bout de papier, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2002) — Summer/Fall 2002 // Été/Automne 2002, p. 39
HIDDEN SECRETS: A COMPLETE
HISTORY OF ESPIONAGE AND THE
TECHNOLOGY USED TO SUPPORT
IT by David Owen; Firefly Books,
Toronto, 2002.
This book is directed at the individual who is casually interested by the world of intrigue and wants an enlightening book which can be consumed in easily read short segments. The book relies heavily on photographs to present its story of the world of intelligence and this approach actually works quite well, especially when acknowledging that the target audience is the casual reader who wants to be informed as much as to be entertained.
The book is organized in a unique manner which may at first appear confusing and annoying to someone skimming it rather than reading from beginning to end. David Owen has organized his material around different intelligence types: HUMINT, SIGINT, ELINT, and IMINT, as well as ’False Intelligence’. The presentation in each section is well done. For example, Owen tells the story of HUMINT from earliest time to the present. Each section is handled in this manner which removes any chronological progression to the book as a whole. Hence, the reader who skims from section to section can have a sense of going forward and backward in time. Since the short chapters, 5-6 pages in length with many photographs, various sidebars, and several Case Studies of about 2 pages each following each chapter would, to this reader at least, seem to encourage a reading of the book in a non-sequential manner, one wonders why the author did not follow a format which adhered to a more logical historical progression.
The book is Canadian but is remarkably bereft of Canadian content. There is no entry for Canada in the index. One of the few indirect Canadian entries is a photograph of Igor Gouzenko, who defected to Canada in 1945, which incorrectly identifies him as having worked for the KGB. Gouzenko, in fact, was with the GRU, Soviet Military Intelligence. Another indirect Canadian link comes with Antonio J. Mendez who wrote the ’Foreword.’ Mendez is identified as a retired covert CIA agent now working as an author and consultant. Mendez, in fact, was the CIA officer who went into Tehran after the seizure of the American Embassy to provide the Americans hidden by Canadian diplomats with the “stories’ to accompany their newly minted Canadian passports to help pass through Iranian exit controls. This facet of Mendez’s background is not identified in the book for inexplicable reasons.
The value of the book rests with its photographs which bring the story to life. As the story goes, “a picture tells a thousand words”, and this is entirely borne out not only by photographs of well known spies but also by pictures of espionage equipment, paraphernalia maps, Enigma machines and the body of Major Martin, ’The Man Who Never Was’. Clearly, photographs help to bring this book to life and it was annoying when they were incorrectly labeled as with Gouzenko, seen above. The same mistake is made with Anatoly Yakovlev, the handler of the 1950s Atom spies in the U.S., where a photograph of a capable Soviet diplomat, with the same name but from a later era, is used. Similarly, the same photograph of the attack on Pearl Harbor is used within pages of each other (92 and 95) with one in colour and the other in black and white and one printed backwards. Other photos would have been available.
The text is remarkably fresh for the type of book that it is. Some effort has clearly been made to avoid errors. Mistakes which are present, occur because the S.E.N.C. a Gene
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The book is very current. Although published in early 2002 the book is able to capture the September I terrorist attacks in the United States, Osama bin Laden, and the conflict in Afghanistan. This is a real achievement when one considers the time it takes for a book to be accepted for publication before it appears in bookstores.
This book is not for the reader with an extensive grounding in literature on intelligence. No new revelations appear in the book; all the information in the 200 plus pages has been described in greater detail elsewhere. The benefit of the book is derived from its brevity, considering the breadth of the subject, and its ability to crunch a great deal of information into a small amount of space. The book succeeds admirably as a good overview, for the novice as well as for the knowledgeable reader, and is bolstered by the successful use of photographs to illustrate the text and bring the story to life.
The book is well worth a reading for its entertaining and enriching value.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2002) — Summer/Fall 2002 // Été/Automne 2002, p. 39. Read the rest of this issue →
