Built in Bias. Someone Ping Libby's lawyer, this should be inccluded in the Appeal process.
Denis Collins, with the International Spy Museum. SPYING: The Secret History of History. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Inc., 2004. 166 pages, bibliography, photos, index.
This coffee-table book, based on the exhibits found in the immensely popular Washington, DC, International Spy Museum, has an attractive cover. But its subtitle claims far more than its content delivers. In attempting to satisfy “the craving in each of us” to know more about the people, operations, and tradecraft of spying (vi), the museum has produced a disappointing book. It is not a matter of being superficial when covering a wide range of topics, it is a matter of being accurate, especially when the source enjoys considerable authority in the field. SPYING contains far too many errors of fact, both historical and contemporaneous. In the former category, in a discussion of British intelligence, author Daniel Defoe is called “the father of British intelligence” (147) when that accolade goes to Sir Francis Walsingham. In the section on George Washington, America’s first spymaster, the museum tells us that Washington was camped in Valley Forge when he decided to attack the Hessians at Trenton in 1776 (12). History, however, records that Washington’s winter encampment at Valley Forge did not occur until a year later.
In a claim related to more recent events—that World War II double agent Dusko Popov gave the FBI evidence of a planned attack on Pearl Harbor and Director J. Edgar Hoover ignored the warnings—the book errs on both counts. Popov brought no warning, and what he did bring, Hoover gave to the War and Navy departments. The museum’s assertion that William Colby and Ian Fleming were graduates of the World War II paramilitary training facility in Canada, Camp X, is equally in error (27).[5] And then there is the story of William Stephenson, head of British intelligence in New York during World War II (57). Most of the biographical details are incorrect, but, more to the point, some operational details are wrong, too. For example, the claim that Stephenson “delivered to President Franklin Roosevelt the map of a scheme to divide Central and South America into German colonies” leaves out the fact that the map, mentioned by the president in a nationwide radio address, was a fake prepared by Stephenson’s unit to influence American public opinion![6]
Turning to Cold War intelligence, SPYING’s narrative notes that after disbanding the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), President Truman “refused all entreaties to form a peacetime agency to collect and evaluate intelligence” (40). Not so, as historian Thomas F. Troy has shown. On the same day that Truman abolished the OSS, he sent a letter to the secretary of state saying: “I particularly desire that you take the lead in developing a comprehensive and coordinated foreign intelligence program for all Federal agencies concerned with that type of activity. This should be . . . under the State Department.”[7] Then there is the sidebar stating that “In 1947, CIA head Allen Dulles . . . ” when that was a position he would not hold for another six years. In the same vein, KGB illegal Rudolf Abel was not, as the museum claims, “fingered by the newspaper boy.” A KGB defector did that job. When describing Operation GOLD, the tapping of Soviet telephone lines in East Berlin, the suggestion that the Soviets might “wrongly believe that the West had not broken its cipher code, making the intercepts harmless,” is put right by David Murphy and Sergei Kondrachev in their book Battleground Berlin—the lines were not encrypted.
While SPYING gives a good idea of the topics and exhibits to be found in the International Spy Museum, the errors in the descriptive commentary, only some of which are mentioned above, diminish its value as a contribution to intelligence literature and reflect poorly on the reputation of the museum.
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