The Spy’s Bookshelf

October 30, 2016

A couple new books have come to my attention which deserve note:

* Nate Jones (ed.), Able Archer 83 (NY: The New Press, 2016). Nate Jones, the director of the FOIA Project at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., has put together a compendium of 13 declassified U.S. government documents he has obtained in recent years concerning the 1983 ABLE ARCHER U.S. nuclear weapons release exercise held in Germany. As the text of this book explains in considerable detail, the Soviet intelligence community badly misread the nature and extent of the exercise, and the Kremlin placed its nuclear forces on heightened alert, thinking that the U.S. military was preparing to attack the USSR. If you want to see how bad intelligence can help start wars, read this book. Further details about this book can be found here.

* Dick van der Aart, The Secret MiGs of Bornholm (Air-Intel Research, 2016). I will bet that few, if any, of you remember that during the Cold War three Soviet-made MiG-15 fighters belonging to the Polish Air Force were flown to the Danish island of Bornholm in the middle of the Baltic Sea, A fourth Polish pilot flew his MiG-15 fighter to Sweden, perhaps wary of the fact that Denmark is by reputation “the happiest country in the world.” This book describes each of these defections, and the resulting furor as the Danish government tried desperately to prevent these defections from becoming a diplomatic crisis while at the same time allowing American and British intelligence specialists to examine the planes. A journalist by trade and aviation enthusiast by habit, Dick van der Aart has written a very readable and important book on a forgotten part of Cold War intelligence history. Well worth reading. Further details can be found here.

* Bob de Graaff and James M. Nyce (eds.), The Handbook of European Intelligence Cultures (NY: Rowan & Littlefield, 2016). This 430-page book consists of 32 chapters covering the activities and political cultures of the intelligence and security services of all European countries, from Albania to the United Kingdom. The editors have chosen academic or journalistic experts from each of the countries to write the chapters, so you really get an excellent and well-sourced reference book on who is doing what to whom in the European intelligence world, foibles and all. This book is not cheap, but it is worth it if you are serious about knowing the details of the European intelligence scene. Further details can be found here.