CANR
WORK TITLE: When the Night Comes Falling
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WEBSITE: https://www.howardblum.com/
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NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: LRC 2014
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1948, in NY; son of Harold K. (an executive at the Kane Miller Corporation) and Gertrude (a schoolteacher) Blum; married Jenny Cox, January 26, 1991 (divorced); children: Tony, Anna, Dani.
EDUCATION:Stanford University, bachelor’s degree, M.A., 1970.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist, writer, and editor. New York Times, New York, NY, reporter, beginning 1986; former journalist for the Village Voice; Vanity Fair, New York, NY, contributing editor, 1994—.
AWARDS:Mike Berger Award, Columbia School of Journalism, 1976, for reporting at the Village Voice; two Pulitzer Prize nominations; Edgar Award for best fact crime, Mystery Writers of America, 2009, for American Lightning.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including New York Times Magazine, Esquire, New York, and Life.
Wanted! The Search for Nazis in America, was adapted for television by the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), 2001; I Pledge Allegiance—the True Story of the Walkers: An American Spy Family was adapted as a miniseries by the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). The Gold of Exodus: The Discovery of the True Mount Sinai was optioned for a feature film; The Brigade: An Epic Story of Vengeance, Salvation, and World War II is being adapted as a feature film by Miramax Films.
SIDELIGHTS
Howard Blum is a best-selling author of both fiction and nonfiction works and a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist whose subjects have ranged from spies to extraterrestrials.
In his first publication, Wanted! The Search for Nazis in America, Blum describes how a group of former Nazis immigrated to the United States after World War II and were protected from extradition by various government agencies. Of the fifty-nine such people the author found, four form the focus of his exposé.
Blum’s book was widely reviewed, and some reviewers noted that despite flaws as an author, Blum had chosen a subject of intrinsic interest. In a comment that echoed the reviews of others, C. Michael Curtis wrote for the Atlantic: “The plot sounds tailor-made for a thriller, and the book is written with precisely that sense of structure and characterization.” New York Times contributor Richard F. Shepard wrote: “Even an uninformed reader might raise an eyebrow at some of the dramatic narration, were it not that this is such a fascinating story that one is glued to it, sharing its emotions.” Robert Jay Lifton, a New York Times Book Review contributor, observed: “Blum has written a very important book, to which he brings a compelling blend of investigative skill and moral passion.”
With Wishful Thinking Blum turned to fiction with a roman a clef based on his experiences as a journalist for the Village Voice. In the novel, Russ Lewis, a young college professor, submits a piece to a new magazine called City. He becomes friends with the owner, Max Fox, and is soon a regular contributor. Then Fox sells the magazine, and Lewis finds himself seduced into working for the paper’s new management.
Some reviewers faulted Blum’s lack of technical skills as a novelist; others, such as Daniel Stern, writing for the New York Times Book Review, observed that “it is the broad strokes that sketch men of ambition against a backdrop of ‘real’ events—a characteristic of journalists when they turn to fiction—that lends this romantic first novel its energy.”
With I Pledge Allegiance—the True Story of the Walkers: An American Spy Family, “Blum has made an almost novelistic drama of John A. Walker Jr.’s decision to betray his country and sell military secrets to the Soviet Union,” according to New York Times contributor Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. The author traces his subject’s career in the navy, including the start of his life as a spy, how he convinced his family to become active accomplices, and his capture by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In Blum’s next investigative effort, Out There: The Government’s Secret Quest for Extraterrestrials, the author examines the U.S. government’s attempts to conceal its interest in unidentified flying objects (UFOs), again using techniques reviewers identified as novelistic. Richard Severo, writing in the New York Times, observed that the book “contains excellent science reporting and lucid explanations of the nature of research.” Blum reconstructs aspects of his story in the first person, as though he had himself witnessed the events he relates. While acknowledging the technique as a questionable journalistic liberty, Severo praised Blum’s storytelling ability. New York Times Book Review contributor John A. Adam noted Blum’s inclusion of facts on cosmology and the history of the government’s investigations into the existence of UFOs.
Continuing his investigative reporting and disclosure, Blum’s next work, Gangland: How the FBI Broke the Mob, details the case that the U.S. government built over the course of five years against mafia boss John Gotti, who was eventually sent to prison. A Publishers Weekly contributor hailed the work as a “suspenseful and superbly written exposé.”
Blum opted to cover what interviewer Brian Bruya, writing for the India World Short Stories Web site, called “the religion beat” in The Gold of Exodus: The Discovery of the True Mount Sinai. This investigative work focuses on the question of whether the biblical exodus actually took place. Blum follows two explorers, Colorado millionaire Larry Williams and California SWAT officer Bob Cornuke, as they embark on a quest to locate Mount Sinai, which they identified as Jabal al Lawz in Saudi Arabia. Speaking to Bruya in an online interview, Blum mentioned that the discoverers proved as interesting as their mission; Williams and Cornuke share “the ability to take large risks, the courage to go out and pursue one of the great discoveries of history.” Sinai-seeking archaeologists of the past had attempted to gain entry to Saudi Arabia but were always denied, noted Blum, adding that such restrictions did not stop his subjects.
Researching the story led to a transformation in the author, Blum told Bruya, convincing him that “the Bible is a true story and that Mount Sinai existed. What do I mean by a true story? I don’t mean necessarily that thunderbolts were thrown down. What I mean is that something happened at Mount Sinai that transformed this slave nation into the Jewish people, a people who would be ruled by laws and a moral code, both of which would have a profound effect on the world.”
With The Brigade: An Epic Story of Vengeance, Salvation, and World War II, Blum turns his attention to a chapter of military history that had not been widely investigated before—the formation the Jewish Brigade, which fought alongside the British army in Palestine during the waning years of World War II. These secretive soldiers often occupied the underground, stealing Allied weapons and sending them to Jews in Palestine to fight Arab armies. At the same time, the brigade was instrumental in providing aid to thousands of refugees and concentration camp survivors.
Blum assembled the book through first-person interviews with brigade veterans. Among them is Sergeant Israel Carmi, “who believed that in order to prove Jewish worthiness, he had to show he was ‘braver than the allies’ in battle,” as Houston Chronicle contributor Chris Patsilelis described it. “Outraged by the Holocaust, he joined the brigade’s intelligence unit after the war and became an expert at extracting information from reluctant Nazi ‘interviewees.’” Patsilelis deemed The Brigade “gripping, suspenseful and assiduously documented.” A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that Blum “presents the material masterfully, building suspense and carefully documenting all the action.”
The Eve of Destruction: The Untold Story of the Yom Kippur War was published in 2004 and details how Israel nearly lost the Yom Kippur War due to numerous factors, including failed intelligence, unprepared forces, and lack of military supplies. The author explains that Israel ignored a spy’s warning that Egypt, in collaboration with Syria, was going to launch an attack on Israel. He then explains how Israel came from the brink of defeat to fight off its attackers in a battle against such overwhelming odds that Israel had even decided that it might use nuclear weapons. He goes on to describe how, four years later, the Yom Kippur War led to a historic agreement between Israel and Egypt at Camp David, the presidential retreat in the United States.
Calling The Eve of Destruction “a fine exercise in popular history,” a Kirkus Reviews contributor noted: “The surprises that Blum turns up in this swift-moving history of the lightning-quick Yom Kippur War are many.” David C. Unger, writing for the New York Times Book Review, commented that “additional documents and added historical perspective permit a fuller, more satisfactory account” and noted that the book “shed[s] light on a conflict that altered the psychology and diplomacy of the Middle East down to the present day.”
In his 2008 book of narrative nonfiction, American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, Movie-Making, and the Crime of the Century, Blum tell the story of the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building on October 1, 1910. Considered the “crime of the century” at the time, the bombing consisted of a series of explosions that killed twenty-one people and completely destroyed the building. “His dedication to digging for facts and adhering to journalistic principles in reporting this entangled and multifaceted tale one hundred years after the fact raises comparisons to Truman Capote’s diligence in writing In Cold Blood,” wrote Don Oldenburg in a review for USA Today.
Integral to the story are three legendary figures in American history: William J. Burns, a former Secret Service agent turned detective; Clarence Darrow, an attorney who would later become famous as the defense attorney at the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial concerning the right to teach evolution; and the famous Hollywood director D.W. Griffith. Blum follows Burns’s quest to find the bombers, who turn out to be leaders of the Iron Workers Union. The author then depicts Darrow’s role as the bombers’ defense lawyer. Griffith is part of the story because of a short film he made called A Corner in Wheat, which was based on a novel and clearly came down on the side of labor in the management-labor battle. He was subsequently investigated by Burns as part of his effort to track down the bombers.
