Push play to hear this 21 minute podcast. You don’t need to subscribe. It is free.
(2-26-20) THIS IS NOT ABOUT MENTAL ILLNESS.
Before I wrote, CRAZY: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness, I authored three books about spies. The History channel recently released a podcast about the CIA traitor Aldrich Ames based, in part, on a long interview with me.
My account about Ames is unique because I was able to interview him without any government censors being present – thanks to a misstep by federal prosecutors.
Early on, prosecutors declared that no journalists would be allowed to speak to Ames without prior FBI and CIA clearance. They informed the judge hearing his case, the FBI, the CIA, and defense attorneys for Ames. But they failed to tell the jailers where he was being held. When I showed up, I was allowed inside and spent 11 days interviewing him before prosecutors discovered it.
From the jail, I traveled to Moscow where I spoke to his KGB “handlers” and then back to the states where the CIA mole hunting team, that had captured him, spoke with me. The result: Confessions of a Spy: The Real Story of Aldrich Ames, published in 1997, is considered the definitive account of the case.
A funny story about the History channel podcast.
When its producers called the CIA to verify information, the agency used my book to “fact check” the broadcast – including the accuracy of my comments!
About the same time the podcast appeared, two friends of mine, published a new book entitled, Spy Sites Of New York, which is part of a series they’ve written.
This book is not some quickly done Map of the Stars offering. Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton, along with Henry R. Schlesinger, packed their book with fascinating details about spies in the Big Apple. On Thursday, March 5th, at 6 pm ET, they will be talking about their finding – where else but the KGB Espionage Museum at 245 W 14th St New York, NY 10011. Gerald Goodwin, the head of the New York Chapter of the Association of Foreign Intelligence Officers, will moderate the talk. The $30 ticket price will include a copy of the book, plus an exclusive tour of the museum.
If you live in the New York area and want to learn from two experts, get your ticket!
More spies from more countries are operating today in New York than in any other city. Why New York? The answer is revealed in the newly released Spy Sites of New York City by intelligence historian H. Keith Melton and former CIA senior officer Robert Wallace. From the intrigue of Revolutionary War espionage by the Culper spy ring through Alger Hiss’ clandestine meeting in a mid-town movie theater with his Soviet case officer to 21st century Russian spy Anna Chapman’s using covert internet communications in a Manhattan Starbucks, Spy Sites views New York through a spy’s eye. 230 entries and associated images chronicle and depict secret encounters, drop-sites, street corners, bars, hotels, and parks where shadowy history is made. Spy Sites is the old, yet fresh, story of tradecraft and deception in a city that grew from a small settlement on the tip of Manhattan Island in the 1700s to an international metropolis. Lesser known episodes about the secret intelligence work of author Ernest Hemingway and designer Bill Blass during World War Two share pages with cloak-and-dagger operations emanating from iconic locations like the Empire State Building, Central Park and and Rockefeller Center. Readers may be left with an eerie sense that in New York any waiter, cabbie, or woman playing Candy Crunch on the subway might be much different than they appear to be. In the city where espionage never sleeps, spies know no boundaries.
Spy Sites of New York City is available on amazon.com or a local book store. Autographed copies ($30 including shipping and handling) may be ordered by sending an email to bobwq@yahoo.com.
Sites of New York City
Book review by William D. Rubinstein
Spy Sites of New York City is a rather unusual, intelligently written and well-produced guide to buildings and other the other places in New York City and its suburbs associated in the broadest sense with spies and espionage, from the period of the American Revolution to the present age of terrorism. The realities of contemporary Great Power politics also mean that there is an entry for the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations (on East 67th Street), which is apparently ‘[known as a base for espionage operations’.
This richly illustrated book is arranged by time period, with, among others, 22 pages devoted to spies of the American Revolution, and 63 pages to espionage under the heading ‘Fascism, Communism, and World War II’. Each chapter is arranged in the form of entries for each relevant place, with, for instance, 52 separate entries in the ‘Fascism, Communism and World War II’ chapter, and some 233 entries in all. The individual entries are unusually well researched and written, and are notably free of tabloid sensationalism.
Continue reading here.
About the author:
