|
|||||||||
Better Together
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
Venona by Nigel West |
Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games by Tennent H. Bagley  (14)
$22.40
|
Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors That Shattered the CIA by David Wise  (1)
|
The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America--The Stalin Era (Modern Library Paperbacks) by Allen Weinstein  (19)
$20.70
|
At Her Majesty's Service: The Chiefs of Britain's Intelligence Agency, M16 by Nigel West  (1)
$27.61
|
Editorial Reviews
In the early 1920s, the newly founded Soviet Union established intelligence-gathering networks in several Western European capitals. Initially charged with spying on White Russians and other enemies of the Bolsheviks, these enclaves soon turned to collecting information on all kinds of political and economic activities in their host countries--and also to recruiting foreign nationals to serve the Soviet regime. The Soviets, write British historian Nigel West and retired Russian intelligence officer Oleg Tsarev, were especially successful in Britain, where they were able to make use of a band of disaffected university-based intellectuals who went into government service and who, in time, turned from coffeehouse revolutionaries to active traitors: John Cairncross, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean, and, perhaps most infamous of them all, Kim Philby.
From the late 1930s to the 1950s, they operated a spy ring in England that gave to the Soviet Union secret information ranging from Allied troop strength in North Africa in World War II to British atomic-weapons development in the early years of the cold war. West and Tsarev reproduce numerous dispatches from these spies, contextualizing them in a detailed narrative that vividly describes the day-to-day hardships involved in forging a career in espionage. For instance, when the East German "atom spy" Klaus Fuchs had to reckon with postwar gas rationing as a factor in arranging rendezvous points with his agents, he had to confine them to London and close to the watchful British counterintelligence service. The story takes as many turns as a John Le Carré thriller, and students of the cold war will find it of much interest. --Gregory McNamee
Virginia Quarterly Review
This is the most sensational volume to appear so far in Yale University Press's rapidly growing library on Soviet espionage. . . . Richly detailed and slickly written, The Crown Jewels is a riveting read.
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
|
