Early Security Gadgets to Keep FDR Safe During World War II

Early Security Gadgets to Keep FDR Safe During World War II

The mission of the Secret Service is always tense and complicated. And in World War when for the first time in history the enemy was capable of sending bombers flying above the White House, dropping parachutis‎ts on the lawn, or, perhaps shooting missiles, the dangers facing the president were unprecedented.

How does one begin to keep the president safe from the invisible threats that surround him? How can an agency outwit what it does not yet know? With a look into the life of one man, the versatility and ingenuity of the Secret Service is revealed. NIGHT OF THE ASSASSINS explores exactly how Secret Service Agent Mike Reilly carried out this one, seemingly impossible mission: to keep President FDR, a man who couldn't walk, who spent his days largely in a wheel chair, safe in wartime.

On the brink of chaos at any moment, Mike Reilly was tasked with preserving the life of FDR in the face of his greatest enemies. Mike could arrange any safety protocol he deemed fit, but FDR was largely an immobile target, a man confined to a wheelchair--succeeding in his mission meant being resourceful. If he couldn’t bar the doors to the White House, then, he decided, he’d better fortify them. He resorted to what he came to dub with a sly relish his “gaudy collection” of “gadgets:” “talking fences, seeing-eye doors, pocket-sized radio senders and receivers.” The problem, however, was that some of these gadgets worked better than others.

The Alnor Door, for example, was one of his brainstorms.  It was a free-standing passageway that let off a high-pitched alarm whenever someone concealing a gun or knife walked through the electrified, metal-sensitive portal. Standard equipment at prisons, Mike ventured that it’d work just as well at the White House (which, if Mike were to have his jumpy way, he’d have been only too happy to turn into a prison of sorts).  On the eve of the tree lighting ceremony, Mike had a couple of the intimidating Alnors, each one weighing several hundred pounds, plunked down at the White House main gate, although in keeping with the Christmas season, he had each of them decked out with boughs of holly. Fifty thousand or so people walked through the makeshift passageways for the festivities, and there was a steady chorus of yelps from the machines. At the end of the evening all Mike had to show for his caution was a tall pile of confiscated metal flasks, which, to Mike’s way of looking at things, was an unanticipated, but nevertheless welcome fringe benefit. The Detail would enjoy some extra holiday cheer. 

Encouraged, he had a smaller version (although still by most residential standards an ugly, gargantuan piece of machinery) of the Alcorn set-up inside the mansion. But every time the solid interior doors swung open, their decorative brass and ornamental locks would set off a sustained series of angry electronic yelps. The Alcorns were in place one day, and gone the next. 

So Mike, tenacious, found an engineer who came up with another metal-detecting device – and this one weighed only eight ounces. It would be hidden away under the agent’s suit jacket, with a connecting buzzer on his lapel. And it worked well – just too well. It emitted a nearly non-stop cacophony of noise as the buzzer-wearing agents roamed through the mansion, passing by the many guard posts manned by gun-toting members of the Detail or the White House police.  

That fiasco led an exasperated Mike to bring a fluoroscope machine to the building. A visitor would stand in front of the device and in an adjacent room an agent would be glancing at a screen that revealed whether a weapon was concealed under a guest’s coat. Or, the smirking agents quickly discovered, under a woman’s dress. And that struck a red-faced Mike as “just a little indecent.” The fluoroscope was quickly gone, too.

The “talking fence” also produced its share of indiscreet moments. Originally deployed at ammunition depots and secret radar installations, minute microphones were attached by a nearly invisible cable to the tall iron fence surrounding the White House grounds. If an intruder attempted to climb the fence, the microphones would pick up the activity and a storm of lights would start flashing on a guard house control board monitored by the Secret Service.  An ancillary benefit, however, was that the sensitive concealed microphones would also pick up even the hushed conversations of the movers-and-shakers walking in tandem by the fence. In the interests of wartime security, Mike decided the Detail’s overhearing a few bits of salacious gossip, or, on occasion, the stray official secret, was an intrusive price worth paying for keeping the president safe.

The entire Detail, in fact, was on Mike’s orders wired-up for sound. Each agent carried a newly invented radio that was not much bigger than the package of Camels that Mike always had tucked in his suit jacket. This radio could receive messages from any transmitting station within one hundred and fifty miles or could send a message to any agent within three miles. That way, Mike very much wanted to believe, his men would be ready to respond in a flash to any emergency.

But while all his ingenious “gadgets” brought Mike a small measure of reassurance, he’d only have to look at the president to be reminded of what his Detail was up against, and how the odds were overwhelmingly stacked in the determined assassin’s favor. Attached to the president’s wheelchair was an unobtrusive black box about the size and shape of one of the tort books Mike had briefly lugged around campus.  Inside was FDR’s gas mask, and he didn’t travel anywhere – either inside the White House, or beyond its gates - without it.

You can order the book now to find out how Secret Service agent Mike Reilly’s security measures outmaneuvered FDR’s assassins, saving the president’s life.

Night of the Assassins

The Untold Story of Hitler's Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin

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Night of the Assassins: New York Times Article, Dec 17, 1943

Night of the Assassins: New York Times Article, Dec 17, 1943

This small New York Times article in 1943 was all the American people knew in the aftermath of the Tehran conference about the plot to kill not only United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but also British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Marshal Joseph Stalin.

After reading this, I felt I needed to know much more about Hitler's assassination attempt on Allied leaders FDR, Churchill, and Stalin—this secret plot in Tehran that involved paratroopers, espionage, and the unparalleled bravery of FDR's Secret Service guard. I threw myself into the research, and am sharing it with readers in my newest book. NIGHT OF THE ASSASSINS: The Untold Story of Hitler's Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin reads like a thriller because with every new source I found, the plot thickened and grew more tense and more exciting—and it's all true.

The mission: to kill the three most heavily guarded men in the world.

The assassins: a specially trained team headed by the killer known as The Most Dangerous Man in Europe.

The adversary: A lone Secret Service agent, Mike Reilly.

The location: a top secret six day summit conference.

The stakes: nothing less than the future of the world.

You can order the book now to find out how Secret Service agent Mike Reilly foiled the plot and protected the president during wartime.

Night of the Assassins

The Untold Story of Hitler's Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin

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© The New York Times

Stalin Bared Plot Against President

Induced Him to Move to Soviet Embassy, Making Any Trips In Streets Unnecessary

Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES

WASHINGTON. Dec.17

President Roosevelt disclosed today what the Russians said was a plot endangering his life at Tehran, the knowledge of which caused him to move his residence from the American Legation to the Soviet Embassy.

