The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers, And Guerrillas

Paul Jablow offers a review of Max Hasting's The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers, and Guerrillas for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

At first glance, Joseph Rochefort was about as unlikely as a war hero gets. A mediocre (at best) naval officer, he narrowly escaped court martial when a destroyer on which he was the duty officer dragged its anchor in San Francisco bay amid six destroyers.

He was transferred to cryptoanalysis when fellow officers noted his penchant for crossword puzzles and bridge. It was Rochefort who played the key role in cracking the Japanese codes that allowed the smaller U.S. fleet to anticipate a June 1942 attack on Midway island, sink four carriers and a cruiser, and turn the tide of war in the Pacific.

Yet Rochefort was unlikely only if one sees espionage as a glamorous job. As Max Hasting points out in this magisterial work, it is often a slow, frustrating search for a flash of light in a corner of an enormous, dark room. Even when leaders note the light, they often ignore it when it fails to match their preconceptions. 

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/entertainment/20160731__The_Secret_War___Masterful_history_of_the_wasteful_art_of_espionage.html 

Note: Max Hasting calls intelligence-gathering "wasteful," but that is not say, in my view, that intelligence-gathering is useless. For every intelligence failure there are many, many successful operations that saved lives and strengthened our national defense. The 9/11 attack came as a surprise, but one should be thankful that the various intelligence agencies thwarted more than a dozen or more follow-up attacks.

You can read Joseph C. Goulden's Washington Times review of The Secret War via the below link:
http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2016/05/the-secret-war-spies-ciphers-and.html

The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers And Guerrillas, 1939-1945

Veteran journalist and author Joseph C. Goulden offers a good review in the Washington Times of Max Hasting's The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers And Guerrillas, 1939-1945.

Writing in the New York Review of Books in March, British historian Max Hastings noted (with an author’s undisguised pleasure) that “seventy years after the conclusion of World War II, works about the conflict enjoy a popularity second only to cookbooks.”

Such is due in large part to writers such as Sir Max, whose hard-eyed objectivity about war is a far cry from the “feel good” books from Stephen Ambrose and others. Mr. Hastings‘ 2011 work “Inferno” dealt with the brutality of war, and it is easily the best one-volume history of the war.

Now I must award Mr. Hastings another “best.” In a quarter-century of reviewing books on intelligence in these pages and elsewhere, “The Secret War” ranks foremost.

His massive overview is a fascinating look at the dark world of espionage and dirty tricks that are a part of warfare, with terse and readable looks at spies, communications intercepts and guerrillas. He postulates some rules that should be heeded by modern masters of the dark arts: report what you find, not what you expect that superiors would like to hear. Further, in the end, intelligence is a sideshow to war — essential, to be sure, but in the end, battles are won by “great armies, fleets, air forces.” In other words, by brave persons who face the enemy directly.

Further, expect political leaders to view intelligence with suspicion. As Joseph Stalin put it, “A spy should be like the devil: no one can trust him, not even himself.”

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

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/16/book-review-the-secret-war-spies-ciphers-and-guerr/