Book and Film Recommendations

Eric Rochant 

Ewa Oginiec, a veteran Polish intelligence officer suffering from occupational burnout, is set to retire before learning that her lover, a fellow agent, has gone missing on an undercover assignment investigating Russian military activity in the region. She agrees to replace him in exchange for her superiors agreeing to help find him. The title refers to the Suwałki Gap, a strategic NATO area around the Polish-Lithuanian border. First season released by HBO Max in January.

Stephen C. Mercado
Pen and Sword, 30 Oct 25

The technicians of the 9th Army Technical Research Institute, known as the Noborito Research Institute, toiled in the shadows of the Second World War to develop spy gear and special weapons for the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA). Their espionage devices, including secret inks, bugging devices, and miniature cameras, helped the Army’s dreaded Kempeitai and the shadowy Yama Agency counter foreign spies and track domestic dissent. Operatives of the IJA’s Nakano School for intelligence operatives and commandos took the equipment into the field with them. Noborito’s forgers reproduced Chinese currency in an operation to wreck China’s economy. Scientists and technicians tested biological weapons on Chinese prisoners as part of a top-secret project fielded by the IJA’s infamous Unit 731 and developed a virus into a weapon to strike at America’s cattle herds. Others developed bombing balloons to attack the American heartland, a target that lay far beyond Japan’s reach by conventional means. Stephen Mercado provides, in this first book in English on an intelligence organization little known outside Japan, an absorbing account of Noborito’s activities.

The author further recounts how, in the shadows of Occupied Japan, Noborito veterans entered US military service in secret, then applied their skills to operations during the Korean War and for years afterwards in the Cold War. Other veterans applied their skills to rebuilding Japan and turning the vanquished empire into a postwar industrial power. This story is one of talented technicians who served their country in war and peace.

Chris Pocock
Independent, 26 Jul 25

Bob Ericson was one of the select group of pilots who were recruited in 1956 by the CIA to fly the U-2 over the Soviet Union. He subsequently flew this extraordinary spyplane for 30 years, 16 years with The Agency followed by another 15 years with NASA. This book tells the story of how a small town boy grew up to serve his country with distinction, how he survived a crash in this most difficult-to-fly airplane, and how he was nearly shot down over the USSR. It also describes Bob’s flight over Cuba in 1962 that set off the Cuba Missile Crisis; his missions over Tibet, China and North Vietnam; and his remarkable save of a crippled U-2 for NASA.

Patrick G. Eddington
Georgetown University Press, 01 Apr 21

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anarchist and socialist political movements spurred the expansion of nascent US federal surveillance capabilities. But it was the ensuing, decades-long persistent exaggerations of domestic political threats that drove an exponential increase in the size and scope of unlawful government surveillance and related political repression, which continue to the present.

The Triumph of Fear is a history of the rise and expansion of surveillance-enabled political repression in the United States from the 1890s to 1961. Drawing on declassified government documents and other primary sources, many obtained via dozens of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits and analyzed for the first time, Eddington offers historians, legal scholars, and general readers surprising new revelations about the depths of government surveillance programs and how this domestic spying helped fuel federal assaults on free speech and association.