Espionage Aficionados discussion

I have just finished OPERATION MINCEMEAT, a non-fiction thriller if there ever was one. It's about a top secret MI6 mission to deceive the Germans about Allied invasion plans. The author, a journalist who works for the Times of London, has dug up some fascinating stuff from the archives. I highly recommend it for all spy fiction fans.

Operation Mincemeat was incredibly great--it's all true, but it reads like fiction. This is the link to my review, if you're interested. http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

I also highly recommend Agent Zigzag, by the same author, Ben MacIntyre.

Thanks, people! I am looking into these!

Roger, John, Helen...just picked up the two Ben MacIntyre's at the library and put the Clifford Stoll on interlibrary loan. Am looking forward to reading them.

I am really enjoying the Clifford Stoll. Not only the story, but the storyteller is great. He leads you into what's happening rather slowly but strongly and how it happened and continued to and through his eyes as he lived it. Just the right blend of why am I here, what's happening, I just don't understand this and all their bickering about systems, etc. is not helping that much. In order to check out this person even more, he's rented a beeper which warns him every time the hacker appears. And his sleep set up in the office has to be such that if he's really sleeping hard, he manages to royally bump his head when he shoots up to log on. Gradually people began to realize what could be happening, and it becomes like almost playing Acronym tag with some really hot stufff, major agencies. The author and his wife have a game going, too (they are not clasified) ... Boris and Natasha joking back and forth with accents and theatrical storyline. And when the author receives a call from whom he thinks is his wife on a Sun. morning and answers, "hey, sweetie", and finds that it is from a rather confused major government computer security systems person in London, UK who thinks he might have dialed a wrong number! And the beat goes on... I'm about 2/3 done and as we get towards the end, it's really building...and Boris and Natasha have just hit on an idea for maybe what the hacker should pull out when he next comes to collect data... Fun book that I'm definitely going to recommend to my kids (they're not little...)

John wrote: "Glad you like the book. I read it in the pre-internet days of the 1980s. Back in those days, I had a 1,200 bit modem (150 KB per second) that I thought was so damn fast!"

I like this author. As a storyteller, I think he's fabulous. He and wife are a combination to be remembered! It was almost like a musical portrayal, building up the pressure, adding the proper elements to ease and balance and really coming into a crashing ending which I haven't quite reached yet.
It's also like a movie I would have loved to have seen. I can just imagine the full hip scene..."Be Polite Now with the "expensive suits and no sense of humor" of the YA of that area in that time period. I have two sisters who were very much a part of it back in the 60's, one at UC Berkley. And I know the whole area quite well and still love it. Have a decent knowledge of computers, but not a great one. I'm an applications person (and why the h... won't that d... application work like it is supposed to on this exponential cookie monster!) Have been at it, sort of for a long time, but, back then. And I liked the way he explained everything...things I was aware of but never really into. I mean, the mainframe was the mainframe, and it was Somebody Else's problem then, thank goodness. This book may be a 5 star from me!

Well, I guess next it is the two Ben MacIntyre's and the 17th century silver mining clash between church, civil & indian that came from Donna's site. Looks fabulous and another area with situations and attitudes that I am also well familiar with. I don't think I have to have totally fiction or non-fiction. Something like Aztec with Gary Jennings where it was said that the only thing fiction about it were the characters themselves. Often there is a universal something or another beneath, and I guess that is part of what I am looking for in alot my literary, and personal tastes, of course. Alan Furst was another one of several that struck me that way, Hennings Mankell was still another. And I loved particularly The Spy who came in from the Cold, was it, by John LeCarre. He came in, tried the life, and walked out, not to be found again. Was some time ago for that one.

John wrote: "Since you like the Stoll book so much from taht era, you might want to check out my book, ROOFMAN. Back in the 1980s, I was a double agent for the FBI against Soviet intelligence. I got a good revi..."

I don't do money. Sorry, John, but I am just not a person who is open to solicitation. Only discussion and sharing in that way.

By the same token, I don't believe Goodreads a forum to push your own writing, and I resent being used in that way. I will complain to Goodreads and some of the forum moderators if this continues! I'm not supporting your chosen way of making a living anymore than I'm asking you to support mine!

"My Spy, memoir of a CIA wife" by Bina Kiyonaga. Take a look.

Some of my favourite non-fiction books on espionage include Cold Warrior by Tom Mangold (a biography of the fascinating James Angleton), Battleground Berlin by Murphy and Kondrashev, and MI6 by Stephen Dorril. These are all extremely well researched books, the first two mainly about the Cold War.