after all, they had gone behind the Iron Curtain, and communication was difficult. But after several months, Erica, too, became concerned and went to Berlin, where she asked a communist friend for help. When Kate tried to contact Erica in Berlin, she couldn’t be found. Kate heard nothing more from any of them for five years. Stalin’s American Spy explains why.
British author Tony Sharp is not the first to try and tell the Fields’s story, but he is the first to get it right—well, mostly right. Journalist Flora Lewis reported the basic story in her 1965 book, Red Pawn.[22] Conspiracy theorist Stewart Steven published Operation Splinter Factor nearly ten years later.[23] Lewis did not have access to the Cold War files released in Hungary that answered key questions. Steven, relying on a leak from a putatively reputable source behind the Iron Curtain, blamed the disappearances on a CIA operation orchestrated by Allen Dulles, who was not at the CIA at the time he and Lewis allegedly had made contact in Switzerland. Sharp gives too much credence to Steven’s dotty conspiracy.
Sharp’s clever title has a double meaning, which, when understood, explains a lot. When Field was still at the State Department, NKVD recruiter Hede Massing convinced him to spy for Stalin. Field also knew his friend in the Department, Alger Hiss, was spying for the GRU. Field continued his spying in Europe during and after the war, first with the League of Nations and then with the Unitarian relief group. At some point, Field contacted Dulles, a family friend, in Bern seeking help for American Spanish Civil War veterans. Dulles could not help, but the Soviets learned they had met.
After Massing testified against Hiss, Field knew he could not return to America or he, too, would be indicted. So, having been a loyal Soviet spy, he sought work behind the Iron Curtain. Sadly for him, he did so at a time when Stalin was arranging purge trials for several Hungarian Communists with whom Field had had contact. The Czechs arrested Field and turned him over to the Hungarians as Stalin’s duplicitous American spy. The Hungarian documents show that he was tortured and confessed before testifying at the purge trial of his former contacts. Herta, Erica, and Hermann were arrested to assure their silence.
In 1953, Józef Światło, the Polish officer who had arrested Hermann at the airport, defected to the West. He had attended the purge trial and revealed the status of the Fields and Erica Wallach. The State Department worked to secure their freedom. Noel and Herta were released after Stalin died but remained in Hungary for the rest of their lives. The Czechs released Hermann, who returned to his wife and became a professor at Tufts University. In 1955, Erica was finally released from the Soviet Vorkuta Gulag, moved with her American husband to Warrenton, Virginia, wrote her memoir, and became a teacher.
Stalin’s American Spy is a good, thoroughly documented, hard-to-believe spy story.
Tales from Langley: The CIA from Truman to Obama, by Peter Kross (Adventures Unlimited, 2014), 378 pp., footnotes, bibliography, photo, appendix, no index.
Tales from Langley gets off to a dreadful start. The first five chapters are about the OSS and the FBI. The remaining 50 chapters mention the CIA and have two characteristics in common—the stories in them have all been told before, and they are a murky mix of fact and error. The latter dominate.
For example, President Truman did not create the CIA solely to inform him “and his top advisors as to what was going on in the world.” (9) James Murphy was not one of three men heading the OSS; Donovan was it. (12) Nor was the OSS “the first national intelligence organization fielded by the United States;” the FBI has that honor. (13) And Donovan was not appointed Coordinator of Information (COI) as a result of Ian Fleming and Admiral Godfrey meeting with the president; the president had made his decision before the meeting. (22) MI5 was not “about to arrest Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean” before they defected to the Soviet Union; MI5 doesn’t have arrest powers, Burgess was not under suspicion, and Maclean was only going to be interviewed. (44) The U-2 didn’t “watch every Soviet military installation without being detected”; its coverage was necessarily selective, and the Soviets were aware of its flight from day one. (101) Pyotr Popov was a major—not a colonel—in Vienna, and his first assignment in East Germany was not at Karlshorst, a post-WW II entity. (109) It is inaccurate that “Richard Helms wanted British intelligence to get Penkovsky first”—whatever that means; the CIA made the first attempts to contact him. (176) Yuri Nosenko was not “at the time of his defection…one of the highest ranking Soviet KGB officers to come westward.” He was a captain. (199) Aldrich Ames was not a “double agent” and it was not the FBI that correlated his bank deposits with his operational meetings; the CIA did that. (281)
Tales from Langley is a scholarly disaster. It might have been a worthwhile summary of espionage cases had basic fact-checking been done. But that is hard work, and there is no app for that.
