October 2011
1 post
Review of “Spycatcher”
NIGEL WEST
Spycatcher
By: Matthew Dunn
William Morrow, 2011.
$16.88.
Why would Spycatcher (published as Spartan in London by Weidenfeld & Nicolson) be of interest to a non-fiction reader? Most likely because the author claims to have served in the British Secret Intelligence Service for ‘nearly six years’ between 1995 and 2001, a period during...
Air Platforms Over China
NIGEL WEST
Chris Pocock with Clarence Fu The Black Bats: CIA Spy Flights over China from Taiwan 1951 -1969
Schiffer Publishing, Atglen, PA 2010. 144pp. £32.50.
Chris Pocock will be familiar intelligence aficionados as the author of Fifty Years of the U-2, a book published in 2005 that competes with Norman Polmar’s Spyplane: The U-2 Declassified, released in 2001. Now...
July 2010
17 posts
The Best World War II Spy Movies Based on Fact
The Man Who Never Was
A deception scheme involving a dead body codenamed MINCEMEAT conducted in 1943 to draw the enemy’s attention away from Sicily.
Operation Crossbow
A star-studded version of the Allied investigation of Nazi secret weapons.
I Was Monty’s Double
A hapless Pay Corps officer is persuaded to participate in...
Blowing My Cover book review A Harvard graduate with Irish and Jewish parentage, Lindsay Moran should have been a natural for the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. With an obvious talent for languages and plenty of initiative, she underwent training as a case officer and much of her book describes the adventures she and her intake experienced while undergoing courses at Camp Peary, the Agency’s...
Defective Defectors
The question of whether or not the Iranian nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri defected to the US is interesting but not unique. Shahram Amiri the Iranian nuclear scientist “defector” has been welcomed back to Tehran from the US like a returning hero. He claims he had been abducted by the CIA while on a pilgrimage to Medina in Saudi Arabia. Not so, say the Americans: he had defected to the...
A Spy’s Journey book review
When he retired from the CIA in 2001 after thirty-four years, all apart from the last three in the Directorate of Operations, Floyd Paseman had spent two decades serving overseas, and at the time held the record in the Agency for the longest assignment abroad in the Clandestine Service. Accordingly, with this experience, having been Chief of Station in Beijing and...
Recent Books on the CIA
Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner (Random House, 2007). A journalist’s history of the CIA. Comprehensive, but too reliant on newspaper reports of the Agency’s well-publicised failures and so reads as a one-sided critique.
The Way of the World by Ron Susskind (Simon & Schuster, 2008). A journalist’s rather disorganised account of the intelligence community’s internal...
The Worst Books Written on Intelligence
Secret Wars by: Gordon Thomas (St Martin’s Press, 2009).
Supposedly a centenary history of MI5 and MI6, this book is filled with errors, invented quotations and incidents that simply never happened, such as Allen Dulles and Stewart Menzies meeting at the 1945 Yalta conference. Neither attended it!
A Man Called Intrepid by: William Stevenson ...
The Spy Who Seduced America book review
The case of Judith Coplon, the American spy convicted twice for espionage following her arrest in 1949 is something of a puzzle because it is so full of contradictions. She underwent two criminal trials, in Washington DC and New York, yet her convictions were set aside because the evidence against her was tainted. However, the Appeals Court also...
Espionage: An Encyclopedia of Spies and Secrets book review
If it is agreed that an encyclopedia should be a compendium of knowledge available at the time of publication, and the author is someone of experience with a detailed understanding of his field, then such books should not only be an essential reference work, but also provide a contemporaneous snapshot of what was known on ...
Into Tibet book review
On the wall of the entrance hall at the CIA headquarters in Langley there is a memorial to its personnel who have fallen in the line of duty. Until the Washington DC journalist Ted Gupp decided to take up the challenge and research the stories of the seventy-one anonymous heroes, no outsiders had been allowed to learn about the circumstances in which they...
The Sixth Man book review
The original five of the notorious Cambridge spies, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross are now fairly familiar, but the name of the New Zealander Paddy Costello is probably not. He was a Russian-speaking, Trinity College, Cambridge-educated soldier, diplomat and academic on the political left whose son Mick became a...
Books regarding Elizabethan era espionage with reference to Sir Francis Walsingham
Read, Conyers. Mr SECRETARY WALSINGHAM, and the policy of Queen Elizabeth - Vol. I of III (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Printed by Oxford, 1925), pp. 443 Hutchinson, Robert. ELIZABETH’S MASTER: Francis Walsingham and the Secret War that Saved England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006),...
How We Squandered the Reich book review
How many books have been written by insiders about the Abwehr? The vanquished understandably are generally reluctant to relive lost battles, and apart from a couple of memoirs published soon after the war, by the sabotage expert Erwin Lahousen and the mastermind behind the Englandspiel in Holland, Herman Giskes, very little has been disclosed...
The Irregulars book review
In 1998 the academic Thomas Mahl revealed in Desperate Deception that during World War II British Security Coordination had engaged in a series of what might now be termed ‘dirty tricks’ to influence American public opinion and undermine the isolationists. As an analysis of covert operations conducted in Washington and New York by perfidious Albion, Mahl’s...
The Ten Best Books on Intelligence
(In alphabetical order by author)
Bearden, Milton, and Jim Risen. The Main Enemy. (Random House, 2004): Fascinating version of the end of the Cold War and the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan by a senior CIA officer.
Benson, Robert Louis and Michael Warner. VENONA: Soviet Espionage and the American Response 1939‑1957 (Washington, DC: NSA/CIA, 1996): The...
The Hunt for Nazi Spies book review
Since the publication of Philip Stead’s Second Bureau in 1959 there have been plenty of books released on the subject of French wartime intelligence operations, but little has appeared on the somewhat arcane topic of counter-espionage conducted by Vichy. Now Simon Kitson, a University of Birmingham academic, has filled the gap with The Hunt for Nazi...
The Spy Who Came in from the Co-Op book review
When The Mitrokhin Archive was released in September 1999 much media attention focused on Melita Norwood, an elderly widow living alone in a London suburb who was revealed by the KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin to have spent a career as a Soviet agent codenamed HOLA. She readily acknowledged that she had been a long-term spy, and later discussed...
‘The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War’ book review
The arrest of the GCHQ linguist Katharine Gun in March 2003 and the British government’s decision eleven months later not to prosecute her became highly controversial because her offence, which she admitted, was to leak a sensitive NSA email to a London newspaper. The authors who examined the Judith Coplon case in 2002 with The Spy Who...
June 2010
11 posts
The Best Spy Novels Written by Intelligence Professionals
Ashenden by Somerset Maugham
A collection of short stories based on the author’s personal experience during the First World War
The Perfect Spy by John le Carré
A semi-autobiographical account of a British intelligence officer’s moral dilemma, written by David Cornwall, a retired MI6 professional
Water on the Brain by...
Open Secret book review
This is the book Whitehall did not want anyone to read, and as a former Director-General of the Security Service, with twenty-seven years’ experience of the organisation, one can understand the government’s reluctance to encourage insiders to make indiscreet disclosures. However, Dame Stella is the most unlikely person to compromise national security, and she has...
The Hidden Hand book review
Politicians have always depended heavily on secret intelligence to assist in decision-making, and it is only now, in the era of declassification and disclosure, that the quality and scope of this covert advice, what Aldrich terms the hidden hand, can be scrutinised and judged.
Aldrich’s task, to assess the British and American contribution, and the part it...
The Puppet Masters book review
There are three broad categories of books on intelligence. Firstly there are the personal memoirs and accounts of participation in intelligence operations. Secondly, there are the studies of particular events and operations, and thirdly there are what might be termed the philosophical treatises, not all of which have to be dry academic documents. Colonel...
The Best Spy Novels
The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler
A classic of the genre. The background of an elusive pre-war master-spy suggests he may not be dead after all.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré
An atmospheric tale of Cold War betrayal in Germany written by an SIS officer who served there under consular cover.
Ashenden by Compton Mackenzie
A British...
‘Who Paid The Piper?’ book review During the Cold War the CIA conducted an offensive against the overwhelming Communist-dominated intelligensia in Europe. Codenamed QK/OPERA it amounted to the covert funding of an organisation, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which held conferences and subsidised the circulation of dozens of magazines and journals that otherwise would never have...
The Best Spy Movies Written by Intelligence Professionals
36 Hours by Alec Waugh
An ingenious Nazi scheme attempts to trick James Garner into revealing the Allied plans for D-Day written by a wartime SIS officer.
The 39 Steps by John Buchan
A classic of the genre as Buchan’s hero Richard Hannay tries to uncover a sinister spy-ring. The author headed Ministry of Munition’s ...
A Bond Bibliography
Casino Royale. Ian Fleming’s first 007 thriller which proved an unexpected success, published in 1952 after the intervention of his older brother Peter Fleming. The hopeless plot may have been based on the author’s visit to the Estoril casino in Portugal in August 1941 when, as a Naval Intelligence Divsiion officer, he participated in the surveillance of a double...
The Best Spy Movies
Pascali’s Island
A First World War tale of espionage in Greece starring Helen Mirren and
The Day of the Condor
A Cold War CIA movie starring Robert Redford about an analyst who learns too much and becomes a fugitive.
In the Company of Spies
A modern, authentic spy-tale filmed on the CIA campus at Langley, but set in North Korea, starring Tom Berringer.
The Lives...
A Time to Die book review
The loss in August 2000 of the Russian Northern fleet’s most modern attack submarine, the Delta-class monster that was only commissioned in 1995, contrasted the deep psychological and cultural divide between Moscow, Vidyaevo where the crew lived, and much of the rest of the world. While the navy’s hardliners were willing to accept the catastrophe, but could not bring...
Sacred Secrets book review
Jerry Schecter and his wife are authentic witnesses to some of the most remarkable events of the Cold War. They played a secret role in the covert negotiations that led to the publication in the West of Nikita Khrushchev’s controversial memoirs and later acted as collaborators when General Pavel Sudoplatov released his autobiography. During Jimmy Carter’s...