Mr. Roosevelt, mentioning the matter during his press conference in discussing the need for security, did not say specifically whether the plot was aimed at all three leaders meeting there, although he implied as much.

While the President was at the American Legation on his first night at Tehran Premier Stalin sent word to him of a plot and urged him to move over to the Soviet Embassy, which adjoined the British Embassy in the same compound.

Although he did not take much stock in the report, the President said, he moved the next day and everything went well from then on.

All three leaders were in the same compound and did not have to pass through the streets. The American Legation was more than a mile from the Soviet compound.

The President observed that in a place like Tehran there probably were hundreds of German spies around and it would have been a pretty good haul for the Germans if they could have gotten all three of the conferees while they were going through the streets.

A Review of The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson

A Review of The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson

It was with a professional interest that I picked up Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile. The Second World War, Churchill, narrative non-fiction – this was, after all, territory in which I (and my books) had traveled. And, I’m embarrassed to admit, that even before I had settled into the first chapter, my critical knives were out, sharpened by a grating envy. This was the #1 bestselling non-fiction book on the NY Times list. I was looking forward to gloating ruefully that its colossal success was eminently undeserved.

Boy, was I wrong. Even before I’d finished the first chapter, I was hooked. Larson masterfully succeeds in making history not just accessible, but compelling. It is a story where all the major characters are well-known, just as we know how the Blitz, the Battle of Britain, and the war itself will turn out. Yet, I was glued to the page, following his carefully spun narrative as the suspense kept building.

And by the time I had finished the book, two thoughts – Larson’s great accomplishments – stood out in my mind.

First, this is a story that resonates across the decades with a gripping immediacy. It is a tale of a leader, Churchill, who had strength of character, a sense of history, a moral courage, and a deep heartfelt empathy for the people he served. He was the leader who was precisely right for the challenges of the times in which he served.

And how did he lead? Not with bluster, or exaggerations, or half-truths, or self-interest. Rather, he had a commitment to sharing the facts with the British people – and at the same time persuading them that while all was grim, all was certainly not lost. He and the nation would keep on fighting. 

Consider these observations by Larson: “Recognizing that confidence and fearlessness were attitudes that could be adopted and taught by example, Churchill…put on a strong positive front.”

Or: “Churchill demonstrated a striking trait: his knack for making people feel loftier, stronger, and, above all, more courageous.”

Then there was, Larson tellingly points out, Churchill’s directive “in these dark days” to government officials: “maintain a high morale in their circles; not minimizing the gravity of events, but showing confidence in our ability and inflexible resolve….”

It is not being simply churlish to compare these remarks, these disciplined and lofty standards of behavior, to the misdirection, untruths, and hapless self-promotion that fill the airwaves whenever the president speaks to the nation about our present pandemic.

Then, there’s Larson’s other great accomplishment: he makes history, the past, seem very real. When my children were younger, I took them on a tour of Churchill’s War Cabinet Rooms, a maze of underground offices and bunkers beneath Whitehall where the prime minister and his key officials directed the war while London was under aerial attack by the Nazis. Walking through this clustered subterranean space made a distant war – its sacrifices, its dangers, its demands of courage and will – seem at once something that they could begin to appreciate. It was no longer just a story they had learned about in school: it had actually happened.

This is what The Splendid and the Vile also succeeds in doing. By his adroit use of first-hand sources – diaries, memoirs, speeches, letters – Larson brings history to life. It is the rich story of lives led in all their many and complicated facets in wartime.

The Splendid and the Vile is not just a compelling read, it’s also an important book, a lesson to be taken to heart in these dispiriting and uncertain times.

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Howard Blum’s Night of the Assassins: The Untold Story of Hitler’s Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill and Stalin will be in stores June 2nd. Order today.

Night of the Assassins

The Untold Story of Hitler’s Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill and Stalin

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The Hill Op-Ed: With coronavirus, the Secret Service faces an invisible assassin

Washington Post Op-Ed: How we can find ways to respond to an onslaught of uncertainties

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company: Oil in the Middle East

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company: Oil in the Middle East

At the dawn of the twentieth century when the last gasps of the Imperial Age still gripped the world, Iran – then called Persia – had caught the predatory attention of both Russia and Great Britain for two primary reasons. 

First, Persia was an ideally situated buffer state, squeezed between the Russian Empire to the north and the British Raj who ruled to the east in nearby India. A self-protective strategy, therefore, had both the Russian Bear and the English Bulldog casting their eyes covetously toward the Peacock Throne. 

Secondly, Persia was sitting on vast subterranean oceans of oil. In 1901, the Anglo-Persian Oil company was formed, with the British Anglo faction of the ostensible partnership making out like the bandits they were. In 1935 APOC was renamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and years later, it became British Petroleum Company—or BP, as you may currently know it.  

After World War 1, Germans began to arrive in droves and found it sympathetic territory largely because the country had a new, unabashedly pro-German leader. Reza Khan became Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Shadow of the Almighty, the King of Kings, the Vice Regent of God, triumphantly in 1925. 

Reza Shah worked to transform Tehran from a crowded, disorganized city to an updated, twentieth-century city.  Parts of Tehran soon had wide, tree-lined boulevards, honking cars, cafés, even electricity and dial telephones. A decree prohibited camels from entering the city gates. But the outskirts of the city were different. Here Tehran was crisscrossed by a maze of narrow alleyways, still very much gripped by the heart of a nomadic darkness: a sand-strewn, dusty world of yapping packs of mongrel dogs, ditches filled with filmy water, of mangy horses and flea-bitten donkeys. There was no sewage system, no electricity. Beyond the shiny new boulevards, the past had not yet become past. 

These were troubled times for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In 1933, the company and its British leaders made an agreement with Reza Shah; an agreement which promised to offer workers better pay, more opportunities for career growth, and build schools, hospitals, roads and telephone system. Unfortunately, AIOC did not fulfill these promises, which caused tension. Then came World War 2, which resulted in Britain and the Soviet Union invading and occupying Iran so that they could secure the oilfields—and create a safe route to transport oil to the USSR. 

The Third Reich also had interest in the area, creating a struggle for control of the area. “The possibility of exerting strong pressure on Turkey and Iran,” the Nazi war planners wrote, “improves the prospect of making direct or indirect use of the countries in the struggle against England…The struggle against the British positions in the Mediterranean and in Western Asia will be continued by converging attacks launched…through Iran.”

