CANR
WORK TITLE: A Brotherhood of Spies
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1934
WEBSITE: http://www.montereel.com
CITY: Chicago
STATE: IL
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME: CANR 263
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1934, in Mattoon, IL; married Mei-Ling Hopgood (a journalist and author); children: two daughters.
EDUCATION:Lake Land College, associates degree, 1991; University of Illinois, bachelors and masters degrees.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and journalist. Washington Post, reporter in Washington, DC, and Iraq, and South America correspondent, 2004-08.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Journalist Monte Reel is a writer and newspaper correspondent in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has been a journalist for the Washington Post, reporting from Washington and Iraq, and served as that paper’s South America correspondent from 2004 to 2008. In The Last of the Tribe: The Epic Quest to Save a Lone Man in the Amazon, Reel “gets right to the heart of the dilemma facing modern-day Brazil as its rush to develop the vast Amazon rain forest rapidly collides with the last vestiges of cultures whose way of life has changed little since the Stone Age,” commented Michael Astor in the Miami Herald. Reel “provides a fresh look at a story that has become almost a cliche,” the last practitioner of an ancient way of life pitted against the inexorable advance of modern society, an ultimately destructive tide that may not represent progress at all, noted Booklist reviewer Colleen Mondor.
In 1996, Reel reports, government agents from FUNAI, the Brazilian agency charged with establishing territories for indigenous peoples, began looking into reports of a single Indian male living in the forests of the Guapore River Valley, near the border with Bolivia. Marcelo dos Santos, one of FUNAI’s chief representatives, realized that immediate action was needed. If the reports were true, this individual would represent the last of his people and would need immediate government protection to prevent Brazilian ranchers from driving him away or, in the worst case, killing him as they expanded their claims to land across the country’s jungles and forests. Reel reports on how the single Indian did indeed exist, and how the government, the ranchers, and others with a stake in the situation worked to resolve the difficulties one human being imposed on a country’s internal processes. Reel describes how government agents tried to make contact with the Indian but were thwarted at the point of the man’s bow and arrow. He relates the solution that was imposed—the granting of nearly a hundred square miles of land to the indigenous resident—and how that affected the government and the plans of farmers who had intended to expand across that land. Although the Indian and his lifestyle remain a mystery even to the people who sought to protect him, “by the end of the book, neither Reel nor dos Santos nor the reader can feel anything but admiration for him,” remarked Brian Bethune in Maclean’s.
“Reel’s tale is expertly told: perfectly timed, thoroughly researched and descriptively written,” commented Eric Simons in the San Francisco Chronicle. Reel “is good with the context … but he’s best when he’s indulging in good old-fashioned adventure-writing,” observed Washington Post reviewer Matthew Shaer. The author “smoothly translates the complexities of the Brazilian frontier into an adventure narrative, without slighting his material,” commented a Publishers Weekly writer.
Reel’s book “does an excellent job” of giving the reader a detailed, up-close chronicle of life in the Amazon and the struggles of the FUNAI representatives, Astor stated. “The conflict between native lifestyles and agricultural interests in recently settled areas of Amazonian Brazil is sharply and effectively portrayed,” observed Elizabeth Salt in Library Journal.
In 2013 Reel published Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure That Took the Victorian World by Storm. The account combines the debate in Victorian England over the theory of evolution with the tale of young African explorer Paul Du Chaillu. The African-born, American-educated Frenchman received American funding for his explorations of Africa in search of gorillas and was later invited to England to share his discoveries to popular acclaim.
Writing in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Tom Zelman opined that “Reel’s title offers playful homage to the melodramatic prose about gorillas that has been so much a part of popular culture (think King Kong!). His prose, by contrast is direct, informative and thoroughly engrossing.” Reviewing the book in the Washington Post Book World, Barbara J. King lamented that “Reel’s lack of analytical distance from the 19th-century perspective is sometimes costly.” However, King pointed out that “Reel’s rescue of Du Chaillu from relative obscurity again brings to the fore troubling questions about the European exploration of Africa.” In a review in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Daniel Dyer observed that “Reel skillfully shifts our attention from continent to continent, from past to present, until the story’s tributaries merge and rush toward the conclusion.” Writing in the New York Times Book Review, David Quammen commented that “although in the early chapters it seems a little scattered, its transitions flaccid, once Du Chaillu and his poor stuffed apes have made their debut in London, it rattles along with fine, wacky momentum.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews concluded by calling Between Man and Beast “a lively footnote to the debate between science and religion and the exploration of the African jungle in the Victorian era.”
