E. B. Held

*A Spy’s Guide to Santa Fe and Albuquerque*, by E. Bruce Held, is a history of Soviet clandestine operations in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico, prior to and during the Cold War, particularly Soviet efforts to acquire information on U.S. nuclear weapons development, with a focus on the geography of Santa Fe and Albuquerque where clandestine information transfers took place.

Held was a CIA officer before heading counterespionage at Albuquerque’s Sandia National Laboratory and serving as the Department of Energy's acting undersecretary for nuclear security in the Obama administration. He introduces readers to the tradecraft of clandestine operations and argues they have an ethical component, and that the ebb and flow of history—whether a nation is in good or bad repute—influences effectiveness in intelligence gathering. Held embeds tradecraft in the narrative, sometimes leading to confusing text, as in Chapter 5, where he uses seven spies’ code-names interspersed unevenly with their real names. He also constructs a hypothetical scenario involving North Korea, paralleling actual events that involved the Soviet Union, rather than telling straightaway what the spies and their Soviet handlers did. On the other hand, Held uses short statements like, “Stalin had a low tolerance for failure,” that cram in a lot of meaning.

Chapter 2 describes Soviet operatives’ use of a Santa Fe drugstore as a jumping-off point for the Mexico City assassination of Stalin’s rival Leon Trotsky. Chapters 3 through 8 describe Soviet operatives’ recruitment of sources within the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, with Oak Ridge, Chicago and Berkeley on the periphery. Hill shows that while the physicists Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall were enthusiastic sources for the Soviets, J. Robert Oppenheimer was not a source. And this reveals an important irony, though Held is not explicit about it: Reality as understood at the highest classification level may differ from reality as understood at a more mundane level. Oppenheimer’s enemy Lewis Strauss apparently made sure Oppenheimer’s security clearance investigators had no access to the highest-level information.

Chapter 9 covers the 1985 defection to the Soviet Union of ex-CIA officer Edward Lee Howard, which began on residential streets in Santa Fe. Howard betrayed a top U.S. spy and an important U.S. intelligence gathering method to the Soviets—but not before those sources revealed information about Soviet weaknesses that President Reagan exploited in his talks with Gorbachev in Geneva and Reykjavik. Held depicts Reagan as a hawk, but in fact Reagan abhorred nuclear war and, beginning with the Korean Air shoot-down in 1983, sought to reduce tensions--and both sides' nuclear arsenals--to the dismay of his hawkish advisors. (See J. Peter Scoblic, *U.S. vs. Them*, Viking, 2008, 131-145.)

Chapter 10 describes the murky case of Taiwan-born nuclear engineer Wen Ho Lee, suspected of spying for China but quietly allowed to retire in Albuquerque.

With 29 photos and three maps (all black-and-white), *A Spy’s Guide* is of special interest to residents of Santa Fe and Albuquerque, and to visitors familiar with these cities in the “Land of Enchantment.” And it was published (in 2011) by the University of New Mexico Press.… (meer)