Michael J. SulickBesprekingen

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!

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.

"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.½

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

This book was received as an "Uncorrected Advance Proof" as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.

I have not read Michael Sulick's earlier work: Spying in America: Espionage from the Revolutionary War to the Dawn of the Cold War, although I am now interested in reading a copy. This volume takes up where I presume the latter leaves off.

Sulick breaks up the book chronolically, by decade mostly. Details are richer for the earlier cases and get thinner as we get closer to the present. This should not be surprising, since presumably the source material of more recent cases would still be classified. Sulick is eminently qualified to write this book, given that he had a 28-year career in the CIA culminating as the director of the National Clandestine Service.

This was an excellent read, easy to read, and very informative. For each case of espionage described, Sulick describes in detail what was done, how it was done, what is known about the ultimate damage, and whenever possible he tries to discuss what is believed to be the motivation of the perpetrator(s) of the espionage discussed. In the Preface, he states that "this volume can serve as little more than an introduction to the history of spying against America during and after the Cold War." It is written fully footnoted and well-referenced. If this is an introduction, it certainly can serve as a "trail of breadcrumbs" for a more serious student of the history of spycraft.

Reading this book in the context of the Edward Snowden revelations of the activities of the NSA also made me think a lot more deeply about the difficult ethical questions that we (as civilians) have to struggle with. People in the military and intelligence communities "know" the importance of of what they do. This book has given me, as a very liberal-minded civilian, a little more to think about before I blindly decry all government keeping of secrets.

I received this book for free as part of LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program.
Books about spies are inherently interesting to me. Books about the Cold War are also inherently interesting to me. Thus, American Spies is in a sweet spot. I probably would have read the author's earlier volume about espionage against America prior to the Cold War, but this is the volume I was lucky enough to receive.

American Spies covered pretty much the ground I expected it to cover, and a little bit more besides. I'm not really a spy buff, but espionage is an important part of my overarching interests in history and politics. While not intended to be a comprehensive listing of all spies who were active during the Cold War, which would be a much longer book, this volume covers all the major spies of the last seventy years. We read about Robert Hanssen spying for Russia, Larry Wu-tai Chin spying for China, and Jonathan Pollard spying for Israel.
Sulick is an insider. He retired as a director at the CIA, and spent some time in counter-intelligence during his tenure. I think this book reflects that experience. Sulick gives us an idea of the way the United States responded, or failed to respond effectively, to spies within. Much like generals are always fighting the last war, the CIA and the FBI often seemed to be tracking the last spy in Sulick's telling. Many of the spies featured in this volume managed to continue spying despite clear warning signs, such as sudden unexplained wealth or friendships with known foreign intelligence agents. Sulick believes there is something in the American character that makes it difficult for us to believe that an American would betray their country. While this is a clear failure of counter-intelligence, it is less clear whether this constitutes a national character flaw. The infamous CIA director of counter-intelligence, John Jesus Angelton, comes in for a drubbing, because he really did believe that anyone could be a spy. Rightly so, since paranoia is not identical to effective counter-intelligence, but it seems that some middle ground is necessary.

This book doesn't really get into what might be truly effective counter-intelligence. I wonder whether that oversight is intentional. Angleton was entirely correct that counter-intelligence is a wilderness of mirrors, and all books written by former CIA officers are subject to prior review and approval. It simply wouldn't do to discuss trade secrets in public, although I am really interested in what they might be. It seems like a really tricky problem in game theory or operations research. For example, is it helping or harming counter-intelligence that so much government and military information in the United States is classified that nearly every soldier and defense contractor requires a security clearance to do their basic work? I don't know, but I bet somebody has looked into it. Sulick does spend time talking about how the CIA and the FBI learned to work with each other, since at least one known spy slipped out of the country while the agencies were fighting turf battles.


The early sections of the book have really fascinating accounts of how the major spies were caught. However, I felt like the details got thinner as we closed in on the present. I'm not certain whether this was due to a need for operational secrecy, or simply because Sulick assumed that topics addressed earlier in the book did not need to be repeated. While many spies stole secrets for years undetected, it is a common theme that failures of tradecraft ultimately brought them down. The spies with the longest careers were the ones who were best at the technical skills of acquiring and passing on information without leaving a trace. Perhaps it is fortunate that many spies are misfits and losers, because otherwise they would be harder to catch. Or else we only catch the losers and misfits. Perhaps Angleton knows.

While I liked this book, I didn't love it. It may just be the engineer in me, but my favorite book so far about Cold War espionage has been Project Azorian. That book had tons of technical detail, a compelling story, and historical context. This book serves as a repository of information, and covers a much broader scope. I learned a lot, but it wasn't near as fun.

Michael J. Sulick has written a concise primer on the men and women who have spied against the U.S. since the mid-1900s. It is compulsively readable too, as Sulick recounts a surprising number of stories. Some of those mentioned receive a paragraph or two of coverage, others several pages or full chapters. I was struck again and again by how many chose to turn to spying not for ideological reasons but out of mere financial greed or need. The ideologues were almost the exception, rather than the expected rule. Sulick is also refreshingly up front about the ways in which the intelligence community missed signs of possible espionage. Highly recommended for professional and armchair historians alike.

With American Spies, Michael Sulick offers an excellent primer on espionage against the United States during and after the Cold War. The book is divided into easily digestible chapters, each dealing with a certain time period or geopolitical area of importance. Each spy is given a few pages, highlighting their background, area of impact, damage done, motivations and how they were caught. While I've been alive for most of the cases presented by Sulick, it surprised me how many of the instances I'd completely forgotten about. Does Marine embassy guard Clayton Lonetree ring a bell, for example?

Sulick spends a fair amount of time discussing the successes and failures of our own counterespionage efforts and the inter-department/inter-agency impediments that make catching spies more difficult.

American Spies is very accessible even to the reader with little or no background in espionage, but it will also be of interest to the experienced national security reader.

Michael Sulick’s American Spies is the continuation of his history of American spies i.e. individuals who have spied on American. His previous book covered the period from the Revolutionary War to the beginning of the Cold War. His latest book, American Spies, covers the period from the Cold War to the present. Sulick undertook quite a challenge with this book. Simply the large number of spies requires more of a survey approach to this history. Sulick developed a flexible organization devoting a chapter to each of major spies of recent history. For the lesser spies he groups them by country, China and Cuba or timeframe. The result is a well organized easy reading narrative.

This approach also avoids extensive rehashing details of spies like Boyce/Lee, Walker, Ames and Hansen that have been covered in detail in individual books.

Sulick pulls no punches when it comes to failures of US counterintelligence activities. Though the counterintelligence failures to detect spies such as Walker, Ames or Hansen are well known, this book reinforces the decades long turf wars that prevented the CIA, NSA and FBI from working effectively together. All the agencies have suffered from an ego trip that blinded them from believing one of their own could be a traitor.

Because of the long lasting implications to CIA counterintelligence, Sulick also includes a chapter on the devastating impact that the master spy hunter, James Angleton, had on the CIA. “The Angleton legacy would haunt the CIA and provoke a backlash that would irreparably damage the spy agency.”

In each case covered by Sulick he also provides a glimpse into the psyche and motivation of the spies. For many (or perhaps most) a primary motivation was money troubles and the quick fix by selling secrets. The most incredible parts of the money story are how easy it would have been to check the spies financial health and how little money was involved (in most cases) versus the consequences.

An interesting thread noted by Sulick in his discussion of the FBI spy, Robert Hanssen, is the relationship with his father. Benedict Arnold, John Walker, Clayton Lonetree, Rick Ames, and Robert Hansen all had abusive fathers that shaped their son’s treachery!

In summary, American Spies doesn’t provide major new revelations but it is an excellent concise survey of modern spying in America. His writing style is light and easy to read.½

American Spies: Espionage against the United States from the Cold War to the Present by Michael J. Sulick

I was surprised and pleased to be one of the recipients of Michael J. Sulick’s American Spies: Espionage against the United States from the Cold War to the Present via the LibraryThing lottery. My interest in this topic is not random. My birth coincided almost exactly with the onset of the Cold War; my late husband served as a civilian intelligence officer assigned to Washington, DC; I remember as a young child being privy to impassioned adult discussions about the Rosenbergs; and I was living in Washington and reading the Washington Post when the ‘home boy’ espionage agents John Walker, Jonathan Pollard, Ronald Pelton, Aldrich Ames, and Robert Hansson were all over the headlines.

Michael Sulick is a retired CIA intelligence operations officer, the recipient of a Ph.D. in comparative literature from CUNY, and the author of an earlier book entitled Spying in America. American Spies, his 2013 work, is a companion volume to his first… and in light of the recent Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning news stories, it is a timely topic. In his introduction, Sulick writes, “the intent of this study is to examine the history of [the disbelief by Americans that fellow Americans choose to commit acts of espionage] through the stories of individual spies and to provide the reader with insights into the unique nature of espionage against America, its successes, failures, and consequences for national security.” In pursuing his objective, Sulick focuses upon a substantial number of acts of espionage, all of which were directed against the United States by citizens of the United States. These occurred between the late 1940s and early 2013. Not surprisingly, in most instances, it was the USSR that reaped the greatest harvest from these acts; in a few instances, however, other nations such as Cuba, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Israel, and China were the beneficiaries.

Sulick uses a chronological, case-by-case framework in order to introduce his reader to virtually all of the prominent and many, if not most, of the not-so-prominent American spies—several dozen in all—of the past sixty-plus years. In some instances his treatment is cursory; in others it is quite detailed. Looking at the two dozen or so spies in his ‘more prominent’ category, Sulick examines each person relative to his background and education, motivation for spying, access to classified materials, specific acts of espionage, apprehension, and punishment as well as the implications to national security of his/her crime. In retrospect, it is amazing, considering the extremely sensitive and damaging nature of so much of the information that was passed along to the Soviets during the Cold War, that a ‘hot war’ did not result, one in which the United States was left as the vanquished. One has to believe that the Soviets were not as bellicose as Americans were lead to believe.

The author provides his reader with a clear profile of the Cold War and early post-Cold War American spy. Although all of those individuals were not cut from exactly the same piece of cloth, there were a number of commonalities that ran across the group: 1. Greed, not ideology, was by far the most common spy motivator. That said many spies sold out for a relative pittance; only five of them achieved membership in the million dollar club. 2. Spies were, in almost all instances, employed either by a U.S. government agency, invariably one tied in some way to national security, or they were members, especially enlisted members, of the United States armed forces. 3. Many experienced troubled childhoods and, especially, unsatisfactory relationships with their fathers. 4. Many wrestled with financial difficulties; gambling proclivities were not uncommon. 5. Many experienced marital problems, often exacerbated by alcohol abuse, 6. Most received a prison sentence not commensurate with the seriousness of the crime. Often the government cut deals so as to avoid embarrassing public trials, protect counterintelligence agents, and/or extract useful information from the accused. No American found guilty of espionage during the Cold War or post-Cold War, except for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (whose crime pre-dated the Cold War), has been executed. 7. Most Americans found guilty of espionage have not or will not have died during incarceration.

Most of the chapters in American Spies present past history —albeit interesting— in which many of the political dynamics and much of the technology was different than it is today. The Soviet Union was America’s primary adversary then; now it is not. For these reasons, some prospective readers may push this work aside, believing it to be irrelevant and outdated. For even those persons, however, the book has a message. In the final chapters, in a section entitled “Espionage in the New Millennium,” Sulick addresses several very serious, post-9/11 issues that relate to national security today…and by extension espionage. These are nuclear terrorism, chemical terrorism, and, cyber-theft, all of which pose great dangers to the American populace. We as Americans have legitimate reason to be frightened and in the years to come it is not Russia about whom we should be mindful but rather China. This book in part is a wake-up call!

American Spies is informative, seemingly thorough, thought-provoking, and engaging. It is both a catalogue of sorts of American spies and their acts of espionage, and a succinct, yet well-executed, sixty-year history of the United States that coincides with the period in which those crimes occurred. Sulick, despite his ties to the higher rungs of the American intelligence community, is candid in acknowledging both past weaknesses and failures within that community as well as the egregiously inadequate security, both in the civilian agencies and in the military… all of which greatly contributed to the success of Americans spying against America. Were he not, his book would be seriously flawed.½

This is an exciting book that draws the reader quickly along and startlingly topical, up to date to the recent crop of traitorous trading of US secrets for cash or glory, Julian Assange and Manning (Bradley or Chelsea) are mentioned, and the publication date meant the author just missed Edward Snowden.

Sulick was the Director of the CIA Clandestine service and is an authoritive historian on the service and the cases he details contain true insight and amazing access. The book is written in a straightforward prose that engages the reader’s attention – in parts in reads like exciting fiction but all of it is researched and even approved by the CIA.

In his conclusion the author states that there is no need for America “to engage in Faustian bargains” for its security at the expense of civil liberties, both must be ensured.

As usual, I received this book as part of a GoodReads drawing and despite that kind and generous consideration my opinions are candidly stated below.

The primary danger for any work on history is that the author will provide information with such force and determination that the result is as dry as a mouth full of crackers. Sulick's treatment of the history of espionage against the United States does not so suffer. His presentation of the topic is pleasingly broad, covering the long history of the country, but still provides enough specific detail about particular cases to inform and entertain.

The book is divided into five roughly chronological parts covering the Revolutionary War, Civil War, 1914-1945, 1930s and 1940s, and lastly the Russian spies around the development of the Atomic Bomb. While obviously there is some odd overlap the arrangement does make sense as later sections deal with specific programs within the government while overlapping in time frame with others.

Each part begins with an overview of espionage in the subject area or period in history and later sections within each part give specifics on individual spies. So a reader wishing for more of a brief reading could peruse the more global sections and skip those that relate to individual players for a briefer read. These are, at times, a bit redundant and of marginal usefulness.

In summary, the author does a wonderful job of taking a potentially dry topic and making hold the reader's attention. One is introduced to a few specific personages of spy fame but also given a sound overall understanding of why espionage works so well in America and entertaining insight on how the bumbling spies of yesteryear screw up and endanger themselves and their counterparts. A wonderful introduction to the real world of international espionage.