Discussing his writing process, Blum told Ryan Vaillancourt in an interview on the Los Angeles Downtown News Web site: “As a reporter your training is to go out with your notebook and interview politicians, so this was like going out as a reporter but going into archives, libraries, sifting through records, sorting through the facts and trying to put the story together. And that was the exciting part, to make Burns a person, to make Darrow an individual person, warts and all. The great thing was that everyone involved in the book wrote memoirs.” The author pointed out that direct quotes from the primary protagonists in the stories came from either their memoirs or trial testimony.
The events of the bombing and its aftermath also pertain to modern-day issues as they reflect on the first known act of domestic terrorism in the United States. In addition, the bombing led to illegal efforts to capture the culprits, including wiretapping without a warrant, suspension of habeas corpus, and confessions that had been coerced.
Noting that “ American Lightning has tremendous verve,” Los Angeles Times contributor Richard Rayner added: “It flies along, with Blum’s fair-minded analysis of motive and a wide variety of memorable character snapshots.” A Publishers Weekly contributor commented that the author’s “tight” prose, “unfailingly sound” speculations, and “extensive” research create “an absorbing and masterful true crime narrative.”
Blum once again spins a narrative from historical events in The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier and the Yukon Gold Rush, a book that San Francisco Chronicle reviewer Jonah Raskin called “True Grit meets The Call of the Wild.” As with American Lightning, Blum bases his characters on actual people, including detective and former cowboy Charles Siringo, prospector George Carmack, and con artist Soapy Smith. Drawn from primary documents and historical accounts, The Floor of Heaven explores relationships, crimes, the promise of riches, and what men would do to get them in the golden sunset of the Old West.
Writing in Library Journal, Nathan E. Bender praised “Blum’s masterful use of a colorful cast of genuine historical characters set in the majestic northwestern wilderness.” Wall Street Journal contributor Mark Lewis, who took issue with some of Blum’s sources, nevertheless commented that “Mr. Blum skillfully intercuts … plotlines, building momentum toward his big finish. His prose at times grows overripe, … but ripeness is all when it comes to Wild West sagas, so few readers will mind.” Raskin felt that “Blum stretches the reader’s credibility, and yet his characters have undeniable folksy charm and ‘grit.’” Booklist contributor Jay Freeman called The Floor of Heaven “a tense, exciting tale filled with colorful characters.”
In his next book, Dark Invasion: 1915; Germany’s Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America, Blum tells the story of how the New York City bomb squad thwarted German terrorist plots against the United States at the onset of World War I.
Wall Street Journal reviewer Howard Schneider had two complaints about the book, stating that it “ends rather abruptly, with America’s entry into the war,” and that “it is also frustrating that Mr. Blum doesn’t discuss how Germany’s espionage affected the European conflict.” Despite these criticisms, Schneider felt that overall Dark Invasion “is well-researched and written, and it maintains a fairly high level of suspense, which is difficult to bring off in a book about historical events.” Don Oldenburg observed in his review of the book for USA Today, “As a writer of ‘popular history’ that reads more like a true-crime novel than academic facts, Blum packs the book with full-blown characters, major and insignificant, skillfully fleshing out their personalities to personalize events.” However, Oldenburg also felt that sometimes when the author “enriches the historical account with what he imagines his characters were thinking or feeling … it seems as if he crosses the line between fact and fiction for the sake of storytelling.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer praised the book, noting that “Blum’s narrative of America’s first exercise in homeland security is a worthwhile page-turner.”
(open new)Blum profiles a spy named Betty Pack in The Last Goodnight: A World War II Story of Espionage, Adventure, and Betrayal. Pack was born Amy Elizabeth Thorpe in Minneapolis, MN, and her father was a U.S. Marine. Pack became pregnant and married Arthur Pack, a British diplomat, in 1930. The couple lived in Chile, Spain, and Poland. In Spain, Pack became involved in the Civil War there, working with both sides despite her support of the Fascist regime. She officially became a spy in Poland, working with British intelligence to gain information on German communication. She seduced high-ranking Polish officials in the course of her duties. Later, in Washington, DC, Pack obtained the Italian naval cipher by seducing that country’s naval attaché, and she performed a similar mission in France. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly commented: “Blum … conveys the irresistible magnetism that turned a young woman into a world-class spy.” Library Journal critic, Mary Jennings, called the book “skillfully researched and entertainingly written.” “Reading more like a suspense novel than history, Blum’s account brings an unsung heroine to vivid life,” asserted a writer in Kirkus Reviews.
In the Enemy’s House: The Secret Saga of the FBI Agent and the Code Breaker Who Caught the Russian Spies finds Blum focusing on the effort to identify Soviet spies in America. He explains how FBI agents Robert Lamphere and Meredith Gardner worked together with a team to decode messages between Soviet spies. The most notable of their targets were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Additionally, Blum offers information about the Soviets’ infiltration of labs in the U.S., as they hoped to gather secrets that would help them make their own nuclear weapons. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Ronald Radosh asserted: “By focusing on Lamphere and Gardner and their pursuit of Soviet spies, Blum has managed to provide a fresh look at the familiar story of the Rosenbergs. Indeed, his book may be the last piece we need to understand the puzzle surrounding one of the most memorable espionage cases of the 20th century.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews described the volume as “taut and well-crafted—of great interest to students of spydom and the early Cold War.”
In The Spy Who Knew Too Much: An Ex-CIA Officer’s Quest Through a Legacy of Betrayal, Blum chronicles the career of Tennent Bagley, who worked in the Soviet Bloc division of the CIA. Bagley was approached by Yuri Nosenko, a member of the Soviet intelligence agency, the KGB. Nosenko offered to spy on behalf of the U.S., and Bagley was initially open to the relationship. However, he later learned of a KGB initiative involving bogus double-agents, and he believed Nosenko was part of it and that there was a mole in the CIA. Nosenko defected, but because of Bagley’s suspicions, he was detained for years. Ultimately, Nosenko was released, and it was presumed that Bagley had been wrong about him. However, after the death of a CIA official years later, Bagley discovered that his suspicions were correct. Harvey Klehr, contributor to Commentary, suggested: “Howard Blum, a former New York Times reporter, has written an exciting, page-turning account of this internecine warfare, why Bagley persisted in fighting it, and the conclusions he finally reached.” A Kirkus Reviews critic called the book a “novelistic, fast-paced history.” “The real pleasure of this book is not the solution but the puzzle. By going back and forth in time, Blum cleverly makes his pieces part of agency folklore, terrific stories in their own right,” asserted Joseph Kanon in the Washington Post.
Blum steps away from spies and discusses a college tragedy in When the Night Comes Falling: A Requiem for the Idaho Student Murders. He highlights the 2022 quadruple murder of university students in Moscow, Idaho and the police investigation that followed. Blum also profiles the suspected killer, Bryan Kohberger, and the families of the victims. A Kirkus Reviews writer asserted: “Blum capably maintains the suspense and thoughtfully probes into the motives of key players in this intriguing yet profoundly unsettling story.” The same writer described When the Night Comes Falling as “a compelling true-crime book.”(close new)
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Archaeology, May-June, 1998, Neil Asher Silberman, review of The Gold of Exodus: The Discovery of the True Mount Sinai, p. 74.
Atlantic, March, 1977, C. Michael Curtis, review of Wanted! The Search for Nazis in America, p. 115.
Booklist, November 15, 1997, Brad Hooper, review of The Gold of Exodus, p. 522; October 1, 2001, Jay Freeman, review of The Brigade: An Epic Story of Vengeance, Salvation, and World War II, p. 296; September 15, 2003, Jay Freeman, review of The Eve of Destruction: The Untold Story of the Yom Kippur War, p. 196; August 1, 2008, Vanessa Bush, review of American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, Movie-Making, and the Crime of the Century, p. 14; March 15, 2011, Jay Freeman, review of The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier and the Yukon Gold Rush, p. 18; October 1, 2011, Karen Harris, review of The Floor of Heaven, p. 44; January 1, 2014, Connie Fletcher, review of Dark Invasion: 1915; Germany’s Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America, p. 37.
Commentary, March, 2018, Harvey Klehr, “The Venona Men,” review of In the Enemy’s House: The Secret Saga of the FBI Agent and the Code Breaker Who Caught the Russian Spies, p. 54; September, 2022, Harvey Klehr, “A Spy Story Too Juicy to Be True?,” review of The Spy Who Knew Too Much: An Ex-CIA Officer’s Quest Through a Legacy of Betrayal, p. 48.
