Reviews, Forthcoming, New Releases, Overlooked
Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan
2025
This three-part Netflix docuseries provides an in-depth look at how the world mobilized to hunt down Osama Bin Laden after his orchestrations of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States.
Kevin Wright
Helion and Company, 31 May 25
The creation of what Winston Churchill named the ‘Iron Curtain’ along the borders between Western and Eastern Europe in the late 1940s made conventional espionage extremely difficult. This forced the Western powers to fall back upon their large fleets of transport aircraft and bombers for intelligence-gathering work. The range of aerial spying activities were extensive, from classic photoreconnaissance, the insertion of agents deep within enemy territory (HUMINT), through to electronic intelligence (ELINT) – subdivided into communications intelligence (COMINT), signals intelligence (SIGINT) and telemetry intelligence (TELINT) – to the monitoring of nuclear tests.
Always at the forefront of such activities, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the USA clandestinely developed a large organization, operating dozens of – often heavily – modified aircraft for all of these purposes. Their activities reached frantic proportions especially during the late 1940s, when the Agency became involved in attempts to inspire popular uprisings in several countries of what would later be known as the Warsaw Pact, or even on the soil of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics itself. While sometimes revealed in public – whether by accident or by design – the mass of such operations remain largely unknown.
While the activities of the U-2 are reasonably well documented We Were Never There Volume 3, is the first ever effort to research, record, and explain CIA-run clandestine operations beyond the Iron Curtain by these other aircraft types and is based on extensive research, dozens of interviews with the participants and official documentation now released to the public.
The book is lavishly illustrated with original photographs, custom-drawn maps and color profiles, thus providing a unique insight into these affairs and and a single-point source of reference.
Alan Marshall
Manchester University Press, 10 Jan 23
This ambitious and important book is a richly detailed account of the ideas and activities in the early-modern 'secret state' and its agencies, spies, informers and intelligencers, under the English Republic and the Cromwellian protectorate.
The book investigates the meanings this early-modern Republican state acquired to express itself, by exploring its espionage actions, the moral conundrums, and the philosophical background of secret government in the era. It considers in detail the culture and language of plots, conspiracies, and intrigues and it also exposes how the intelligence activities of the Three Kingdoms began to be situated within early-modern government from the Civil Wars to the rule of Oliver Cromwell. It introduces the reader to some of the personalities who were caught up in this world of espionage, from intelligencers like Thomas Scot and John Thurloe to the men and women who became its secret agents and spies. The book includes stories of activities not just in England, but also in Ireland and Scotland, and it especially investigates intelligence and espionage during the critical periods of the British Civil Wars and the important developments which took place under the English Republic and Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s.
The book will appeal to historians, students, teachers, and readers who are fascinated by the secret affairs of intelligence and espionage.
Steve Vogel
Mariner Books, 24 Sep 19
Its code name was “Operation Gold,” a wildly audacious CIA plan to construct a clandestine tunnel into East Berlin to tap into critical KGB and Soviet military telecommunication lines. The tunnel, crossing the border between the American and Soviet sectors, would have to be 1,500 feet (the length of the Empire State Building) with state-of-the-art equipment, built and operated literally under the feet of their Cold War adversaries. Success would provide the CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service access to a vast treasure of intelligence. Exposure might spark a dangerous confrontation with the Soviets. Yet as the Allies were burrowing into the German soil, a traitor, code-named Agent Diamond by his Soviet handlers, was burrowing into the operation itself. . .
Betrayal in Berlin is Steve Vogel’s heart pounding account of the operation. He vividly recreates post-war Berlin, a scarred, shadowy snake pit with thousands of spies and innumerable cover stories. It is also the most vivid account of George Blake, perhaps the most damaging mole of the Cold War. Drawing upon years of archival research, secret documents, and rare interviews with Blake himself, Vogel has crafted a true-life spy story as thrilling as the novels of John le Carré and Len Deighton.
Betrayal in Berlin includes 24 photos and two maps.