Customer Rating:  
Summary: save the planet, recycle it!
Comment: I'll just give you one example of Volkman's "creativity." Read this quote from his book: "On December day, a thin balding Swedish diplomat stormed into the headquarters building, barged his way into the office of General August Schmidhuber, and proceeded to threaten him..." etc, so supposedly Schmidhuber called off the plan to destroy Jewish ghetto.
1st, the name of the general in Budapest was Gerhard, not August. August Schmidhuber was another German general, who was in the SS, not in the Wehrmacht, and he commanded the 7th and 21st Waffen SS divisions in the Balkans. Gerhard Schmidhuber commanded the 13th Panzer division in Budapest pocket and was in charge of the Pest defense. 2nd, the only source of this story was in the post-was testimony of Pal Szalai, who claimed that it was him, not Wallenberg, who met with Schmidhuber. 3d, the plan to destroy the ghettos was supposedly taking place around January 15-16th, not in December. 4th, it has been already pointed out that there is not enough evidence to be sure that such plan even existed.
With "espionage expert" like E. Volkman one does not need brothers Grimm.
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Summary: Stories About Intelligence Operations
Comment: Ernest Volkman is a former prize-winning investigative reporter for 'Newsday' who is an authority on espionage and intelligence. He has written other books. These 22 chapters are called "The Greatest Spy Operations of the 20th Century", and are classified as "Grand Deceptions", "Spies in the Ether", "The Enemy Within", "A Wilderness of Mirrors", "Disasters", and "Spectaculars". This is an entertaining and very readable book, but it is not the definitive history of any of the operations described here. Most occurred since WW I. There is an 'Index' but no Bibliography for additional information. Some of the operations are well-known, others will be news.
Chapter 1 does not mention that none of the Great Powers were prepared to extend WW I and attack Soviet Russia. Elsewhere Volkman tells of the difficulties of operating in a "police state". Chapter 2 tells of another deception operation in Cuba. An operation that aided the Normandy invasion is in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 tells about the Double Cross operation, another "Trust Operation". Dusko Popov's book provides another view (p.45). (Volkman doesn't tell how MI5 rounded up all German spies in 1914.) [Does this chapter echo the difficulties of operating in a "police state"?] Chapter 5 tells about the operation that inspired the movie "The House on 92nd Street". Chapter 6, 7, and 8 tell about codes and ciphers that were broken to provide intelligence about enemy activities. Anwar Sadat aided a German spy (p.85).
Chapter 9, 10, 11, and 12 tell about espionage in a country that revealed technical secrets of Nazi Germany, the American atomic bomb, German sabotage during WW I, and Soviet military intelligence. Chapter 13, 14, 15, and 16 tell about "moles", double agents who work for the other side. "The Lady at the Kiosk" has to be the funniest chapter in this book. Chapters 17, 18, and 19 are about "flaps" or disastrous operations. The chapter on Pearl Harbor is incomplete. It does not reference Robert Stinnett's book, Volkman claims there were "no sources in Japan" (p.187), as if there were no US diplomats, military attachés, or tourists there. The US Navy was aware in 1932 of the problem at Pearl Harbor (pp.181-182). E. Phillips Oppenheim told of such an attack in his 1926 novel "The Wrath to Come". The newspapers in 1941 told of heightened tension. Ian Fleming escorted Dusko Popov to tell J. Edgar Hoover of planned espionage there in July 1941! The failure in chapter 18 came from an alliance with the rejected aristocracy (p.198). Volkman misunderstands the law (p.211); divulging intercepts is legal when given to authorized agencies.
Chapter 20 and 21 tell about spectacular successes in intelligence gathering that lasted nearly two decades. Chapter 22 tells how a country acquired supplies of uranium oxide despite a ban on its trade. The 'Epilogue' tells of an inherently flawed operation. Was this a make-work operation used for empire building? Volkman doesn't list Truman's other reasons for shutting down the OSS: it was staffed with his political enemies, and did redundant work. The agencies of State, Army, and Navy did not want a competitor.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Entertaining and informative
Comment: At last I was able to find a book about espionage that could keep me awake after 30 minutes of reading late in the night. The topics include a wide range of operations, some well known and some others not (like the Israelis' succesful attempt to purchase 200 tons of uranium from Belgium through a German firm in 1968 in order to build their nuclear arsenal), the writing style is simple but excellent and Volkman knows well how to keep the reader fixed. Surely, some subjects deserved to be better analyzed in greater details, but the book is only an introduction to the espionage operations and it must be considered as such. It certainly fired my interest!
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Summary: I Spy
Comment: This book is basically a series of short stories dealing with major spy operations, mostly involving World War II. The stories are interesting and well written but there is a certain similarity and synergism to the stories that does not come out well in this format. Also, the author gives compelling evidence that Amelia Earhart was on an espionage mission when she disappeared but the story leaves you wanting more.
I would use this book as an introduction to this genre and if you are interested there are a number of novels dealing with the individual stories. A number of books have been written about the Walker spy ring as well as other spy operations.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Good Book But
Comment: While I thought this was a good book and covered some very interesting topics I found myself a bit disappointed that the stories did not delve deeper into what they initially touched on. I would have enjoyed this more had the book been, say, three times as long and the stories gone deeper. I finished each chapter, or case, realizing that this was quite interesting and insightful to what had happened, many times in a historical concept. But found myself wondering about the little intricacies that would have been necessary to pull these capers off. This book is would be a good start to preview some espionage cases and pick the ones you like to research further.
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