Houston Chronicle, December 30, 2001, Chris Patsilelis, “Passive No More,” review of The Brigade, p. 21.
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2003, review of The Eve of Destruction, p. 1053; June 15, 2008, review of American Lightning; December 15, 2013, review of Dark Invasion; January 15, 2016, review of The Last Goodnight: A World War II Story of Espionage, Adventure, and Betrayal;January 15, 2018, review of In the Enemy’s House;May 1, 2022, review of The Spy Who Knew Too Much;June 1, 2024, review of When the Night Comes Falling: A Requiem for the Idaho Student Murders.
Library Journal, June 15, 2008, Deirdre Bray Root, review of American Lightning, p. 81; March 1, 2011, Nathan E. Bender, review of The Floor of Heaven, p. 84; September 1, 2011, John Swails, review of The Floor of Heaven, p. 76; February 15, 2014, Brian Odom, review of Dark Invasion, p. 117; February 1, 2016, Mary Jennings, review of The Last Goodnight, p. 82.
Los Angeles, October 1, 2008, “Shelf Life,” review of American Lightning, p. 46.
Los Angeles Times, September 21, 2008, Richard Rayner, “Punctuated by Dynamite and Death,” review of American Lightning, p. F9.
Newsweek, February 21, 1977, review of Wanted!, pp. 86-87.
New York Times, February 16, 1977, Richard F. Shepard, review of Wanted!; October 8, 1987, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of I Pledge Allegiance—the True Story of the Walkers: An American Spy Family; October 19, 1990, Richard Severo, review of Out There: The Government’s Secret Quest for Extraterrestrials; January 27, 1991, “Jenny Cox Is Wed to Howard Blum”; January 24, 1998, Laurence Zuckerman, “Did Amateur Gold Diggers Find Mount Sinai? The Pros Doubt It,” p. A17; November 25, 2001, Peter Temes, review of The Brigade.
New York Times Book Review, January 16, 1977, Robert Jay Lifton, review of Wanted!; July 28, 1985, Daniel Stern, review of Wishful Thinking, p. 8; September 9, 1990, John A. Adam, review of Out There, pp. 7-8; February 15, 1998, George Robinson, review of The Gold of Exodus, p. 23; November 25, 2001, Peter Temes, review of The Brigade, p. 28; February 15, 2004, David C. Unger, “Not Such a Lovely War,” review of The Eve of Destruction, p. 29; November 23, 2008, David Oshinsky, “Disaster Reel,” review of American Lightning, p. 6; April 15, 2018, Ronald Radosh, “Catching the Rosenbergs,” review of In the Enemy’s House, p. 18.
People, March 2, 1998, Deborah Waldman, review of The Gold of Exodus, p. 37.
Publishers Weekly, September 20, 1993, review of Gangland: How the FBI Broke the Mob, p. 52; December 15 1997, review of The Gold of Exodus, p. 41; September 10, 2001, review of The Brigade, p. 70; June 9, 2008, review of American Lightning, p. 39; November 18, 2013, review of Dark Invasion, p. 41; February 22, 2016, review of The Last Goodnight, p. 80.
Tampa Tribune, September 21, 2008, Roger K. Miller, “‘Lightning’ Strikes at Hearts of Neocons,” review of American Lightning, p. 10.
USA Today, July, 1998, Gerald F. Kreyche, review of The Gold of Exodus, p. 97; September 25, 2008, Don Oldenburg, “‘Lightning’: Electrifying Slice of History,” review of American Lightning, p. 5.
Village Voice, October 1, 1985, review of Wishful Thinking, p. 54.
Washington Post, February 7, 2014, Gerard DeGroot, review of Dark Invasion; July 22, 2022, Joseph Kanon, “Book World: A (Dubious) Suicide, a (Possible) Mole and an Enduring CIA Mystery,” review of The Spy Who Knew Too Much.
Weekly Standard, January 5, 2009, Winston Groom, review of American Lightning.
ONLINE
FirstShowing.net, http://www.firstshowing.net/ (October 20, 2008), Alex Billington, “Howard Blum’s American Lightning Book Being Adapted.”
Howard Blum website, http://www.howardblum.com (July 12, 2024).
India World Short Stories, http://iw.sify.com/ (April 7, 1999), “Interview: Brian Bruya in Conversation with Howard Blum, Author of The Gold of Exodus.”
Los Angeles Downtown News, http://www.ladowntownnews.com/ (October 13, 2008), Ryan Vaillancourt, “The Day Downtown Got Bombed,” interview with author.
NoBSBookReviews, http://nobsbookreviews.blogspot.com/ (November 26, 2008), review of American Lightning.
NPR website, http://www.npr.org/ (February 25, 2014), Dave Davies, “During World War I, Germany Unleashed ‘Terrorist Cell in America,’” author interview.
PopMatters, http://www.popmatters.com/ (March 21, 2009), Heather West, review of American Lightning; “Howard Blum: 20 Questions.”
Powell’s Books, http://www.powells.com/ (March 21, 2009), “Howard Blum: Describe Your Latest Project,” interview with author.
San Francisco Chronicle Online, http://articles.sfgate.com/ (May 4, 2011), Jonah Raskin, review of The Floor of Heaven.
USA Today Online, http://www.usatoday.com/ (February 26, 2014), Don Oldenburg, review of Dark Invasion.
Vanity Fair Online, http://www.vanityfair.com/ (March 21, 2009), author profile.
Wall Street Journal Online, http://online.wsj.com/ (April 30, 2011), Mark Lewis, review of The Floor of Heaven; (February 21, 2014), Howard Schneider, review of Dark Invasion.*
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Not to be confused with Howard Bloom.
Howard Blum
Born 1948 (age 75–76)
Occupation Author
Language English
Nationality American
Education Horace Mann School
Alma mater Stanford University
Genre Non-fiction
Notable works American Lightning
Notable awards Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Fact Crime, 2009
Spouse Jane Davenport "Jenny" Cox (m. 1991; div.)
Children Tony
Anna
Dani
Website
www.howardblum.com
Howard Blum (/ˈblʌm/) (born 1948) is an American author and journalist. Formerly a reporter for The Village Voice[1] and The New York Times, Blum is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair[2][3] and the author of several non-fiction books, including the New York Times bestseller and Edgar Award winner American Lightning.[4]
Career
In 1986, Blum began working as a reporter for the New York Times, where he earned two Pulitzer Prize nominations.[2] Since 1994, Blum has been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair.[2] Several of his books were non-fiction bestsellers, including Gangland, Wanted, The Gold of Exodus, and The Brigade: An Epic Story of Vengeance, Salvation, and WWII.[3] Additionally, a number of his works have been optioned for film.[2] Miramax Films is in the process of making The Brigade into a major motion picture.[3]
Personal life
Blum is the son of Harold K. Blum (1917–1984), an executive at the Kane Miller Corporation in Tarrytown, New York,[5][6][7] and Gertrude Blum, a schoolteacher in New York City.[5] For high school, Blum attended the Horace Mann School and earned his undergraduate degree from Stanford University, where he also received an M.A. in government in 1970.[1][5] In January 1991, he married Jenny Cox, a book editor.[5] They are divorced. He currently resides in Sag Harbor, New York and Connecticut.[2][8] Howard is the brother of celebrity wedding planner Marcy Blum.
Bibliography
Wanted! The Search for Nazis in America (1977), New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., ISBN 0812906071
Wishful Thinking (1985), New York: Atheneum Books, ISBN 0689115431
I Pledge Allegiance--: The True Story of the Walkers: An American Spy Family (1987), New York: Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0671626140
Out There: The Government's Secret Quest for Extraterrestrials (1990), New York, Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0671662600
Gangland: How the FBI Broke the Mob (1993), New York: Pocket Books, ISBN 0671900153
The Gold of Exodus: The Discovery of the True Mount Sinai (1998), New York: Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0684809184
The Brigade: An Epic Story of Vengeance, Salvation, and World War II (2001), New York: HarperCollins, ISBN 0060194863
The Eve of Destruction: The Untold Story of the Yom Kippur War (2003), New York: HarperCollins, ISBN 0060013990
American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century (2008), New York: Crown Publishers, ISBN 0307346943
The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier and the Yukon Gold Rush (2011), New York: Crown Publishers, ISBN 0307461726
Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany’s Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America (2014), New York: Crown Publishers, ISBN 0307461750
The Last Goodnight: A World War II Story of Espionage, Adventure, and Betrayal (2016), HarperCollins, ISBN 0062307673
In the Enemy's House: The Secret Saga of the FBI Agent and the Code Breaker Who Caught the Russian Spies (2018), HarperCollins Publishers, ISBN 0062458248
Night of the Assassins: The Untold Story of Hitler's Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin (2020), HarperCollins Publishers.