The oil in this part of the Middle East has shaped, and still shapes, other nations’ policies and interests in the area. The oil money that flowed into Tehran, Britain, Russia, and Germany created the foundation for the city to become the setting of one of the most dramatic assassination attempts of all-time—the attempt to kill Stalin, Churchill, and FDR in one fell swoop as they met there in secret in 1943. The stakes? Nothing less than the fate of the world. My new book, NIGHT OF THE ASSASSINS, tells the thrilling real-life history of the assassination attempt, spies, and the bravery of the men who kept the Allied leaders safe.

Night of the Assassins

The Untold Story of Hitler’s Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin

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Keeping the President Safe: FDR's Armored Car

Keeping the President Safe: FDR's Armored Car

As head of the Secret Service, Mike Reilly’s primary job was to keep President Roosevelt safe. FDR didn’t make it easy. In The Night of the Assassins, I write about Mike’s role in foiling an assassination plot against FDR during a secret meeting in Tehran—but his job of protecting the president started much closer to home.

A little-known piece of American history is that, according to Mike Reilly, FDR borrowed the famous gangster Al Capone’s armored car directly after the Pearl Harbor attack which catapulted the U.S. into World War II. Reilly’s own memoir, Reilly of the White House, tells the story of FDR using the car on December 9, 1941.

Before borrowing Capone's car, FDR rode in his own custom limousine, the Sunshine Special. This beauty was equipped with 2-way radio, a siren, and extra-wide running boards for Reilly and the other secret service agents to stand on. The problem with The Sunshine Special? The convertible top left the president vulnerable to attack. Capone’s armored vehicle was just one of the measures that Mike Reilly and the Secret Service took to protect Roosevelt during his presidency.

An excerpt from The Night of the Assassins:

Just twelve hours after learning of the Japanese attack, the president informed the detail he’d be riding from the White House to the Capitol to declare war against Japan. The entire journey was about a mile and a half, only a few minute’s drive.  But Mike began to fear that FDR might not make it to his destination. In his open-topped car, the president would be a perfect target for enemy assassins.

Even before the war, Mike had argued that the Boss should travel in an armored car. Part of his job was to read the belligerent and too often threatening letters that arrived at the White House each day, and that disquieting duty had left him with the acute realization that “there were literally tens of thousands of Americans who would love to shoot the President of the United States.” It was a necessary, even common sense precaution, he’d pleaded, for the presidential limousine to be bullet-proof. His concern, however, was overruled by the Treasury Department. The problem, he was primly informed, was money.

Government regulations explicitly stated a  maximum of $750 could be allotted for the president’s vehicle. And while $750 would purchase a pretty nifty roadster, it wouldn’t begin to cover the sticker price of a car that was as indestructible as a tank.

On the momentous day of FDR’s speech to Congress, then, the best Mike could do was line the route deep with soldiers, the taller the better. And he had Secret Service agents, the huskier the better, draped over the president’s limousine.  After taking those small precautions, he could only, he recalled with a forlorn pang, “hope for the best.”  

Wishful thinking, however, would not be sufficient to get the president safely through the remainder of the hostilities. Mike decided he’d need to improvise. He quickly came up with a resourceful plan, one that would have to suffice until the money could somehow be authorized to build the president a suitable wartime car.  And he soon got the opportunity to try it out.

Two days later,  FDR announced that he wanted to go for a ride. “I’m not going to spend the rest of the war in hiding,” he barked, glowering at Mike as if he expected him to object.

“Yes, sir. What time will you be ready?” Mike responded, a model of obedience.

Within the hour Mike was wheeling the president to the White House driveway as a car pulled up. It was a green Cadillac about the size of an Army truck, and at first glance, arguably twice as unwieldy.  

“What’s that thing, Mike?” FDR demanded.

“Mr. President, I’ve taken the liberty of getting a new car,” Mike began, relishing his straight man’s role. “It’s armored. I’m afraid it’s a little uncomfortable. And I know it has a dubious reputation.”

“Dubious reputation?” the president repeated with impatience.

“Yes, sir. It belonged to Al Capone. The Treasury Department had a little trouble with Al, you know, and they got it from him in the subsequent legal complications. I got it from the Treasury.”

The president stared quizzically at the mammoth vehicle, 9,000 pounds of reinforced steel. Mike wondered if he wanted to kick the tires, or, for that matter, possibly kick him. But in the end, he simply accepted the situation. “I hope Mr. Capone doesn’t mind,” FDR said coyly. Then, fellow conspirators enjoying a shared joke, they went off for their ride in the new presidential limousine. 

Night of the Assassins

The Untold Story of Hitler’s Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin.

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3 Better-than-Fiction Historical Thrillers

3 Better-than-Fiction Historical Thrillers

While writing my upcoming Night of the Assassins: The Untold Story of Hitler's Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin, I spent some time researching other nonfiction historical thrillers.

The elements that make a good thriller are strong, believable characters, a compelling story with high stakes, fast-paced action sequences—and it turns out that when you dig into historical accounts of political sabotage and strategic warfare, that’s exactly what you find. You find underdogs who are determined to break out from others’ expectations, you find leaders with real pain, fear, and weakness who learn to overcome those obstacles to bring about change. You find love, betrayal, violence, and a million lies and misdirections.

There’s nothing more rewarding than bringing little-known moments in history to light, and sharing the stories of real-life heroes who struggled against great odds to accomplish huge feats. These stories truly are better than fiction. That’s why I write nonfiction historical thrillers—and that’s why I love to read them. too. Over the last few years, there have been several that I’ve really liked— and a few good movies, too.

Here are three I’d recommend.

The Devil in the White City: In Erik Larson’s book, the smoke, romance, and mystery of the Gilded Age come alive as never before. The Devil in the White City draws the reader into a time of magic and majesty, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and others. Erik Larson’s gifts as a storyteller are magnificently displayed in this rich narrative of the master builder, the killer, and the great fair that obsessed them both.

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The Spy and the Traitor. If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation's communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union's top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6. For nearly a decade, as the Cold War reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West turn the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots, as the Soviet leadership grew increasingly paranoid at the United States's nuclear first-strike capabilities and brought the world closer to the brink of war. Desperate to keep the circle of trust close, MI6 never revealed Gordievsky's name to its counterparts in the CIA, which in turn grew obsessed with figuring out the identity of Britain's obviously top-level source. Their obsession ultimately doomed Gordievsky: the CIA officer assigned to identify him was none other than Aldrich Ames, the man who would become infamous for secretly spying for the Soviets. 

