American Spy Research Articles

Raising Malcolm’s Ghost: Black Radicalism, Third World Internationalism, and Counterintelligence in Lauren Wilkinson’s American Spy

ABSTRACT This article considers the “warring ideals” (Du Bois, Souls of Black Folks) of Black American solidarity with Third World Internationalism and complicity in U.S. imperialism through a reading of Lauren Wilkinson’s American Spy (2019). The novel, a spy thriller, centers on the life and experience of Marie Mitchell, a Black woman FBI agent recruited by the CIA to further an assassination plot against Thomas Sankara, the charismatic socialist leader of Burkina Faso. The story puts individual career advancement in the service of American imperialism in direct tension with the larger collectivist goals of Black and Third World liberation. Thus, the novel invites an exploration of the geopolitical implications of Du Bois’s famous formulation about Black American double consciousness, a formulation most often considered solely as a matter of individual psychology.

Fall of a New Soviet-Jewish Person: The Unmasking of Anti-Antisemite Aleksandr Litinskii, aka American Spy Big Boss

The paper examines the unmaking of an exemplary individual in Stalin's Soviet Union, a New Soviet Person, caught in the anti-Jewish campaign of Stalin's last years, often remembered for the notorious Doctors’ Plot. Aleksandr Litinskii was a Soviet true believer, a veteran of the Second World War, and a Jew whose father died in the Holocaust. When confronted with the anti-Jewish campaign, he was not disillusioned but decided to save the Soviet project through an elaborate attempt at reverse psychology. He posed in letters as an American spy bent on undermining the Soviet Union through antisemitism. Evidence from this bizarre case, collected from police archives that Ukraine declassified after the Maidan Revolution and from Litinskii's memoir, suggests new insights into Soviet Jewish experiences and into the legacy of persecution among Eastern Europeans who supported the regimes that repressed them.

Chinese Diplomacy in the 1950s: A Study of Dag Hammarskjlds Visit to China

After the Korean Armistice Agreement in 1953, the direct war between the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) and United States was temporarily halted. But the subsequent issues relating to the prisons of war, China students studied at US and the collusion between US and Taiwan, made the tensions between the PRC and US government. In order to resolve the American spy case, the United States manipulated the UN General Assembly (UNGA) to pass a resolution which Dag Hammarskjld, Secretary-General of the United Nations(UNSG), was mandated to visit China to solve this issue. This incident offered the PRC government a rare opportunity to engage with the UN and participate in global affairs. Zhou Enlai, the Chinese Foreign Minister, successfully defended Chinas sovereignty. This engagement helped to highlight the newly established PRCs position in the international affairs during Cold War while alleviate the tense atmosphere between China and the United States. This event also provided crucial groundwork for the resolution of issues concerning Chinese-American immigrants.

Queen of Cuba

Ana Montes, a senior intelligence analyst, spied on the Defense Intelligence Agency for Cubans. Highly specialized in Latin American military intelligence, she was known as “Queen of Cuba.” Her traumatic childhood made her susceptible to recruitment and her motivation was ideological. Using classic espionage techniques, mainly memorization, she managed to spy for 16 years until she was discovered. The findings of an American spy in Cuba, a bad relationship with coworkers, and the lack of a support agent led to her exposure. Ana was sentenced to 25 years in prison and five to probation. Her case indicates 10 conclusions about espionage.

Modernisation from the Shadows: Conspiracy, Monasticism and Techno-Utopia in the Amharic novel Dertogada

ABSTRACT The Amharic novel Dertogada (2009) was a smash hit in Ethiopia, launching Yismake Worku’s career as one of the most popular Amharic writers of the last decade. This paper explores Dertogada’s huge cultural influence by tracing its unique synthesis between the Amharic literary tradition, American spy thrillers and conspiracy novels, and postcolonial critique. Dertogada is a projection into the future of a series of questions about modernisation and the Ethiopian state that preoccupied Amharic authors throughout the twentieth century. We suggest that the conspiracy novel provides a model for connecting a technologically advanced surveillance state with an older, sacralised notion of the state based on the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. It is the very movement between techno-utopia and ancient religious wisdom, we argue, that lends the novel its particular popular nationalist impetus.

The ingenuity of spies - [Reflections

EVERY ENGINEER HAS STORIES OF BUGS that they discovered through clever detective work. But such exploits are seldom of interest to other engineers, let alone the general public. Nonetheless, a recent book authored by Eric Haseltine, titled The Spy in Moscow Station (Macmillan, 2019), is a true story of bug hunting that should be of interest to all. It recounts a lengthy struggle by Charles Gandy, an electrical engineer at the United States' National Security Agency, to uncover an elaborate and ingenious scheme by Soviet engineers to intercept communications in the American embassy in Moscow. (I should say that, by coincidence, both Haseltine and Gandy are friends of mine.) • This was during the Cold War in the late 1970s. American spies were being arrested, and how they were being identified was a matter of great concern to U.S. intelligence. The first break came with the accidental discovery of a false chimney cavity at the Moscow embassy. Inside the chimney was an unusual Yagi-style antenna that could be raised and lowered with pulleys. The antenna had three active elements, each tuned to a different wavelength. What was the purpose of this antenna, and what transmitters was it listening to? • Gandy pursued these questions for years, not only baffled by the technology, but buffeted by interagency disputes and hampered by the Soviet KGB. At one point he was issued a cease and desist letter by the CIA, which, along with the State Department, had authority over security at the embassy. These agencies were not persuaded that there were any transmitters to be found: Regular scans for emissions from bugs showed nothing. • It was only when Gandy got a letter authorizing his investigation from President Ronald Reagan that he was able to take decisive action. All of the electronics at the embassy-some 10 tons of equipment-was securely shipped back to the United States. Every piece was disassembled and X-rayed.

FIGHTING FOR WOMEN EXISTENCE IN POPULAR ESPIONAGE MOVIES SALT (2010) AND ZERO DARK THIRTY (2012)

American spy movies have been considered one of the most profitable genre in Hollywood. These spy movies frequently create an assumption that this genre is exclusively masculine, as women have been made oblivious and restricted to either supporting roles or non-spy roles. In 2010 and 2012, portrayal of women in spy movies was finally changed after the release of Salt and Zero Dark Thirty, in which women became the leading spy protagonists. Through the post-nationalist American Studies perspective, this study discusses the importance of both movies in reinventing women’s identity representation in a masculine genre in response to the evolving American society. Keywords: American women, hegemony, representation, Hollywood, movies, popular culture

Sharp, Tony Stalin's American Spy: Noel Field, Allen Dulles and the East European Show Trials (review)

REVIEWS 387 hands. If that’s true — and also if it is not true — there is an interesting story to be told, but in order for that to happen a difficult history needs to be excavated. University of Chicago Michael Geyer Sharp, Tony. Stalin’s American Spy: Noel Field, Allen Dulles and the East European Show Trials. Hurst & Company, London, 2014. xiii + 410 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £25.00. Noel Field was an unlikely player in a real-life spy drama. As a half-American Quaker and a self-proclaimed ‘pacifist idealist’ (p. 29), he was regarded as an outsider in the State Department, and yet he quickly developed into a ‘perfect bureaucrat’ in the eyes of his colleagues (p. 26). The ambitious, workaholic Harvard graduate became an acknowledged expert on disarmament and the League of Nations. Although his Communist sympathies excited suspicion, Noel’s profile and personality scarcely fitted the image of a Soviet agent, much less the reverse role of an ‘American master-spy’ in which he was cast by Stalin (p. 147). As the German Communist Paul Merker observed about the youthful Noel, ‘He was the sort of uncomplicated, middle-class American, who from a religiously motivated outlook and morality […] took the side of the weak and needy in society’ (p. 100). By 1949, however, Noel held the dubious distinction of being investigated as a traitor and a spy by both the Americans and the Soviets at one and the same time. Arguably, it was only a quirk of fate that he was kidnapped and arrested by the Czechoslovak and Hungarian secret services, and that he did not stand trial in the United States. Whilst the disappearance of Robert Vogeler, another American accused of espionage, prompted a torrent of protest from the United States Legation in Budapest, the vanishing of a former State Department employee — and subsequently of his wife, brother and foster daughter — barely caused a stir. After all, Noel had already been named by defectors as a covert Communist Party member who previously worked as a Soviet agent. Ironically, the Fields had travelled to Eastern Europe as a precaution, hoping to evade the Western intelligence services. When Noel went missing in Prague in May 1949, his wife assumed he had been seized by the Americans. She had no notion that her husband was languishing in Hungarian custody. Despite his pre-war record in Soviet foreign intelligence, and his wartime assistance of Communist refugees in Switzerland, Noel’s status changed overnight from Stalin’s spy to Stalin’s victim. This dramatic reversal is covered in minute detail by Tony Sharp, who documents how the capture of Noel was followed by that of his wife, Herta, his brother, Hermann and his foster daughter, Erica, all of SEER, 95, 2, APRIL 2017 388 whom ended up in Communist captivity. In addition, most of those who were helped by the Field brothers during the war came to rue the connection, faring badly at the hands of the East German, Polish, Czechoslovak, Hungarian and Soviet secret services. Whether or not the Fields’ associates received what they deserved,theyareportrayedinthisbookwithadegree ofcompassion,ashapless creatures caught in a spider’s web. Sharp relates many tales of human suffering and betrayal, without passing judgement on the individuals concerned. By contrast, in a recent Hungarian study on the trial of László Rajk and his fellow accused (‘A nagy politikai affér’ a Rajk-Brankov-ügy, 2 vols, Budapest, 2013–14), Tibor Zinner harps on the culpability of the Communist victims. Sharp’s more balancedapproachisto humanizethepersecuted,to‘treatthem withsympathy’, whilst suspending ‘empathy with their motives’ (p. 6). His canvas is at once broad and narrow: he effectively links the whole chain of East European show trials to the ordeal of one unfortunate American family. One might argue that Sharp devotes too much attention to some of the East European investigations and purges that had no bearing on the plight of the Fields. He also leaves unanswered some important questions about the anti-American purposes of the Rajk case. Why was Noel picked as the first American victim of Stalinist ‘justice’ in Budapest, and why was he not eventually tried in a Hungarian court, as Vogeler was...