The Spy Who Knew Too Much: An Ex-CIA Officer's Quest Through a Legacy of Betrayal (2022), HarperCollins Publishers, ISBN 9780063054219
Howard Blum is the author of New York Times bestsellers including Dark Invasion, the Edgar Award–winner American Lightning, as well as Wanted!, The Gold Exodus, Gangland, The Floor of Heaven and Night of the Assassins. Blum is a contributing editor at Airmail, his series of articles on The Idaho Murders were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. While at the New York Times, he was twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. He is the father of three children, and lives in Connecticut & East Hampton.
QUOTED: "Blum capably maintains the suspense and thoughtfully probes into the motives of key players in this intriguing yet profoundly unsettling story."
"a compelling true-crime book."
Blum, Howard WHEN THE NIGHT COMES FALLING Harper/HarperCollins (NonFiction None) $32.00 6, 25 ISBN: 9780063349285
The prolific nonfiction author returns with the story behind the 2022 slayings of four University of Idaho students.
Blum, author of Night of the Assassins, Dark Invasion, and other bestselling books, characterizes Moscow, Idaho, as a "quaint" and "churchy" town that also happened to be home to a university known for being "the best party school in the state." Beneath the pleasant exterior, a disturbing history--which included drug trafficking, brutal murders, and allegations of pedophilia and sexual assault against respected members of a local church--quietly lurked. Blum reveals how the stabbing deaths of Kaylee Goncalves, Maddie Mogen, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin on November 13, 2022, revealed, in their shocking senselessness, Moscow's unacknowledged dark side. The police investigation ultimately yielded a suspect, a troubled criminology doctorate student named Bryan Kohberger, and circumstantial evidence pointed to Kohberger's guilt. However, there were no significant connections between the indicted killer and any of the victims, which has since led to multiple postponements of the trial: "And so now after all the tedious, exasperating delays, whenever it finally does take place, it will be a footnote to the larger, ineluctable events .Besides, what will the trial reveal? The dialectics of the courtroom would inevitably prevail and opposing teams of experts will be summoned to go at one another." Blum suggests that a second tragedy--the effect the murders have had on victims' families--exists alongside the actual murders themselves. In their frustration with the criminal system and desire for justice, Goncalves' parents and siblings offered support for death penalty legislation that would permit death by a firing squad, effectively making them victims of a "raging, all-consuming anger" that would mark them for life. Blum capably maintains the suspense and thoughtfully probes into the motives of key players in this intriguing yet profoundly unsettling story.
A compelling true-crime book.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Blum, Howard: WHEN THE NIGHT COMES FALLING." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795673911/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=de8fdb46. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "Howard Blum, a former New York Times reporter, has written an exciting, page-turning account of this internecine warfare, why Bagley persisted in fighting it, and the conclusions he finally reached."
The Spy Who Knew Too Much: An Ex-CIA Officer's Quest Through a Legacy ofBetrayal
BY HOWARD BLUM
Harper, 352 pages
TENNENT "Pete" Bagley seemed destined for great things. His father was a distinguished admiral, as were two of his brothers. His uncles included Josephus Daniels, a secretary of the Navy during World War I, and William Leahy, fleet admiral during World War II. After serving in the Marines, Pete graduated from Princeton and, assisted by Leahy, joined the CIA in 1949, just two years after its formation.
Tall, amiable, good-looking, and intellectually curious (he later earned a Ph.D.), Bagley was both an effective field agent facing danger in encounters with Soviet intelligence in Europe and an executive at headquarters in Langley. He helped to spirit Soviet KGB Major Peter Deriabin out of Vienna and participated in running GRU Major Petr Popov. As head of the Soviet Russia Division's counterintelligence section, Bagley had a hand in cases involving such important informants as Michael Goleniewski and Oleg Penkovsky, and the debriefings of defectors Anatoly Golitsyin and Yuri Nosenko. By the early 1960s, he was thought of as a future CIA director.
Within a few years, however, his career stalled. Bagley found himself immersed in a brutal internecine struggle at the CIA that destroyed careers, disrupted operations, and led to accusations of disloyalty. Posted to Brussels in 1967 as the agency's station chief, he retired in 1972 at the age of 46 and lived in Belgium for the rest of his life, making regular trips to the United States, estranged from many of his former colleagues.
His downfall, and the resulting turmoil that rattled the CIA for decades, was linked to the problematic defection of Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who first approached Bagley in Switzerland in 1962 and defected in 1964. Bagley himself wrote about the Nosenko affair in Spy Wars (2007). So have numerous writers on American intelligence. It remains a controversial topic. Sources in the American intelligence community denounced Bagley's book as "radioactive poison," and Oleg Kalugin, a former high-ranking KGB officer who relocated to the United States after the collapse of the USSR, called it "absurd... trash."
Howard Blum, a former New York Times reporter, has written an exciting, page-turning account of this internecine warfare, why Bagley persisted in fighting it, and the conclusions he finally reached. Unfortunately, by the time it reaches its denoument, Blum's The Spy Who Knew Too Much has sacrificed careful evaluation of the incredibly complex and ambiguous world of intelligence for dramatic, unsourced speculation.
THE DISPUTE about the bona fides of Nosenko touched on whether he was a genuine defector or a Soviet plant who was sent into the belly of the enemy beast to spread disinformation. The stakes went far beyond one defector. They involved whether the Soviet Union might have had a hand in the assassination of President Kennedy and whether several productive American spies in the USSR had been betrayed by a high-ranking mole in the CIA.
The arrest of Popov inside the Soviet Union in 1959 was "a shattering blow" to American intelligence. In 1960, Michael Goleniewski was forced to flee Poland after learning he had been exposed. Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, often considered the most valuable source ever recruited by the CIA, was arrested by the Soviets in October 1962, and tried and executed the following year. It became crucial for the CIA to figure out whether these sources had been exposed by accident, poor tradecraft, or, more worrisome, by a mole in the CIA itself.
That question seemed to be answered in 1962 when Nosenko met Bagley. Disclaiming any intention to defect, Nosenko asked only for $250 to pay for a drunken spree. He claimed that Soviet surveillance of American Embassy personnel in Moscow had led to Popov's arrest. He provided hints about American code clerks recruited by the KGB. But he refused to allow the CIA to contact him in Moscow. While initially elated by Nosenko's revelations, Bagley soon began to develop doubts about the Russian's motives and information.
Nosenko resurfaced in January 1964 in Geneva, insisting on being relocated to the U.S. Not even two months after the assassination of JFK by Lee Harvey Oswald, an avowed Marxist-Leninist who had deserted from the Marines to live in the USSR and then returned to America, Nosenko claimed that he had investigated Oswald immediately after he arrived in the USSR and had read his file after November 1963. He improbably insisted that the KGB had never even interrogated Oswald and that when Oswald had gone to the Soviet consulate in Mexico City asking to be allowed to return to the USSR, the KGB had abruptly refused his request.
Bagley was flabbergasted and deeply suspicious of this fortuitous defection. The Oswald story seemed outlandish. Would the KGB have ignored a military defector who had worked on a base in Japan involved in U-2 surveillance flights? Had Oswald been sent back to the United States on some sort of mission? If the USSR had in any way been involved in the assassination, the consequences would have been dire. The CIA informed the Warren Commission about Nosenko but admitted it was suspicious about his veracity. His name and information were kept out of the report.
As Nosenko was debriefed, it became apparent that he had lied about his life and his career in the KGB. He could not have held the jobs he did at the times he claimed. He was ignorant of KGB practices he should have known about. Several polygraphs confirmed his deceptions. Determined to get the truth, Bagley and his superiors decided to isolate him at a remote part of a Virginia military base for nearly three years. Although subjected to intense and hostile interrogation and cut off from most human contact, Nosenko continued to insist he was a genuine defector.
Increasingly, Bagley suspected that Nosenko had also lied about Popov and Penkovsky to protect a CIA mole who had betrayed them both. James Angleton, then the chief of the CIA's counterintelligence staff, launched a mole hunt that focused on the Soviet Russia division. Several officers were put under a microscope; some retired and others had their careers blighted. Angleton's chief investigator eventually suggested that "severe attention" be placed on Bagley himself. And when Angleton cleared Bagley, the prober concocted a theory that Angleton himself was likely the mole.
