A fascinating account of counterintelligence in the pre-cyber era and a reminder of how an astute interviewer can be an...
Firsthand account of Cold War espionage from the FBI agent who uncovered it.
Navarro (Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows You How to Identify and Protect Yourself from Harmful People, 2014, etc.), a founding member of the FBI’s National Security Division Behavioral Analysis Program, recounts his dogged efforts to court and prosecute a bedraggled but brilliant young spy in the late 1980s. What began as a routine interview for Navarro, who had SWAT team, aerial surveillance, and counterintelligence responsibilities in the Tampa office, turned into an all-consuming absorption with an unprecedented spy enterprise in West Germany. Over a year and a half, the author met repeatedly—eventually daily—with Rod Ramsay, a former soldier who had been the junior partner of an espionage mastermind at the 8th Infantry Division headquarters. Navarro and his superiors learned that the two men passed along incalculably important information, including war plans, to the Hungarians and the Soviets. At times, the author gets mired in government jargon, but he presents a riveting story of how he earned Ramsay’s confidence and slowly elicited a mountain of incriminating information. He was helped by the suspect’s loneliness and narcissism. Navarro provides a tutorial on interviewing technique, employing psychology, theater, and a well-honed understanding of nonverbal cues. In fact, several minor aberrations in body language triggered the case that led to one of the biggest spy busts in American history. However, throughout the investigation, Navarro was thwarted by intra- and interagency jealousies and turf concerns. The process affected his family life and eventually his physical and mental health. It took him more than 25 years to write this story of a serious breach in American national security.
A fascinating account of counterintelligence in the pre-cyber era and a reminder of how an astute interviewer can be an invaluable asset to law enforcement.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2827-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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 Yorkerstaff 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
