Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service
By Frederic Wakeman, Jr.
Reviewed by Bob Bergin

Covert Action in the Cold War: US Policy, Intelligence and CIA Operations
By James Callanan

Honorable Survivor: Mao's China, McCarthy's America and The Persecution of John S. Service
By Lynne Joined
Reviewed by Joseph C. Goulden

~ updated review ~

World War II: Saving the Reality (A Collector's Vault)
By Kenneth Rendell
Reviewed by Dan Pinck

Go To Book Reviews

By Thomas Lippman
Selwa Press
Reviewed by Joseph Goulden

Middle East veterans of a certain era - the World War II era into the 1950s - speak with respectful awe of William A. Eddy. Soldier, scholar, statesman, spy, Arabist - of him a colleague said, "Bill Eddy was probably the nearest thing that the United States has had to a Lawrence of Arabia."

His rich career is detailed by Thomas Lippman in "Arabian Knight: Colonel Bill Eddy USMC and the Rise of American Power in the Middle East." Mr. Lippman reported from the Middle East for decades, chiefly with The Washington Post. He documents how Mr. Eddy initially exerted much influence on U.S. policy in the Middle East and how much of his advice went unheeded.

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By Andrew Meier
W. W. Norton
Reviewed by Joseph C. Goulden

In the parlance of espionage history, the term “The Great Illegals” has especial resonance. The reference is to the small band of agent-handlers who worked for Stalin’s Soviet intelligence apparatus during the 1920s and beyond, not necessarily spying on their own, but servicing and directing those who did. The record shows that they performed well, enabling the USSR to build a between-wars intelligence machine that infiltrated the highest levels of Western governments, including the US and Great Britain (remember the infamous Philby ring?), stealing military and diplomatic secrets hither and yon.

Their collapse came with stunning rapidity in the late1930s, when these previously-trusted handlers were recalled to Moscow during the Great Purge. Those who obeyed the call vanished. Those who resisted were tracked down and killed – for instance, Alexander Orlov, who managed to reach the US before falling victim to a staged “suicide” in a Washington hotel, and Ignace Reiss, brutally murdered in the French countryside..

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By Jennet Conant
Simon and Schuster
Reviewed by Joseph C. Goulden

What more could one wish from a book? Here we have a discussion of propaganda and covert actions written with text-book clarity. Add salacious gossip about the upper circles of Washington’s political and media community. And a writing style that has one racing from page to page, eager to soak in more details.

I thump my desk with glee over Jennet Conant’s The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington. The book’s connective thread is the story of the somewhat caddish English writer Dahl, obscure in the 1940s, but later to achieve fame and wealth with children’s books such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But Ms. Conant’s scope is far wider.

Severely injured in a crash early in his service in the Royal Air Force, Dahl was assigned to the Washington embassy as a deputy attache. He hated the thought of being a desk-bound warrior. Fortunately, he quickly fell into a hush-hush group called British Security Coordination (BSC). As Ms. Conant observes, BSC was “one of he most controversial, and probably one of he most successful, covert action campaigns in the annals of espionage.” At one level it was a massive “propaganda machine,” tasked with gaining American public support for Britain, and countering isolationists who wanted no part of the European war. Another brief was collecting intelligence on the inner-workings of the Roosevelt Administration.

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The story is at once confusing and fascinating. The  Vichy regime tracked down left wing resistants  and supporters of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces. It deported slave works and Jews to Germany. Yet concurrently, it tracked down and arrested hundreds of German agents who sought to further undermine France militarily. More than one hundred of them were sentenced to death, and Kitson  writes that he found “formal proof” that eight were actually executed.  A ranking French counterintelligence officer, Paul Paillole, puts the number of 42, which to Kitson “seems credible.”  Other efforts were directed against British officers seeking to organize resistance groups preparing for the inevitable invasion. As the papers make plain, the French military harbored a keen sense that it was “betrayed” by England in the opening months of the war.

To understate, French internal politics of the era were devilishly confused. Curiosity directed me to a book remainder house, where I found a 2005 biography of Petain by Charles Williams, a former Labour member of the British House of Lords. As I frequently discover as I age, the “full story” is often more complex than we were taught in school. So be it with Petain’s Vichy government.

Kitson is a highly-recommended  read for anyone interested in the intricacies of counterintelligence.