In the first 120 pages of this history by the Harvard professor, there are hundreds of acronyms, aliases, and agencies from around the world. He covers some territory that was new to me, but there were also a lot of familiar names and details. This portion only covers the period up to the end of WWII.
In 1945, the defection of Igor Gouzenko from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa awakened the western spies agencies with the documents he regaled. Among them wea proof that Stalin had obtained two shipments of uranium from Canada’s Chalk River nuclear research facility to build an atomic bomb. ironically, Stalin’s first nuclear bomb was a plutonium one, like the one dropped on Nagasaki, not uranium based like the one dropped on Hiroshima.
The Berlin tunnel used by Western spies to eavesdrop on Soviet communications, was already familiar to me, having recently read Simon Kuper’s Spies, Lies and Exile.
The blatent interference of the U.S. and other so-called Democratic countries in foreign elections, is perhaps best illustrated in postwar Italy, later in Iran, and much later still in British Guinea, now Guyana, in Congo with the removal of Lumumba, and Chile. This highlights the hypocrisy of their outrage when it happens at home.
Russian bioweapons secret program was illegal, denied for years and then finally revealed.
“The CIA was so bereft of intelligence on China that it resorted to buying fish and chips in Hong Kong to read the stories from the mainland that they were wrapped in.”
There is one obvious error. In his dotage, Brezhnev had a brain disorder, but it certainly was not cerebral palsy as stated.
I am in awe of the author’s deep research, his intelligence and his perspective on the relationship with China as he finishes the book, but it is also very scary.
More than most readers would ever want or need to know about the history of the world as seen through the sometimes paranoid eyes of the spies, this is nevertheless a timely and important book. The author would be a great addition to the advisors of any future Democratic president.
3.5/5
Thanks, Goodreads.
The Passionate Reader 