In A Brotherhood of Spies: The U-2 and the CIA’s Secret War, Reel takes a new look at an often-told story: the shooting-down of an American spy aircraft over the Soviet Union in 1960, near the height of the Cold War. The U-2 “program, we learn,” explained David Pitt in Booklist, “was intended to propel the U.S. to the forefront of the spy game.” In many ways it did: U-2 photographs, for instance, revealed Soviet missiles being placed in Cuba in 1962, leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis. But the downing of a U-2 reconnaissance plane in 1960 sparked an international incident that colored US-Soviet relations for years.
The U-2 incident central to Reel’s story began toward the end of Dwight Eisenhower’s second term. “President Eisenhower and aides wanted a look at the Moscow area in advance of a scheduled arms talk in Paris with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev,” wrote Joseph C. Goulden in the Washington Times. “There were concerns about a new Soviet plane, the Bison, capable of bombing runs all the way to the U.S. Ike had one big worry: What if the plane somehow crashed and the pilot was captured?” A Brotherhood of Spies “puts an unlikely figure at the center of events: photographic innovator Edwin Land, developer of, among many other things, the Polaroid camera,” stated a Kirkus Reviews contributor. “He code-named prototypes of that camera U-2.” Other important characters include the man who designed the aircraft (still in service in the twenty-first century), University of Michigan-educated Lockheed designer Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, Richard Bissell, the man who managed the U-2 program, and Francis Gary Powers—the pilot who was brought down by anti-aircraft fire in Soviet airspace. “This exemplary work,” concluded a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “provides a wholly satisfying take on a central chapter of the Cold War–a dramatic story of zeal and adventure.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 1, 2010, Colleen Mondor, review of The Last of the Tribe: The Epic Quest to Save a Lone Man in the Amazon, p. 68; April 1, 2018, David Pitt, review of A Brotherhood of Spies: The U-2 and the CIA’s Secret War, p. 35.
California Bookwatch, October 1, 2010, review of The Last of the Tribe.
Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 20, 2013, Daniel Dyer, review of Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure That Took the Victorian World by Storm.
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2010, review of The Last of the Tribe; December 1, 2012, review of Between Man and Beast; March 15, 2018, review of A Brotherhood of Spies.
Library Journal, June 15, 2010, Elizabeth Salt, review of The Last of the Tribe, p. 80.
Maclean’s, August 2, 2010, Brian Bethune, review of The Last of the Tribe, p. 81.
Miami Herald, June 27, 2010, Michael Astor, review of The Last of the Tribe.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune, March 27, 2013, Tom Zelman, review of Between Man and Beast.
New York Times Book Review, April 7, 2013, David Quammen, review of Between Man and Beast, p. 1.
Publishers Weekly, May 24, 2010, review of The Last of the Tribe, p. 48; September 3, 2012, review of Between Man and Beast, p. 55; March 19, 2018, review of A Brotherhood of Spies, p. 63.
San Francisco Chronicle, June 20, 2010, Eric Simons, review of The Last of the Tribe.
Science News, May 18, 2013, review of Between Man and Beast, p. 30.
Smithsonian, March 1, 2013, Chloe Schama, review of Between Man and Beast, p. 100.
Washington Post Book World, August 1, 2010, Matthew Shaer, review of The Last of the Tribe; March 22, 2013, Barbara J. King, review of Between Man and Beast.
Washington Times, May 7, 2018, Joseph C. Goulden, review of Brotherhood of Spies.
ONLINE
Backroom, http://www.thebookbeat.com/ (June 25, 2010), “Authors Mei-Ling Hopgood and Monte Reel at Book Beat.”
Diane Rehm Show Website, http://thedianerehmshow.org/ (June 23, 2010), author profile.
John Shaplin Web log, http://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/ (July 19, 2010), review of The Last of the Tribe.
Monte Reel Website, http://www.montereel.com (September 7, 2013).
New York Academy of Sciences Website, http://www.nyas.org/ (March 7, 2011), author profile.
NPR’s All Things Considered, http://www.npr.org/ (March 31, 2013), Laura Sullivan, “An Unlikely Explorer Stumbles into Controversy.”
Omnivoracious, http://www.omnivoracious/ (April 5, 2013), Chris Schluep, review of Between Man and Beast.
Simon & Schuster Website, http://www.simonandschuster.com/ (March 7, 2011), author profile.
MONTE REEL is the author of two previous books, Between Man and Beast and The Last of the Tribe. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and other magazines. He currently writes for Bloomberg Businessweek as part of its Projects & Investigations staff, and previously was a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post. He lives in Illinois.
A Brotherhood of Spies: The U-2 and the CIA's Secret War
David Pitt
Booklist. 114.15 (Apr. 1, 2018): p35.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
A Brotherhood of Spies: The U-2 and the CIA's Secret War. By Monte Reel. May 2018.368p. Doubleday, $27.95 (9780385540209); e-book, $14.99 (9780385540216). 327.1273047.
