My Amazon Review of Francine Prose's "The Vixen"

 

Cold War Fantasy

 

Francine Prose has offered up a Cold War fantasy. She has Simon Putnam, who despite his name, is a Coney Island Jew who recently graduated from Harvard with a folklore major. Through his uncle he ends up being a very junior editor at the snooty publishing firm, Landry, Landry, and Bartlett. There the very naïve Simon is chosen to edit a bodice-ripping fantasy that turns the very frumpy atomic spy Ethel Rosenberg into a Mata Hari who has sex with her Soviet controllers and her prosecutors. 

 

The book entitled “The Vixen, the Patriot and the Fanatic” was presumably written Anya Partridge who has very kinky tastes about the places to have sex. Further the book was supposed to be a bestseller that would financially rescue the failing publishing firm. Of course, Simon does not ask why he was chosen to edit the book and he is looped into Anya’s life with a series of sexual encounters. Not only is Simon naïve about his assignment, but he also has a habit of falling in love way too easily.

The story is all personal to Simon because his mother knew Ethel Rosenberg from her neighborhood and the book opens with the execution of the Rosenberg’s in June 1953. All of this is going on against the backdrop of the growing power of Senator McCarthy and the misadventures of the early CIA.

Prose is way too sympathetic to the Rosenberg’s, especially Ethel. Her husband Julius was running a vast spy ring more encompassing that stealing atomic secrets. And Ethel was no communist wallflower, she was into the party up to her eyeballs and Julius’ work. Whether she deserved to be executed is a separate question, but remember the Soviets wanted her dead too.

Prose knows how to write, and if her politics did not get in the way it would have been a better book.

For the full Amazon URL see: Cold War Fantasy (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Howard Blum's "In the Enemy's House: The Secret Saga of the FBI Agent and the Code Breaker who Caught the Russian Spies"

Spy Catchers

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.

We learn that the Soviets understood the importance of an atomic bomb as early as 1940 and created Operation Enormoz to steal U.S. and British secrets with an elaborate spy network run by the KGB and staffed largely by American communists. Lamphere and Gardner get hints of this operation from coded transcripts of Soviet cables, but the single pad code system used by them was nearly impossible to break despite all of their efforts. Blum highlights that the U.S. code breaking operation was headquartered in Arlington Hall, a former girl’s finishing school in northern Virginia. It was largely staffed by female Ivy League graduates and one of them would become Gardner’s wife. Arlington Hall was the U.S. equivalent of Britain’s Bletchley Park.

Lamphere and Gardner get three major breaks. First as the German army was at the gates of Moscow, the Soviet repeat a pad, a real no no. Then in 1945 Igor Gouzenko a code clerk in the Soviet embassy in Canada defects with information suggesting a vast spy network and that was followed by Elizabeth Bentley’s defection in same year. She worked as courier for the KGB who transferred information from the spies to their KGB handlers. Further the FBI benefitted from illegal “black bag” operations and in one case seized cable transcripts from the Soviet consulate in New York.  Those transcripts became the basis of what is now known as the Venona Files. Soon Gardner was able to read the Soviet’s mail.

Thereafter the FBI learns that the Soviets had three spies at Los Alamos. The German physicist Klaus Fuchs who delivered the guts of the A-Bomb plans to his handler was arrested in Britain. Ted Hall a 19 year old “wunderkind” physicist was never arrested because the FBI couldn’t use the Venona transcripts as evidence. And last there was David Greenglass, a machinist, who delivers diagrams for the lens implosion portion of the bomb. Greenglass is Julius Rosenberg’s brother-in-law and it was Rosenberg who was running a vast spy ring designed to steal electronic and nuclear secrets. He appears throughout the transcripts under his code name, but is not discovered until 1950.

Julius Rosenberg along with his wife Ethel, become cause celebe’s among the American Left; both are convicted and sentenced to death for nuclear espionage. At the urging of both Lamphere and Gardner FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover wrote a letter to the judge to spare Ethel’s life, but to no avail. They both believed that Ethel played a small role in the espionage ring. In their disappointment both leave their agencies shortly thereafter.

Howard Blum has told a very important story in a very compelling manner. The reader gets a real sense of how hard counter-espionage work is and how important luck is. Nevertheless as baseball executive Branch Rickey taught us. “Luck is the residue of design.” I highly recommend “In the Enemy's House” for both nonfiction and fiction readers.

The full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2O39QVVP5KM7S/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv