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justabean_reads's review against another edition
dark
informative
slow-paced
3.5
In 1998, the US government declassified a whole tonne of WWII and post-WWII intelligence records, and I sort of picture these four authors diving in like Scourge McDuck into his swimming pool full of gold. They're essentially subject matter experts who are contextualising this new information into their areas of study. The book is made up of essays by one or two of them, expanding on what we've learned on a given topic, such as "When did the OSS know about the holocaust?" or "How much did Army Intelligence know about the backgrounds of the Nazis they hired post war?" or "Was hiring Nazis to spy on the Reds actually in any way useful?"
It's fairly easy to see why John le Carré turned out to be such a cynic, as he came up in that era. Almost all of the choices seem to have been bad ideas in retrospect (and indeed bad ideas at the time), and the left hand was perpetually incapable of even vaguely checking in with the right hand. For example, the OSS/CIA had recovered a tonne of German intelligence records, which included personnel jackets for a bunch of Gestapo and Abwehr agents, so they could, if they'd bothered to check, have known the exact history of people they were hiring, and that they'd been buddies with, say, Eichmann. They just didn't look. The authors seem rather grumpy about this.
The book was a little dry in places, but over all if you're interested in academics dickering over details, it was worth a read.
It's fairly easy to see why John le Carré turned out to be such a cynic, as he came up in that era. Almost all of the choices seem to have been bad ideas in retrospect (and indeed bad ideas at the time), and the left hand was perpetually incapable of even vaguely checking in with the right hand. For example, the OSS/CIA had recovered a tonne of German intelligence records, which included personnel jackets for a bunch of Gestapo and Abwehr agents, so they could, if they'd bothered to check, have known the exact history of people they were hiring, and that they'd been buddies with, say, Eichmann. They just didn't look. The authors seem rather grumpy about this.
The book was a little dry in places, but over all if you're interested in academics dickering over details, it was worth a read.
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