It was an event so famous that it's still widely talked about. In 1960, an American airplane was shot down over the Soviet Union. Although the Americans soon announced that the plane was merely off course, that it had crashed due to pilot error, and that its pilot had died, it soon emerged that the downed aircraft had been a spy plane and that its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was very much alive and held captive by the Soviets. The U.S.--the whole world, in fact--was plunged into deep shock: the American president had been caught lying. This captivating book traces the history of the U-2 spy program from its inception in the 1950s. The program, we learn, was intended to propel the U.S. to the forefront of the spy game; instead, it almost destroyed American-Soviet relations, and it surely contributed to the longevity of the Cold War. A richly detailed, well-researched, and engagingly written book that takes us behind the scenes of one of the twentieth-century's most nail-bitingly tense episodes.--David Pitt
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Pitt, David. "A Brotherhood of Spies: The U-2 and the CIA's Secret War." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2018, p. 35. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534956790/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f2e42071. Accessed 15 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534956790
A Brotherhood of Spies: The U-2 and the CIA's Secret War
Publishers Weekly. 265.12 (Mar. 19, 2018): p63.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* A Brotherhood of Spies: The U-2 and the CIA's Secret War
Monte Reel. Doubleday, $27.95 (368p)
ISBN 978-0-385-54020-9
This gripping work of narrative nonfiction tells the extraordinary story of the U-2--the ultralightweight high-altitude spy plane that was the CIA's "first technological development project"--and the I960 U-2 crash in the Soviet Union that made public the U.S.'s first peacetime espionage program. The plot revolves around four characters: Edwin Land, the "brilliant scientist," inventor, and corporate leader of Polaroid who threw himself into clandestine work; Clarence Johnson, the "fiery engineer" behind the U-2's unconventional design; Richard Bissell, the "bookish bureaucrat" tasked with overseeing the covert project; and Francis Powers, the U-2 pilot who was shot down and captured in the Soviet Union. Drawing on interviews, declassified documents, and secondary sources, Reel (Between Man and Beast) captures the secrecy involved in developing the plane (including hiding an emergency-landed prototype from the occupants of a military base), the wrangling between the old covert operations guard and the innovators from outside of espionage, and the international scandal engendered by the revelation that the U.S. had given up its former aversion to peacetime spying. Along the way, Reel seamlessly integrates other related narrative threads: the birth of the military-industrial complex, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and other technological innovations spurred by the U-2 project. This exemplary work provides a wholly satisfying take on a central chapter of the Cold War--a dramatic story of zeal and adventure. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A Brotherhood of Spies: The U-2 and the CIA's Secret War." Publishers Weekly, 19 Mar. 2018, p. 63. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531977373/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fa391581. Accessed 15 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A531977373
Reel, Monte: A BROTHERHOOD OF SPIES
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Reel, Monte A BROTHERHOOD OF SPIES Doubleday (Adult Nonfiction) $27.95 5, 8 ISBN: 978-0-385-54020-9
High-flying history of the U-2 spy plane program and its unlikely clutch of fathers.
In this constantly surprising tale of espionage and under-the-table diplomacy, Bloomberg Businessweek contributor Reel (Between Man and Beast: A Tale of Exploration and Evolution, 2013, etc.) puts an unlikely figure at the center of events: photographic innovator Edwin Land, developer of, among many other things, the Polaroid camera. He code-named prototypes of that camera U-2, "an acknowledgment of his 'other life,' which was an open secret among the scientists inside the Polaroid labs." That "other life" involved Land's putting his talents at the disposal of the CIA, which put much more powerful versions of the camera in successive versions of its spy planes. Within the agency, the high-altitude U-2 was managed by a career employee who is best remembered today, a touch unfairly, as the architect of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. The U-2 was controversial: Dwight Eisenhower, the president at the project's inception, insisted that it be under civilian control to keep espionage and warfare at arm's length; even so, Eisenhower predicted that he would "catch hell" if one of them wound up in enemy territory. One of them did, famously, with Francis Gary Powers serving as living evidence--he was not supposed to live, but he did, while a Soviet pilot was killed by friendly fire during the incident--of capitalist perfidy. After much diplomatic wrangling, Powers was released; Reel notes that he chafed to reveal his side of the story but was ordered to keep silent, living out his few final years working as a helicopter-flying traffic reporter in Los Angeles. The U-2 program was not unsuccessful altogether, however. As Reel writes, it turned up evidence of the Soviet space program before Sputnik even launched, and the photographs it delivers can pinpoint a footprint in the Afghan snow, for which reason the spy plane is still in service today.