As paranoia, paralysis, and concerns about the legality and morality of Nosenko's detention spread, Richard Helms, then the CIA director, gave Bagley a deadline to make the case that Nosenko had been dispatched to protect a high-level mole. Bagley produced a nearly 1,000-page report but admitted, "he had not, with certitude, got at the truth that lay hidden behind the lie." The CIA decided to clear Nosenko. A final report suggested that Bagley and the advocates for the "Master Plot" were zealots who had concocted a "Monster Plot." By 1975, Angle-ton had been fired. This came after the New York Times published a story revealing a CIA mail-intercept program. Bagley had retired and Nosenko was rehabilitated.
Bagley refused to give up. In 1981, he tried to get the CIA to reopen the case but was rebuffed. In 1984, he reengaged after the arrest of Karl Koecher, a Czech emigre dispatched to the United States posing as a political dissident who had gotten a degree from Columbia and who had worked for the CIA from 1973 to 1977 and for several years thereafter as a contract employee. Koecher was part of a prisoner exchange in 1986 that included Natan Sharansky. But Koecher could not have been responsible for the betrayals of the early 1960s.
MUCH of the suspense in the book revolves around Blum's claim that Bagley had concluded that the major Soviet mole in the CIA was John Paisley, whose badly decomposed body was allegedly found in Chesapeake Bay in 1979, a week after his sailboat, loaded with sophisticated electronics equipment and some secret documents, had been found adrift. The boat showed no sign of blood or a struggle, but the body had been wrapped with two chains and there was a bullet hole in the skull. Almost from the moment the body was found, there was speculation in the press that Paisley had been a mole--and that the body was not his.
According to Blum, Bagley was suspicious that Paisley was reported to have visited Nosenko after the latter had been cleared and to have become friendly with him. He also allegedly connected Paisley with Koecher as fellow participants in swinger parties in Washington that afforded the two of them an opportunity to confer. And he believed that Paisley had been in positions where he could have gotten information about those CIA assets who been exposed.
But allowing or encouraging two moles in the CIA to meet at swinger parties would have violated the most basic standards of tradecraft. Could Bagley, an experienced counterintelligence officer, havebelieved that the KGB would have allowed a valuable source like Paisley to expose himself to Nosenko and Koecher?
Blum's style of writing and sourcing raises major issues when it comes to his account of Bagley's alleged investigation of Koecher and Paisley. Although he provides a summary list of sources for each of his chapters, and he notes that he interviewed 83 people, he does not identify the source of any particular quotation or description of events. Bagley and most of the other main characters, including Paisley's widow, were dead before Blum began his research. Many of the quotations that purport to come from Bagley are attributed to anonymous "interviews with Bagley Family Sources." A claim by Mrs. Paisley that her husband was still alive and an account of her receiving regular postcards from abroad that might have come from him is sourced to unnamed friends.
I became especially concerned once I learned that Bagley's closest family members refused to speak with Blum after he contacted them for an initial introductory discussion, during which they told him that Bagley had not been fixated on Paisley and hadn't thought he was a mole. Moreover, Bagley's papers at Boston University--which Blum consulted--barely mention Paisley.
After the end of the Cold War, Bagley met a number of former Soviet intelligence operatives and developed a friendship with Lieutenant General Sergei Kondrashev, a one-time high-ranking KGB official who had asked Bagley to help prepare his memoirs for publication in English (Spymaster, 2013). Blum breathlessly recounts a meeting in Moscow at which Bagley pressed him about whether Paisley was a mole. Kondrashev was very uncomfortable and refused to answer. But the next day, he took Bagley to Novodevichy Cemetery and implied that Paisley was buried there under an assumed name.
Blum notes that Bagley recounted this conversation with an unnamed friend. But neither of Bagley's two books--written in 2007 and 2013--mentions either Paisley or Koecher. And these friends and close relatives insist that apart from one trip to Moscow with Kondrashev after the two were in Sochi in 1996 to film a documentary, Bagley never returned there: All his other meetings with Kondrashev during their collaboration were in Brussels or Western Europe. Would someone convinced that Paisley was the mole he had long hunted never mention it even after his source for the information (Kondrashev) had died?
John Paisley may have been a mole, but there is no persuasive evidence that he had been exfiltrated by the KGB, that a body had been substituted for his, or that he had been buried in Moscow. Bagley even told relatives that this was "a crackpot theory." There is no persuasive evidence that Paisley and Koecher collaborated. And the verdict on Nosenko remains murky. He was a deeply troubled man who exaggerated and lied. Some former KGB officers insist he was a genuine defector, others that he was dispatched. Pete Bagley and his superiors, despite all their virtues and abilities, may have mishandled his debriefing and interrogation and been wrong about KGB penetration of the CIA. Not for nothing did James Angleton call the world of counterintelligence a "wilderness of mirrors." That is why factual evidence with all its ambiguity must trump fictional re-creations if we are to get it right.
Reviewed by HARVEY KLEHR
HARVEY KLEHR is the author, most recently, of The Millionaire Was a Soviet Mole: The Twisted Life of David Karr.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 American Jewish Committee
http://www.commentarymagazine.com
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Klehr, Harvey. "A Spy Story Too Juicy to Be True?" Commentary, vol. 154, no. 2, Sept. 2022, pp. 48+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A718104356/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f8aafbe8. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "novelistic, fast-paced history."
Blum, Howard THE SPY WHO KNEW TOO MUCH Harper/HarperCollins (NonFiction None) $28.99 6, 7 ISBN: 978-0-063-05421-9
Cold War-era CIA intrigue, dramatic and brutal.
Prolific author and reporter Blum tells a striking story, though his breezy narrative may put off readers familiar with more judicious CIA-related books, Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes foremost among them. Blum's central character is Tennent Bagley of the CIA's elite Soviet Bloc division. He was working in Switzerland in 1962 when KGB agent Yuri Nosenko offered his services. After interviewing him, Bagley was convinced that Nosenko was precisely who he claimed to be. Promising to deliver secrets, Nosenko returned to Moscow and Bagley to Washington, D.C., where James Angleton, head of CIA counterintelligence, suggested that he read the file of Anatoly Golitsyn, another KGB agent who had defected in 1961. To Bagley's amazement, Golitsyn had recounted incidents and operations identical to Nosenko's. He concluded that Nosenko was a bogus agent sent to impugn Golitsyn but also that this indicated the presence of a highly placed mole inside the CIA. The plot thickened when Nosenko defected. Flown to the U.S., he responded to Bagley's questioning with a mixture of boasting, self-promotion, contradictions, and lies, but he insisted that his defection was genuine. Nosenko was locked alone in a small, dark room for more than three years, taken out only for interrogation. Still maintaining his innocence, he received his freedom, an apology, compensation, and permission to remain in the U.S. Unconvinced and certain he was the victim of self-serving CIA politics, Bagley retired only to be galvanized years later by the apparent death of a CIA official, unconvincingly described as a suicide. Although he was barred from CIA archives, he launched an exhaustive search and ultimately concluded that the purported victim, John Paisley, was the mole. Blum admits that nearly everyone involved, Bagley included, was dead when he began his research. While many passages are pure speculation, tolerant readers will enjoy a largely entertaining spy story full of cutthroat CIA infighting and the occasional cut throat.
Novelistic, fast-paced history.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Blum, Howard: THE SPY WHO KNEW TOO MUCH." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A701896769/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8920a76c. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "The real pleasure of this book is not the solution but the puzzle. By going back and forth in time, Blum cleverly makes his pieces part of agency folklore, terrific stories in their own right."
Byline: Joseph Kanon
The Spy Who Knew Too Much: An Ex-CIA Officer's Quest Through a Legacy of Betrayal
By Howard Blum
Harper. 352pp. $28.99.
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On Sept. 25, 1978, an unmanned sailboat ran aground on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay. The cabin was in disarray, and papers marked "Top Secret" were found, along with a phone directory filled with 351-prefix numbers, a classified CIA exchange. As veteran investigative reporter Howard Blum tells it in his intriguing new book, "The Spy Who Knew Too Much: An Ex-CIA Officer's Quest Through a Legacy of Betrayal," things then moved quickly. The boat's owner turned out to be John Arthur Paisley, later described by the agency as a "low-level analyst."
