Nail-biting. . . . Blum’s access to Bagley’s writings and a myriad of other sources enables him to craft a page-turning narrative. This reads like a John le Carré novel come to life.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
By going back and forth in time, Blum cleverly makes his pieces part of agency folklore, terrific stories in their own right. This is the Cold War at high noon, missiles loaded, when spies were the front-line troops. If you have even a passing interest in the period, the book will be catnip. . . . The period details are so atmospheric and rich that it would be no surprise to see Kim Philby make a guest appearance. . . . It would be easy to get lost in all this, but Blum lays out his pieces clearly, and entertainingly. — Washington Post
"Howard Blum, a former New York Times reporter, has written an exciting, page-turning account of this internecine warfare, why Bagley persisted in fighting it, and the conclusions he finally reached." — Commentary
"An eye-popping, nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat thriller." — Linda Hitchcock, BookTrib
★ 04/25/2022
Did the KGB have a mole with access to some of the CIA’s most sensitive information who was never caught? That tantalizing question is at the heart of this nail-biting account from former New York Times investigative reporter Blum (Night of the Assassins: The Untold Story of Hitler’s Plot to Kill FDR, Churchill, and Stalin). Starting in 1950, Pete Bagley was the deputy head of the CIA’s Soviet Bloc division and came to suspect that Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer who defected to the U.S. soon after President Kennedy’s assassination, was a plant, but was unable to persuade his superiors of that conclusion. Instead, Bagley himself came under suspicion of providing intelligence to the Soviets. Bagley searched for the real mole and continued his hunt even after leaving the CIA in 1972. The suspicious death of John Paisley, a CIA analyst whose body was found in Chesapeake Bay in 1978, ruled a suicide despite contrary evidence, led Bagley to pursue clues that Paisley was the mole—and that Nosenko had “defected” to help conceal Paisley’s treachery. Blum’s access to Bagley’s writings and a myriad of other sources enables him to craft a page-turning narrative. This reads like a John le Carré novel come to life. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (June)
01/01/2022
New York Times best-selling authors Abrams and Fisher join forces with Gray, the young Black lawyer who served as Martin Luther King's defense attorney when King was tried for his part in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, to tell the story of the trial in Alabama v. King (150,000-copy first printing). Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bissinger chronicles The Mosquito Bowl, a football game played in the Pacific theater on Christmas Eve 1944 between the 4th and 29th Marine regiments to prove which had the better players (400,000-copy first printing). In The Spy Who Knew Too Much, New York Times best-selling, Edgar Award-winning Blum recounts efforts by Tennent "Pete" Bagley—a rising CIA star accused of being a mole—to redeem his reputation by solving the disappearance of former CIA officer John Paisley and to reconcile with his daughter, who married his accuser's son (50,000-copy first printing). Associate professor of musicology at the University of Michigan, Clague reveals how The Star-Spangled Banner became the national anthem in O Say Can You Hear? Multiply honored for his many history books, Dolin returns with Rebels at Sea to chronicle the contributions of the freelance sailors—too often called profiteers or pirates—who scurried about on private vessels to help win the Revolutionary War. With The Earth Is All That Lasts, Gardner, the award-winning author of Rough Riders and To Hell on a Fast Horse, offers a dual biography of the significant Indigenous leaders Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull (50,000-copy first printing). With We Refuse To Forget, New America and PEN America fellow Gayle investigates the Creek Nation, which both enslaved Black people and accepted them as full citizens, electing the Black Creek citizen Cow Tom as chief in the mid 1800s but stripping Black Creeks of their citizenship in the 1970s. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Hoffman's Give Me Liberty profiles Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá, who founded the Christian Liberation Movement in 1987 to challenge Fidel Castro's Communist regime (50,000-copy first printing). Forensic anthropologist Kimmerle's We Carry Their Bones the true story of the Dozier Boys School, first brought to light in Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Nickel Boys (75,000-copy first printing). Kissinger's Leadership plumbs modern statecraft, putting forth Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, Margaret Thatcher, Richard Nixon, Lee Kuan Yew, and Anwar Sadat as game-changing leaders who helped create a new world order. From a prominent family that included the tutor to China's last emperor, Li profiles her aunts Jun and Hong—separated after the Chinese Civil War, with one becoming a committed Communist and the other a committed capitalist—in Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden. New York Times best-selling author Mazzeo (Irena's Children) reveals that three Sisters in Resistance—a German spy, an American socialite, and Mussolini's daughter—risked their lives to hand over the secret diaries of Italy's jailed former foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, to the Allies; the diaries later figured importantly in the Nuremberg Trials (45,000-copy first printing). A Junior Research Fellowship in English at University College, Oxford, whose PhD dissertation examined how gay cruising manifests in New York poetry, Parlett explains that New York's Fire Island has figured importantly in art, literature, culture, and queer liberation over the past century (75,000-copy first printing). Author of the New York Times best-selling Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy and a former CIA officer, Reynolds argues in Need To Know for the importance of U.S. intelligence during World War II in securing victory. As he reveals in Getting Out of Saigon, White was directed by Chase Manhattan Bank to close its Saigon branch in 1975 and went beyond orders by evacuating not just senior Vietnamese employees but the entire staff and their families (75,000-copy first printing).
2022-04-12
Cold War–era CIA intrigue, dramatic and brutal.
Prolific author and reporter Blum tells a striking story, though his breezy narrative may put off readers familiar with more judicious CIA–related books, Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes foremost among them. Blum’s central character is Tennent Bagley of the CIA’s elite Soviet Bloc division. He was working in Switzerland in 1962 when KGB agent Yuri Nosenko offered his services. After interviewing him, Bagley was convinced that Nosenko was precisely who he claimed to be. Promising to deliver secrets, Nosenko returned to Moscow and Bagley to Washington, D.C., where James Angleton, head of CIA counterintelligence, suggested that he read the file of Anatoly Golitsyn, another KGB agent who had defected in 1961. To Bagley’s amazement, Golitsyn had recounted incidents and operations identical to Nosenko’s. He concluded that Nosenko was a bogus agent sent to impugn Golitsyn but also that this indicated the presence of a highly placed mole inside the CIA. The plot thickened when Nosenko defected. Flown to the U.S., he responded to Bagley’s questioning with a mixture of boasting, self-promotion, contradictions, and lies, but he insisted that his defection was genuine. Nosenko was locked alone in a small, dark room for more than three years, taken out only for interrogation. Still maintaining his innocence, he received his freedom, an apology, compensation, and permission to remain in the U.S. Unconvinced and certain he was the victim of self-serving CIA politics, Bagley retired only to be galvanized years later by the apparent death of a CIA official, unconvincingly described as a suicide. Although he was barred from CIA archives, he launched an exhaustive search and ultimately concluded that the purported victim, John Paisley, was the mole. Blum admits that nearly everyone involved, Bagley included, was dead when he began his research. While many passages are pure speculation, tolerant readers will enjoy a largely entertaining spy story full of cutthroat CIA infighting and the occasional cut throat.
Novelistic, fast-paced history.
