Customer Reviews

Spies: The Secret Agents Who Changed the Course of History

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have been a casual student of the history of espionage since I took an outstanding college course on the topic. I have enjoyed reading books about Wilhelm Canaris and World War II intelligence operations like ULTRA. I bought Volkman's "Spies" in order to branch out and find some new characters on whom to focus attention in my future reading.

Unfortunately I was underwhelmed by this book. It is an ambitious task to tell the tales of the 30 or 40 historical figures in one collection. In the end, it was too ambitious. Each of the "spooks" (or espionage agents) referenced receives only five pages of treatment. To take such legendary and important figures as Kim Philby or Richard Sorge and condense them to five pages guarantees that their impact will be lost on a casual reader. Fortunately for me, I learned of their importance in my earlier studies. Casual readers will read this book and have no real sense of how important the men and women were.

I give credit (and a second star in my rating) to Volkman for using language that is emphatic and intense. You can tell he cares about the subject matter and tries to build suspense. The fatal flaw is in the ultra-condensed space provided, which does not allow him to convey the context or the true importance of the actions he describes.

To sum, this book reads like a collection of school children's essays... a five page book report for each spy. Not nearly enough room for the insight that I sought.

Includes biographies of major spies from many different countries. I enjoyed this book because it shouwed how smart some of these spies were, and were able to stay under the radar for so long, and then strike so fast. The book categorizes spies (like "Moles", or "Cryptographers") and gives a lengthy biography on each spy. It is amazing that the reporter that wrote this book was able to gather all the information on people that strove to be invisible! A fascinating read about the world of espionage.

This book clocks in at just under 300 pages and manages to offer the profound true stories of "The Secret Agents who Changed the Course of History". In straightforward, easy-to-read prose Volkman gives 5-7 page vignettes about these people where he sets the stage for them as individuals and most importantly, in my opinion, works to contextualize them by offering the results and implications of their work.

He manages a lot of information about a lot of spies by breaking them up into categories like "Moles", "The Legends" and "The Traitors". As defining characterstics these seem arbitrary (weren't the moles also traitors?), but he had to break them up somehow and he admits that it's difficult to do so; it might as well be loosely thematic. There are 45 stories, after all, and you can't just have them all blocked up together.

The majority of them deal with what would become the KGB, and CIA agents up to and during the cold war. Which is probably what most people expect in regards to spydom. But there are a lot of surprises and of course lots of people I'd never heard of. Who can name 45 spies? I was disappointed to see that Aldrich Ames and David Greenglass didn't make it on to the list.

The problem, like another review noted, is that its hard to explain why so many people are important in so little space. These are not stories about great people. They are, however, quick insights into a shady business and the tremors they caused that changed the world. Rock on, that.

And its a good introduction for those of us who aren't cloaked and daggered enough to already know about all these people.

As a history professor, I try to research a historic event from every possible angle. When researching World War II, I came upon Mr. Volkmans book and I have to say that I was simply blown away. Many of us (myself included) are not aware of the fact that espionage has played a vital role in many historic events. This book is a must read for anyone who wants to get the "story behind the story." Mr. Volkman lays this out very well and as a history professor, I can tell that Mr. Volkman has done thorough reseach and leaves no stone unturned. A must read!

my son is currently at the naval postgraduate school and in his spare time read this book. he called and specifically recommended this to me. an avid reader and a far smarter man than i, this alone was enough for me to seek out and find a copy.

This gripping book surveys 49 top agents from the 20th Century. In brief yet compelling chapters, author Ernest Volkman profiles military spies, atomic spies, moles, turncoats, secret police chiefs, etc. These agents worked for or against the USA, Soviet Russia, Britain, Nazi Germany, Israel, etc. Readers see how espionage contributed to the defeat of Nazi Germany (Richard Sorge, Fritz Kauders, F.W. Winterbotham, etc.), leaks from the Manhattan project (Klaus Fuchs), the downfall of the Soviet Union (Oleg Penkovsky, Vladimir Vetrov, etc.), and other major events. Some readers may be shocked at how riddled was British intelligence with deluded communist traitors (Kim Philby, George Blake, etc.), and we see the murderous terror unleashed from Moscow by secret police chiefs like Felix Derzhinsky and Laventri Beria. As the author shows, espionage is no gentle game. Captured spies and defectors have faced prison, torture, or worse - the KGB fed Oleg Penkovsky into a live furnace - and Stalin routinely eliminated agents for knowing too much.

This is a surprisingly informative book, althougth the author never devotes too much attention to any agent, and he missed a few as well. Still, one can learn much from these readable pages, particularly if the reader has a basic knowledge of 20th Century history.

Ernest Volman has the talent to tell his stories in a wonderful way, like watching a thriller on TV. The case he presents are very interesting and cover a wide range of countries and eras, so it is a very good introduction to the international spy game for a beginner. I must say that I had only minimum knowledge about the stories presented here, but when I was able to compare data from the "Sorge" chapter of this book against Whymant's masterful book "Stalin's Spy", I was somewhat disappointed by the numerous mistakes and the plethora of annoyning errors that Volkman's work includes. Still, it is a very readable and enthralling look to the world of espionage.

With the publication of "The da Vinci Code," a substantial corollary of publishing flotsam and jetsam has spread, encompassing "The Name of the Rose", and "Foucault's Pendulum" among other worthwhile enterprises. Martin Gardiner inspired this auxiliary niche much earlier with his magnificent tomes deconstructing the Dodson oeuvre. Even Samuel Clemens has his explainers establishing that decoding Grimm is grim indeed.
Hence, this book is a handy reference to seeing which real life Karlas were confabulating into Littell's Starik (Old Man). Littell derived the title from Jan Berzin, p.201, the successor to Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the original landlord of Lubyanka. Starik's Lolita propensities, which Littell uses as a recurring obsessive liet motif, were derived from Beria, who "could indulge his vices, the chief one of which was little girls. Beria had little girls kidnapped all over Moscow; they were taken to his luxurious dacha, where he raped them." P. 214.
Littell used Marcus Wolfe to demonstrate the unknown quality of Starik, the superspy model for Le Carre's Karla in the Smiley sagas, p. 177, and of course, Jack J. McAuliffe, is James Bond, ala Ian Fleming, in real life Dusko (not the ill-fated Pyotr, p.35, who suffered a furnace fire execution) Popov[e], pp. 98-102.
Ernest Volkman, a prize-winning former national correspondent for Newsday, spices up this book by pointing out that Giovanni Montini was a praised and prize covert asset for the CIA before he was elected Pope Paul VI and was nominated for sainthood recognition by John Paul II who was overt except for the covert funding of Solidarity, p. 276.
Volkman does not resolve the still unanswered question as to whether Jesus Angleton was "Sasha" and used his devoted acolyte Golitsin to discredit Nosenko, who was tortured by Angleton, ala Littell's Leo Kritsky. However, Volkman's "Spies" was published in 1974, some eighteen years before Littell's "The Company" (2002).
A two page update to Volkman, can be found in Freeh's not quite maxima mea culpa, "My FBI [Feebi]" (2005), which notes that Aldrich Ames was head of the firm's Soviet Branch of the Directorate of Operations in 1985, eleven years after Angleton was fired, whilst discussing Bob Hanssen and Earl Pitts. ("My FBI", at pp. 235 et seq.)
All in all, "Spies" is still welcome to reference space on my overcrowded shelves. I strongly encourage others to do as I have done, i.e. to skim "Spies" before rereading Littell's "The Company". [Apology: there are so many books depicting the Firm, a successor to The Trust, which use "Company" in the title, some 58+, I have had to train myself to always use the conjoin the author, e.g. Agee for "Inside the Company.", when Company is a book title synonym for CIA.]