Download PDF Bridge of Spies, by Giles Whittell
Even we discuss the books Bridge Of Spies, By Giles Whittell; you might not discover the printed publications right here. Many collections are given in soft documents. It will exactly provide you more advantages. Why? The initial is that you could not need to bring guide all over by fulfilling the bag with this Bridge Of Spies, By Giles Whittell It is for guide is in soft data, so you could wait in device. After that, you can open up the device everywhere as well as read the book appropriately. Those are some few advantages that can be got. So, take all advantages of getting this soft documents book Bridge Of Spies, By Giles Whittell in this site by downloading in web link given.
Bridge of Spies, by Giles Whittell
Download PDF Bridge of Spies, by Giles Whittell
Think of that you get such particular remarkable experience and also knowledge by only reading a publication Bridge Of Spies, By Giles Whittell. Exactly how can? It appears to be higher when a book could be the most effective thing to discover. E-books now will certainly appear in printed as well as soft documents collection. Among them is this publication Bridge Of Spies, By Giles Whittell It is so typical with the printed books. However, many individuals often have no space to bring the publication for them; this is why they cannot check out guide wherever they desire.
Reviewing book Bridge Of Spies, By Giles Whittell, nowadays, will not compel you to always buy in the store off-line. There is a fantastic area to buy guide Bridge Of Spies, By Giles Whittell by on the internet. This website is the very best site with great deals varieties of book collections. As this Bridge Of Spies, By Giles Whittell will certainly remain in this publication, all publications that you need will correct below, also. Simply hunt for the name or title of guide Bridge Of Spies, By Giles Whittell You could find what exactly you are searching for.
So, also you need commitment from the firm, you may not be confused anymore due to the fact that books Bridge Of Spies, By Giles Whittell will always help you. If this Bridge Of Spies, By Giles Whittell is your best companion today to cover your job or job, you could when possible get this publication. Exactly how? As we have told previously, merely see the web link that our company offer below. The final thought is not just guide Bridge Of Spies, By Giles Whittell that you search for; it is exactly how you will certainly get several publications to sustain your skill and also capacity to have great performance.
We will certainly reveal you the very best and simplest method to obtain publication Bridge Of Spies, By Giles Whittell in this globe. Bunches of compilations that will certainly support your task will be right here. It will certainly make you really feel so ideal to be part of this site. Ending up being the member to constantly see just what up-to-date from this book Bridge Of Spies, By Giles Whittell site will certainly make you feel appropriate to search for guides. So, just now, and here, get this Bridge Of Spies, By Giles Whittell to download as well as wait for your priceless worthwhile.
The dramatic events behind the film, BRIDGE OF SPIES.
Who were the three men the American and Soviet superpowers exchanged at Berlin's Glienicke Bridge and Checkpoint Charlie in the first and most legendary prisoner exchange between East and West? Bridge of Spies vividly traces their paths to that exchange on February 10, 1962, when their fate helped to define the conflicts and lethal undercurrents of the most dangerous years of the Cold War.
Bridge of Spies is the true story of three extraordinary characters – William Fisher, alias Rudolf Abel, a British born KGB agent arrested by the FBI in New York City and jailed as a Soviet superspy for trying to steal America’s most precious nuclear secrets; Gary Powers, the American U-2 pilot who was captured when his plane was shot down while flying a reconnaissance mission over the closed cities of central Russia; and Frederic Pryor, a young American graduate student in Berlin mistakenly identified as a spy, arrested and held without charge by the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police.
By weaving the three strands of this story together for the first time, Giles Whittell masterfully portrays the intense political tensions and nuclear brinkmanship that brought the United States and Soviet Union so close to a hot war in the early 1960s. He reveals the dramatic lives of men drawn into the nadir of the Cold War by duty and curiosity, and the tragicomedy of errors that eventually induced Khrushchev to send missiles to Castro. Two of his subjects — the spy and the pilot — were the original seekers of weapons of mass destruction. The third, an intellectual, fluent in German, unencumbered by dependents, and researching a Ph.D. thesis on the foreign trade system of the Soviet bloc, seemed to the Stasi precisely the sort of person the CIA should have been recruiting. He was not. In over his head in the world capital of spying, he was wrongly charged with espionage and thus came to the Agency’s notice by a more roundabout route. The three men were rescued against daunting odds by fate and by their families, and then all but forgotten. Yet they laid bare the pathological mistrust that fueled the arms race for the next 30 years.