The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book, by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée (Pantheon, 2014), 352 pp., endnotes, bibliography, photos, index.
In September 1958, a month before the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Boris Pasternak, a Russian-language edition of his Doctor Zhivago was distributed at the Brussels World Fair with the help of the Vatican. The title page indicated the publication was the work of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the Italian publisher who defied the Soviets and released the book in 1957. Feltrinelli furiously denied his firm was responsible for the Russian edition. Other publishers followed with French and English editions in 1958, and they, too, denied involvement with the Russian version. (154) But there were a few other clues. The dust jacket and hardcover binding suggested that Mouton, a publisher based in The Hague, played a role, but it declined comment. When readers noticed the book was riddled with grammatical and typographical errors, it was clear it had not been published in Russia. So who was responsible? And how had the book made it out of the Soviet Union in the first place? Washington Post journalist Peter Finn and coauthor Petra Couvée, a teacher at St. Petersburg State University, supply answers in The Zhivago Affair.
It didn’t take long for the CIA to become a suspect. It was “first mentioned…as [the] secret publisher in November 1958.” But it wasn’t until 2013 that it “acknowledged its role.” (17) The word “role” is appropriate since many other parties contributed, and each one maintained the secrecy of the CIA connection. Britain was a crucial player. MI6 delivered a copy of the Russian manuscript to the CIA on microfilm on 2 January 1958. (294) Finn and Couvée explain how publication was integrated into the CIA’s clandestine program for distributing Western books behind the Iron Curtain (see review of Hot Books in the Cold War on page 54), and how variations in delivery routes masked CIA links. After a false start with the University of Michigan and warnings from “British intelligence…not to publish in the United States,” (130) the assistance of the Dutch intelligence service (BVD) was solicited. The BVD, dealing through a cutout, arranged a special printing by Mouton. (136) The CIA handled distribution through the Vatican pavilion at the Brussels Fair.
The story of the book’s origins—it was Pasternak’s only novel, begun in 1945—and its escape from the Soviet Union is less complicated but offers its own puzzles. In the telling, Finn and Couvée probe Pasternak’s complicated family life, his international fame as a poet, and the reasons he survived the Soviet purges of the 1930s, when so many other authors went to their deaths or the Gulag. The authors conclude Pasternak was protected by Stalin, himself “a poet in his youth [and] a voracious reader of fiction” who “once telephoned Pasternak to discuss whether a particular poet, Osip Mandelstam…should receive…the Stalin Prize.” (15) Finn and Couvée also include Pasternak’s often quarrelsome sessions with his Soviet editors and the government officials who forced him to decline his Nobel Prize. But it was his international reputation that was the key factor in getting his manuscript to the West after it was clear it would not be published in the Soviet Union. Pasternak merely gave a copy to an Italian Feltrinelli representative, who carried it to Italy. Pasternak would later send copies to Britain and France, somehow managing to communicate by letter with secret meanings only the recipients would understand. Finn and Couvée never explain how he managed to avoid the ever-present KGB.
The Zhivago Affair is a great story, wonderfully told.
[Top of page]
Memoirs
Go Spy the Land: Being the Adventures of IK8 of the British Secret Service, by George Alexander Hill (Biteback, 2014), 303 pp., appendix, index.
