The Past is Never Dead: A Look Back at In the Enemy's House
The Past is Never Dead: A Look Back at In the Enemy's House
On a brisk, late October day in 2005, John F. Fox, the studious Ph.D. who served as the FBI’s official historian, stood at the podium at the annual Symposium on Cryptologic History and launched into a riveting presentation. “One man,” he began, “was tall, thin, a genius linguist at the NSA who was working on breaking coded telegrams sent from Soviet offices in the U.S. to Moscow. The other was a lawyer and cop, a young FBI supervisor recently transferred to Headquarters. . . .”
Nearly a decade later I received the transcript of this short speech describing the unique working partnership of Bob Lamphere, an FBI counterintelligence agent, and Meredith Gardner, the man who re-created the KGB codebook. It had been sent my way by a friend in the intelligence community who presciently thought “there might be a bigger story here.” After my initial reading, I knew he was right.
Here was a true-life espionage tale, a story of two very different and very unlikely friends who had teamed up to chase down the most consequential spy ring in American history— the atomic spies. And it was also the story of one of the nation’s great, but barely known, intelligence triumphs, the long-running secret operation—hidden away at a former school for well-bred young women in Virginia—that had cracked the “unbreakable” Russian codes.
It was a tale, I quickly realized, I wanted to tell, and I began my own hunt to get at the previously unknown heart of the story and the people who had lived it.
In the Enemy’s House is the result of that investigation. It is a narrative non-fiction spy tale. It has no ambitions to be a scholar’s buttoned-down, footnoted tome. Still, it is no less a true story. It is no less a history. It is no less buttressed by a firm foundation of facts.
At its narrative heart, In the Enemy’s House is a story about people who made history.
When I began work on this book my narrative ambitions were to share a spy drama, a tale of friendship, courage, genius, and regret. Yet as I researched and wrote the book during the presidential election campaign of 2016 and well into the first year of the new presidency, this Cold War history took on an unexpected resonance. And a chilling prescience.
“The past,” as Faulkner warned, “is never dead; it is not even past.”
Here’s what people are saying about In the Enemy’s House:
★★★★★
“The book reads like the best of the spy novels.”
—David S., Amazon Reviewer
★★★★★
“Kudos to Mr. Blum on his fast paced, informative retelling of this all too overlooked episode in the history of USSR-U.S. relations. The story flies by and leaves one with a clear appreciation of the significance of this period.”
—Barry W., Amazon Reviewer