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The Looming Tower. This Pulitzer Prize winner is the basis for the Hulu series starring Peter Sarsgaard, Jeff Daniels, and Tahar Rahim. A gripping narrative that spans five decades, The Looming Tower explains in unprecedented detail the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, the rise of al-Qaeda, and the intelligence failures that culminated in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Lawrence Wright re-creates firsthand the transformation of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri from incompetent and idealistic soldiers in Afghanistan to leaders of the most successful terrorist group in history. He follows FBI counterterrorism chief John O’Neill as he uncovers the emerging danger from al-Qaeda in the 1990s and struggles to track this new threat. Packed with new information and a deep historical perspective, The Looming Tower is the definitive history of the long road to September 11.

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Historical Nonfiction Thrillers by Howard Blum

And my new book, Night of the Assassins, is available for preorder now. Here’s a more about this history of World War 2:

The New York Times bestselling author returns with a tale as riveting and suspenseful as any thriller: the true story of the Nazi plot to kill the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and the U.S.S.R. during World War II.

The mission: to kill the three most important and heavily guarded men in the world.

The assassins: a specially trained team headed by the killer known as The Most Dangerous Man in Europe.

The stakes: nothing less than the future of the Western world.

The year is 1943 and the three Allied leaders—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin—are meeting for the first time at a top-secret conference in Tehran. But the Nazis have learned about the meeting and Hitler sees it as his last chance to turn the tide. Although the war is undoubtedly lost, the Germans believe that perhaps a new set of Allied leaders might be willing to make a more reasonable peace in its aftermath. And so a plan is devised—code name Operation Long Jump—to assassinate FDR, Churchill, and Stalin.

Immediately, a highly trained, hand-picked team of Nazi commandos is assembled, trained, armed with special weapons, and parachuted into Iran. They have six days to complete the daring assignment before the statesmen will return home. With no margin for error and little time to spare, Mike Reilly, the head of FDR’s Secret Service detail—a man from a Montana silver mining town who describes himself as “an Irish cop with more muscle than brains”—must overcome his suspicions and instincts to work with a Soviet agent from the NKVD (the precursor to the KGB) to save the three most powerful men in the world.

Filled with eight pages of black-and-white photographs, Night of the Assassins is a suspenseful true-life tale about an impossible mission, a ticking clock, and one man who stepped up to the challenge and prevented a world catastrophe.

Reza Shah and Adolf Hitler: Iran’s History with the Third Reich

Reza Shah and Adolf Hitler: Iran’s History with the Third Reich

On January 3, 2020, a US airstrike at the Baghdad airport in Iraq killed top Iranian military official Major General Qassem Soleimani. Representatives at the Pentagon said, “General Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region.” Soleimani was widely respected in Iran, and some groups of Iranians have vowed revenge on the United States.

The tensions between Iran and the United States are certainly not new, and neither are governments deciding on a policy of “targeted assassinations.” Consider this true story from WWII of a targeted killing that was launched in Tehran.

In Night of the Assassins, I tell the true, better-than-fiction story of how Secret Service head Mike Reilly warded off an attack on Allied leaders by the world’s top assassins and the part that Iran’s leadership and top spies played in the political attack. 

Reza Shah, photo credit Wikipedia.org

A passage from the book, “How can one explain the deep, mutual attraction between Reza Shah and Adolf Hitler?  Two strongmen, prone to fiery tirades, who held on to power with an unforgiving, take-no-prisoners vengeance? Two egotists hell-bent on realizing their personal ambitions under the pretense of the national interest? Two would-be dynastical rulers convinced their legacy would resonate for the next thousand years? Certainly, the commonalities ran deep…”

A bond between a predominantly Muslim nation and Hitler’s Third Reich may seem surprising, but Reza Shah’s determination made it possible. “Reza Shah proudly howled whenever he got the chance that his people were not lowly Semites like their Jewish or Arab neighbors, but pure-blooded Aryans – same as the Germans. He made sure the world got this message, too. In 1935 he issued a proclamation to the League of Nations that “henceforth” the country of Persia would be called Iran – the name reaching back in time to the country’s ancient roots and the Sanskrit phrase “Airyanem Vaejah,”  or “Home of the Aryans.”

In quick response, Germany bestowed their seal of racial purity on the kingdom: the pernicious Nuremberg Laws that had made anti-Semitism the law of the land, were amended.  Iranians, the Nazi’s racial nit-pickers formally adjudicated in 1936, were to be considered as Aryan as any full-blooded German. 

This happy kinship received further cultural staying power from the fact that the swastika was emblazoned all over Germany, from the flag to the uniforms of its goose-stepping battalions. It was the iconic emblem of the Third Reich. Yet millennial before the crisscrossed geometric design had been designated as the calling card of the Nazi Party, it had been a commonplace good luck symbol in Eurasia; the word, “swastika,” can be traced back to sacred Sanskrit texts.  The swastika had decorated Persian art since the time of Zoroaster, carved into ancient stone columns, etched into tribal pottery. Now, however, this historical accident was deliberately seen as something more – further proof of the deep-seated Aryan ties between the people of the Reza Shah and, as the German chancellor was called with deference in Iran, Hitler Shah. 

But Reza Shah’s affection for the Nazis had other deep roots, too. An emperor setting out to do nothing less than establish a dynasty, he was by necessity a practical statesman. He wanted, needed, to be on the side that was winning. In the opening years of the war, the Nazis had not only blitzkrieged across Europe, but seemed poised to take control of the Middle East. The Reich’s far-reaching talons were firmly hooked into Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, and Syria. Waves of  German paratroopers had dropped like mythic omnipotent gods from the sky to seize the oilfields and refineries at Mosul, in Northern Iraq. And the Afrika Korps was still on the march. It seemed inevitable that their panzers would roll victoriously through Palestine, Egypt, and Iran as the unstoppable battalions rumbled towards India. Reza Shah was convinced he was backing the winning side.”

