Espionage

Review: Book and Dagger

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Cover image of "Book and Dagger" by Elyse Graham

Book and Dagger

Book and Dagger, Elyse Graham. Ecco Books (ISBN: 9780063280847) 2025.

Summary: The contribution of scholars and librarians to undercover and intelligence operations during World War II.

James Bond they were not. They were Ivy League academics. Among them were literature professors, historians, librarians, and archivists. But they played a critical role for a nation desperately in need of an intelligence service.

When Pearl Harbor was attacked and the United States found itself in a global conflict, government leaders recognized our profound lack of good intelligence. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was formed, the predecessor to today’s CIA. One of the decisions they made was that academics were people good at ferreting out information. They knew how to spend time in archives and make sense out of disparate and sometimes apparently insignificant sources like a phone book or a newspaper ad or even trash. As researchers, their vocation also allowed them to go undercover to find that information.

Elyse Graham focuses her story around three of these academics. Joseph Curtiss was a literature professor who was able to recruit a network of German double agents in Turkey. Adele Kibre was a single archivist who went to Stockholm to acquire critical information about German plans, using charm when needed to dupe those who didn’t think a woman librarian could be a spy. Meanwhile, Sherman Kent, a historian, pioneered and led research and analysis efforts, sifting through mountains of information to create actionable intelligence.

Graham describes the training agents underwent. The goal was to survive capture for 48 hours. However, this wasn’t the time until rescue, but rather the time for other agents to evacuate to safety. Of course, there was the cyanide capsule. Along the way, Graham describes a number of operations, including a raid on a Norwegian heavy water plant. She also describes all the intelligence disinformation efforts surrounding D-Day. Consequently, a number of German resources were elsewhere.

Here is an example of what academics could accomplish. A group from Yale went to the library and from publicly available information reconstructed over 90 percent of the U.S. military’s order of battle and strategic plans. All of this was supposed to be classified. Other analysts studied returning bombers to recommend where to put extra shielding from anti-aircraft fire. They noticed that engines didn’t suffer a lot of hits. Counter-intuitively, that’s where they recommended shielding. Bombers with engine hits didn’t return.

My one criticism of the book is that the author included so many stories that didn’t involve Curtiss, Kibre, and Kent, that one lost the thread of the narrative of their experiences. Not that the stories weren’t interesting. It’s just that after a while, it felt like one story after another that proved the author’s thesis rather than developing the narrative.

However, the thesis itself is worth noting. The scholars turned spies were so successful because of the disciplines they developed as scholars. Graham lists these:

“How to sift through paper evidence like newspapers, leaflets, and novels. How to gather clues from unlikely sources like advertisements and society columns. How to read a lot in just a little time. How to look at a pile of cracked and curling pages and see a treasure hunt. How to evaluate claims. How to tell stories. How to come up with audacious methods of solving problems using unlikely data: figuring out military secrets, say, by tracking ball bearings, or railroad rates, or the serial numbers of tank components. How to make arguments that aren’t merely summaries of what has been said, but that say something new. How to understand another country–because the past, too, is another country–on its own terms” (p. 297).

Graham doesn’t pass up the current relevance of this lesson from history. Scholars, especially from the humanities, are routinely disparaged. Yet doesn’t this story demonstrate that there is a kind of intelligence that we ignore at our peril? Thankfully, there were leaders during World War II who recognized the importance of such intelligence and people who had cultivated the intellectual discipline it required.

Review: Marco Polo, If You Can

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Cover image of "Marco Polo, If You Can" by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Marco Polo, If You Can

Marco Polo, If You Can (Blackford Oakes, Number 4), William F. Buckley, Jr. Mysterious Press/Open Road (ISBN: 9781504018524) 2015 (first published in 1981).

Summary: Blackford Oakes awaits a death sentence in the Lubyanka as a spy, part of a plot to expose a Soviet mole.

The trial was pro forma. Oakes U-2 flamed out over Soviet territory, allowing his capture. Known as a spy, he’s sentenced to death. And appeals for reprieves or lighter sentences have failed. Uncharacteristically, Oakes is down to prayers.

Most of the book concerns how Oakes, out of the spy business for three years, has ended up in the Lubyanka. The problem is that there is a mole high in the U.S. government in the Eisenhower administration, leaking the contents of sensitive meetings. Who it is, how it is being done, and the network that gets that information to the Soviets occupies much of the book.

Initially, the CIA brings Oakes back to help expose the network. The high stakes of this operation strike home when Oakes loses of friend to save his life.

