The blogger at GreatCharlie.com has posted a comprehensive review of my new book:
Outstanding spy novels tell exciting tales of spy rings, secret and double agents, surveillance, codes and ciphers, wiretaps, microdots, deception, disinformation, and even use of invisible ink!
That is what a reader would expect from the works of John le Carré, Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludlum, or Tom Clancy.
In Hoover’s Secret War Against the Axis: FBI Counterespionage During World War II (University Press of Kansas, 2014), Raymond Batvinis recounts equally thrilling stories of international intrigue as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), working alongside other US government elements and allies, sought to overcome Germany’s efforts to disrupt and defeat its war effort in the US before and during the war.
They will transfix the reader to the book’s pages much as the writings of the great spy novelists.
However, unlike the novelists’ works, Batvinis’ accounts are not amusements, but discussions of real cases of a struggle between adversaries filled with lessons on counter-intelligence (spycatching) as well as counterespionage (turning enemy agents against their spymasters).
The stories present the thought provoking, sometimes absurd, and often horrifying realities of spycatching and turning spies into double-agents.
The history is not presented as nostalgia, but as a text on a unique aspect of the intelligence war against Germany, and to a lesser extent, Japan, from which valuable lessons can be drawn.
It is not by chance Batvinis’ book would be presented in this fashion. The work is a product of painstaking, detail oriented research, and the benefit of his experience as a former FBI special agent. . . . . (read the rest)