A week later a corpse was discovered floating in the bay, identified by the chief medical examiner as Paisley. Cause of death: suicide. Never mind that the examiner's office did not receive the corpse until the day after his report. Never mind that the autopsy listed a 5-foot-7, 144-pound male, while Paisley's Merchant Marine records had him as 5-foot-11 and 170 pounds. Never mind that the fatal gunshot wound was behind the left ear and Paisley was right-handed. Never mind that the FBI and the CIA claimed to have no fingerprints on file (of a CIA employee). A few days later, the body was cremated, before Paisley's wife viewed it. And that was that.
Or it would have been if an enterprising reporter from Wilmington, Del., hadn't followed up and broken the story, with all its inconsistencies, which in turn was picked up - and picked apart - by the national press. Official explanations went from evasive to far-fetched. The corpse had been wrapped in diving belts weighing 38 pounds. The Maryland State Police theorized that Paisley had wrapped himself in the belts, then leaped from the side of the boat, reaching across his chest while in midair and shooting himself.
Not surprisingly, the story refused to go away. Had Paisley been murdered, or had he taken his own life, or had he simply gone to ground somewhere (and why)? The Senate Intelligence Committee conducted an inquiry and in 1980 said it had found "no information which would detract from [Paisley's] record of outstanding performance in faithful service to his country," then promptly classified the full report. The committee's counsel, who had directed the investigation, said: "Chances are we will never understand the outcome of the case. It is a mystery." And that was (and officially is) that.
Or it would have been if Pete Bagley, one of Paisley's old CIA colleagues, hadn't found in this mystery a possible puzzle piece to a larger mystery he was trying to solve. Retired in Brussels, where he had been station chief, and operating without official sanction, he went on a paper chase to find not only the truth about Paisley but how it might fit into his deepest fear: that the agency had been penetrated by a high-level mole.
Too many things had gone wrong over the years. Just a year before Paisley's disappearance, an operation in Moscow was blown in what Bagley considered highly suspicious circumstances, another jigsaw piece perhaps. "The Spy Who Knew Too Much" is the story of that chase, going all the way back to the beginning, the 1962 defection by Yuri Nosenko, who Bagley became convinced was a KGB plant and in whose exhaustive debriefing (all two years of it) Bagley hoped to find the Rosetta stone, the clue that would explain everything. He didn't, and the attempt damaged his career.
Bagley was one of the agency's postwar gentleman spies (his uncle, Fleet Adm. Bill Leahy, one of the founding fathers of the Central Intelligence Group, the CIA's predecessor, made the recommendation call to his friend Rear Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter, then CIA director, and Pete was approved) and had been a protege of James Angleton, whose own reputation for tenacious suspicion, if not paranoia, became legendary. The relentlessness of their pursuit of Nosenko drove a wedge through the agency - those who believed in the Master Plot (Nosenko as plant) and those who took to calling it the Monster Plot. Bagley is the hero of Blum's book, but he may not be everyone's hero - Nosenko's brutal debriefing, for instance, can make for queasy reading. But his Ahab-like quest is certainly the driving force here. No need for car chases; there is enough suspense in poring over transcripts, finding a discrepancy of dates, the inevitable slip that will trap the enemy.
If he is the enemy. I wouldn't presume to spoil Blum's carefully woven narrative by revealing what Bagley finds - except to say it's all plausible and persuasive, though the CIA probably wouldn't agree. Conclusive proof may not be possible anymore. Much is made, rightly, of Bagley's meetings with former KGB officers after the Berlin Wall came down in '89, long evenings with old war stories and reminiscences, some of them useful and confirming. And, after all, the KGB should know. But they're the KGB, and before you know it, you find yourself - in Angleton's phrase, borrowed from T.S. Eliot - "in a wilderness of mirrors."
Still, the real pleasure of this book is not the solution but the puzzle. By going back and forth in time, Blum cleverly makes his pieces part of agency folklore, terrific stories in their own right. This is the Cold War at high noon, missiles loaded, when spies were the front-line troops. If you have even a passing interest in the period, the book will be catnip. It's all here: the dead drops, the surveillance, the honey traps, the disillusioned Joes, the office politics, the martinis. The period details are so atmospheric and rich that it would be no surprise to see Kim Philby make a guest appearance. There is even a recruitment scene in a steam bath in Bogotá (what novelist would dare?). It would be easy to get lost in all this, but Blum lays out his pieces clearly, and entertainingly. He has important background matters on his mind - the self-protective culture of the agency, for instance - but, like Bagley, he never loses sight of the main story. Let's go back to the transcript. Who was Paisley? Start there.
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Joseph Kanon is the author of 10 espionage thrillers, including most recently "The Berlin Exchange."
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
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Kanon, Joseph. "Book World: A (dubious) suicide, a (possible) mole and an enduring CIA mystery." Washington Post, 22 July 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A711098516/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=13dd82e6. Accessed 27 June 2024.
In the Enemy's House
BY HOWARD BLUM
Harper, 336 pages
MORE THAN 30 years have passed since the former FBI agent Robert Lamphere detailed his key role in uncovering major Soviet espionage networks in The FBI-KGB War. That book provided the first detailed (but truncated) account of the Venona Project, the most successful American counterintelligence operation of the Cold War. Hidden from historians and the public for decades, Venona provided the key leads that resulted in the convictions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Judith Coplon in the United States and Klaus Fuchs in Great Britain by making it possible for FBI agents to read thousands of high-level Soviet communications. Venona also exposed hundreds of other Soviet spies, most of whom could not be prosecuted since independent evidence was lacking and it was thought inexpedient to reveal Venona in court.
Nearly a decade would pass until the FBI and NSA began to release the actual Venona transcripts in 1995. In the years since, a number of books (including several co-authored by me) have analyzed the Venona revelations, while others have mined Communist International files and the KGB archives. Virtually all the major mysteries about Soviet espionage in the United States have been resolved by these once-secret documents. In addition to confirming the guilt of the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and virtually every other person accused of spying in the 1940s by the ex-spies Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, these books have exposed several important and previously unknown agents such as Theodore Hall, Russell McNutt, and I.F. Stone. Indeed, the only accused spy who turns out to have been innocent (although he was a secret Communist almost up until the day he took charge of developing an atomic bomb) was J. Robert Oppenheimer.
A handful of espionage deniers, centered around the Nation magazine, continue to argue, against all evidence and logic, that Alger Hiss is still innocent. The Rosenberg children continue to distort their mother's role in espionage. And some hard-core McCarthyites still demonize Oppenheimer. But in truth, the bloody battle over who spied is over.
Lamphere's book emphasized his collaboration with the Army cryptographer Meredith Gardner in the hard work of unraveling the spy rings using the Venona cables. Employing those 1986 recollections as a template, the Vanity Fair contributor Howard Blum has now given us In the Enemy's House, an overly dramatized but largely accurate account of the friendship between the outgoing, hard-driving, atypical G-man Lamphere and the shy, scholarly, soft-spoken Gardner as they worked together to find and prosecute those Americans who had betrayed their nation.
Blum intersperses the American hunt for spies with the recollections of Julius Rosenberg's KGB controller, Alexander Feklisov, who ran Rosenberg in 1944 and 1945 and supervised Fuchs in Great Britain from 1947 to 1949. Feklisov watched with mounting dread as the KGB's atomic spy networks were exposed, both because of Venona and the KGB's own blunders--most notably because the Russians used Harry Gold, Fuch's contact, to pick up espionage material from David Greenglass, who was Julius Rosenberg's brother-in-law and part of his spy ring.
Blum also uses information from many of the scholarly accounts that have already appeared, although not always carefully. His only new source of data comes from interviews with members of the Lamphere and Gardner families and access to their personal notebooks. But while he provides a list of his sources for each chapter, Blum does not use footnotes, so that although many of the personal and emotional reactions to the investigation he attributes to people, and especially to Lamphere, presumably come from these sources, it is never clear whether they are based on contemporaneous written notes or third-party recollections of events more than 50 years in the past.
Such objections are not mere academic carping. While Blum successfully turns this oft-told story into an interesting and suspenseful narrative, his approach comes at a cost. For example: He is eager to transform Lamphere from a diligent and resourceful FBI investigator who often chafed at the bureaucracy and petty rules that governed the agency into a full-blown rebel who almost singlehandedly forced the FBI to take up the problem of Soviet espionage. To do so, Blum suggests that until the FBI received an anonymous letter in Russian in August 1943 alleging widespread spying and naming KGB operatives, the Bureau regarded the investigation of potential Soviet spies as useless because allies did not spy on each other.