Along with Italy and Japan, Iran fought for Germany during World War II and supplied Germany with oil, which Hitler saw as a pathway to dominance and the eventual surrender of Great Britain. In December 1943, Reza Shah and Hitler Shah (as the Iranians referred to him), along with their top strategists, helped to plan the assassinations of FDR, Churchill, and Stalin, which would have changed the course of the world as we know it. Night of the Assassins, coming out on 06/02/2020, is the true story of that plan and the heroic bravery that went into stopping it. 

Following the British and Russian invasion of Tehran, Reza Shah escaped and his son, who quickly joined with Allied causes, took the throne. After a period of peace, tensions again escalated. Today, the voices of Americans, including Iranian Americans, are calling out for peace and a stop to the bloodshed. Generation to generation, the conflict may seem to shift, but the tension has remained for centuries. The path outward is murky and unclear, but understanding the history of this long-embattled relationship is a vital first step.

Order your copy today. In stores 6/2/2020.

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Hitler Shah sends his greetings to Reza Shah, both proud Aryans setting out to build dynasties.

Tunnel Vision BY HOWARD BLUM, airmail.news

Tunnel Vision BY HOWARD BLUM, airmail.news

A member of the “Cambridge Five,” the British spy Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby (far right) served as a double agent for the Soviet Union during World War II and in the early stages of the Cold War.

A Cover Reveal—and a Sneak Peek of The Night of the Assassins

The mission: to kill the three most heavily guarded men in the world.

The assassins: a specially trained team headed by the killer known as The Most Dangerous Man in Europe.

The adversary: A lone Secret Service agent, Mike Reilly.

The location: a top secret six day summit conference.

The stakes: nothing less than the future of the world.

This is the true story told in my forthcoming (to be published a year from now, June 2020, by HarperCollins) non-fiction book, THE NIGHT OF THE ASSASSINS.

In 1943, as World War II was coming to an end, the three Allied leaders – Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin – decide to meet in-person for the first time at a top-secret conference in Tehran. They will meet for six days to discuss rebuilding the world after so much of Europe was reduced to rubble, and so many American and Allied lives lost.

The Nazis learn about the meeting and decide this is Germany’s last chance: although the war is undoubtedly lost, if they can assassinate the Big Three, a peace can be negotiated that will allow the Reich to survive.  

We know that these assassins did not succeed, but the story of how very close they came is a shocking must-read story that is often swept under the rug of history.

Be the first to read this book.

• Preorder your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or HarperCollins.

• Add this book to your “Must Read” list on Goodreads today to be the first to get this book.

Russian Code-Breaking and Cryptography During the Cold War – In the Enemy’s House

Cryptography, Post World War II

This method of code breaking and deciphering may have changed with the onset of the Internet and modern technology, but the approach remains the same.

In this excerpt from In the Enemy’s House, I walk through the hypothetical stages of how a Russian spy might communicate—and how a cipher clerk might be able to decode that message. This is the technique in which the US worked backwards to capture Russian spies during the Cold War era.

Code-Breaking, In the Enemy’s House:

The system worked, in its plodding, laborious, and seemingly foolproof way, basically (and hypothetically) like this:

A Russian spy, call him Paul Revere, came in from the cold to the New York rezidentura (as the Soviet diplomatic missions were known) with an important message that needed to reach Moscow without delay: “The British are coming.”

The cipher clerk grabbed the message from the secret agent and jumped into action. Like a diligent copy editor, he smoothed Paul Revere’s unpolished prose, taking care that it conformed to all the elements of style that had been drummed into him in cipher school.

He must, he knew straight off, disguise the source. The security-conscious KGB prohibited the mention of an agent’s actual name in a cable; only aliases could be transmitted. So the dutiful clerk checked a top-secret list for Revere’s code name. He found it: Silversmith.

The rest of the brief message needed some sprucing up, too. There is no “the” in Russian; the article is a notion alien to the language. Also, verbs were often deleted in cables, the logic being that they were implicit and only slowed down the recipient’s unbuttoning of an urgent message. Finally, per another stylistic convention, certain nouns with Western national and ideological affinities, such as “British” (or, say, “CIA” or “FBI”), were replaced with an insider’s jargon, a practice rooted more in a jaunty spy fellowship than any security concerns. Thus, “British” became “Islanders.”

The edited message the clerk transcribed on his work sheet—the verbs deemed necessary—now read: “Silversmith reports Islanders coming.” (Of course, KGB-trained clerks wrote in Russian, using Cyrillic characters; this example, for clarity’s sake, is playing out in English.)

With the editing of the plaintext—i.e., the original message—completed, the clerk was ready to take the codebook out of the safe.

The codebook was a secret dictionary that allowed the members of the club—in this case, KGB officers—to communicate with fellow clubmen without outsiders being able to understand. It was employed to translate the information into the secret language—to encode it.

The club’s shared covert language was numerical. Words, as well as symbols and punctuation, and often entire phrases, were reduced to four digits. If a word was not in the KGB’s dictionary—an American family name or some abstruse scientific term, for example—then there was a prearranged way to handle that, too: a specific four-digit number was employed to announce to anyone in the club receiving the message, “Here’s where we’re going to begin spelling an untranslatable word.” Next, the word would be spelled out in Roman letters, with two-digit designations for each letter taken from a “spell table” that was an appendix to the secret dictionary. And, finally, to indicate that this strange (at least to a Russian reader) word was completed, there’d be another specific two-digit number—the “end spell” code.
Working carefully, checking and rechecking each word in the codebook, the code clerk would soon have come up with a translation:

Silversmith reports Islanders coming
8522 7349 0763 6729

Next was another small but crucial security measure. The four-digit dictionary words were transformed into unique five-digit numbers by a simple bit of hocus-pocus: the initial digit of the second four-digit group was tacked on to the end of the first group, and so on, the immediately subsequent digits moving forward until each group was now five numbers. However, for the final unit, the remaining digit would become the first number of the original last word. The clerk’s worksheet would now read like this:

Silversmith reports Islanders coming
85227 34907 63672 96729

And with this, the first lock on the door had been turned: the message had been encoded.

Order Your Copy of In the Enemy’s House

Discover more about how Meredith Gardner and Bob Lamphere uncovered a ring of Russian spies during the Cold War as they worked on operation Venona, a top-secret mission to uncover the Soviet agents and protect the Holy Grail of Cold War espionage—the atomic bomb. A breathtaking chapter of American history and a page-turning mystery that plays out against the tense, life-and-death gamesmanship of the Cold War, this twisting thriller begins at the end of World War II and leads all the way to the execution of the Rosenbergs—a result that haunted both Gardner and Lamphere to the end of their lives.

Order your copy today.

“The spy hunt set off by the Venona decrypts is one of the great stories of the Cold War and Howard Blum tells it here with the drama and page-turning pace of a classic thriller.” (Joseph Kanon, bestselling author of Defectors, Leaving Berlin, and Los Alamos)

“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.” (Ronald Radosh, New York Times Book Review)

“In a time when our nation is worried about Russian influence Howard Blum brings us a page turning history of how the FBI and the forerunner to the National Security Agency ultimately tracked down the Soviet spy rings operating in America. The book reads like the best of the spy novels. His heroes are FBI agent Bob Lamphere, a hard-drinking kid from Idaho and code breaker Meredith Gardner, a nerdy language expert from Mississippi. In these two people we have a very successful integration of human intelligence with signals intelligence.” 5-Star Amazon Review, David Shulman

Meet the “Red Queen” Elizabeth Bentley: Vassar Graduate, Russian Spy, Double-Agent

Meet the “Red Queen” Elizabeth Bentley: Vassar Graduate, Russian Spy, Double-Agent

Excerpt from In the Enemy’s House by Howard Blum. 

Image credit: Vassar Encyclopedia

Elizabeth Bentley’s confession became one of the puzzle pieces that aided Bob Lamphere and Meredith Gardner as they uncovered the Russian spies aiming to steal secrets of atomic weapons from the United States during World War II. For the full story, pick up In the Enemy’s House.

Elizabeth Bentley was the pampered daughter of solid New England stock, a graduate of Vassar with a pert smile, shy charm, an inquisitive nature, and a very impressionable mind. She fell into espionage in stages, drifting along as circumstances, rather than a hard-driving dialectical commitment, pulled her in deeper and deeper.  In October 1945, she walked into the FBI’s offices and willingly gave up the names of a ring of over 100 Russian spies. The tabloids coronated her “the Red Queen.”

While doing graduate work at the University of Florence, she had a fling with fascism; Mussolini’s strident right-wing rantings gave her, she’d gush, “goose bumps.” But after she returned to the States and began studying for a masters in Italian at Columbia, she did a complete about face. Bentley joined the Communist Party, mostly attracted, she would later explain, by the convivial community and rigid structure it brought to her lonely graduate student life. And for several years, this new infatuation served her well.  Bentley was, as she put it, an “average run-of-the-mill Communist,” her previously empty social calendar now jammed with a hectic schedule of meetings, demonstrations, and working dinners with her tight circle of Party friends.

Image credit: Spartacus Educational

Looking to earn some money while she continued her studies,  in 1938 she found a job as a secretary at the Italian Library of Information, just a short subway ride from her apartment up near Columbia. She hadn’t been working there long before she realized that the only information the library dished out was fascist propaganda. A loyal Party member, she approached the leaders of her cell offering to get the goods; she’d give them the proof of what the Library was really up to. They brusquely explained there were more important concerns. But Bentley, her indignation at being duped when she took the job fueling her persistence, wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. And in time the harassed Party officials passed her plan on to Jacob Golos.

Golos was the real thing, a Russian-born and Moscow Center trained KGB operative. And he always had his eye out for new talent. He saw something in Bentley’s enthusiasm, her amateur’s eagerness to play spy. So he let her run with her small-time operation against the Italian Library. Under his tutelage, she was listening at closed doors, furtively sorting through her boss’s trash.  

And as Bentley lurked in the shadows, as she discovered the thrill that came with her new covert life, something unexpected happened. Golos had first struck her as “rather colorless and shabby – a little man in a battered brown hat, non-descript suit and well-worn shoes.” But their shared danger proved to be a powerful aphrodisiac. She no longer paid much attention to his scuffed shoes. In her revisionist history, Golos grew in stature. He was now “powerfully built with a large head, very broad shoulders and strong square hands. “His eyes were startlingly blue, his hair bright red.” And, as if to seal the deal, she  decided “his mouth was very much like my mother’s.” With her eyes wide shut, Bentley fell in love with the KGB man.

Image credit: Spartacus Educational

Golos, who had a wife and a son back in Moscow and a mistress in Brooklyn, soon added Bentley to the queue. Only in addition to being his lover, she also served as his courier. Golos ran a widespread network of diverse and valuable contacts, from a chemical engineer who was passing on blueprints of secret industrial processes to a Washington-based cell with high-placed assets in the Treasury Department and even the White House. And Bentley was Golos’s indefatigable legman, to use the jargon of her new profession. In her knitting bag – an inspired bit of tradecraft that even the veteran KGB man admired – she brought back haul after haul of secret documents; after just a single trip to Washington, she’d brag, her bag was stuffed with forty undeveloped rolls of microfilm.

On Thanksgiving of 1943,  Golos, as he’d requested, devoured “a super special meal with all the trimmings.” It turned out to be his last supper; he died that night of a heart attack. And Bentley inherited his networks.

But her new KGB handler soon grew uncomfortable with the double mystery she presented – as a woman and as a possible traitor. At first he was eager to play matchmaker.  “She is a rather attractive person,” the agent runner informed Moscow Center. “If I could give her in marriage to one of our operatives,” he nearly pleaded. “If there is no one [here], why not send someone from home?”

Then Bentley’s behavior grew erratic. She showed up drunk at one debriefing. At another she reported that she had found a new lover, a man she met in a hotel lobby. At still another, she revealed she was considering “an intimate liaison” with a woman.  The KGB handler, now in full panic, didn’t need to wait for any more warning signs. He cabled Moscow: “Only one remedy is left – the most drastic one –to get rid of her.”

Did Bentley know what Moscow Center was mulling? As she tells the story, she simply had, after long, thoughtful walks on a Connecticut beach, reached the conclusion that “Communism…had failed me. Far from answering the problem of suffering and injustice, it had only intensified it.” And so with “shaking knees” she walked into the FBI field office in New Haven in late October, 1945,  and announced, “I’d like to see the agent in charge.”

Bentley hadn’t arrived at FBI’s doorstep lugging the sort of hard, incriminating evidence Gouzenko had stuffed under his shirt. She was asking simply to be taken at her word. Compounding the problem, her allegations were as incendiary as they were incredible. She named more than 80 Soviet sources and agents, and identified a dozen government agencies whose secrets had routinely been passed on to the KGB.

A shaken Hoover, even before her charges could be investigated and substantiated, felt he had no choice but to inform the White House. On November 8, 1945, a special messenger delivered the director’s preliminary report. “Information has been recently developed from a highly confidential source indicating that a number of persons employed by the Government of the United States have been furnishing data and information…to espionage agents of the Soviet government.”

10 Facts You Didn’t Know about the History of the Russia Investigation

10 Facts You Didn’t Know about the History of the Russia Investigation

If you’re an American—and alive and breathing—you probably know a lot about the current Russian investigation. (Maybe more than you want to.) You likely know facts like:

• The investigation is being conducted to better understand how Russians and Americans attempted to influence the 2016 election using social media ads, rallys, and in-person conversations.

• Robert Mueller is leading the investigation. Mueller has been the leading investigator on sweeping mob investigations and massive cover-ups.

• Paul Manafort’s trial is currently underway. None of the charges are actually related to Russian interference in the 2016 election, but it’s widely believed that as Trump’s campaign chairman, he had misconduct that suggests collusion.  

• 13 Russians have already been indicted for their alleged roles in a huge, complicated plan to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.

• Two members of Trump’s campaign — national security adviser Mike Flynn and foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos — have pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and are cooperating with the Mueller probe.

• The U.S. president, Donald Trump, continues to dismiss the investigation, calling it a “hoax” and a “witch hunt” — though of course the facts indicate otherwise.

But even if you know these basics, and more, you might be missing a big part of the story. To understand what’s really happening here, you need to go back—way back—to Russian KGB interference in the United States in the 1950’s atomic era. These are outlined in my bestselling history, In the Enemy’s House.

Amongst other praise, the CIA says, “In the Enemy’s House is a solid addition to Cold War literature and an especially revealing look inside the minds and often tense lives of a brilliant cryptologist and a dogged FBI counterintelligence agent as they dealt with an all-absorbing challenge of strategic significance, an important chapter in the history of Soviet and US intelligence operations.”

So what do you need to really understand about the past in order to understand the current Russian investigation?

Here are 10 facts from Cold War history that help to put into context the intense relationship we’ve had during the decades since World War II with Russia, and why Putin, a former KGB spy, likely knows more than he is asserting.

1. Vassily Zubilin was the head of the Russian spy network in the 1950’s. Zubilin worked under a banal diplomatic cover at the Soviet Embassy, but, under his real name of Zarubin, he was the crafty deputy head of the KGB Foreign Intelligence Directorate Service… and the chief KGB officer in the U.S.

2. Operation Enormoz was the code name given to the Russian attempts to steal America’s greatest prize –  the mystery of how to build an atom bomb. As World War II raged, Russian science needed assistance. The West was far ahead in its work to build a bomb. To keep pace with the American atomic research, the KGB would need to help. And by “help,” Russian spies knew they needed to steal.

3. Cecil Phillips is the name of the young breaker who noticed that the KGB’s code had “too many sixes.” That was the first clue in deciphering the code, and ultimately bringing the Russian spies to justice.

4. A ‘black bag job’ is  an attempt to gather enemy information that clearly involves trespassing or other illegal means. These are banned by the FBI and could only be completed with a warrant signed by Hoover (that would be destroyed instead of filed after reading). It was a black bag job that spiked the Soviet consulate in New York City and broke into their code rooms.

5. In the winter of 1944, young FBI agent Bob Lamphere had a terrifying stand-off in Chinatown with a corrupt official. This incident ultimately got Bob reassigned to the Soviet Espionage squad. This was the first piece in a puzzle that would lead to major espionage discoveries.

6. Meredith Gardner, a young code-breaker, began working at the Army Security Agency (ASA) at Arlington Hall. Gardner would find an unlikely partnership with Lamphere that would bring Russian spies to justice in the U.S.

7. Despite the U.S.-Soviet alliance during World War II, higher-ups at Arlington Hall determined that America needed to read Russia’s mail for secret codes in addition to Germany’s and Japan’s. They knew even then that it was crucial that the nation know precisely what the Russians are up to.

8. The U.S. began referring to the cracking of Russian code with a cover name – “the Blue Problem.” They took the name from an ongoing classified Navy investigation of Russian radio networks known as “Blue Caesar.”

9. After several dramatic discoveries of Russian espionage from file clerks to the romantic partners of state officials leading up to the mid-1950’s, FBI agent Bob Lamphere began to understand that he was in the midst of an “intense but nearly invisible combat.”  It was a war, he acknowledged with a new found alertness, where “the Soviets had built up an early lead.”

10. Years after their code breaking broke up the ring of spies who were stealing the U.S.’s atomic secrets, Lamphere and Gardner both came to feel that Ethel Rosenberg did not deserve to be executed. The mother of two young children knew of her husband Julius’s espionage work and had even helped to recruit her brother, David Greenglass, into the ring of spies. But she was not actively involved in stealing atomic secrets. She was complicitous, but not an active Soviet agent. Lamphere wrote Hoover that she did not deserve the death penalty, only a jail sentence. And Hoover passed this recommendation on to the sentencing judge, Irving Kaufman, but the judge remained adamant and Ethel, the mother of two young boys, was executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison.

Order now: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Indiebound

Starred Booklist Review for In the Enemy’s House

Starred Booklist Review

*In the Enemy’s House.
Blum, Howard (Author)

Feb 2018. 352 p. Harper, hardcover, $29.99. (9780062458247). 341.4.

Edgar-winning Blum, a former New York Times reporter, unites journalistic detail with propulsive storytelling. Blum’s focus is on Russia’s efforts to steal atomic secrets from the U.S. during WWII by infiltrating American intelligence. These efforts were aided and shielded by an elaborate and unbreakable code, much trickier than those of the Germans or Japanese. Blum’s story is about how two Americans (the first, Meredith Gardner, an accomplished linguist and codebreaker; the second, Bob Lamphere, a somewhat reluctant FBI special agent) worked together to discover the identities of Russian spies, crack the Russian code, and keep the Russians from getting the atom bomb, at least for a while. Blum presents both a historical and a character-driven study here; perhaps even more interesting than the accounts of the spy-breaking moves and countermoves is the way that Blum shows the personalities of both Gardner and Lamphere, with the narrative arc leading to their shared sense of guilt over the fates of convicted—and executed—spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. There’s a lot of excitement throughout, as Blum shows how a piece of paper left on a desk, an overheard conversation, and a New York Times article (read by a Russian spy) contributed to hair-raising outcomes. Blum is a standout in the field of espionage history.