Intriguing stuff for fans of true spy tales and students of the Cold War alike.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Reel, Monte: A BROTHERHOOD OF SPIES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650780/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1bc9d9b9. Accessed 15 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530650780
‘Possibly the greatest achievement of any intelligence service’
FILE - In this Jan. 14, 2015, file photo, odds are displayed on a screen at a sports book owned and operated by CG Technology in Las Vegas. New Jersey has challenged the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, the 1992 law forbidding all but Nevada and three other states from authorizing gambling on college and professional sports. Only Nevada offers betting on single games. (AP Photo/John Locher, File)
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Monte Reel
United States Central Intelligence Agency
Print
By Joseph C. Goulden - - Monday, May 7, 2018
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
BROTHERHOOD OF SPIES: THE U-2 AND THE CIA‘S SECRET WAR
By Monte Reel
Doubleday, $27.95, 368 pages
The U-2 spy plane stands as one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s landmark accomplishments.
Reviewing the decades of its service, from the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 to current wars in the Middle East, former Director George Tenet termed the U-2 as “possibly the greatest achievement of any intelligence service, anywhere in the world, at any point in history.”
During the frostiest years of the Cold War, when nuclear war was a legitimate national worry, the U-2 kept national security officials informed of the strength of Soviet missile programs.
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Hard evidence gathered from altitudes of more than 70,000 feet dashed the myth of the so-called “missile gap,” created in large part by the scare stories from columnist Joseph Alsop.
U-2 facts meant that the U. S. government did not squander uncountable billions of dollars to “keep up with the Russians” in a race that did not really exist.
Author Monte Reel gives fresh and fascinating life to an oft-told story by concentrating on the four men who were instrumental in the U-2 story.
• Edwin Land, grandson of Russian Jewish immigrants, first tinkered with optics as a teenager. His inventions included the Polaroid camera and the first successful 3-D movie, becoming one of the richest men in America.
• Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, one of nine children born to Swedish immigrants, went to work in a machine shop at age 12 and managed to work his way through the University of Michigan. He blossomed into a genius of designing aircraft for Lockheed, revered by a generation of fighter pilots. Designed for stealth, Johnson’s U-2 “did not fly through the air as much as float upon it.” The wingspan was twice as long as the nose-to-tail length.
• Richard Bissell, from a prosperous Connecticut family, was a Yale graduate with a knack for bureaucratic efficiency, first during wartime logistics, then with the Marshall Plan. CIA director Allen Dulles tapped him to oversee the top-secret U-2 project, and to keep it from being seized by a jealous Gen. Curtis LeMay.
• Francis Gary Powers was born in rural Kentucky, son of a “fifth-grade dropout who scratched out a living as a coal miner.” Mr. Powers joined the Air Force and volunteered for the U-2 program — totally unaware of what was involved. Powers was not the first pilot to fly a U-2 mission. Five earlier flights covered suspected missile sites away from Moscow, photographing thousands of square miles.
But President Eisenhower and aides wanted a look at the Moscow area in advance of a scheduled arms talk in Paris with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. There were concerns about a new Soviet plane, the Bison, capable of bombing runs all the way to the U.S.
Ike had one big worry: What if the plane somehow crashed and the pilot was captured?
Mr. Bissell and other CIA officials said Mr. Powers had an “L” pill — meaning “lethal” — containing a dose of prussic acid that would kill him within 30 seconds. Mr. Dulles was “absolutely categorical” that the pilot would not survive a crash.
As events played out, a Soviet anti-aircraft missile sent the U-2 tumbling to Earth. Mr. Powers parachuted to safety, ignoring the “L pill.”
For several days the White House clung to a cover story that the U-2 was a weather plane that went off course during a storm.
Then Khrushchev dropped a bombshell: He produced not only Mr. Powers but also significant wreckage revealing the plane’s true mission. He angrily canceled the meeting with Mr. Eisenhower.
Ike had warned earlier that if the mission failed “I’m the one who is going to catch hell.” And indeed he did, both from the American left and foreign critics.
The unanswerable question is whether the Paris talks would have produced concrete agreement on arms limitation. Khrushchev recently issued his famed threat to “bury” the U.S. and showed no signs of conciliation.
Author Reel’s story is marred somewhat by his contention that such spying as was carried out by the U-2 is somehow immoral; that covert intelligence is not in the American tradition.
In criticizing the U-2 overflight as an unethical invasion of another nation’s airspace, he ignores Soviet Sputnik flights beginning in 1957 — three years before the Powers U-2 incident — that overflew the U.S. daily.
On the value of covert intelligence, I refer the fellow to a quotation from his own book. Historian Arthur S. Schlesinger Jr., a Kennedy aide, termed the Cuban Missile Crisis “the most dangerous moment in human history.” Intelligence gathered by the U-2 permitted JFK to end the crisis without war.
Amusingly, one prominent CIA figure voiced tongue-in-cheek criticism of the U-2. Mr. Dulles, director from 1951 to 196l, greeted the success with a good-natured grouse. “You’re taking all the fun out of intelligence.”
• Joseph C. Goulden writes frequently on intelligence and military matters.