Kati Marton, True Believer: Stalin's Last American Spy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016. 289 pp. $27.00

Kati Marton, <i>True Believer: Stalin's Last American Spy</i>. New York: Simon &amp; Schuster, 2016. 289 pp. $27.00

Spies and Diplomats in US Soviet Policy

Spies and Diplomats in US Soviet Policy Jörn Happel Mark A. Bradley, A Very Principled Boy: The Life of Duncan Lee, Red Spy and Cold Warrior. 348pp., illus. New York: Basic Books, 2014. ISBN-13 978-0465030095. $29.99. Lorraine M. Lees and William S. Rodner, eds., An American Diplomat in Bolshevik Russia: DeWitt Clinton Poole. 332pp., illus., map. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. ISBN-13 978-0299302245. $26.95. DeWitt Clinton Poole (1885–1952) stands in the center of a group of men and women dressed in fur coats and fur hats. Leaning on his cane, he gazes directly into the camera through his thin glasses. While some people of the group are smiling, he has a rather serious look in his eyes. The American diplomats together with their consul Poole had their picture taken in front of a representative building in Arkhangel´sk in midwinter 1918/19. The photograph is impressive.1 It adorns the front as well as the back cover and is also prominent in the memoirs of DeWitt Clinton Poole, published by Lorraine M. Lees and William S. Rodner. The confident look and posture, standing in the midst of his colleagues, and the respect shown to him capture one of the pioneers of American Soviet Union policy on his best behavior. His memoirs, laid out in this fine edition for review, cover the years 1917–20 in the young Soviet Union. The source of the memoirs is Poole’s interviews, recorded as part of Columbia University’s Oral History Project just before he died in 1952. Poole’s thoughts offer an apt analysis of the circumstances in revolutionary Russia, plagued by civil war. There is great merit in commemorating this important pioneer with the publication of his writings. The American spy [End Page 918] Duncan Lee also emerges in A Very Principled Boy, by Mark A. Bradley, which describes the life of a Cold War agent. Despite the differences between Poole and Lee, their lives give us an inside take on how US government offices perceived Lenin’s and Stalin’s empire, how the Cold War started, and how it changed the living environments of numerous experts on the East. DeWitt Clinton Poole is a well-known figure in the emergence of the Cold War. In contrast to other cold warriors, Poole as yet has no biography based on archival documents, although he played an important role in the development of the United States’ Soviet policy after 1917/18 and after 1945. He knew what was right and how to fight the Soviet antagonist. From another perspective, Duncan Lee exemplifies the problems of fighting for the “right thing”—for leftist ideas but against Soviet communism—and of working as a spy against the US motherland to create a better world based on a communist outlook. In summary, Poole’s memoir and Bradley’s study of Lee help us understand how to learn about the Soviets.2 Lee was one of thousands of European and American idealists who made pilgrimages to experience the Soviet Union in the 1930s.3 But unlike many of the others, he was ready to spy for the Soviet Union after World War II. In contrast to the diplomat Poole, who recognized during his years in Russia that the Soviet regime was an antagonist of every democratic government, Lee believed in communist ideas. For many years, historians focused on the big players in US diplomacy, such as George F. Kennan or Charles E. Bohlen.4 Alternatively, scholars had only to look for the history of popular spies at the beginning of the Cold War: Igor S. Gouzenko, Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, David Greenglass, Ethel and [End Page 919] Julius Rosenberg.5 What we learn from Poole’s memoirs and from the biography of Duncan Lee lies beyond the often told story of how Russia became a Bolshevik enemy after the revolution and how leftists became involved in the Cold War spy game. These two studies offer new insights into the history of the Russian Revolution, US involvement in the Russian Civil War, and early American domestic troubles in fashioning a Soviet policy during and after World War II.6 It...

