Fans of le Carré and other spinners of secret-agent tales will find this of considerable interest.
Two former CIA agents stationed in Moscow reveal the ins and outs of spycraft.
The golden days of the espionage aspect of the Cold War may have been the early 1960s, but the contest was still going strong in the late-’70s, when the Mendezes (Spy Dust, 2002, etc.) were CIA operatives in Moscow. It was a heady and dangerous time, they write, whose closing months, dating into the mid-’80s, were marred by revelations of double agents and the quick dismantling of the CIA’s spy network. “The majority of Soviet citizens working for us,” they write, “had been arrested and executed, most of them betrayed by Americans inside the intelligence community.” But before that, there was a world of spycraft to explore, with elaborate disguises, consultations from magicians who helped construct secret compartments, and all kinds of nifty gadgetry, such as “a contraption that would allow an individual to rapidly rappel down an apartment building and return up the rope using an ascension device, which had fondly been nicknamed the Spiderman.” Cool tools aside, the authors make it clear that espionage is a deadly business, and dealing with nations that are good at it requires a special kind of agent and a flexible protocol (the “Moscow rules” of the title). One evolutionary stage of those rules occurred in the 1960s, when the U.S. and U.K. collaborated to “run” a Soviet agent whose intelligence helped prevent the Cold War from turning hot during the Cuban missile crisis. Another was to bring in technical officers “who would never have feet on the ground in an actual CIA overseas operation,” including scientists, graphic artists, and the like. Much of what the authors describe is the quotidian back and forth of spycraft, boredom punctuated by episodes of real excitement; the narrative has the same choppy feel at times, but reading about prosthetics, cameras hidden in fountain pens, and other such things makes for eye-opening entertainment.
Fans of le Carré and other spinners of secret-agent tales will find this of considerable interest.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5417-6219-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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