Content area
Full Text
Bombshell: The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy By Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel. (New York: Times, 1997. xvi, 399 pp. $25.00, ISBN 0-8129-2861-X.)
A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century. By Jeffrey T. Richelson. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. x, 534 pp. Cloth, $35.00, ISBN 0-19-507391-6. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 0-19-511390-X.)
Secrets: The cIA's War at Home. By Angus Mackenzie. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xx, 241 pp. $27.50, ISBN 0520-20020-9.)
Once, when accused of being a genre writer, the novelist John le Carre mildly rejoined, "Yes, but the cold war was a genre war." In history and fiction, spy stories fall into a category distinguished by a surplus of conventions and a shortage of plots. Individual spies must be solitary figures caught between loyalties demanded by love, duty, and nation. The services that employ them must start humblytweedy code breakers puttering with ciphers in rooms once occupied by a finishing school-and grow into technologically adept intelligence bureaucracies. The work they do, the genre insists, is little known but very, very important.
There are doubters on this last point. John L. Gaddis reviewed the history of Cold War spying ten years ago and wondered "what, if anything, it all meant. . . . Is the world today-was the world then-any different as a result?" But intelligence history holds an avid readership, not because of any inherent significance, but because of the satisfactions of the genre: its brainy, obsessed characters, insider's nomenclature, and reassurance that the safety of nations can still hang on the actions of an unknown man in a rumpled suit.
The grayish figure, collar askew, on the cover of Bombshell is Theodore Alvin Hall, a physicist who spied for the Soviets at Los Alamos. In February 1996, the...