This is wrong. In fact, the FBI had already mounted two large-scale investigations--one of Comintern activities in the United States undertaken in 1940 and the other of attempted espionage directed at atomic-bomb research at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, which began in early 1943. Both had unearthed information on atomic espionage. These included discomfiting details about Robert Oppenheimer's Communist connections; efforts by Steve Nelson, a CPUSA leader in the Bay Area in contact with known Soviet spies, to obtain atomic information; and contacts between a Soviet spy and Clarence Hiskey, a chemist on the Manhattan Project.
At one point, Blum renders one of Hiskey's contacts, Zalmond Franklin, as Franklin Zelman and mischaracterizes him as "a KGB spook working under student cover." In fact, Franklin was a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade working as a KGB courier. In any event, the FBI neutralized this threat by transferring Hiskey from Chicago to a military base near the Arctic Circle, thereby scaring his scientific contacts (whom he had introduced to a Soviet agent) into cooperating with the Bureau.
There are other occasions where Blum demonstrates an uncertain grasp of the history of Soviet intelligence. He misstates Elizabeth Bentley's motives for defecting; angry at being pushed aside by the Soviets, she feared she was under FBI surveillance. And he claims that only three witnesses testified against the Rosenbergs (Ethel's brother and sister-in-law and Harry Gold), which leaves off others (Bentley, Max Elitcher, and the photographer who had taken passport photos for the family just prior to their arrests).
Blum's account of the way the KGB encoded and enciphered its messages is oversimplified. The mistake that made it possible for American counterintelligence to break into the Soviet messages was their intelligence services' use of some one-use-only pads a second time. Not all of the one-time pads were used twice, and only if such a pad was used twice could the FBI strip the random numbers from the message sent by Western Union. That process allowed Gardner to attempt to break the underlying code. The vast majority of the Soviet cables remained unbreakable, and many could be only partially decrypted. And most of the decrypted cables had nothing to do with atomic espionage but concerned the stealing of diplomatic, political, industrial, and other military secrets.
Partly to heighten suspense, Blum misrepresents or distorts the timelines on matters involving Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenberg ring. He harps on Lamphere's frustration about not being able to use the decrypts in court, but the FBI had concluded it was highly unlikely that they could be legally introduced into evidence without exposing valuable cryptological techniques, a conflict Lamphere surely understood. That very problem helps explain the FBI's inability to prosecute Theodore Hall, the youngest physicist at Los Alamos, who had been exposed as a Soviet spy. Blum mistakenly suggests that the FBI agent in Chicago who investigated Hall was unaware of Venona. But that agent did know; the problem was that when the FBI began its investigation in the spring of 1950, Hall had temporarily ceased spying. He was eventually brought in for questioning, but neither he nor his one-time courier and friend, Saville Sax, broke and confessed. Lacking independent evidence, the FBI was stymied.
THE MOST SIGNIFICANT flaw of In the Enemy's House is its assertion that Ethel Rosenberg's conviction and execution were monumental acts of injustice that disillusioned both Lamphere and Gardner, soured their sense of accomplishment, and left them consumed by guilt. It is true that Lamphere had opposed Ethel's execution and had drafted a memo that J. Edgar Hoover sent to the judge urging she be spared as the mother of two young sons. Gardner had translated one Venona message that indicated Ethel knew of her husband's espionage but because of her delicate health "did not work," which Gardner interpreted to mean she was not part of the spy ring. But, as Lamphere pointed out in his own book, her brother David Greenglass had testified to her involvement in his recruitment. And KGB messages available following the collapse of the Soviet Union now make clear that Ethel had played a key role in persuading her sister-in-law, Ruth Greenglass, to urge her husband to spy.
In The FBI-KGB War, Lamphere never evinced deep moral qualms about their fate. He expressed a more complex set of emotions. "I knew the Rosenbergs were guilty," he writes, "but that did not lessen my sense of grim responsibility at their deaths." And he calls claims that the case was a mockery of freedom and justice both "abominable and untruthful."
Blum insists that Gardner was "stunned" by their deaths and quotes him as saying somewhere: "I never wanted to get anyone in trouble" (which would suggest a monumental naivete if true).
Blum's claim that Lamphere and Gardner had condemned themselves "to another sort of death sentence" for their roles is a wild exaggeration. So, too, is his charge that Lamphere believed that in the Rosenberg case the United States "might prove to be as ruthless and vindictive as its enemies."
Finally, Blum links Lamphere's decision to leave the FBI for a high-level position in the Veteran's Administration to a sense of lingering guilt. But in his own book, Lamphere attributes the move to the frustration he felt once he realized he would be stuck as a Soviet espionage supervisor for years to come. Blum links Gardner's brief posting to Great Britain to work with its code-breaking agency as an effort to escape his guilt, but he never mentions that Gardner returned to work at the National Security Agency for many years.
Retired intelligence agents friendly with both men have no recollection of their expressing regret about their role in the Rosenberg case. It is possible that they may have made some such comment to a family member or jotted down something in a notebook, but without very specific and sourced comments, the idea that they ever regretted their work exposing Soviet spies is nonsense that mars Blum's otherwise entertaining account.
Reviewed by HARVEY KLEHR
HARVEY KLEHR is an Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of Politics and History at Emory University.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Jewish Committee
http://www.commentarymagazine.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
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Klehr, Harvey. "The Venona Men." Commentary, vol. 145, no. 3, Mar. 2018, pp. 54+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A531978454/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cd7726f3. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "By focusing on Lamphere and Gardner and their pursuit of Soviet spies, Blum has managed to provide a fresh look at the familiar story of the Rosenbergs. Indeed, his book may be the last piece we need to understand the puzzle surrounding one of the most memorable espionage cases of the 20th century."
IN THE ENEMY'S HOUSE The Secret Saga of the FBI Agent and the Code Breaker Who Caught the Russian Spies By Howard Blum Illustrated. 317 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $29.99.
In writing about the events and the back story surrounding the espionage case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Howard Blum, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, seems at first glance to be going over well-trod territory. But ''In the Enemy's House'' is not a mere rehash. Instead, it is an account of the two men who were principally responsible for tracking down the Rosenbergs: Robert Lamphere, an F.B.I. counterintelligence agent, and Meredith Gardner, the most experienced and able code-breaker working for the United States government.
Blum succeeds in making comprehensible the difficult story of how code-breakers unraveled a system of encrypted Soviet messages that eventually became known as the Venona files (and started being released in 1995). He has also managed to write a book that is not an academic work (although it is informed by a careful reading of numerous academic volumes) but a gripping detective thriller. The reader gets into the minds of the two men, accompanying them in the tense but eventually successful effort to uncover a major Soviet network. Blum bases his work on Lamphere's own 1986 autobiography, ''The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent's Story'' (written with Tom Shachtman), together with interviews with Lamphere conducted by others, and also on many conversations with Gardner's relatives, various F.B.I. files and personal papers from the two men's families. He paints fascinating portraits of the ''reticent, inaccessible'' Gardner and of the meticulous Lamphere, who stayed on track though constantly challenged by his superiors.
Blum's book is especially valuable in rebutting the dwindling few who still believe the Rosenberg case was about the government seeking to curb the civil liberties of dissenters. Suppression of dissent, Blum demonstrates, was the furthest thing from the two men's minds.
Turning to the Soviet side, readers will learn how and when Soviet intelligence began to concentrate on getting its agents into the American labs that were working to create an atomic weapon. In the early 1940s Russia's station chiefs in the West were ordered to gather evidence on any atomic work undertaken by American scientists. For example, a Soviet ''spook working under student cover'' went to see a professor at Columbia University, who asked him what he would think of a bomb that could completely destroy the center of New York City. The agent thought that was impossible, but the professor blurted out: ''There is such a bomb. I'm working on it.''
In Moscow, the Soviets quickly set up a lab run by the scientist Igor Kurchatov to try to develop the bomb first. Kurchatov immediately saw that his team needed aid -- that is, espionage from the United States. The deputy intelligence chief Leonid Kvasnikov was sent to the New York office to lead the effort, and once there, he helped establish a connection to Julius Rosenberg.
By the time Lamphere began working with him, Gardner had already found one important clue. It was a code name -- ''Lib?? (Lieb?) or possibly LIBERAL'' or ''ANTENNA.'' Gardner noted that a message of Nov. 27, 1944, ''speaks of his wife ETHEL, 29 years old.''