Drawing on new interviews conducted in the United States, Europe and Russia with key players in the exchange and the events leading to it, among them Frederic Pryor himself and the man who shot down Gary Powers, Bridge of Spies captures a time when the fate of the world really did depend on coded messages on microdots and brave young men in pressure suits. The exchange that frigid day at two of the most sensitive points along the Iron Curtain represented the first step back from where the superpowers had stood since the building of the Berlin Wall the previous summer – on the brink of World War III.
From the Hardcover edition.
- Sales Rank: #119468 in Books
- Published on: 2010-11-09
- Released on: 2010-11-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .70" w x 5.20" l, .73 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 304 pages
Review
"Riveting, meticulously researched and beautifully written, Bridge of Spies unlocks one of the most fascinating espionage mysteries of the Cold War" - Ben Macintyre, author of Operation Mincemeat
About the Author
Giles Whittell is the Washington, DC bureau chief for the Times of London. He has been the Times’ correspondent in Moscow and Los Angeles and has written four previous books including two about the break-up of the Soviet empire.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
THE WATERSPOUT
Shock and awe was not invented for Saddam Hussein. It was invented for Joseph Stalin, and it worked pretty well.
On July 24, 1946, as most of Russia slept, a team of U.S. Navy frogmen guided a heavy steel container to its final resting place in the clear waters of Bikini Lagoon, 2,500 miles west of Honolulu. They stabilized it with cables ninety feet below an anchored amphibious assault ship that gloried in the name LSM-60. The container was made from the conning tower of the USS Salmon, a scrapped navy submarine, and inside it was a working replica of the plutonium bomb that had killed eighty thousand people at Nagasaki the previous year. That evening, on a support vessel outside the lagoon, the frogmen ate T-bone steaks with all the trimmings.
Around the LSM-60, like giant moon shadows on the water’s calm surface, a target fleet of eighty-five more ships spent that night emptied of crew and supplies, with no role left except to sink. One of the closest to the bomb was the USS Arkansas, a 27,000-ton battleship that had carried President Taft to Panama before the First World War and bombarded Cherbourg and Iwo Jima in the Second. For most of her life the only way for a battleship to go down had been with guns blazing, but the nuclear age had changed that. It turned out that with the help of an atom bomb a battleship could go down like a toy in a bath. It could be flicked onto its bow and rammed into the seabed so that its superstructure fell off as if never even bolted on.
Shortly after breakfast time on the morning of the twenty-fifth, the Arkansas was photographed from every angle as the bomb in the steel container was detonated 170 yards from her hull. Cameras in a B-29 bomber twenty-five thousand feet above the lagoon and a little to the south captured the sight of a huge disc of ocean turning white in an instant. That was the water beneath the Arkansas being vaporized.
The shockwave from the initial blast rolled the ship onto her side and ripped off her propellers. A six-thousand-foot column of spray and water, created in about two and a half seconds, then heaved her into a vertical position in which two thirds of her length were clearly visible ten miles away, dwarfed by the largest man-made waterspout in history. She has lain upside down on the floor of the lagoon ever since.
The Arkansas was one of ten ships sunk outright by what came to be known as the Baker shot. It was the second of two nuclear tests conducted at Bikini with undisguised panache as the world adjusted to an awesome new technology (and to the daring swimsuit it inspired; the first-ever bikini, presented in Paris that month, was called l’atome, and the second was a buttock-baring thong described by one fashion writer as what the survivor of a nuclear blast could expect to be wearing as the fireball subsided).
Participation in the tests by U.S. military personnel was voluntary but popular. In shirtsleeves and sunglasses, 37,000 men extended their wartime service for a year to help set up the tests and to see for themselves the power of the weapon that had brought Japan to its knees.
Pat Bradley was there, up a tree with a movie camera on Bikini atoll to film the blast and the tsunami it produced—a single ninety-foot wave that subsided before it hit the island, then three smaller waves. “It took a couple of minutes before the first wave came in to the atoll,” he remembered. “The second came in higher, then the third completely covered the island four to six feet deep.”
A lean and thoughtful young air force captain named Stan Beerli was there too. He had survived the world war in B-17 bombers over Italy and would survive the cold war in the regulation dark suit of the CIA. His tasks would include trying to keep Gary Powers and the U-2 in the shadows where they belonged, but for the time being the cold war was pure spectacle.
The foreign and domestic press were welcome at Bikini. The Baker shot was witnessed by 131 reporters, including a full Soviet contingent. With Warner Bros.’ help, the Pentagon released a propaganda film of the blast for anyone who had missed the initial coverage, and Admiral William “Spike” Blandy, who oversaw the operation, posed with his wife cutting an angel food cake in the shape of a mushroom cloud.
Responding to public anxiety before the blast, Blandy promised that he was “not an atomic playboy” and that the bomb would not “blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole.” This was true, but it could still do a lot of damage. In the summer of 1947 Life magazine published a long article based on official studies of the intense radioactive fallout from the Baker bomb. It concluded that if a similar weapon were to explode off the tip of Manhattan in a stiff southerly wind, two million people would die.
America had finished the war with a pair of atom bombs and started the peace in the same way. President Truman’s message to Stalin could not have been clearer if written in blood. It was a warning not to contemplate starting a new war in Europe trusting in the Red Army’s old-fashioned strength in numbers. And it signaled more concisely than any speech that Truman had accepted the central argument of George Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram,” sent from the U.S. embassy in Moscow six months before the tests: the Soviet Union had to be contained. As Truman himself put it: “If we could just have Stalin and his boys see one of these things, there wouldn’t be any question about another war.”
Stalin refused to be intimidated. He had not sacrificed twenty million people to defeat Fascism only to be told where to set the limits on Stalinism. And yet he had a problem.
At the time of the Bikini tests, the Soviet Union was still three years and a month from exploding its first nuclear weapon. Its efforts to build one were under way on a bend in the Shagan River in eastern Kazakhstan, under the direction of a bearded young hero of Soviet science (and tightly closeted homosexual) named Igor Kurchatov. Stalin had deemed the bomb “Problem Number One.” He had created a special state committee to ensure that no expense was spared in solving it. Whole mountains in Bulgaria had been commandeered to give Kurchatov the uranium he needed. But Kurchatov was not an innovator. He was a nuclear plagiarist, almost completely dependent on intelligence from left-leaning scientists in the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. As he admitted in a 1943 memo to the Council of People’s Commissars, this flow of intelligence had “immense, indeed incalculable importance for our State and science”—but in 1946 the flow had slowed suddenly to a trickle.
Just a year earlier, not one but two descriptions of the first bomb tested at Los Alamos were in the Kremlin nearly two weeks before it even exploded. After that test, more detailed diagrams of the device reached Moscow than were provided in the first official nuclear report to Congress. One was smuggled out of Albuquerque in a box of Kleenex. Atomic espionage was never more bountiful than this. But on November 7, 1945, Elizabeth Terrill Bentley, a thirty-seven-year-old graduate of Vassar and a paid-up Soviet agent, went to the FBI with a 107-page description of Soviet intelligence activities in North America. The following day J. Edgar Hoover sent a secret memo to the White House based on Bentley’s material. It produced few arrests because she offered scant supporting evidence, but her defection forced Moscow to shut down most of the channels feeding nuclear secrets to Kurchatov.
There were other reasons why Soviet espionage in the United States was grinding to a halt. Victory in the war had removed the most compelling reason for scientists at Los Alamos to share designs with their former Soviet allies—the defeat of Nazism. And the U.S. Army had at last begun decoding encrypted Soviet cable traffic, code-named Venona, that corroborated many of Bentley’s allegations.
Without vital intelligence from the true pioneers of nuclear fission in New Mexico, Kurchatov would not be able to complete the bomb. Without the bomb, the most that the Soviet empire could hope to do was defend its interminable frontiers. As the Bikini lagoon erupted, the outlook for international Communism looked bleak indeed. Yet from the bowels of the Lyubianka—headquarters of the KGB and the true engine room of the revolution—there came a glimmer of hope.
Most helpful customer reviews
67 of 69 people found the following review helpful.