George Hill (1892–1968) was born in Estonia to a timber merchant. Educated at home by governesses, he learned Russian, French, and German. Hill was vacationing in British Columbia when WW I broke out. He promptly joined a Canadian infantry regiment. He was seriously wounded when his unit fought at Ypres in 1915. Unfit to continue in the infantry, he transferred to military intelligence, where he added Bulgarian to his languages. He trained as a pilot and was sent to Greece, where he flew agents behind enemy lines. In 1917, he was sent to Petrograd as a member of the “Royal Flying Corps.” There he helped Leon Trotsky organize the Red Air Force and a military intelligence service. At the same time, he worked with Sidney Reilly—and later Arthur Ransome and Paul Dukes—to build an agent network that kept the Foreign office informed of events in Russia. (See reviews of Russian Roulette and Britannia and the Bear above). Hill provides extensive detail on how he recruited and handled his agents.
After the British landed troops in Murmansk and Hill’s network was exposed, he escaped Russia in the aftermath of the Lockhart Mission—a failed attempt to unseat the new Bolshevik leadership—and returned to London, where he met Mansfield Cumming (“C”) for the first time. He spent the next three years in southern Russia with Reilly reporting on attempts by Russian monarchists to overthrow the Bolsheviks. When he returned to London, he was awarded the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order, and then was dismissed from the service owing to budget cutbacks. He lived in a trailer while seeking employment and began work on this memoir. It was finally published in 1932. Hill wrote a second memoir, Dreaded Hour,[24] in which he told of his service in southern Russia. Recalled to service with the SOE during WW II, he trained new officers—including Philby—in the use of demolitions before being sent to Moscow, where he became a brigadier in the British army. After the war, he became a director of the British-owned German mineral water company Apollinaris.
This new edition of Go Spy the Land not only makes available again an important work that has long been out of print, but it adds an appendix with Hill’s recently released official report on the Lockhart Plot. Hill was one of a kind. With no training, he became an effective intelligence officer by applying common sense. His firsthand account of British secret service operations in Russia is good reading.
Good Hunting: An American Spymaster’s Story, by Jack Devine with Vernon Loeb (Sarah Crichton Books, 2014), 324 pp., endnotes, photos, index.
In 1966, when Jack Devine was teaching social studies in suburban Philadelphia, his wife gave him copy of The Invisible Government,[25] —the very controversial book DCI John McCone tried to suppress. In one of life’s subtle ironies, instead of “being shocked and outraged by its revelations of a vast and secret intelligence bureaucracy,” (11) he wrote asking for employment. A year later, he began a 32-year career with the CIA. Good Hunting tells how it went; it is not a quotidian memoir.
While the format of Good Hunting is conventional—a roughly chronological progression—the career experiences and policy messages it conveys are not. After recounting his initial training, where he encountered Aldrich Ames, Devine describes his initial overseas assignment as a case officer in Chile during the Allende years. His firsthand account of CIA’s role in supporting opposition forces there establishes a theme that surfaces in his discussions of subsequent assignments—covert action done properly can be a force for good.
Devine rose rapidly at the CIA, serving six presidents during his career. He was directly involved in the decision to provide shoulder-fired antiaircraft weapons to the mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. And he challenges critics who allege that “CIA’s covert war in Afghanistan created al-Qaeda.” (104) His disagreement with those who supported actions that led to the Iran-Contra Affair is equally instructive.
In addition to his covert-action assignments, Devine served as chief of station in Italy, Argentina, and other countries. While in Rome, he met the Pope, who asked, “Where do you work?” Devine finessed his answer with the conventional response, “for the US Government,” and the Pope understood. (114) Covert action also became an issue in Rome when the flap over the ‘Gladio’ stay-behind network surfaced. Devine’s explanation of the program should silence any lingering critics, but it probably will not. It was also in Rome that he encountered Aldrich Ames for the second time, and he later comments on Ames’s treachery. Wherever Devine was station chief, he supervised espionage operations, and he describes recruitments, defections, technical operations—planting bugs—and surveillance procedures. (138-9) His comments on these are illuminating.
The principal senior positions Devine held at CIA included chief of the Counternarcotics Center, chief of Latin America Division, associate deputy director of operations (A/DDO), and briefly, acting DDO. Besides his comments on day-to-day events, he adds incisive remarks on the management and bureaucratic issues that often complicated what should have been straightforward decisions. His relationship with former DCI John Deutch is interesting in this regard.
In 1998, after his tenure as A/DDO, Devine decided to retire and enter the world of business intelligence. While the final portion of the book is devoted to how this worked out, he also offers his views on the Iraq war, the CURVEBALL disaster, and the value of “CIA directed…Special Operations Forces” (as opposed to DOD-led missions) to accomplish national objectives.
The term “Good Hunting” was often attached to cables that referred to “relentless pursuit of… intelligence.” (4) The book Good Hunting embodies that concept in the story of Jack Devine’s career as a CIA case officer.
Spy Lost: Caught Between the KGB and the FBI, by Kaarlo Tuomi, edited by Sakari Määttänen (Enigma Books, 2014), 151 pp., index. With an introduction by John Earl Haynes.
Kaarlo Tuomi was born to Finnish parents in Michigan on 30 November 1916. He died eighty years later in Florida. In between, he served in the Red Army during WW II, was a prisoner of war, and taught English in Russia. In 1954, he was recruited by the GRU to become an illegal. After training, he was sent to the United States via Canada in 1958. Promptly caught by the FBI, he was offered the chance to become a double agent. He accepted. But in his first controlled message to his GRU handlers, he included a signal that he was under control; his true loyalty remained with the Soviet Union. In 1963, when Tuomi was about to be recalled to the Soviet Union, he suspected that Oleg Penkovsky may have identified him as a genuine GRU agent. Tuomi changed sides again and asked the FBI to let him remain in America. Spy Lost is the story of his early life in the United States, why he went to the Soviet Union, and his work as a double agent.
In his introduction, John Haynes adds further background to the story, including Tuomi’s involvement with the Polyakov case. Haynes also notes that the FBI never revealed how it learned about Tuomi so quickly in 1958. He adds that Tuomi believed an uncle in the United States had given the FBI a letter from Tuomi in which he asked to have his birth certificate sent to him in Russia. He assumes he was then placed on a watch list.
Looking back, Tuomi concluded, “The spy’s life is worthless. He is everybody’s spittoon.”(143)
[Top of page]
Fiction
The Red Cell, by André Le Gallo (Amazon Kindle, 2014).
André Le Gallo’s latest novel, The Red Cell, is distinguished first by a foreword written by a CIA colleague and former deputy director of operations, Thomas Twetten, who explains André’s unusual credentials as a CIA case officer. Second, one of the characters in the book battles ALS, a disease Le Gallo himself knows firsthand. And third, it is an exciting story well told.
Following a thematic thread established in his two previous novels, The Caliphate and Satan’s Spy, protagonists Steve Church and his fiancée, Kella Hastings, struggle to foil Iranian Islamic terrorists. Their leader seeks revenge against Church personally, the result of previous encounters, and the United States in general, especially its economy. The story begins in Washington, DC, but soon expands to Europe and to San Francisco. Along the way, LeGallo provides realistic descriptions of terrorists, agents, and moles seeking to accomplish their missions while pursued by a team assembled by Church and Hastings.
National Clandestine Service officers are well known for their storytelling gifts, but few are able to write espionage stories that are realistic, clever, and entertaining. Le Gallo is one of those few and has done it again with The Red Cell. It is enjoyable reading but only available in digital form from Amazon Kindle.
A Spy’s Lonely Path, by Gene Coyle (AuthorHouse, 2014), 288 pp.
Gene Coyle spent 14 of his 30 years with the CIA abroad working undercover. Now a professor at Indiana University Bloomington, he has combined experiences from his former profession to answer a long latent “literary itch.” A Spy’s Lonely Path is his fourth and most recent espionage novel.[26]
Coyle’s protagonist, Robert Hall, is a young CIA operations officer who meets Alexander Golovin, a Russian diplomat, at an arms negotiation conference in Vienna. When Hall learns Golovin is also a professor at Moscow University who has developed a sophisticated risk assessment algorithm relied on by the Russian president, Golovin becomes a potentially valuable target for recruitment. When Golovin learns Hall is CIA, the recruitment takes a surprising turn. But Hall is not the only one interested in Golovin; the Russian security service (the FSB) is monitoring him closely because of his contacts with the president and thus becomes aware of his contacts with Hall. The recruitment is complicated by Golovin’s relationship with his graduate assistant, Elizaveta Petrvicha, as his marriage fails.
Coyle lets the reader follow the recruitment by including Hall’s cables to headquarters and the responses that both encourage his efforts and reveal attempts by a headquarters superior to take undeserved credit. The operation ends in a series of events engineered in part by the FSB without realizing they have endorsed the inaccurate results produced by the risk assessment algorithm, which embarrasses the president on the world stage. A Spy’s Lonely Path is both entertaining and informative—a pleasure to read.
[Top of page]
Footnotes
[1]Raymond J. Batvinis, The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence (University Press of Kansas, 2007).
[2]Peter Ustinov, My Russia (Little, Brown, 1983), 13.
[3]Nadia Benois Ustinov, Klop and the Ustinov Family (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1973), 191.
[4]Jill Pearlman, “The Spies Who Came into the Modernist Fold: The Covert Life in Hampstead’s Lawn Road Flats,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 72, No. 3 (September 2013): 358–81
[5]Ibid., 359.
[6]See also Christopher Moran and Robert Johnson, “In the Service of Empire: Imperialism and the British Spy Thriller, 1901–1914” in Studies in Intelligence 54 no. 2 (June 2010) for an examination of the impact of the espionage novels written during the period.
[7]Thomas Boghardt, Spies of the Kaiser: German Covert Operations in Great Britain during the First World War Era (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)
[8]Christopher Andrew, Defend The Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (Knopf, 2009)
[9]Nigel West, Historical Dictionary of World War I Intelligence (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014)
[10]Andrew, 44-46.
[11]Boghardt, 96, 107, 115.
[12]Larry A. Valero, “The American Joint Intelligence Committee and Estimates of the Soviet Union, 1945-1947,” Studies in Intelligence 9 (Summer 2000).
[13]Chester Cooper, The Lion’s Last Roar: Suez, 1956 (Harper & Row, 1978), 70.
[14]Stanley Lovell, Of Spies and Stratagems (Prentice, 1963), 23.
[15]Ewen Montagu, The Man Who Never Was (J. P. Lippincott Company, 1954).
[16]Andrew Cook, On His Majesty’s Secret Service: The True Story of Sidney Reilly Ace of Spies (Tempus, 2002); Harry Ferguson, Operation Kronstadt: The True Story of Honor, Espionage, and the Rescue of Britain’s Greatest Spy, the Man with a Hundred Faces (Overlook, 2009); and Roland Chambers, The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome (David R. Godine, 2012).
[17]See, for example, Frederick Bailey, Mission to Tashkent (J. Cape, 1946).
[18]P.K. Rose, The Founding Fathers of American Intelligence. P.K. Rose was the pen name for Kenneth Daigler.
[19]Carl Van Doren, Secret History of the American Revolution (Viking, 1941); John Bakeless, Turncoats, Traitors and Heroes (J. B. Lippincott, 1959).
[20]David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (Oxford University Press, 2004).
[21]Alexander Rose, “The Strange Case of John Honeyman and Revolutionary War Espionage,” Studies in Intelligence 52, no. 2.
[22]Flora Lewis, Red Pawn: The Story of Noel Field, The Strange History of an American Caught Up in an International Communist Intrigue (Doubleday, 1965).
[23]Stewart Steven, Operation Splinter Factor (Lippincott, 1974).
[24]George A. Hill, D.S.O., Dreaded Hour (Cassell, 1936).
[25]David Wise and Thomas Ross, The Invisible Government (Random House, 1964).
[26]Gene Coyle’s previous novels are The Dream Merchant of Lisbon: The Game of Espionage (Xlibris, 2004); No Game For Amateurs: The Search for a Japanese Mole on the Eve of WW II (AuthorHouse, 2009), and Diamonds And Deceit: The Search for the Missing Romanov Dynasty Jewels (AuthorHouse 2011).
[Top of page]
All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed in this journal are those of the authors. Nothing in any of the articles should be construed as asserting or implying US government endorsement of their factual statements and interpretations. Articles by non-US government employees are copyrighted.