Back in the States, the investigation homes in on the source, a woman Oakes had once been intimate with. Likewise, they figure out how it is being done, despite close monitoring. A Xerox machine plays a leading role. But things take a twist because the CIA knows about the leak. They mix misinformation with credible information including a project dubbed “Marco Polo.” Instead of the Soviets embarrassing the Americans, the Americans want to do the embarrassing.

But first, the Americans must embarrass themselves. And that’s where Oakes flight comes in, paralleling the real life Gary Powers incident. But the Soviets shot down Powers, whereas Oakes stages his flameout. His landing in Soviet territory is deliberate. But you will have to read to understand why, and whether the plan works prior to Oakes execution.

Buckley’s Oakes evokes the cold war machinations of Le Carre and the sexuality of Ian Fleming’s James Bond without the flare of either author. The plot is diverting but not thrilling. The sex is ho-hum. Of greatest interest are the portrayals of Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover. And we care enough about Oakes to hope he will escape with his life. There are others in this series, particularly Stained Glass and Saving the Queen that I would rate more highly. But if you like the series or just want some pleasant Cold War era diversion, give this a read.

Review: Passenger to Frankfurt

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Passenger to Frankfurt, Agatha Christie. William Morrow Paperbacks (ISBN: 9780062094452), 2012 (Originally published in 1970).

Summary: Sir Stafford Nye helps a woman in the Frankfurt airport by giving her his cloak, passport, and boarding ticket to England and finds himself caught up in a global plot.

Sir Stafford Nye is a middle aged diplomat on his way home from Malaya when approached by a woman claiming that the re-routing of her flight jeopardizes her life, and asks that Nye help her by giving her his cloak, passport and boarding ticket. To make it all seem plausible, she says she will drug his beer while he leaves behind the cloak with passport and boarding ticket to step away for a moment. When he returns, they are gone, he drinks his beer and is eventually wakened, holding the stuffed Panda he had purchased for his niece, Sybil. Panda will return!

He treats it as a strange embarrassment until a colleague in security tells him he saved Mary Ann, an important agent who is variously known as Daphne Theodofanous and Countess Renata Zerkowski. When his passport is returned, he places a “personal” and ends up meeting her at the opera Siegfried, where she leaves a program with an important clue. Before he knows it, he is involved with her in an espionage plot designed to thwart the rise of a fascist organization sowing mayhem in the world led by a child purportedly sired by Hitler, but masterminded by an obese Bavarian countess.

Throughout, Nye tries to understand what is his part. He also learns rule number one in espionage–trust no one. Indeed, a traitor has infiltrated the intelligence organization directing “Mary Ann’s” efforts. At times, we wonder if Mary Ann is to be trusted.

Indeed, it was puzzling to me what role Nye plays beyond his initial unusual act of trust, other than his connection to his Aunt Mathilda who actually seems to have more to do with the denouement than Nye.

It’s an odd story, implausible at a number of points. The redeeming element is the mysterious Mary Ann. This was written when Christie had turned eighty and was the last of her spy stories. Perhaps the other element of the story is Christie’s prescient appreciation of the compelling attraction of fascism. Few would have credited this in 1970, when the horrors of fascism were still fresh. That aspect of this work is, sadly, far more plausible fifty years later.

Review: The Captain and the Enemy

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The Captain and the Enemy, Graham Greene. New York: Open Road Media, 2018 (orginally published in 1988).

Summary: A boarding school boy is taken to live with a poor woman in a London flat by a confidence man called “The Captain,” who sporadically visits, provides money and seems to care for the woman, Liza, who become’s “Jim’s” mother. Only years later does he understand more about this mysterious figure, and the various relations in his life.

There is much in the setup to this story that stretches plausibility. Victor Baxter, a boarding school student whose distant father is known as “The Devil” is taken out of school one day by a distinguished figure of military bearing, only known as the Captain. That things are not on the up and up becomes clear when, first The Captain asks the boy to lend him what little money he has, and then takes him for an extravagant meal at a hotel, charges it to his room, and then leaves without paying for anything. They are driven to a poorer part of London, to a basement flat, where a poor young woman, Liza lives. The Captain instructs Victor that he is to call her mother and that he will be Jim, and will not be going back to school. He tells Victor/Jim and Liza that he won the boy in a game of backgammon from his father.

