Book review by John Stanchak in the October 2014 issue of “America in WWII” magazine of Hoover’s Secret War against Axis Spies: FBI Counterespionage During World War II: ALL THE COMBATANTS in World War II feared there were foreign agents within their ranks, so they sponsored and supported special intelligence organizations that rooted out enemy […]
Book Review by Tim Weiner in the November/December 2014 issue of “World War II” magazine: HOOVER’S SECRET WAR AGAINST AXIS SPIES: FBI Counterespionage during World War II By Raymond J. Batvinis. 312 pp. Kansas, 2014. $34.95. DOUBLE AGENT: The First Hero of World War II and How the FBI Outwitted and Destroyed a Nazi Spy […]
(Politico) . . . .The authors also revealed that Stalin had a spy in Congress, an exasperating character who once “blazed up very much, claiming that if we didn’t give him money he would break with us,” according to his Soviet contact. To this day, Sam Dickstein is the only known U.S. representative to have […]
Yesterday I had the great pleasure of attending a talk at the International Spy Museum where my dear friend Peter Duffy spoke about his new book, Double Agent. Duffy, a talented writer who lives in New York City, recounts the story of an American citizen named William Gottlieb Sebold, a German who came to America […]
Last week I read with great interest two articles in The Washington Post. The first one appearing on Friday covering FBI director James Comey’s press conference was captioned “FBI Chief Slams Apple, Google over Encryption”. The second was Cyrus Vance’s September 28 Op-Ed piece entitled “Can you catch me now? Good.” Both officials voiced outrage […]
I would recommend Double Agent: The First Hero of World War II and How the FBI Outwitted and Destroyed a Nazi Spy Ring by Peter Duffy. He will be giving a book talk at the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC on October 7, 2014 at noon: Double Agent: The First Hero of World War […]
(The Week Magazine) Chief Warrant Officer John A. Walker, who died in federal prison late last month at the age of 77, was the most consequential spy in American history. Over the course of seven years, from 1967 to 1975, he turned over some of the country’s most significant military secrets to the Soviet Union. […]
I will be part of a panel at the International Spy Museum on October 27, 2014 about the 1971 break-in of the FBI’s office in Media, Pennsylvania. Here’s all the details from the museum and how you can attend: – – – More than four decades ago, under the cover of night, a group of […]
On September 11, 2014, I had the honoring of speaking about my book, “Hoover’s Secret Wars Against Axis Spies: FBI Counterintelligence During World War II,”at the Ralph J. Bunch Library at the US State Department in Washington, DC. I talk about why I wrote the book, what is in it, the unique sources I tapped into and, because of […]
A first-person account of Watergate by Angelo Lano (FBI: 1960-1989) in The Grapevine, published by The Society of Former Agents of the FBI. Watergate: Forty Years Later (.pdf) The nature of an FBI agent’s work is anonymous. Usually it involves collecting facts, often with a team of agents whose names will disappear in a myriad of files over the […]
This is the article I wrote for The Grapevine (Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI publication) about the Benson House on Long Island and its FBI connection. Benson House: A Secret Revealed (.pdf) It is nothing more than a dirty block of concrete stuck in the dark and dank basement floor of a hundred-year-old house. […]
(New York Post) Feisty and probably still with a warm spot in her heart for the Soviet cause, Miriam Moskowitz, 98, is trying to clear her name of a six-decade-old conviction. Too bad she was guilty. She was only a bit player on the fringes of the “atom spies” scandals that gripped the nation in […]
(AP) Fearing a Russian invasion and occupation of Alaska, the U.S. government in the early Cold War years recruited and trained fishermen, bush pilots, trappers and other private citizens across Alaska for a covert network to feed wartime intelligence to the military, newly declassified Air Force and FBI documents show. Invasion of Alaska? Yes. It […]
My review of A Very Principled Boy: The Life of Duncan Lee, Red Spy and Cold Warrior by Mark A. Bradley. “I want to say categorically that I am not and have never been a Communist and that I have never divulged classified information to any unauthorized person.”—Duncan Lee Duncan Chaplin Lee offered this statement […]
I will be part of a panel examining the Richard Hollis case: British Patriot or Soviet Spy? Clarifying a Cold War Mystery A demonstration of new analytic techniques to examine the controversial case of whether Britain’s former MI5 Director General, Roger Hollis, was or was not a Soviet agent. Friday, October 17, 2014 4:00-6:30 PM The […]
My review of “A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal” by Ben Macintyre British author and columnist Ben Macintyre first burst on to the American scene in 2007 with “Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal,” the story of British crook and con-man Eddie Chapman who became one of MI5’s […]
Ed Appel Sr, retired senior FBI Supervisory Special Agent and Director of Counterintelligence and Security Programs at the National Security Council, recently wrote a review of “Hoover’s Secret War Against Axis Spies” on Amazon and graciously gave the book five stars: As a retired member of the US Intelligence Community, I found Ray Batvinis’ Hoover’s Secret […]
My new book, “Hoover’s Secret War Against Axis Spies,” has just been reviewed in The Weekly Standard: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/hoover-war_797355.html Hoover at War How the G-man beat the Germans at their own game THE WEEKLY STANDARD, AUG 4, 2014, VOL. 19, NO. 44 BY DAVID AIKMAN Ever since the death of J. Edgar Hoover in 1972, journalists and disparate authors […]
The Institute of World Politics videotaped the lecture I recently gave about my new book, Hoover’s Secret War against Axis Spies: FBI Counterespionage During World War II.
During World War II, FBI agents and radio technicians lived and worked undercover at Benson House, secretly transmitting coded messages that the Nazis believed came from their own spies. A plaque placed at Benson House in honor of the 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion recognizes the counterintelligence efforts of FBI employees during WWII. (FBI) In […]
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