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...