The Captain shows up sporadically, always giving Liza assistance, though the source of the money is obscure. Newspaper reports of jewelry thefts mention a figure like The Captain in description, and there are times when he must make himself scarce and times they are not to answer the door to anything but his signal. When he is present, The Captain gives history and geography lessons that suggest wartime escapes and flights. It’s evident that he cares for Liza, that there is some deep bond. “Jim’s” role as he becomes older is to look out for Liza in The Captain’s absence–more prolonged now that he is in Panama. His letters promise wealth around the corner, but again, don’t mention where this will come from.

“The Devil” also shows up and doesn’t challenge the arrangement. It turns out that Liza had been a mistress of his, became pregnant, and a botched abortion resulted in her inability to have children. Through The Captain, one child of the Devil replaces another one lost. The Captain comes off as the noble trickster or confidence man, using deceit to accomplish his idea of the good.

As Jim grows up, he starts working for a newspaper, eventually moving out but staying in touch with Liza. The Captain, now going by Smith, sends money for them to come to Panama. Before she is able, Liza is struck by a car, on an errand Jim once ran. Jim decides to come to Panama, but conceals the truth of Liza’s death. He is met by Quigley, an acquaintance, but not a trusted friend of Smith, who seems very interested in knowing from Jim what the Captain is doing. Jim learns that it has to do with Smith’s plane, which he uses to haul “cargo” for various customers. Remember, this is in the late 1970’s. Jimmy Carter has signed a treaty to turn over the canal to Panama. There are various revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements. Arms are needed, drugs are sold to pay for them. The latter part of the book have to do with the Captain’s efforts, supported by the Panamania government who set a guard on his lodgings, and Mr. Quigley’s real work behind the mask of a financial journalist.

The culmination of the story reveals more of this shadowy figure’s true character, his love for Liza, and Jim’s own relationship with The Captain/Smith. Personally, while I wanted to see how the story would resolve, I felt Greene stretched plausibility and the story didn’t work for me. How schools, family, and social structures let this happen, even after an aunt found out what was going on stretched credulity. I felt this was not up to the level of his great novels of the 1940’s and 1950’s although having the whiff of espionage, of characters who live in the shadows, and yet who love and long for purposeful lives. This one, written toward the end of his life in 1988 (he died in 1991), is for fans who want to read all of his works. I would not base my opinion of Greene on this work but rather ones like Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American, and Our Man in Havana, all written before 1960.

Review: The Ministry of Fear

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The Ministry of Fear, Graham Greene. New York: Open Road Media, 2018 (first published in 1943).

Summary: Just released from a psychiatric hospital for the mercy killing of his wife, Arthur Rowe inadvertently gets caught up in a twisty espionage plot.

It is 1943, the middle of World War 2 in London, with nightly bombing raids and no one knowing if they will live to the next morning. Arthur Rowe lives quietly in a flat, reading and re-reading The Old Curiosity Shop. He’s been exempted from the war effort because he was recently released from a psychiatric facility where he had served a sentence of the mercy killing of his wife.

Inadvertently, he is caught up in an espionage affair, surviving poisoning, escaping another murder charge only to survive a bomb blast when a case, supposedly of books that he is carrying to a hotel rendezvous explodes. He loses his memory, narrowly escapes a sinister psychiatrist, and joins the effort to hunt down the espionage mastermind, the brother of a woman he has fallen in love with, Anna Hilfe. I’ve seen plenty of plot movement and narrow escapes in other Greene novels, but nothing like the madcap adventures of this novel, reminiscent more of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday than anything else I’ve read by Greene.

It begins at a charity fete where Rowe visits a fortune teller who mistakes him for one of the conspirators, that enables him to win a cake in which a role of microfilm has been hidden. He is poisoned, but survives, when he will not give up the cake. After working with a detective, he visits the fortune teller again, and when the lights go out, a man is murdered with a knife carried by Rowe. Knowing he could be charged with murder, he flees, ends up carrying a case of what he thinks are books to a hotel for a man he met at a book seller.

The case explodes, he survives but with the loss of his memory, recovering in a bucolic country psychiatric facility (again!) headed by a soothing but sinister doctor up to no good. He’s visited by Anna Hilfe, who works at the charity that ran the fete, who he’d met earlier and encountered just before the suitcase bomb exploded. He comes to love her, even though he does not remember the prior connection, nor the ways her brother Willi is involved in the espionage plot, ways that become clearer as memory returns and he joins the effort to uncover the ring and retrieve a crucial microfilm.

