Welcome to Episode 176 of the Spybrary Spy Book podcast. Spywrite's Jeff Quest speaks to author Alma Katsu, formerly with the NSA and CIA. Katsu’s latest book, Red Widow, follows a CIA mole hunt. It’s been optioned for television and is out in paperback on March 1st. They discuss switching from NSA to CIA and...
A review of The Company written by Robert Littell and reviewed by John Koenig for the Koenig Memorandum. Spy Book review – The Company by Robert Littell. The Company is pleasantly paced, detailed to an extreme, bringing places and people alive on the page in memorable fashion, yet never bogging down. Somehow Littell maintains a...
Having read and very much enjoyed The Fever, the opening salvo from Michael Brady's Into The Shadows range, I was eager to dig into the second volume. This one would take the firmly established CIA non-official cover (NOC) officer Michael Brennan to Asia in what seemed to be another tale potentially ripped from the headlines....
First appearing nearly thirty-five years ago in the pages of The Hunt For Red October, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan is arguably the closest thing to an American James Bond. Not only with a highly successful series of novels but also a trilogy of successful films in the early 1990s. Recently, however, the CIA analyst has...
My recent viewing of the film The Good Shepherd and my reading of the CIA History Staff's 2007 critique of the film left me curious about the fact behind the Hollywood fiction. Hitting upon a recommendation from that analysis and the film's archived website, I bought a book that had been sitting for months already...
I am quite fond of the saying that “truth is stranger than fiction.” As those of us who read spy fact (and those fiction works which blur the boundaries between the two) know, it is often the case. The film The Good Shepherd, directed by Robert De Niro and released by Universal Pictures in...
The True Story of Oleg Penkovsky with Author Jeremy Duns Thrilling, evocative and hugely controversial, Codename: Hero blows apart the myths surrounding one of the Cold War's greatest spy operations and potentially it's greatest spy Oleg Penkovsky In the late 1950s the USSR appeared to be winning the arms race: their 1949 nuclear...
Today is Memorial Day in America. Most of us will take a moment to think about those who lost their lives fighting for our freedom. Memorial Day got me thinking though, what about our brave men and women in the clandestine services? Shouldn't we spare a moment to think about them as well? So this...
Spybrary Brush Pass: The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton Spybrarian Matthew Kresal shares his brush pass review on The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton by Jefferson Morley which has recently been published. According to Tim Weiner, author of Legacy of Ashes -The History of the...