Information and Intrigue: From Index Cards to Dewey Decimals to Alger Hiss by Colin B. Burke

Reviewed by: Information and Intrigue: From Index Cards to Dewey Decimals to Alger Hiss by Colin B. Burke Jon Agar (bio) Information and Intrigue: From Index Cards to Dewey Decimals to Alger Hiss. By Colin B. Burke. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Pp. 382. $45. In a world dominated by Google Inc., with its mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” we sometimes forget how difficult it once was to find out where to find knowledge. The Library of Alexandria was too big to simply browse, and so possessed a catalog to help readers locate the scroll they wanted. Catalogs have been a help ever since. But the growth of science in the nineteenth century, specifically the growth of scientific journals, presented a more pressing problem: how would scientists find the freshly published articles that they needed to read? Mere knowledge of the title of a journal was inadequate, because it was the specific and specialist content that was important. Science as a coherent, international endeavor depended on the solution to such problems. In the 1890s, Herbert Haviland Field, an American son of a Quaker family, offered a solution. His Concilium Bibliographicum was an immense and expensive undertaking. Field’s proposal, which he sold as a service to libraries, was to summarize the contents of scientific papers on cards, which would be classified according to a Dewey numerical identifier. Every few months a subscribing library would receive a new, and increasingly large, batch of cards. By consulting this distributed catalog, scientists could locate the new journal articles of interest to them. The Concilium was one of a number of responses to late-nineteenth-century scientific information overload. Other, to greater or lesser extent rival, projects were pursued by the Royal Society of London, which attempted to track and list new journals, and in Belgium by Paul Otlet with his equally ambitious informational schemes. These projects are part of a long history of information, an area which is now receiving considerable attention from historians. Colin B. Burke, a historian who has worked on both secret and open sides of the intelligence curtain, relates the curious family tale of the Fields. Herbert was a rich, idealistic internationalist. His Concilium would, in Burke’s account of Field’s interests and motivations, “erase national intellectual boundaries and equalize access to scientific discoveries” (p. 41). Field established the Concilium’s headquarters in Switzerland, home of a certain spirit of neutral internationalism and financial support. Nevertheless, the project was always short of cash. Burke describes in considerable detail the ebbs and flows of family feuds and alliances and the attempts by Field to interest even larger philanthropic concerns, notably the Rockefeller Foundation, in supporting his internationalist service. The detail is sometimes rather overwhelming, as the project advances a few steps and then falters, over several decades. [End Page 1019] And then Herbert Field suddenly died, “one of the last victims of an international catastrophe, the pandemic influenza” that followed the First World War. Herbert’s wife Nina now held the reins, and benefited from a generous settlement offered by the Rockefeller Foundation. But it was not enough to save the Concilium, which, like Otlet’s similarly grand and idealist inter-nationalist Mundaneum, decayed away in an increasingly fraught and riven international context. The final quarter of Information and Intrigue concerns Herbert and Nina’s sons and daughters. Noel Field became a minor Soviet spy. In the late 1940s sons Hermann and Noel, Noel’s wife Herta, and Herta and Noel’s adopted daughter Erica, “disappeared after traveling to Central and Eastern Europe” (p. 302). They were imprisoned and tortured (and later released) as suspected American spies despite being, certainly in Noel’s case, Soviet agents. This spying angle has clearly intrigued Burke. There is a tantalizing hint, in the account he gives of the information challenges encountered by the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA which “soon built files larger than Paul Otlet’s or the Concilium’s” (p. 291), of a genuine and deep intersection of librarian and security service worlds. But the almost contingent connection of Herbert and Noel Field is too narrow...

The old ‘white actor playing a Chinese man’ trick: Get Smart and race

Abstract This article examines the portrayal of Chinese characters in Get Smart (1965–70). Get Smart was a 1960s American spy comedy based on the premise of good (Control) against evil (KAOS) set against the back drop of the Cold War. Many of the episodes in this comedy featured a Chinese character as the enemy. This article will examine the way the characterization and performance of the Chinese roles play out in Get Smart. It locates them within the long-standing but now highly dubious tradition of ‘yellowface’ casting in American vaudeville, theatre and cinema, as Caucasian actors almost always played the Chinese roles in Get Smart. More particularly it examines Get Smart and especially the episodes with Chinese characters as examples of adaptation. Doing so suggests that different and at times competing conceptions of Chinese archetypes have been brought onto the screen, from the oriental villainy of Sax Rohmer and Ian Fleming to the criminal detective genius of Earl Derr Biggers’ Chan stories. These archetypes (and indeed stereotypes would be a better word in some instances), nonetheless permit the argument that Get Smart brings onto the screen a reasonably complex understanding of its Chinese characters and a critical view of the American characters.

Hunt for the Bamboo Rat by Graham Salisbury (review)

Reviewed by: Hunt for the Bamboo Rat by Graham Salisbury Elizabeth Bush Salisbury, Graham Hunt for the Bamboo Rat. Lamb, 2014 [336p] Library ed. ISBN 978-0-375-94070-5 $19.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-375-84266-5 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-307-97970-4 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-10 Salisbury returns to the theme of his previous acclaimed books (Under the Blood-Red Sun, BCCB 11/94, etc.), the plight of Japanese-Americans in World War II, who [End Page 173] were American patriots mistrusted by both homeland and enemy. Zenji Watanabe’s flawless mastery of English and Japanese is well known to his ROTC officer, so the recent high school graduate is quickly recruited into military intelligence and sent to Manila, just in advance of U.S. entry into the war. Of course, Pearl Harbor ups the ante of his mission, and his superiors instruct him to allow himself to be captured among the Filipinos rather than Americans, the better to gain further intel, as well as to maximize his own chances for survival. Unfortunately, when he’s rounded up into an internment camp, Zenji is singled out by his captors as a possible American spy or Japanese traitor, either of which is likely to assure his execution. Salisbury bases his novel on the wartime experiences of decorated Army intelligence agent Richard Sakakida, with other real life figures taking on supporting roles. Although the dialogue-rich text is accessible to younger readers, the complexity of Zenji’s cat-and-mouse game and the intensity of the torture scenes suggest a more mature audience with some background knowledge of World War II. This is a worthy companion piece to the Under the Blood-Red Sun titles, now remarketed as the Prisoners of the Empire series. Copyright © 2014 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

American spies: espionage against the United States from the Cold War to the present

American spies: espionage against the United States from the Cold War to the present

Hotel California

This essay examines the song “Hotel California” by The Eagles, which has garnered legions of fans (and detractors) and taken on a variety of meanings as it has made its way around the globe. Well known in China and India, among other places, it even made a cameo appearance in the American spy plane incident of 2001, when Chinese guards asked members of the U.S. crew of a downed surveillance jet to tell them the words to this well known song from their country. The essay looks at the song’s popularity abroad, and the power of music in forming memories and conjuring a sense of place and time.

John Reed, American Spy?

Nothing is what it seems.Except when it is exactly what it seems. John Silas Reed was a rock star of American radicalism. The quintessential “romantic revolutionary,” he died young and was buried a...

