Michael J. Sulick

Spying in America
Espionage from the Revolutionary War to the Dawn of the Cold War
By: Michael J. Sulick
Narrated by: Kevin Pierce
This book was one I received from freeaudiblecodes and I am so glad I did! It is so rich in information but also presented in an entertaining way. I was never bored. The book covers spying from the Revolution War to more recent times.

The more famous stories of spies I thought I would know a lot about because I am a big history nut but boy was I
arrogant and a fool! The book went into so much behind the story, with hidden secrets that I only knew a small portion of the story! I was amazed and excited! A lot of these were women too! It also discussed how slaves were used.

There were plenty of lesser known, or unknown to me, cases that were just as astonishing! Not only did the book describe the cases and who was involved but often more about the background of those people. This really made them come alive and gave me a glimpse as to why they did what they did.

If you like history, spies, a good mystery, or you're just a curious person than I would recommend this book! I was never bored and the narrator was excellent!… (meer)

It was interesting reading, but like the Bible, doesn’t include much drama – just known facts and an estimate of the damage. The book identifies commonalities in why people spy, but there are also considerable difference. In some cases it is for ideology. More often it is for money. But motivations are diverse and sometimes mixed. A recruited spy often comes from a troubled background, and money is often a motivating factor, as is revenge.

Despite, the lack of drama, it was interesting reading, and surprising how many spies have infiltrated high places in the US, and the amount of damage they caused.

Now, in the post USSR era, there are a lot more countries and organizations spying on the US. China is not only a big country, they have a lot of people in the US gathering bits of information. China’s methods are different than those of Russia, and therefore the traditional techniques for catching spies did not work. (Much of it wouldn't be prosecutable anyway - which is a minor theme in the book.)

Interagency rivalry has been an impediment, as has prosecution without divulging sensitive information. Spying by allies, industrial espionage, terrorists, and technology changes provide different challenges.

“… likewise the tension between civil liberties and national security … will always be an issue in a democratic society” (end of chapter 27)

This book has an extensive bibliography. Compare chapter 6 with the article "Molehunt" in the October 2013 Smithsonian magazine Pages 58-65

This is recommended reading because of changing national security issues in a post cold war era.

I read a prepublication copy.… (meer)

"American Spies: Espionage Against the United States from the Cold War to the Present" by Michael J. Sulick offers a simple and engaging look at 20th and early 21st Century spy operations against US assets. The author takes a case-by-case view of the evidence, presenting the personal histories of spy cases ranging from Robert Lee Johnson in the 1950s and 1960s, to the activities of Ali Mohammed and other al-Qaeda operatives and sympathizers.

Sulick's background as a retired intelligence operations officer at the CIA provides an interesting perspective of the cases from the intelligence community. Particularly surrounding the cases of Aldrich Aimes and Robert Hanssen, Sulick depicts the unfolding of events from the perspective of the United States government and her intelligence agencies. He avoids dwelling to heavily on Soviet espionage, taking an interesting look at the cases of Wen Ho Lee (People's Republic of China), Ana Montes (Cuba), Daniel Pollard (Israel), and Clyde Conrad (Hungarian People's Republic). While tying individual cases to those previously introduced, each story is confined to a few paragraphs to a few pages, perhaps due to the sheer number of cases available to the author to cover.

The book was disappointing in its overall lack of academic analysis of cases and the US response to espionage. Sulick offers sufficient citations for hard facts, such as quotations and dates. However, the ends of case histories felt like rambling psychological analyses of the individuals concerned with little scholarly foundation. The childhood abuse of Robert Hanssen by his father is raised by the author as a thread common with other illustrious spies like Benedict Arnold, John Walker, and Clayton Lonetree. While Sulick holds abusive fathers up as the character-shapers of many spies, he does not offer evidence to back up these assertions other than correlation. The base motivations for spying, such as financial need or ideological affinity, are only shallowly introduced and accepted for each profiled spy.

"American Spies" does offer a facinating introduction into the world of modern espionage against the United States, especially by American citizens. It reopens the wounds of past failures in US counterintelligence and security efforts while offering a peek at the challenges faced by new philosophies and modalities of espionage by players like the Chinese and al-Qaeda. Sulick's privileged background also informs each story, especially for those that unfolded during his intelligence career. However, his ideologically-heavy narratives prevent critical questions from being answered that leaves the experienced student in intelligence history looking for less clouded analysis.… (meer)

Michael J. Sulick is a retired senior intelligence officer who served as director of the CIA's National Clandestine Service (2007-10), chief of CIA counterintelligence (2002-4), and chief of CIA’s Central Eurasia Division (1999-2002), among other assignments. AMERICAN SPIES: ESPIONAGE AGAINST THE UNITED STATES FROM THE COLD WAR TO THE PRESENT is the sequel to Sulick’s first volume on Americans who betrayed their country by spying for a foreign power, SPYING IN AMERICA: ESPIONAGE FROM THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR TO THE DAWN OF THE COLD WAR (obviously neither volume is going to win any contests for imaginative titling). While Sulick is no historian, and I’m not sure that Sulick’s background and professional expertise shine through here, AMERICAN SPIES is a very readable account that does exactly what it says on the tin. I hesitate to describe it as “workmanlike,” because that would seem to damn Sulick’s work with faint praise, but I should emphasize that this is a straight-forward account with very clear prose. It never becomes boring, nor is it over-laden with platitudes and generalities, and it does provide a solid introduction to the topic.

Sulick has chosen a strictly chronological approach for this work, structuring his account around a series of short case studies of each major (and many minor) espionage cases. There are chapters on all the usual suspects (the Walker ring, Ames, Hanssen, etc.) and many more on the lesser-known cases. I recommend this work as an excellent introduction to the topic, but it has certain limitations I should note. First, the book’s scope is both limited and expansive, to its detriment. It is limited in that it just focuses on the Americans who conducted espionage against the United States during and after the Cold War. It is not about other foreign intelligence collection efforts against the United States, nor does it attempt to put these individual case studies into much of a broader picture; the reader will not find, for example, an overview of Soviet espionage against the United States during the Cold War. The book’s scope is expansive in that it attempts to offer at least brief summaries of all relevant cases, which means that there’s a lot crammed in here, so nothing receives an exhaustive treatment. This work certainly does not contain the definitive treatment of any of the espionage cases it mentions. Second, while the book serves as a great primer on each of the major case studies during and after the Cold War, it does not forge new ground. Sulick relies almost solely on already published accounts of these cases (a few published government reports are occasionally cited), but it essentially contains nothing one couldn’t find in other readily available sources. It does do a nice job of compiling very readable overviews of each case, and the footnotes do serve as a good first step for readers interested in learning more about particular cases, but there are no newly revealed details here. For all of Sulick’s undoubtedly outstanding career, we don’t see any of that reflected in sparkling new insights and analysis. These are summaries and potted biographies; clear, well-written ones, but that’s it. Third, almost inevitably, the narrative stops in the mid-2000s. That leaves out several of the interesting and important cases of the last few years, including, of course, the Snowden affair. Not at all surprising, as that still needs some time and distance before we can sort out the meanings of the case, but at least a brief nod at these cases in the conclusion would have been a partial gesture. There are brief mentions of the Bradley Manning and Wikileaks affairs, but almost no detail on either, and what little information is provided is incomplete at best and misleading at worst.

Ultimately, I think that AMERICAN SPIES is a great text for someone looking for an overview of the subject, or at least a rapidly accessible summary. If your library is already expansive in this area, there’s probably little need to pick it up; you won’t find anything new here. If you’re looking for a primer on the subject, than this would be a good choice.

Review copyright © 2014 J. Andrew Byers… (meer)