Spies

January 1, 2023

Award-winning Vanderbilt historian Blackbourn rethinks Germany in the World, arguing that it was a persuasive force even before unification in the 19th century. Joint Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces and a prolific historian, Borman (Crown & Sceptre) limns the historic significance ofAnne Boleyn & Elizabeth I. In Revolutionary Spring, Wolfson Prize--winning Clark refreshes our view of the revolutions that rocked Europe in 1848. In Homelands, Oxford historian Garton Ash draws on both scholarship and personal experience to portray Europe post-World War II. In Soldiers Don't Go Mad, distinguished journalist Glass uses the friendship and literary output of outstanding war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen--both gay and both ultimately opposed to fighting--to show how an understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder and its treatment first emerged during the industrialized slaughter of World War I. Journalist Hartman's Battle of Ink and Ice shows that the contention between explorers Robert Peary and Frederick Cook, both claiming to have discovered the North Pole, also sparked a newspaper war with all the earmarks of fake news. The long-anticipated My Friend Anne Frank recounts Holocaust survivor Pick-Goslar's friendship with Frank (she's called Lies Goosens in The Diary of a Young Girl), having been together with her at the Westerbork transit camp and eventually Bergen-Belsen. Also known as the Graveyard of the Pacific, the Columbia River Bar forms where the river pours into the ocean off Oregon's coast and creates fearsome currents that have claimed numerous lives; like his abusive father, Sullivan risked crossing it, and he makes his book at once history, memoir, and meditation on male behavior at its extreme. Former undersecretary of defense for intelligence in the Obama administration, Vickers recalls a life in intelligence and special operations that arcs from his Green Beret days to his involvement in the CIA's secret war against the Soviets in Afghanistan to the war on terror. In Road to Surrender, the New York Times best-selling Thomas (First: Sandra Day O'Connor) relies on fresh material to convey the decision to drop the atomic bomb from the perspectives of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, and Gen. Carl "Tooey" Spaatz, head of strategic bombing in the Pacific. In National Dish, three-time James Beard award-winning food journalist von Bremzen investigates the relationship between food and place by examining the history of six major food cultures--France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Mexico, and Turkey. In Beyond the Shores, the Harriet Tubman Prize--winning Walker (Exquisite Slaves) considers why Black Americans leave the United States and what they encounter when they do, moving from early 1900s performer Florence Mills to 1930s scientists to the author's own grandfather. An historian at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Walton assays the century-long intelligence war between the West and the Soviet Union/Russia, considering lessons that can be gleaned today in Spies.

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May 15, 2023
Historian Waldron (Empire of Secrets) presents an authoritative appraisal of 100 years of intelligence operations between Russia and the West. Drawing on declassified records in American, British, Russian, and former Soviet bloc intelligence archives, Walton contends that the espionage of the Cold War was just another step in a still-ongoing covert conflict that began with the Russian Revolution of 1917—though it took the West until the Cold War to realize the extent of Soviet infiltration, which Walton argues was as real as Senator Joseph McCarthy alleged during the Red Scare of the 1950s, despite most of McCarthy’s specific claims being “inaccurate and overblown” and his “purges” unnecessary for national security. (“Between 1947 and 1956, 39,000 federal employees were sacked and or resigned.... In Britain, the total for the same period was just 124,” and most were reassigned, not fired.) Still, Walton contends that Russian intelligence operations outpaced the West, pointing for example to Soviet espionage inside the U.S. atomic bomb project. He concludes with lessons to apply to the struggle now unfolding between the U.S. and China, and warns against “a new Chinese red scare.” This is an encyclopedic yet entertaining dossier on the people, organizations, and events that shaped one of the 20th century’s defining ideological battles.

Starred review from May 1, 2023
A thorough history of a century of conflict between Britain and America and the East. A serious scholar and lucid writer, Harvard historian Walton, author of the three-volume Cambridge History of Espionage and Intelligence, maintains that the Cold War began with the 1918 Soviet coup and is still in progress in the digital world. Taking advantage of recently declassified documents, the author delivers a vivid account of intelligence skulduggery, mostly familiar to history buffs but no less deplorable in the retelling. Despite a dystopian government and threadbare citizenry, the Soviet government's proclamation that they were building the first truly just society galvanized idealists around the world. This gave them a permanent spying advantage because many Westerners volunteered their services. Stalin feasted on their avalanche of intelligence but acted as his own analyst; wildly paranoid, he regularly dismissed vital information. The Cold War followed with occasionally spectacular but mostly uninspiring and often disastrous operations, from the overthrow of unsympathetic governments to American officials' near-psychotic obsession with Cuba to unwinnable wars and Soviet moles. At the same time, unhappy Russians occasionally defected or passed on their nation's secrets. Walton emphasizes that the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 did not include the KGB, which reconstituted itself as an agent of revenge against the West. "It was from this bitter revanchist stew in Russia that Putin emerged," he writes. Putin's efforts to make Russia great again may not be going well, but his intelligence service's strategy of hijacking the internet to spread disinformation and influence American elections may be its most successful operation. In the final chapter, Walton focuses on China. Not crippled by a command economy and more technologically sophisticated, it is vacuuming up American secrets with a remarkable efficiency. Throughout, the author is incisive in his analyses, and the seven-page glossary of relevant acronyms will help readers keep track of countless global agencies and organizations. A gripping, authoritative work.

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