Bon Appétit! The Delicious Life of Julia Child by J. Hartland

Hartland, Jessie. Bon Appétit! The Delicious Life of Julia Child. New York: Schwartz &amp; Wade Books, 2012. Print.Master chef and author Julia Child (1912–2004) was adored by audiences from the moment she first starred in her own television cooking show in 1963. It was an immediate success because people were captivated by Child’s warm, high-spirited personality and her enthusiasm for good food and wine. Indeed, she regularly toasted viewers with a glass of wine and her trademark “Bon appétit!” in her distinctive voice. Young readers are introduced to Child in this delightful picture book biography that is a feast for the eyes. It offers a surprisingly thorough account of her life, and includes scenes from her early childhood in Pasadena, California, her brief career with an American spy agency, and her struggle to publish the now famous “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”, to name but a few of the highlights. In one especially amusing spread, readers are shown how to make chicken galantine in 32 numbered panels, which make clear that Child encouraged her fans to try new foods and cooking techniques. Author-illustrator Jessie Hartland uses simple cartoons and a handwritten typeface to tell the story, and it is immediately apparent from the opening pages that the book is jam-packed with artwork and text, but the overall effect is one of considerable charm and animation. The endpapers are crammed with line drawings of kitchen tools, ingredients, and objects from Child’s life, which have English and French labels for readers who want to learn some essential vocabulary in both languages. For readers who want to learn more about Child, the book includes a useful bibliography, brief epilogue, and web links that show Child’s actual kitchen from her house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the restaurant where she had her first meal in France. This adorable publication will appeal to foodies of all ages. Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Robert DesmaraisRobert Desmarais is Head of Special Collections at the University of Alberta and Managing Editor of The Deakin Review of Children’s Literature. A graduate of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information Studies, with a Book History and Print Culture designation, he also has university degrees in English literature and publishing. He has been collecting and enjoying children’s books for as long as he can remember.

Enemies of the People

Enemies of the People. Directed by Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath. Old Street Films, 2009, 94 minutes. Enemies of the People is a documentary film extraordinary in the scope of its investigation. Indeed when art becomes evidence at a tribunal, you know this is not your average documentary. The film's title, Enemies of the People, comes from a phrase coined by Nuon Chea, the Khmer Ronge's Brother Number Two (Pol Pot, who died while under house arrest in 1998, was Brother Number One), who now stands trial in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, otherwise known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. However, the context in which this phrase appears is muddied. Who are the Enemies? Who are the People? Through the magic of editing, it is not entirely clear to whom Nuon Chea refers to as enemies of the people. While it is frequently assumed that the reference is to whomever the regime killed or whose death it caused, it is probably more likely that he was referring to those people he saw as traitors to the regime--Vietnamese saboteurs, American spies, etc.--which then begs the question: were the 1.7 million people who died during the Khmer Rouge's rule all traitors or only the ones executed at Khmer Rouge torture centres like S-21 (Tuol Sleng)? The distinction seems pedantic, but places like S-21 were for the regime's elite or special cases needing interrogation and torture in the eyes of Angkar (the Organization). Indeed, it is not clear to whom Nuon Chea refers to necessarily as and later as criminals when he says the following in an exchange with filmmaker Thet Sambath: Nuon Chea: Our policy was first to re-educate them to stop ... Then we gave them two or three warnings to stop their treacherous activities. Next we required them to present their revolutionary personal history ... and make a self-criticism. If that didn't work ... they would be expelled from the party. If they still could not be corrected ... they had to be solved. These people were categorized as criminals. Criminals. Sambath: What did you do with these criminals? Nuon Chea: They were killed and destroyed. If we had let them live, the party line would have been hijacked. They were enemies of the people. But nevermind Nuon Chea, whom we can safely assume will be found guilty by the Khmer Rouge Tribunal sooner or later (if the Tribunal itself does not collapse from the sheer weight of its own incompetence) and who will spend the rest of his life behind bars, regardless. At its core, the film is really a case study of Pol Pot's willing executioners. While Nuon Chea is the centrepiece, it is everyday killers--people like Suon and Khuon, low-level Khmer Rouge cadres--who really carry the film with their own confessions of how (if not why) they killed. They describe in explicit detail the murders they committed in the name of Angkar and even reminisce about the cannibalism they practised (eating the gall bladders of their victims). …

Spies: the rise and fall of the KGB in America

This stunning book, based on KGB archives that have never come to light before, provides the most complete account of Soviet espionage in America ever written. In 1993, former KGB officer Alexander Vassiliev was permitted unique access to Stalin-era records of Soviet intelligence operations against the United States. Years later, living in Britain, Vassiliev retrieved his extensive notebooks of transcribed documents from Moscow. With these notebooks John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have meticulously constructed a new, sometimes shocking, historical account. Along with general insights into espionage tactics and the motives of Americans who spied for Stalin, Spies resolves specific, long-seething controversies. The book confirms, among many other things, that Alger Hiss cooperated with Soviet intelligence over a long period of years, that journalist I. F. Stone worked on behalf of the KGB in the 1930s, and that Robert Oppenheimer was never recruited by Soviet intelligence. Spies also uncovers numerous American spies who were never even under suspicion and satisfyingly identifies the last unaccounted for American nuclear spies. Vassiliev tells the story of the notebooks and his own extraordinary life in a gripping introduction to the volume.