—Connie Fletcher

Meredith Gardner and Family – In the Enemy’s House

Meredith Gardner and Family – In the Enemy’s House

In the Enemy’s House is the story of an unlikely friendship between a high-spirited FBI agent and a genius code breaker. Working out of Arlington Hall, a former girls’ finishing school in Virginia that had been turned into a top secret decoding facility, the two men stumble to their surprise on Operation Enormoz – a covert KGB mission to steal America’s atomic secrets.

In the aftermath of this startling revelation, the two men begin their own mission to identify and later hunt down the Soviet spies working in America.

The photos that follow – the personal photographs of Meredith Gardner provided by the Gardner family ‎- give a quick introduction to the life and work of the tenacious and talented code breaker whose revelations changed the course of history. And his work continues to  resonate into the present day as Russian spies continue their secret war against America.

Blanche Hatfield, a Mount Holyoke Phi Beta Kappa grad and a code wrangler at Arlington Hall, introduced herself to fellow code breaker Meredith Gardner, with a flirty, “I thought you were just a legend!”And in German, to boot. It was pretty much love at first sight.

Meredith Gardner was a long, lanky, ascetic man, partial to a deliberately donnish attire. A man whose very thinness seemed to suggest that all the fun had been squeezed out of him.

Meredith and his daughter Ann on the boat to England. After the execution of the Rosenbergs, he felt a deep guilt that his puzzle-solving had culminated in their deaths. He went to work at Cheltenham, the British code-breaking facility, because he wanted to get away from America for a while.

Kirkus Review of In the Enemy’s House

IN THE ENEMY’S HOUSE
The Secret Saga of the FBI Agent and the Code Breaker Who Caught the Russian Spies
Author: Howard Blum
Amazon • Barnes & Noble • IndieBound • HarperCollins

Review Issue Date: January 15, 2018
Online Publish Date: December 19, 2017
Publisher:Harper/HarperCollins
Pages: 352
Price ( Hardcover ): $29.99
Price ( e-book ): $17.99
Publication Date: February 20, 2018
ISBN ( Hardcover ): 978-0-06-245824-7
ISBN ( e-book ): 978-0-06-245827-8
Category: Nonfiction

“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. 

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The Past Is Not Past: The Crucial History of Russian Intervention in the US.

The Past Is Not Past: The Crucial History of Russian Intervention in the US.

Faulkner said, “The past is never past.”

It’s true.

When I’d first started researching and writing IN THE ENEMY’S HOUSE, I was intent on telling a true and previously unknown Cold War spy story.

It was a suspenseful tale about a playboy FBI agent and a nerdy code breaker who, working in a former girls’ finishing school turned into a top secret government facility, teamed up to break the KGB codes and then hunted down the Russian spies who had stolen America’s atomic secrets.

But as I continued writing, I began to realize that this was not simply a real-life thriller about the past.

Rather, as my recent piece in Vanity Fair on the Christopher Steele dossier made clear, the past is not past. To understand the full intent of Russia’s intervention in the last election, one needs to go back to the beginning of their covert attack on America – the spy story I tell in IN THE ENEMY’S HOUSE.

Preorder In the Enemy’s House today.
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How Far Did Mueller Go to Get Flynn’s Guilty Plea?

How Far Did Mueller Go to Get Flynn’s Guilty Plea?

As my new Vanity Fair report shows, Mueller understands the art of the deal – and Flynn is only the latest to switch sides as the special counsel hunts bigger game.

The investigation into Russia’s intervention in the last election is gathering steam.
It’s helpful to look back at the John Gotti trial and what Mueller was willing to offer Sammy “the Bull,” in order to gather the evidence he needed…

And to understand what Russia is really up to in the United States, it’s necessary to go back to the beginnings of their covert war against America – the spy story I tell in IN THE ENEMY’S HOUSE.

An excerpt from the Vanity Fair piece on the distance Mueller is willing to go:

“It is not difficult to imagine the tortured debate within Mueller’s mind as he weighed the decision to let Sammy “the Bull” switch sides in the John Gotti investigation. He could allow Sammy, a man who had admittedly killed 19 men, to play for Uncle Sam’s team. Or he could go into the Gotti trial knowing that Teflon Don—the swaggering crime boss who had walked away from three prior trials—could once again get away with murder. Pulling him in one direction was a lifetime of rectitude: a lofty moral code passed on by his education at St. Paul’s School, Princeton University, and the Marine Corps. And doubtlessly pulling him in another direction was a fair share of ambition. He’d be the man who brought down John Gotti, and the world would unquestionably be a better place for it.”

Read the rest of this piece now. 

A Holiday Gift Guide for Espionage Fans

A Holiday Gift Guide for Espionage Fans

It’s the season of giving and that means you’re probably looking to buy the perfect gift for all the important people in your life. Here’s a list of must-haves that any espionage buff is bound to love.  

The Last Goodnight: A World War II Story of Espionage, Adventure and Betrayal by Howard Blum—what better way to keep an espionage lover on his or her toes than a riveting biography of a dazzling American debutante who became an Allied spy during WWII? 

Dark Invasion by Howard Blum—a gritty, high-energy true-life tale of German espionage and terror on American soil during World War I, and the NYPD Inspector who helped uncover the plot—the basis for the film to be produced by and starring Bradley Cooper.

James Bond Ultimate Collector’s Set—a collection of all 21 James Bond films, from Dr. No to Casino Royale and another 21 discs full of bonus features; a set that any 007 fan would die for.

An iSpyG1 Espionage Gum Stick Spy Cam Tiny Mini DVR + SD—what espionage adherent wouldn’t love the world’s smallest DVR that records up to 90 minutes of high-quality full color video and sound? 

Famous Assassinations in World History: An Encyclopedia—a book including the most up-to-date coverage of assassinations of key figures throughout history and around the world.

A spy t-shirt—grab this customizable spy t-shirt (available in multiple colors) that any espionage lover is bound to adore.

MI-6 Secret Service Logo Mug—this unique coffee mug is perfect for anyone who wants to feel like a spy as they sip their coffee or tea.

The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell: A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI’s Hunt for America’s Stolen Secrets by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee— a thrilling novel based on real-life events about an FBI’s hunt for Brian Regan known as the Spy Who Couldn’t Spell.

Bridge of Spies DVD—what can be better than a historical drama legal thriller film directed and co-produced by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks?