The Secret Agent Books

As a proud former member of the United States Secret Service, I believe that this product is worth your time and money...and I also feel it is my perogative to inform everyone here that, while Vince Palamara is to be commended for his notable research acumen and getting many of my colleagues-and myself- to speak to him, he has also done so at the expense of many of their feelings, beliefs, and trust. In short, Vince Palamara believes the means justifies the ends.
So, imagine my horror when I turn on the television a few years back and I SEE the young researcher who promised myself and many others that he was not a journalist, stating facts, theories, and innuendo as the gospel truth. Emory Roberts, for one, cannot defend himself. I will concede that I have no good explanation for what transpires on the film Palamara shows-but does that have to lead to conspiratorial conclusions? Does it, Vince?
From what I gather, many members of the AFAUSSS, myself included, are quite upset with him, as well they should be.

Can we let sleeping dogs lie? Lee Harvy Oswald killed President John Kennedy, acting alone. Yes, my colleagues did not do their jobs as effectively as they could have or probably should have-but will that bring back the man? No. What useful purpose is served by defaming Kennedy's memory and all the still-living former agents with calling into question the very painful loss of said man, as well as their job performance.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
T.R., proud alumni/ past member of the folowing organizations:
MSU
Army 1957-1959
USSS 1961-1982

As the leading civilian authority on the U.S. Secret Service, I heartily recommend this internal SECRET SERVICE ONLY book (meant for former agents, primarily). I was fortunate to have a very old, former agent graciously provide a complete photocopy of this book. There are priceless photographs and some very good information inside...lots of cool pictures of Robert L. "Bobby D" DeProspero, Jerry Behn, Floyd Boring, etc. etc. etc. Highly recommended...if you can obtain a copy from a retired agent! ;-)

Professor Hans Winberg taught organic chemistry at my alma mater, Grinnell College [1950's]. Students of my era knew only marginally anything about Dr. Winberg's World War II experiences. We were just impressed to know such an intelligent person. Destination Innsbruck provides all the amazing details of his war experience. Equally important is the detail about the people of Oberperfuss who sheltered him from the Nazis. I can be thankful that the events happened at the end of the war when the outcome, the Allied Forces Victory, was known to all rational people. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and the sense of suspense.

As one of the participants in this mission I must admit reading about my own adventure with continued interest. I didnot realize that I was this brave...! In a broader context it is highly revealing to a younger generation that the three participants in this daring mission behind enemy lines during the second world war was carried out by two immigrants (Freddy and Hans) and one "foreigner". When the war was over, and the CIA arose out of the ashes of the OSS, neither of these three agents was eligble for employment with that agency, since the CIA (in 1947) decided to employ american citizens only... Hans Wynberg Professor of Organic Chemistry (retired)

This book, written by a former Secret Service agentgives a great insight to what the job is like in the eyes of an Agent. McCarthy gives great detail in the assassination attempt of Ronald Reagan which is interesting. This is overall a great book that I keep on reading over and over again.

As the leading civilian authority on the U.S. Secret Service, I was most impressed with this fine book by Dennis (no relation to Tim) McCarthy (with some help from his co-author, Philip W. Smith). It reads very well, it's funny, informative, and even has a nice photo section, to boot. The Secret Service were NOT pleased with this book...further reason to get it asap! ;-) Seriously, although, in hindsight, although he received a medal, Dennis McCarthy's role that fateful day on 3/30/81 was relatively minor, especially in comparison to the bravery (and bloodshed) of Jerry Parr, Tim McCarthy, Drew Unrue, and Ray Shaddick, among others. In fact, on the video "Inside The Secret Service," an actor portraying a threat to the President is shown reading a copy of this book (!) and, if that weren't enough, a still photo of the four agents decorated for valor for their heroics---Parr, Shaddick, McCarthy, and TIM McCarthy---is depicted with DENNIS McCarthy cropped out and not even mentioned! All that aside, a fine book. Get it!!!

This is the very best book I have read regarding the Japanese invasion of Manchuko 1931-1945. Mr. Vespa exits Harbin, China just ahead of the Japanese Police. His family are captured and treated horribly. His stories correspond with what my friend General "C" told me. They were friends in this conflict and the General had the higest regard for the man he simply called "Vespa". You will enjoy this book! If you are the relative who wrote the other review I would like to trade emails. You can contact me at netplus dot net. Thank you!

I have been listening stories on "Zio" (uncle, in Italian) Amleto since I was a kid. He was my grandfather's favourite uncle. My granpa was so proud of the man that took his own family and life by surprise, deciding to leave everything to fight for things he believed in. I used to dream of this courageous man who left a small town and a poor family in the Italian countryside to fight the Mexican civil war without blinking. I re-lived his life through my grandfather's words, his travels through Eastern Europe in an era when no one dared to do so, marrying a Polish Countess and taking her along to Asia; i went through a rollercoaster of emotions imagining trains blowing up, real james bond type action, a glamourous life and such an un-glamourous death. I read the letters Amleto Vespa wrote his family back in Italy, his fear of being killed without seeing his loved ones. My great grand uncle lived his to the fullest and travelled distances to realize whatever his dreams might have been. Secret agent of Japan is a simple and wonderful book that tells you how life was for a real spy in the Orient during early-mid century. Needless to say this book is dearest to me, and I hope that some of you will take the time and patience to read it.

If you are reader who wrote the above review, please email me at laviniapenna@juno.com - tried to email you but your email came back. thanks.

