Roosevelt's Secret War; FDR and World War II Espionage

xxiv, 564, [4] pages. Illustrations. Includes Foreword, A Note to Readers, Acknowledgments, and Prologue, as well as Bibliography, Source Notes, and Index. Chapters include Gentleman Amateurs; Spies, Saboteurs, and Traitors; Strange Bedfellows; Spymaster in the Oval Office; The Defeatist and the Defiant; "There Is No U.S. Secret Intelligence Service"; Spies Versus Ciphers; Donovan Enters the Game; "Our Objective Is to Get America into the War"; Catastrophe or Conspiracy; Secrets of the Map Room; Intramural Spy Wars; Premier Secret of the War; Enter the OSS; "We Are Striking Back"; An Exchange: An Invasion for a Bomb; Leakage from the Top; Distrusting Allies; Deceivers and the Deceived; The White House Is Penetrated; If Overlord Fails; Cracks in the Reich; A Secret Unshared; "Take a Look at the OSS"; Sympathizers and Spies; A Leaky Vessel; Who Knew--and When? "Stalin Has Been Deceiving Me All Along"; The Following Are the Latest Casualties"; and Aftermath. Blending anecdotes, speculations, and documented facts into an exciting story of collecting and transmitting information in wartime, Persico offers a clear-eyed take on FDR's approach to intelligence. Roosevelt's use of intelligence decisively shaped the war and helped define the peace that followed. Joseph Edward Persico (July 19, 1930 - August 30, 2014) was an author and American military historian. His book Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial tells the story of the Nuremberg Trials; it was adapted for television as the docudrama Nuremberg. He contributed to the design of the World War II Memorial. Derived from a Kirkus review: A historian argues that FDR's fascination and talent with intelligence helped make him an effective commander-in-chief during WWII. Persico is a Roosevelt partisan. Persico fills a void in WWII histories by focusing on the intelligence aspects of most of the war's major events. He begins, of course, with Pearl Harbor, which he calls "the most stunning failure of intelligence in the country's history, likely in the history of warfare". Persico argues forcefully that neither FDR nor Winston Churchill knew of the raid in advance, despite the chain of evidence that suggests they could have. Persico charts the various rises and falls of J. Edgar Hoover and the OSS's William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan. Persico reveals that FDR was convinced that Charles Lindbergh was a Nazi and that Churchill did not conceal any knowledge of an imminent Luftwaffe raid on Coventry to prevent the Nazis from concluding that the British had cracked the German Enigma code. He reminds us that the US rounded up and detained about 20,000 German- and Italian-Americans in addition to the 114,000 Japanese-Americans. He tells the stories of the abortive attempts by the Nazis to land spies in the US-and of the more successful USSR penetration of the Manhattan Project, from which the Soviets stole 10,000 pages of information, enough to enable them to construct their own atomic bomb. Persico supports FDR's decision to do nothing dramatic to rescue Jews from the Holocaust: winning the war was the best strategy, he says. Persico shines some light on the shadowy activities that helped the Allies achieve some of their most significant victories. …