by David Stafford ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2003
Good stuff for le Carré fans.
British historian Stafford (Roosevelt and Churchill, 2000, etc.) casts a revealing torchlight on an obscure and odd episode in the Cold War espionage game.
It’s not much comfort to know, as the author recalls, that British schoolchildren in the 1950s feared nuclear annihilation as much as their American (and, presumably, Soviet) contemporaries. Neither is it much comfort to read of the astonishing incompetence that seems to have marked Allied efforts to spy on the Reds. Stafford provides a meaty case in point: a daring project in which American and British intelligence agents tunneled half a mile into the Soviet sector of Berlin to set up a listening post by which they could intercept Russian and East German transmissions. Allen Dulles, then head of the CIA, called the Stopwatch/Gold tunnel “one of the most valuable and daring projects ever undertaken,” and by all rights it should have worked, to judge by the success of similar capers in Vienna. Trouble was, the Soviets knew about the tunnel before an ounce of dirt was removed from the construction site, thanks to the diligent work of a British double agent named George Blake, one of many Secret Intelligence Service employees in the employ of the KGB. Strangely, the Soviets did not take full advantage of this opportunity to disseminate disinformation; instead, while they gave out enough mixed signals to keep the West on its toes—as one CIA report had it, “Intelligence is inconclusive as to whether or not the Soviet intention is to precipitate a global war now”—they also used transmissions into the tunnel to assure the Allies that they weren’t about to launch a first-strike nuclear attack. The Soviets finally dug up the tunnel in 1961, not long before Allied agents figured out what Blake had been up to; a 15-meter section is now preserved in a Berlin museum. To judge by Stafford’s account, it’s amazing the Cold War turned out the way it did.
Good stuff for le Carré fans.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58567-361-7
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
Share your opinion of this book
More by David Stafford
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Awards & Accolades
Likes
17
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2017
New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
National Book Award Finalist
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by David Grann
BOOK REVIEW
by David Grann
BOOK REVIEW
by David Grann
BOOK REVIEW
by David Grann
More About This Book
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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.
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.