Documenting 35 years of cutting-edge work from one of America's most important contemporary artists, The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson is a "must have" for academics, artists and anyone interested in contemporary film, video, performance art, installation art, feminism or new media. If Leeson's range of media seems impressive, run down the list of her technical innovations, which reads like the dreams of several artists rather than the achievement of one (a theme, by the way, underscored throughout her work): creator of one of the first interactive videodisc artworks, one of the earliest networked robotic art installations, the first artwork to use touch-screen interface and, most recently, a process for making virtual sets, called LHL, designed for her first feature film, Conceiving Ada. Her reputation as a constant innovator and "pioneer of new media" isn't surprising, unlike the fact that this book is the first comprehensive look at her work. If you don't know about Lynn Hershman Leeson already, you should.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Hershmanlandia: The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson, this book does an excellent job of both providing coverage while offering detailed analyses of Leeson's work. Edited by artist and art historian Meredith Tromble, the text includes a well-balanced selection of multidisciplinary essays written by art critics, historians and curators, film historians and theorists, and Hershman herself. Hershman's "Private I: An Investigator's Timeline," gives a succinct yet detailed account of her career while reenacting her playful, witty and sophisticated use of autobiography as a means to articulate the complexities of subjectivity in general, where binary distinctions such as public vs. private, personal vs. political, human vs. machine, art vs. science, fantasy vs. reality, and art-making vs. world-making are, through a plethora of odd meetings and wild matings, playfully problematized and profoundly upended.

The collection of essays are, for the most part, concise and insightful, produced by some of the best scholars in their respective fields. For example, Abigail Solomon-Godeau reads Leeson's strategies of "conscientious objectification," her "intervention into the mechanics of spectacle," as a form of "ethical self-reflection," while Amelia Jones locates Leeson in a genealogy of performative photographic self-display routed through Claude Cahun, recognizing Leeson's ability to simultaneously affirm both surface and depth in an image, the "simulacral nature of postmodern culture" and the lived experience of a subject in the flesh--in this case, "female experience in patriarchy." David E. James also addresses Leeson's work as a performance of self, but shows how Leeson complicates and extends this strategy by working with the influences, tensions and contradictions that circulate between autobiography (as authorial agency, biographical truth as well as fabrication) and the materiality of representation (in this case video), throwing into relief the tenuous and porous boundaries between the individual and the social, subjects and objects of knowledge, truth and fiction, life and death, and trauma and healing.

The book contains 17 color plates, a good number of figures, and a beautifully organized DVD that includes presentation of the artworks (both stills and clips), more essays on Hershman's work, and selected histories: videos, films, exhibitions and awards. While much of the material overlaps, the DVD will also point you to Hershman's website and impressive web-based projects, such as Agent Ruby. Be sure to check them out.

First in a series of 40 ASSIGNMENT books, this one was published a couple years after Ian Fleming's Casino Royale. With cold war and missle shots, good, hard hitting, realistic spy fiction sold well. And these books by both Fleming and Aarons still sell today.

Sam Durell works for K-Section, CIA, at 20 Annapolis Street, Washington, D.C. He has previously worked with G2, and the OSS during WWII. He is one of our first cold war soldiers and tough customer in and of himself. Hailing from Louisanna Peche Bayou off a gambler's river boat, he is a person with few illusions but much tenacity of spirit.

This novel has a space scientist gone missing, and Sam (or Cajun as he will later be called), has only 96 hours in which to find Calvin Padgett. He has orders to find him, stop him, kill him if necessary. And for 160 pages Sam is totally committed to this mission, while all people around him turn completely against him. He becomes a man alone in this mission, "in a deadly race against time" from page 1 through page 160.

This book introduces the character Sam Durell and those around him, such as General Dickinson McFee, who become standards in many of the books. The action of this novel moves from Washington to Maryland to New Mexico to Louisanna and back to D.C. before eventually working itself out. The writing is very good and Aarons' plotting is too. But since many other Sam Durell books have been read by this reviewer in the past, this book seems a little stiff, not cardboard stiff, but somewhat lacking in characterization. Understandably the author was no doubt as much a stranger to Sam Durell as we were, feeling his way along, shaping the character as he went. With each subsequent novel Sam becomes a much more believable, and much less angry hero.

If you enjoy espionage as portrayed by Ian Fleming's James Bond, you will no doubt find Sam Durell worth your reading time. Though I very much enjoy the James Bond character, I always find Sam Durell much more believable and realistic. Though Mr. Aarons has been dead for some time, he left us a remarkable series of ASSIGNMENT books for our reading pleasure.

Recommended reading.

Semper Fi.

Alex Constantine, does it again with some very good investgative work. So often what we see and hear does not make sense, and that is because it is not suppose to make sense. We are to just believe and except what is presented to us. Journalist like Alex goes past the noise and finds out the real facts and presents it to his readers.
Concerning the LA riots, as he says "caged birds do not sing". For the most part the people of the riot areas have been beaten down and do not have the energy or drive to pull off the kind of coordinated effort seen in the riots. Agent provocateurs were and are still used to further the government agenda.

Thanks
Ben

This book was given to my 9 year old son and he loves it! We used some of the activities for his Spy Party and all the kids had a blast trying to decode the secret messages. The book is filled with activities and it provides you with the necessary paper/forms to carryout those activities. Not only does it have great activities, but it also has wonderful information about real spies. Overall, this is a great book for kids who enjoy pretending to be spies and learning about them!

Anyone interested in thehistory of nazi espionage will find that this book is a must-read. Absolutely riveting. Highly recommended.

As the leading civilian authority on the U.S. Secret Service, I get a kick out of Marty Venker: he is alot like one of his evident heroes, Brooks Keller (the wild former agent chronicled briefly in both his book and Dennis McCarthy's). Venker's book, actually 'written' by George Rush, is a funny yet informative chronicle of a square peg in a round hole---Venker, the wild child, trying to conform to rigid, structured, pressure-packed duty as a Special Agent. The lack of an index will frustrate you (at least in the paperback), but there are many nice nuggets and anecdotes to be found here. Get this at once!