“The Ministry of Fear” formally is an espionage ring, but becomes more in Greene’s plot. It is the dull reality of the nightly existence of Londeners. For Rowe, it is the fear of being found guilty of a murder he didn’t commit while struggling to justify the one he did. Fear and distrust taints love as both Rowe and Anna know things of the other and of themselves that they dare not reveal. With the catastrophic losses of war and the gray world of espionage, one senses people anxiously clinging to illusions of normalcy in a world gone wrong, and living off balance as a result. It may well be Greene’s snapshot of his times–and a parable for our own.

Review: Dragon’s Teeth

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Dragon’s Teeth (The Lanny Budd Novels #3), Upton Sinclair. New York: Open Road Media, 2016 (originally published 1942).

Summary: As Irma’s fortune wanes, Lanny uses his art dealings both for income and to secure release of the Robins, who are swept up in the anti-Semitism of pre-war Nazi Germany.]

This is the third of eleven books Upton Sinclair wrote around young, well-connected Lanny Budd, set in the years between the two wars and World War 2. In my review of book #2, I noted a Matthew Arnold quote about “Wandering between two worlds, one dead,/The other powerless to be born.” and hoping the wandering would end with this book. If anything, Lanny and Irma’s wanderings around Europe seem more pronounced with yacht trips and migrations from Bienvenu on the Riviera to Paris, Berlin, and Munich.

If there is a plot line, it revolves around the Robin family, a Jewish financier and his sons, Hansi and Freddi and their spouses. Hansi and Freddi were swept up into Lanny’s “pink” socialism, while Johannes had cultivated a business relationship with Lanny’s father, a gun manufacturer. Johannes thinks his affluence protects him and his family. It turned out otherwise. Lanny negotiates the family’s freedom with Hermann Goring, at the cost of the Robin fortune. But Freddi is left behind, and eventually reported in Dachau. Much of the story revolves Lanny’s efforts to get him out of Germany.

Under his trade as an art dealer, he goes in and out of Germany, holding shows of his step father, Marcel Detaze’s paintings. He mutes his socialism and cultivates ties with Goebbels, Goring, and even Hitler, who he meets twice. Throughout, the question is really who is using who, but a significant part of the narrative is an expose’ of the growing persecution of the Jews, the “disappearings,” and the ambitions of the Fuhrer.

Lanny and Irma make a glamour couple with her fortune and his looks, though that fortune is “declining” due to the crash of the market. In this book, one senses increasing tension between the daughter of capitalists and the socialist Lanny. Each indulge to a point the wishes of others, but Lanny’s efforts to rescue his Jewish, socialist friends at the risk of his life clearly strains the relationship as Irma sees more clearly who she married, and Lanny wrestles with the circuits around Europe, seeing and being seen. Irma wants to host a salon. Lanny wants to find some greater purpose, preferably resisting the rising Nazi threat, whose measure he has accurately taken.

This book won a Pulitzer in 1943. I personally wonder what this says about other published works of that year. Most of the action and excitement happens in the last 100 pages of a 600 page book. The rest is hundreds of pages of wanderings around Europe whose main purpose is to show Western society’s last flurry’s as Nazism arose–the dissolution of the French government against the backdrop of a German society buying order and prosperity at the cost of the suppression of the Jews and the rise of tyranny. I do think Sinclair could have cut at least 200 pages out of this book without harm either to the plot or Sinclair’s polemic purposes.

Reviews of previous books in the series:

World’s End

Between Two Worlds

Review: Stained Glass

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Stained Glass (Blackford Oakes #2), William F. Buckley, Jr. New York: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Media, 2015 (first published in 1978).

Summary: When a charismatic German who fought against the Nazis in the resistance in Norway campaigns to become Chancellor on a platform to reunite Germany, Soviets and Americans come together to block this, with Blackford Oakes at the center, restoring a family chapel of the candidate.

Count Axel Wintergren participated in the Nazi invasion of Poland, disappearing and turning over Nazi invasion plans to the Poles. For the remainder of the war, he fought with the resistance in Norway, returning to his village and family enclosure after the war. Elections for the Chancellorship in West Germany are coming with Konrad Adenauer the leading candidate. That is until Wintergren. Over the months, he has slowly built a following throughout the country, then announced his candidacy. The country is electrified with this youthful face with a radical idea that captures their hearts: reunite Germany. Outside of Germany no one likes this idea. Not the Soviets whose sphere of influence includes East Germany. Not the Americans who recognize the possibility that World War III could break out with NATO dangerously unprepared and the only deterrent being America’s nuclear arsenal.

