Reviews, Forthcoming, New Releases, Overlooked
Zhang Yimou | Netflix series, 2026
Vital intelligence leaked. The national security team vowed to find the traitor, but arrests failed repeatedly. As tension mounted, suspicion turned inward to the team itself. A silent battle unfolded amid trust and betrayal. Oscar-nominated Zhang Yimou directs the first film “led and created” by China’s Ministry of State Security.
Chris Jones | Pen and Sword Military | 30 March 2026
In his short life, Liverpool-born Alexander Foote went from being a volunteer in the International Brigade in Spain to becoming an agent of Soviet military intelligence in Switzerland. Pretending to his friends that he was a dim-witted Englishman with private means, Foote became the key telegraphist of the so-called ‘Red Three’ network of radio stations, communicating top secret German intelligence to the USSR from under the noses of the Swiss authorities. The information from Foote’s Morse key originated from sources in Germany and came to Foote via the enigmatic figure of Rudolph Rossler, known as Agent Lucy. Where he obtained the information from is a mystery that has never been solved. During the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, Soviet generals came to depend on the information from Foote’s transmitter and those of his comrades.
On his release from a ten-month remand in a Swiss gaol on an espionage charge, Foote absconded to Paris in 1944 before being invited for debriefing in Moscow. When he arrived, he became aware that he was under suspicion of being a British spy and it took all his wit to talk his comrades in Soviet intelligence out of sending him to the gulag: a fate that waited for many of the others in his Swiss network.
Disillusioned with life in the USSR, Foote approached British intelligence while he was on a Soviet mission in Berlin. He made them an offer: if they got him back to Britain he would tell them all he knew about Soviet intelligence, from the inside.
This is his story.
Scott A. Moseman | University Press of Kansas | 18 March 2025
From 1882 to 1947—the year the CIA was established—strategic military intelligence organizations struggled to define their missions. The American public, government and military leaders, and intelligence professionals all had competing ideas of what military intelligence should be and do. The quest of strategic military intelligence organizations to define themselves and their mission was directly influenced by the trends of a growing American military and maturing American society in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This dynamic and insightful facet of intelligence history, however, has remained largely in the shadows. How did government leaders and American society define strategic military intelligence organizations? How did these organizations describe themselves in their service to the US military and the American public as they evolved from a four-man office in 1882 to a multi-organizational operation with a staff of thousands by the 1940s?
In Defining the Mission, Scott Moseman examines how US strategic military intelligence organizations have adapted to several external and internal factors in finding their raison d’être. Focusing on the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Military Intelligence Division, Moseman explores themes including the growth of the American military, internationalism versus isolationism, the increasing complexity of the government, military professionalism, Hamiltonian versus Jeffersonian ideals, military progressivism, and domestic security. Exploring the contours of the dynamic relationships between strategic military intelligence organizations and government, military, and society, Moseman shows how the mission and work of military intelligence reflects the very society it serves.
Heinz Hohne | Doubleday | 31 October 1979
Viewing Hitler's director of espionage as some bizarre Jekyl-and-Hyde figure, Hohne investigates Wilhelm Canaris's involvement in several conspiracies to overthrow the Nazi regime, including one of many unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Hitler.