A must-read for spy buffs
By matt
Utterly fascinating. This book is important for anyone with an interest in why the arms race dragged on so long, but it's a must if you have a secret thing for spy planes. Considering its impact on world events, the story of Gary Powers' final flight over Russia in 1960 is surely one of the most neglected of the Cold War. It has been told before, but to my knowledge this is the first time a western writer has tracked down the Russians who actually brought Powers down. Whittell has put together the final hours leading up to the shoot-down in a way that finally lays to rest the theory that Powers somehow brought it on himself by flying too low. He also claims that but for the shoot-down there would have been no Cuban missile crisis and Nixon might have beaten Kennedy in 1960. What is not in doubt is that the collapse of the superpower summit two weeks after Powers was taken prisoner set the scene for the Berlin spy swap on the bridge in the book's title. There were supposed to be no civilian witnesses to the exchange, but one of those involved was an American post-grad falsely accused of working for the CIA, and one of those who saw the tail-end of the swap on the bridge was a young Reuters correspondent who never got a byline for her story. The author interviews them both, and many more. Brilliantly written, this is an essential addition to any Cold War buff's collection.
44 of 44 people found the following review helpful.
Spooks and U2s
By michael evans
Giles Whittell is a natural-born reporter, a writer with an eye for detail and for the dramatic. Bridge of Spies is not just his version of the famous story of the U2 pilot who was shot down over the Soviet Union and his swap with a legendary Russian spy. It's a thriller in its own right, with all the ingredients of an exceptionally well told and observed story. Whittell is a reporter in his element, writing on a subject he clearly finds fascinating and portraying Francis Gary Powers in a sympathetic light, unlike his CIA masters who appear to have resented the fact that he survived his traumatic shoot-down at 70,000ft and was imprisoned by the KGB, poviding the Russians with a propaganda trophy with which to berate the Americans.
What makes this book such a good read are the characters. They bring this story to life and provide the reader with an insight into an historical event which was not just about the politics of the Cold War but a personal account of people who were embroiled in some of the most daring and exciting exploits of that past era; and as we know from the more recent exposure of the Russian spy ring in the United States which included a beautiful and shapely female spy, Anna Chapman, espionage is not a dying profession. The Cold War, in a different disguise, goes on.
The secrecy of the U2 programme - the elegant silver (then black) aircraft which were supposedly part of the Weather Reconnaissance Squadron Number Two - the sheer endurance of the pilots like Powers, strapped for hours in space suits as they flew over the forbidden territory of the Soviet Union; the machinations of William Fisher, alias Rudolf Abel, who achieved very little despite a reputation for being a masterspy; and Frederic Pryor, the spy who never was a spy. All the components required for a thriller. I also loved the bravado of the American lawyer, James Donovan, Fisher's lawyer, and the woman who briefly stars in the story whose scoop was read around the world - Annette von Broecker, the Reuters "editorial assistant" (not even a reporter) who predicted that the spy swap between Powers and Fisher would take place at Berlin's Glienicke Bridge and while every other reporter was waiting at the more famous Checkpoint Charlie, she rushed off to the lesser known bridge and was in time to witness the handover. But she didn't even get her byline on the story - just a cup of hot chocolate from her colleagues by way of thanks! Another personal ingredient in a wonderful book.
30 of 30 people found the following review helpful.
Great
By kupchr36
Disclaimer right up front: I knew basically nothing about all of this, I was not even close to alive near any of these events and had not done any independent research on it before reading this book. I knew a U2 got shot down over the USSR at some point in the Cold War and that is about it...
That being said, I thought this book was great. It reads quickly, keeps you moving while still being informative/somewhat scholarly, and it is, most importantly, entertaining. I found the overall premise really fascinating on its own, but the author does a good job of spicing up duller parts (perhaps a bit liberally, but nonetheless it works). There really is not much more to say, if you find the description interesting then this book will entertain you, it is not a deceptive description of the story. If you think you would find this book interesting, you will...
Bridge of Spies, by Giles Whittell PDF
Bridge of Spies, by Giles Whittell EPub
Bridge of Spies, by Giles Whittell Doc
Bridge of Spies, by Giles Whittell iBooks
Bridge of Spies, by Giles Whittell rtf
Bridge of Spies, by Giles Whittell Mobipocket
Bridge of Spies, by Giles Whittell Kindle
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar