Spies In Palestine: Love, Betrayal, And The Heroic Life Of Sarah Aaronsohn

Veteran journalist and author Joseph C. Goulden offers a good review in the Washington Times of James Srodes' Spies in Palestine: Love, Betrayal, and the Heroic Life of Sarah Aaronsohn.

In more than half a century of reading intelligence literature, seldom have I encountered an operative with the raw courage of Sarah Aaronsohn. Whatever spy tradecraft the woman knew was self-taught. She had to contend not only with hostile neighbors, but with Turkish security officers who delighted in fashioning new and gruesome ways to torture adversaries.

Ms. Aaronsohn’s story is grippingly told by James Srodes in an account that also explores, in brisk and incisive language, a phase of World War I that hisorians tend to skim past — the attempts of Kaiser Germany and allied nations of the Ottoman Empire to seize the Suez Canal, cutting Great Britain’s lifeline to India and the East.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/nov/27/book-review-spies-in-palestine-love-betrayal-and-t/

‘Disciples: The World War II Missions Of The CIA Directors Who Fought For Wild Bill Donovan

James Srodes offers a review in the Washington Times of Douglas Waller's Disciples: The World War II Missions of the CIA Directors Who Fought for Wild Bill Donovan.

This book will make a dandy holiday gift for the spy story buff who eats up yarns about the dark side of the world of intelligence and those masters of intrigue who exist inside the web.

This is an authoritatively researched and smoothly written tale of four future directors of the Central Intelligence Agency who began their careers in America’s World War II covert action service, the Office of Special Services (OSS) headed by the charismatic Gen. William “Wild Bill” Donovan.

The four profiles of Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby and William Casey are linked by their ties to Donovan, but their lives also intersected with each other. This presents author Douglas Waller with the tricky task of telling their stories while keeping Donovan in the foreground even after he had been set down as the nation’s spymaster by President Harry Truman 90 days after Japan’s surrender.

Mr. Waller carries it off, however. A former Washington correspondent for both Time and Newsweek magazines, he is a seasoned reporter of the intelligence scene and the author of a respected 2012 biography of Donovan and, in 2004, of Gen. Billy Mitchell. None of these profiles is the last word on Donovan or the four disciples, as Mr. Waller calls them. There are biographies galore of all of them and the four were prolific writers themselves. But as an entertaining read for the armchair spymaster it is a good primer about the OSS and the controversy over whether it really made much difference in the outcome of the war.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/nov/17/book-review-disciples-the-world-war-ii-missions-of/

The Politics Of Deception: JFK’s Secret Decisions On Vietnam, Civil Rights And Cuba

James Srodes offers a review of Patrick J. Sloyan's The Politics of Decption: JFK's Secret Decisions on Vietnam, Civil Rights and Cuba in the Washington Times.

This riveting book is a compelling read not only for correcting a much-mythologized era, but also for reminding us of the harsh and often crass realities that influence all our presidents when they get blindsided by the unintended consequences of their acts.

Author Patrick J. Sloyan is a reporter’s reporter. In a 40-year career that spanned covering the White House for United Press International and the First Gulf War for Newsday, Mr. Sloyan collected a shelf of journalism press awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1992.

With dogged persistence, scrupulous archival work and firsthand interviews, he has turned on its ear the sanitized history of the last year of John F. Kennedy’s presidency. He started with the long-awaited release by the Kennedy Presidential Library of hours of audio discs of the secret tape recordings JFK ordered during crucial Oval Office policy decisions taken during those fraught 11 months. He then searched through other presidential archives for the oral histories stored there by other Kennedy aides and tracked down a number of the key participants who were still extant long decades later.

It is not a pretty story, but it resonates. Mr. Sloyan’s conclusions offer no comfort to haters of the fictional Kennedy Camelot nor to the still-thriving industry of the JFK hagiographers, but they explain why seemingly intelligent men do such stupid things when they become president.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jan/27/book-review-the-politics-of-deception-jfks-secret-/?page=all

His American Characters Are Cartoons: James Srodes On John le Carre's 'A Delicate Truth

James Srodes reviewed John le Carre's A Delicate Truth for the Washington Times.

I confess to being a fan of John le Carre, both for his skill at storytelling and for the razor-sharp characters he creates. Laser portraits of even secondary characters make the reader believe he actually knows people like that.

I also like and admire David Cornwell, the man behind the nom de plume. Unlike many writers of crime and espionage literature, Mr. Cornwell has walked the walk. He worked for both Britain’s MI-5 (domestic counter-intelligence) and MI-6 (foreign intelligence) cracking safes, tapping telephones, running agents and other covert ops. Indeed, he was so employed when he wrote his first two books, “Call for the Dead” (1961) and “A Murder of Quality” (1962), both of them worth a read, by the way.
 

... The one flaw is one that is common to all of Mr. le Carre’s books. David Cornwell positively despises Americans and particularly those connected with the U.S. intelligence services. His indictment at base is one shared by many Britons of the left and is fueled in part by the newspapers they read (the Guardian) and it lies mainly in the undeniable fact that we are definitely not British. Not only are we far too polyethnic but we just refuse to order our society along proper British lines.

The result is that while Mr. Cornwell is unsurpassed in drawing acute portraits of his own national characters, his Americans are cartoons. One of the main villains in the story here is a wealthy woman who bankrolls Ethical Outcomes. She is a Texan (of course), coarse and bumptious (what else?), a Tea Party loony (sigh) and, most damning of all, a born-again Christian. His treatment of U.S. spy services is equally cliche-ridden.

I am sure Mr. Cornwell despises Americans because he told me so. Once, back in the early 1980s, I was introduced to him in a smoky Fleet Street pub frequented by journalists by an Australian newsman who had served as one of Mr. le Carre’s stock characters in several books. While he was cordial enough to me at the start, as the night wore on he became ever more bitter about America and its clumsy, self-indulgent national character which had given the world the Vietnam War, race riots, Richard Nixon and a host of other plagues.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/19/book-review-a-delicate-truth/

You can also read my column Spy Writer Vs. Spy Writer about John le Carre and Ian Fleming via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/08/spy-writer-vs-spy-writer-john-le-carre.html 

Review Of '1775: A Good Year For Revolution'

James Srodes at the Washington Times wrote a good review of Kevin Philips' 1775: A Good Year for Revolution.

If you buy only one history book for the rest of 2013, this should be the one.

Book reviewers have long turned such phrases as “magisterial” and “masterpiece” into cliches. This book richly deserves far more effusive encomiums. I can only say that Kevin Philips will change everything you think you know about our American Revolution and replace it with a deeper, richer understanding of the more complex and very human story of our founding.

Good history writing should fulfill two objectives. It should provide the reader with a clearer grasp of what the historic characters were thinking as well as how they acted. Equally important, there should be some resonant connection with our current lives, for while history does not repeat itself exactly, it is vital that we remember that our past is fashioned by ordinary humans like ourselves who often face eerily similar dilemmas

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/mar/12/book-review-1775/

The Dictionary of Espionage: Spyspeak Into English

James Srodes, the author of a good book on legendary CIA director Allen Dulles, wrote a good review of Joseph C. Goulden's The Dictionary of Espionage: Spyspeak into English (Dover Publications) for the Washington Times.

In this accessibly written book, Washington author Joseph C. Goulden illuminates and defines much of the standard jargon of the intelligence community with refreshing asides about many of spying’s urban legends - many of which may or may not be true. Informed by remarkable access to the intelligence community, the book, first issued in 1986, has been significantly updated and contains a foreword by Peter Earnest, the founding executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington and a former CIA operations officer.   

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/mar/2/spy-worlds-lingo-legacy/

Note: I recently interviewed Joseph C. Goulden for Counterterrorism magazine. The Q & A will appear in the next issue of the quarterly publication.

I previously interviewed Mr. Goulden, as well as Peter Earnest, for a piece on espionage and the International Spy Museum that appeared in Counterterrorism magazine a few years back.

You can read the piece via the below links:

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/SpyMuseum1.jpg

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/SpyMuseum2.jpg

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/SpyMuseum3.jpg