Testing the Limits: Aviation Medicine and the Origins of Manned Space Flight (review)

Reviewed by: Testing the Limits: Aviation Medicine and the Origins of Manned Space Flight Matthew H. Hersch (bio) Testing the Limits: Aviation Medicine and the Origins of Manned Space Flight. By Maura Phillips Mackowski . College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005. Pp. xii+289. $49.95. Almost immediately upon launching their first large rockets in the late 1940s, researchers in the United States and the Soviet Union stuffed the nose cones with a petting zoo's worth of animals just to see if they would survive the trip. The health of mice in space was not an idle concern in the years after World War II; physiologists preparing for World War III wondered which lethal mechanism—weightlessness, temperature, insanity—would fell future space pilots first. Soviet space dog Laika, a stray mutt launched into Earth orbit in November 1957, spent three days in abject terror, a feeding tube crammed down her throat, until she died of heat exhaustion. American researchers trained chimpanzees to mimic the human pilots who would soon follow them into space, pulling levers in pretend cockpits. Such experiments were only one small (and much-mocked) part of the research program of "aviation medicine," a field of study that, shortly before World War II, expanded from a fringe pursuit into a thriving international research discipline. Aviation medicine could not have found a better champion than Maura Phillips Mackowski; her new book, Testing the Limits, faithfully recounts the efforts of American and German research physicians who, at the dawn of the space age, saved more than a few pilots' lives by perfecting life-support equipment and quantifying the physiological and psychological effects of aviation. It is a telling statement about this [End Page 897] research that Mackowski follows it through personalities rather than institutions: in the mid-twentieth century, aviation medicine flourished under the stewardship of a handful of dedicated scientists who tirelessly lobbied skeptical superiors, scrounged for funds, and experimented on themselves. These pioneers include Harry Armstrong, who founded the first U.S. aeromedical research laboratory in 1934 at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, and his German counterpart, Hubertus "Struggie" Strughold, who, like the Führer, was a wonderful dancer. Germany's wartime experience with high-speed airplanes made its aviation physicians particularly valuable at war's end, and Strughold, the least Nazified of the group, found a warm reception in the United States when American spies smuggled him and many other scientists out of the Reich in Project Paperclip. In America, the "Paperclips" and native-born colleagues like Randy Lovelace and Paul Stapp established human tolerances for acceleration and altitude and the medical implications of transformative wartime technologies like ejection seats and rocket planes. American aviation medicine of the 1950s emerges in Testing the Limits as a research frontier populated by hands-on iconoclasts quite content to abuse their bodies for science, exposing themselves to supersonic wind blasts or jumping from stratospheric weather balloons. Some intrepid physiologists dreamed of taking their work literally to the Moon, but until the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, space remained a dirty word in the air force, under whose auspices most American aviation physiologists worked. The years 1958 through 1961, however, quickly became space medicine's heyday, with the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) calling on the physicians to help select the military pilots who would become America's first astronauts. Ultimately, though, NASA wanted the physiologists' reassurance, not their research. Mackowski is charitable toward the doctors, but their "examinations" were often worthless experiments masquerading as evaluative tests. As it turned out, nude anthropometric photography couldn't distinguish good pilots from bad ones, and aviation medicine's influence over astronaut selection quickly waned. Mackowski's final chapter, on the group of unqualified civilian women Lovelace unsuccessfully promoted as potential astronauts in 1961, reveals, ultimately, only the physiologist's naivete about the military foundations of "big science." Testing the Limits is a thoroughly researched work making excellent use of archives and oral history; only Soviet space medicine is noticeably shortchanged. Mackowski's account resounds with the kind of thrilling stories for which basic cable was invented, but evaluating aviation medicine's scientific legacy remains tricky. Nazi experiments were...