With that, Gardner and Lamphere were off and running, and after months of grueling decoding work they were confident that they had uncovered a Soviet spy network put together by Julius Rosenberg. Eventually, both Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested and sentenced to death.
Blum says that Lamphere and Gardner both ''knew beyond any doubt the wrongness of Ethel Rosenberg's death sentence,'' and he concludes his book by describing a reunion years later when the two men supposedly expressed regret that Ethel's execution could not have been stopped. Today, students of the case all agree that her involvement was only peripheral, and that her execution was unwarranted. Nonetheless, various Soviet archives do show that she urged her sister-in-law Ruth to recruit her husband, David Greenglass, into Julius's circle and that she also provided names to the Russians of those she thought were potential recruits. She was, then, guilty of being part of the conspiracy.
By focusing on Lamphere and Gardner and their pursuit of Soviet spies, Blum has managed to provide a fresh look at the familiar story of the Rosenbergs. Indeed, his book may be the last piece we need to understand the puzzle surrounding one of the most memorable espionage cases of the 20th century.
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PHOTOS: Meredith Gardner, left, and Bob Lamphere. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY GARDNER FAMILY COLLECTION, COURTESY OF MICHELE AND ARTHUR GARDNER; BETTMANN / CONTRIBUTOR)
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Radosh, Ronald. "Catching the Rosenbergs." The New York Times Book Review, 15 Apr. 2018, p. 18(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A534700239/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cf055325. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "taut and well-crafted—of great interest to students of spydom and the early Cold War."
Blum, Howard IN THE ENEMY'S HOUSE Harper/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $29.99 2, 20 ISBN: 978-0-06-245824-7
"Both died without making any confessions": a finely detailed study of crime and punishment in the days of the Manhattan project.
It was an unlikely pairing: a geeky linguist and codebreaker working for an early iteration of the National Security Agency just after World War II and an earnest FBI agent who teamed up to search out evidence of Soviet espionage inside the atomic bomb program. At the end of that trail lay the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the capture of Klaus Fuchs, but success in breaking up the spy ring and ferreting out the mole deep inside the organization was not without episodes of ineptitude and ball-dropping: "then, without either warning or explanation, two months after the Blue Problem had been launched, it was ended," writes veteran historian of spookdom Blum (The Last Goodnight: A World War II Story of Espionage, Adventure, and Betrayal, 2016, etc.), a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Getting to that mole was one thing; doing so without tipping the Soviets off to the fact that their codes had been broken was quite another. The author's story, which grows to enfold the Venona program, isn't entirely new, but it reinforces several points: how thoroughly Soviet agents were able to penetrate the government and scientific circles and the undeniable guilt of those who were eventually brought to justice--and, to boot, the ordinariness of some of the key players ("when Spillane arrived punctually at two, Kalibre, along with his pregnant wife--the woman code-named Wasp--sat with him at the kitchen table"). Blum is especially good on the motivations that caused some Americans to take the Soviet side. One explained that he felt that the American government committed "gross negligence" in not sharing atomic secrets with its recent ally, while Julius Rosenberg's haughty arrogance may lose him any sympathy readers might have had before opening the book.
Taut and well-crafted--of great interest to students of spydom and the early Cold War.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Blum, Howard: IN THE ENEMY'S HOUSE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A522643045/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cfab73f7. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "Blum ... conveys the irresistible magnetism that turned a young woman into a world-class spy."
The Last Goodnight: A World War II Story of Espionage, Adventure, and Betrayal
Howard Blum. Harper, $28.99 (528p)
ISBN 978-0-06-230767-5
Passion fuels the missions of WWII secret agent "Cynthia," aka Betty Pack (1910-1963), in this scrupulously researched profile of the "blonde Bond" from Vanity Fair contributing editor Blum (Dark Invasion). Taking advantage of access to newly declassified material, Blum leaves little to the imagination. Pack, nee Thorpe, grew up in Washington, D.C., and an early marriage to an English civil servant led to an unexpected career as an MI6 agent when the couple was posted overseas. Having seduced her way through Spain during its Civil War and Warsaw on the eve of WWII, an assignment to infiltrate the embassy of Vichy France sent her into the arms of husband number two. The book opens in 1960s France, with Pack--as Mme. Brousse--reconnecting with fellow operative H.M. Hyde after a two-decade hiatus, igniting old sparks. Hyde serves as the willing confidant to whom she recounts her life story, which Blum presents in seven parts, each featuring a different romance. Though barely known today, Pack's undercover work changed the course of the war in favor of the Allied troops. Details of her early life seem superfluous, but Blum successfully delineates the social forces in play at the time and conveys the irresistible magnetism that turned a young woman into a world-class spy. Photos. (Apr.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
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"The Last Goodnight: A World War II Story of Espionage, Adventure, and Betrayal." Publishers Weekly, vol. 263, no. 8, 22 Feb. 2016, p. 80. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A444400997/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7351e318. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "skillfully researched and entertainingly written."
Blum, Howard. The Last Goodnight: A World War II Story of Espionage, Adventure, and Betrayal. Harper. Apr. 2016.528p. photos, notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9780062307675. $28.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062307798. BIOG
Journalist Blum (Dark Invasion) delivers a provocative biography of glamorous debutante Betty Pack (1910-63), a Minnesota native who became an extraordinary Allied spy during World War II. At 19, Pack (nee Thorpe) married a British diplomat many yean her senior. Although the match proved unhappy, it afforded the adventurous Pack the opportunity to travel the world. It was during a posting in Madrid that she first became involved in spycraft. In the dangerous days leading up to the Spanish Civil War, Pack used her persuasive charms to ascertain the location of a politically imprisoned paramour and secure his release. Her resourceful behavior did not go unnoticed; Pack was recruited by Britain's MI6 to become a covert operative and was involved in missions that included securing material that helped decipher the German Enigma machine. Blum successfully demonstrates how the intelligence gathered during Pack's clandestine career directly aided Allied victory. Using recently unclassified files, the author provides an exhilarating rendering of this courageous female agent, while Mary Lovell's Cast No Shadow imparts a more conventional review of Pack's life. VERDICT Skillfully researched and entertainingly written, Blum's narrative will appeal to both military buffs and those fascinated with the world of espionage. [See Prepub Alert, 10/19/15.)--Mary Jennings, Camano Island Lib., WA
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Jennings, Mary. "Blum, Howard. The Last Goodnight: A World War II Story of Espionage, Adventure, and Betrayal." Library Journal, vol. 141, no. 2, 1 Feb. 2016, p. 82. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A441402102/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=aa48441b. Accessed 27 June 2024.
QUOTED: "Reading more like a suspense novel than history, Blum's account brings an unsung heroine to vivid life."
lum, Howard THE LAST GOODNIGHT Harper/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $28.99 4, 12 ISBN: 978-0-06-230767-5
Fascinating portrait of an accidental but very effective female American spy at the fraught early stages of World War II. Vanity Fair contributing editor Blum (Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America, 2014, etc.) finds an intriguing, beguiling subject in Betty Pack, the Minneapolis-born wife of a British diplomatic functionary who fell into the world of espionage. Born Amy Elizabeth Thorpe to a Marine father and Minnesota bluestocking mother, Pack, "by nature a restless and solitary girl," married the British diplomat Arthur Pack out of desperation in 1930, not only because of her pregnancy, but also to escape the provincial U.S. and see the world. After a diplomatic stint in Chile, when she recognized that she and her husband were fatally incompatible, and then Madrid, she became radicalized by the Spanish Civil War. Though she sympathized with the Fascists, she had to play both sides in order to secure supplies for the rebels as well as spring her lover from prison. At her husband's next posting, in Warsaw, Pack was recruited into British intelligence, specifically William Stephenson's British Security Coordination, which wanted desperately to know about the Polish attempts to crack the German Enigma code. With her excellent diplomatic cover and her reckless highflying flair, which Blum portrays with brio, Pack was enlisted to seduce high-level Polish official Count Michal Lubienski, among others. Posted next to Washington, D.C., Pack was ordered to use her skills at "discreet entertaining" to get possession of the Italian naval cipher, which she dutifully accomplished by bedding the Italian naval attache Alberto Lais. Subsequently, and rather incredibly, she was able to break into the Vichy French Embassy and secure their naval ciphers. Reading more like a suspense novel than history, Blum's account brings an unsung heroine to vivid life. Occasionally breathless and torrid in description, this is a well-documented work that certainly never bores.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Blum, Howard: THE LAST GOODNIGHT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2016. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A541695278/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f7cc63c8. Accessed 27 June 2024.