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THE MOSCOW RULES

THE SECRET CIA TACTICS THAT HELPED AMERICA WIN THE COLD WAR

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

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
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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 Yorker staff 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

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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