Enter Blackford Oakes, whose engineering skills qualify him to restore the St. Anselm chapel on Wintergren’s estate, allowing him to get close to Wintergren, to pass along intelligence, to dissuade…and more? There are two surprises for the Americans. One is that Oakes cover is blown. Chief KBG agent for Europe Boris Bolgin know who he’s working on. The other is that the Soviets have their own agent, Erika Chadinoff, working as Wintergren’s translator. The bug in Oakes’ room at the chateau traces back to her room.

All of this brings the Americans and Soviets into a most unlikely alliance. Wintergren must be stopped. When attempts to torpedo his standings in the polls through apparently compromising personal information fail and backfire, they conclude there is only one option left, to eliminate Wintergren. Both Bolgin and his CIA counterpart look to Oakes to do the deed.

There is just one problem. Oakes has come to respect and admire Wintergren as one of a kind in his generation. Meanwhile, Wintergren’s security man has growing suspicions of Oakes, as does Wintergren’s mother. All this with global thermonuclear conflict hanging in the balance.

Actually, it doesn’t fall to Oakes alone. Erika Chadinoff is in on the alliance. Actually, they had already formed an intimate alliance of sorts, the typical spies in bed trope, despite Blackford’s relationship with Sally back home. It almost felt to me a bit obligatory and predictable. Far better, and more consonant with Buckley’s values would have been an unconsummated relationship, albeit with some sexual tension thrown in. That would have been more interesting.

The shame of this is that it wasn’t needed. The build up to the election, the moral dilemma and the international ramifications are plenty to make this an interesting story. The bromance between Wintergren and Oakes is far more riveting than the romance.

Review: Our Man in Havana

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our man in havana

Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene. New York: Open Road Media, 2018 (originally published in 1958).

Summary: A struggling Englishman in 1950’s Cuba is recruited to be a secret agent for MI6 and ends up deceiving the service only to find his fabrications becoming all too real.

James Wormold is a struggling proprietor of a vacuum cleaner business in 1950’s Cuba. His wife has left him and their teenage daughter Milly. He struggles to sell vacuum cleaners named “the Atomic Pile,” a real loser, and come up with enough money to support his daughter’s expensive interests while guarding her against the romantic interests of police Captain Segura, known for his ruthless investigative techniques. At first, this appears to be another one of Graham Greene’s middle-aged men struggling to make some sense of their existence in a far-off foreign land. And it is, with a difference. Comedy. Dark comedy.

Then Hawthorne, an MI6 agent walks into his life and tries to recruit him as an agent. Cuba is a hotbed of competing interests under the Batista regime of the mid-1950’s. Wormold finally realizes that the money he will be paid is the answer to his financial woes. Except he has to become an agent, recruit sub-agents, and send “reports” via code. He confides in his one friend, Dr Hasselbacher, his dilemma and Hasselbacher suggest that he could invent them. He does, a mix of fictional and actual figures who don’t really work for him. He creates reports from newspapers, and sends drawings of an “installation” based on blown up drawings of vacuum parts.

Everyone back at MI6 believes they’ve found a “natural” and his reports create quite a stir. Hawthorne has his doubts, but as the lone doubter in a company of believers, he keeps silent. The do arrange a secretary, Beatrice, to keep an eye on him and his agents. The game appears to be up when a man who has the name of one of his fictional agents turns up dead, and another is shot at. It appears that someone close to him has discovered his “reports” and that the English aren’t the only ones who believe Wormold’s reports. He faces an assassination threat of his own, and has to figure out how to extract himself from Cuba. But first he wants to get a list of agents Segura has, and avenge a murder, leading to a most unusual game of checkers.

Even if he can escape danger from Segura and foreign operatives he (and Beatrice) have to face the music with MI6. All I will say is that the ending is Greene’s “last laugh” at MI6, and all the government experts who are too clever for their own good.

Review: Who’s On First

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Who's on First

Who’s On First (A Blackford Oakes Mystery), William F. Buckley, Jr. New York: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Media, 2015 (originally published 1980).

Summary: Oakes becomes involved in a plot to abduct a Soviet scientist couple involved in the research to launch Sputnik.

CIA agent Blackford Oakes leaves Hungary with the memory of the execution of Theophilus Molnar during the quenched Hungarian uprising of 1956. Having provided access to a “safe” house, somehow his safety is betrayed, Molnar is arrested, and executed on the spot.

Vadim and Viktor sustained each other through eight years in the Gulag. Both were scientist arrested for “anti-Soviet” agitation. Viktor believes Vadim saved his life by giving him hope. Later Vadim defects, and becomes involved with the CIA as “Serge.”

