In the Enemy's House

Starred review from April 16, 2018
In this gripping exploration of Cold War spycraft, Blum (The Last Goodnight) lays out the complex chain of circumstances that led to the exposure of a major Soviet spy ring responsible for stealing America’s atomic secrets during and after WWII, and culminated with the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. As Blum follows the exploits of FBI agent Bob Lamphere and genius code breaker Meredith Gardner, he lays out the difficulties they faced in patiently unraveling the espionage network, one suspect at a time. To follow the trail to its source, they decrypted each stage of the code, compared it to a treasure trove of uncoded Soviet cables, and had to “re-create the KGB codebook” in order to match code names to actual people (“Kalibre” was Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass). Through extensive research and interviews, Blum brings a widespread cast of significant participants to life, from Lamphere and Gardner (from their awkward first meeting: “Meredith once again appeared to give the question considerable thought. But whether that was really the case... Bob could only guess. He found the man across from him inscrutable”) and their Soviet counterparts to the Rosenbergs and their many colleagues. Concise yet packed with details, this is a true page-turner, sure to appeal to those interested in the history of espionage or the Cold War. Photos.

January 15, 2018
"Both died without making any confessions": a finely detailed study of crime and punishment in the days of the Manhattan project.It was an unlikely pairing: a geeky linguist and codebreaker working for an early iteration of the National Security Agency just after World War II and an earnest FBI agent who teamed up to search out evidence of Soviet espionage inside the atomic bomb program. At the end of that trail lay the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the capture of Klaus Fuchs, but success in breaking up the spy ring and ferreting out the mole deep inside the organization was not without episodes of ineptitude and ball-dropping: "then, without either warning or explanation, two months after the Blue Problem had been launched, it was ended," writes veteran historian of spookdom Blum (The Last Goodnight: A World War II Story of Espionage, Adventure, and Betrayal, 2016, etc.), a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Getting to that mole was one thing; doing so without tipping the Soviets off to the fact that their codes had been broken was quite another. The author's story, which grows to enfold the Venona program, isn't entirely new, but it reinforces several points: how thoroughly Soviet agents were able to penetrate the government and scientific circles and the undeniable guilt of those who were eventually brought to justice--and, to boot, the ordinariness of some of the key players ("when Spillane arrived punctually at two, Kalibre, along with his pregnant wife--the woman code-named Wasp--sat with him at the kitchen table"). Blum is especially good on the motivations that caused some Americans to take the Soviet side. One explained that he felt that the American government committed "gross negligence" in not sharing atomic secrets with its recent ally, while Julius Rosenberg's haughty arrogance may lose him any sympathy readers might have had before opening the book.Taut and well-crafted--of great interest to students of spydom and the early Cold War.

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Starred review from February 15, 2018
Edgar-winning Blum, a former New York Times reporter, unites journalistic detail with propulsive storytelling. Blum's focus is on Russia's efforts to steal atomic secrets from the U.S. during WWII by infiltrating American intelligence. These efforts were aided and shielded by an elaborate and unbreakable code, much trickier than those of the Germans or Japanese. Blum's story is about how two Americans (the first, Meredith Gardner, an accomplished linguist and codebreaker; the second, Bob Lamphere, a somewhat reluctant FBI special agent) worked together to discover the identities of Russian spies, crack the Russian code, and keep the Russians from getting the atom bomb, at least for a while. Blum presents both a historical and a character-driven study here; perhaps even more interesting than the accounts of the spy-breaking moves and countermoves is the way that Blum shows the personalities of both Gardner and Lamphere, with the narrative arc leading to their shared sense of guilt over the fates of convictedand executedspies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. There's a lot of excitement throughout, as Blum shows how a piece of paper left on a desk, an overheard conversation, and a New York Times article (read by a Russian spy) contributed to hair-raising outcomes. Blum is a standout in the field of espionage history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)