The Soviet Union and the United States are in a mad race for space, to put the first satellite in orbit. Each has technical problems, which if solved would clear the way to launch. Each has the answers the other needs.

All these factors come together in Paris when Viktor and his wife Tamara are in Paris for a scientific conference. It is decided to abduct the couple, who are working on the critical research, using the friendship with Vadim to elicit their co-operation. Oakes is enlisted as a taxi driver to abduct them during a staged bus breakdown, with a cover plot of an Algerian radical group seeking an exchange of weapons for hostages.

Unbeknownst to Oakes, KGB agent Bolgin knows Oakes is in Paris. A mole in the French resistance develops a plot to seize and execute Oakes. Oakes, recognized in photos at the abduction scene, unknowingly betrays the kidnapping as a CIA operation. The attempt to obtain Russian secrets jeopardizes the lives of Oakes, and Viktor and Tamara. Along with the death of Theo, all of this raises questions for Oakes, questions that if he survives could end his career. Meanwhile, questions of a different sort at a higher level raise the question of whether winning the space race is worth it, even as a critical operation to sink a Russian freighter carrying a critical piece of technology is counting down to zero hour.

Buckley weaves a compact, fast paced espionage novel around these elements. He recalls the mood that existed in the Cold War era leading up to the launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957, an event that actuated a military and scientific effort in the United States anticipated in this novel. He exposes the moral dilemmas of what Cold War maneuvering meant for the individuals whose futures and even lives might be sacrificed in covert efforts to attain a benchmark of supremacy. Having missed this series when it first came out, I’m glad for the second chance afforded by the folks at Open Road Media.

 

Review: The Story of Henri Tod

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The Story of Henri Tod

The Story of Henri Tod (Blackford Oakes #5), William F. Buckley, Jr. New York: Mysterious Press/Open Road Media, 2015 (originally published 1983).

Summary: As East Germany takes steps to stem the emigration of its people to the west through East Berlin in 1961, Blackford Oakes is tasked to find out what their intentions are and how they and Moscow will respond if NATO and the US intervenes.

After appearing weak and inexperienced in an initial meeting with Nikita Khrushchev President Kennedy learns that East Germany is taking steps to partition East and West Berlin to stem the tide of people emigrating from East to West Berlin and West Germany. This would violate agreements made at the end of World War II, and could trigger a new war, perhaps even a nuclear conflict between the US and the Soviet Union. CIA agent Blackford Oakes is tasked with getting critical intelligence to determine whether Berlin will be completely isolated from the West, and what the East will do if NATO responds.

Oakes key contact with East Berlin and the East Germans is Henri Tod. Tod leads a resistance organization from West Berlin against the Communists. They call themselves The Bruderschaft and are not above violent efforts to subvert the Communists. He has become enemy Number One but has eluded capture. But the Communists have discovered an Achilles heel. Tod, whose real name was Toddweiss, was a German Jew, who along with his beloved sister Clementa, was shielded by the Wurmbrand family, when Jews were being sent to the death camps. They spirit him out of the country when he becomes draft-eligible. They pay with their lives and Clementa is sent to a camp to die. But she is liberated by Soviet troops, only to become their captive. Thought dead, she lives, and becomes the means to lure Tod and capture him, with Oakes being involved as an intermediary.

Meanwhile, East German leader Walter Ulbricht also has his own Achilles, a nephew Caspar, who he has taken under his wing as a personal assistant, perhaps to atone for killing his father. Caspar has discovered the rail car used by Hitler, abandoned in a rail yard, and turns it into a love nest for him and his girlfriend Claudia. Their paths cross with Tod when Tod is wounded after an assassination of an East German official and the rescue him from his pursuers, nursing him back to health in the rail car, and becoming converts to his cause and a source of critical information.

Blackford Oakes has all this to deal with, as he tries to get the needed intelligence to the President. How will he respond to the likely trap using Tod’s sister? How will he work with the independent Tod and his rogue organization? How will they react to the intelligence they are passing along to Oakes? And what will the U.S. government do?

The book is a page turner, moving quickly between Kennedy, Khruschev and Ulbricht, Oakes and Tod, Caspar and Claudia. Perhaps the most fascinating element is the challenge of divining an enemy’s intent and character, what action one should take, and how one’s adversary will respond. Anyone who has studied this era realizes how easily things could have turned out otherwise than they did, a salutary lesson for our own day.