I have learned to hate all traitors, and there is no disease that I spit on more than treachery… Aeschylus

They look commonplace like pictures of your father or grandfather. They are for the most part in business suits and while a few may have pretensions to an elegance that belies their treachery most have an off the rack, if not rumpled, appearance. There are no horns growing out of their foreheads and no red stars or armbands decrying their comradeship with Stalin. Like black adders posing as garden snakes they are all the more deadly for it. The harm they have done to this nation – and that their successors continue to do – is like the worm in wood and Ann Coulter may have put it best when she said, Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, [leftists] are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America’s self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant.

Alger Hiss : why he chose treason  Christina Shelton ; an introduction by Richard Pipes  New York : Threshold Editions, 2012  Hardcover. 1st ed. and printing. xvii, 330 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG

In 1948, former U.S. State Department official Alger Hiss was accused of being a Soviet spy. Because the statute of limitations on espionage had run out, he was convicted only of perjury. Decades later archival evidence surfaced confirming the accusations: a public servant with access to classified documents had indeed passed crucial information to the Soviets for more than a decade.

Unwilling to acknowledge the inconvenient truth many American leftists still consider Hiss an iconic figure — an innocent victim accused of unsubstantiated crimes. They prefer to focus on the bankrupt collectivist ideals Hiss stood for, rather than confront the reality of a man who systemically and methodically betrayed his country in a life that displayed equal parts of cunning and cowardice.

Former U.S. Intelligence analyst Christina Shelton employs an in-depth knowledge of Soviet intelligence affairs as well as recently released Hungarian and KGB archival material to shine a fresh light on one of the most famous U.S. espionage cases. The story is dramatic, but Shelton’s analysis goes beyond sensationalism as she explores both the ideological motivation behind Hiss’s behavior and the lasting influence it has had on U.S. foreign policy.

Hollywood party : how communism seduced the American film industry in the 1930s and 1940s  Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley  Rocklin, CA : Forum, c 1998  Hardcover. 1st ed. and printing. xvii, : ill. ; 24 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 320-342) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG

In the fall of 1997 some of the biggest names in show business filled the Motion Picture Academy theater in Beverly Hills for Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist, a lavish production worthy of an Oscar telecast. In song, film, and live performances by stars such as Billy Crystal, Kevin Spacey, and John Lithgow, the audience relived a time some fifty years before, when, as the story has always been told, courageous writers and actors stood firm against a witch-hunt and blacklist that wrecked lives and destroyed careers. Left untold that night, and ignored in books and films for more than half a century, was a story not so politically correct but vastly more complex and dramatic.

In Hollywood Party the complete story finally emerges, backdropped by the great upheavals of our time and with all the elements of a thriller—wrenching plot twists, intrigue, betrayal, violence, corruption, misguided passion, and lost idealism.

Using long neglected information from public records, the personal files of key players, and recent revelations from Soviet archives, Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley uncovers the Communist Party’s strategic plan for taking control of the movie industry during its golden age, a plan that came perilously close to success. He shows how the Party dominated the politics of the movie industry during the 1930s and 1940s, raising vast sums of money from unwitting liberals and conscripting industry luminaries into supporting Stalinist causes.

In riveting detail, the shameful truth unfolds: Communist writers, actors, and directors, wealthy beyond the dreams of most Americans, posture as proletarian wage slaves as they try to influence the content of movies.

From the days of the Popular Front through the Nazi-Soviet Pact and beyond World War II, they remain faithful to a regime whose brutality rivaled that of Hitler’s Nazis. Their plans for control of the industry a shambles by the mid-1950s, the Party nonetheless succeeded in shaping the popular memory of those days.

By chronicling what has been left on the cutting-room floor, from “back story” to aftermath, Hollywood Party changes those perceptions forever.

Israel cannot afford to stand against the entire world and be denounced as the aggressor… Moshe Dayan

Foxbats over Dimona : the Soviets’ nuclear gamble in the Six-Day War  Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez  New Haven : Yale University Press, c 2007  Hardcover. 1st ed. and printing. xi, 287 p. : maps ; 24 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 265-273) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG

Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez’s groundbreaking history of the Six-Day War in 1967 radically changes our understanding of that conflict, casting it as a crucial arena of Cold War intrigue that has shaped the Middle East to this day. The authors, award-winning Israeli journalists and historians, have investigated newly available documents and testimonies from the former Soviet Union, cross-checked them against Israeli and Western sources, and arrived at fresh and startling conclusions.

Contrary to previous interpretations, Ginor and Remez’s book shows that the Six-Day War was the result of a joint Soviet-Arab gambit to provoke Israel into a preemptive attack. The authors reveal how the Soviets received a secret Israeli message indicating that Israel, despite its official ambiguity, was about to acquire nuclear weapons. Determined to destroy Israel’s nuclear program before it could produce an atomic bomb, the Soviets then began preparing for war – well before Moscow accused Israel of offensive intent, the overt trigger of the crisis.

Ginor and Remez’s startling account details how the Soviet-Arab onslaught was to be unleashed once Israel had been drawn into action and was branded as the aggressor. The Soviets had submarine-based nuclear missiles poised for use against Israel in case it already possessed and tried to use an atomic device, and the USSR prepared and actually began a marine landing on Israel’s shores backed by strategic bombers and fighter squadrons. They sent their most advanced, still-secret aircraft, the MiG-25 Foxbat, on provocative sorties over Israel’s Dimona nuclear complex to prepare the planned attack on it, and to scare Israel into making the first strike. It was only the unpredicted devastation of Israel’s response that narrowly thwarted the Soviet design.

They kill me because they are afraid of me; and what more can any man’s heart desire? Ethel Lilian Voynich

Trust No One : The Secret World of Sidney Reilly  Richard B. Spence  Los Angeles : Feral House, 2002  Hardcover. 1st ed. and printing. xiv, 527 p., ill., maps, 24 cm. Contains bibliographical references p. 503-505 and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG   

The first impression of Reilly is unpleasant. His dark eyes expressed something biting and cruel; his lower lip drooped deeply and the neat black hair was too slick, the demonstratively elegant suit… Everything in his manner expressed something haughtily indifferent to his surroundings… Alexander Yakushev

Trust No One, Richard B. Spence’s exhaustive volume about one of the most enigmatic and mysterious figures of the twentieth century, accesses new material from both Russian and British intelligence, and corrects decades of disinformation from every political side of the capitalist/communist equation.

Sidney Reilly spent most of his life in the shadows of international intrigue and counted among his legion of friends, victims and accomplices the likes of Rasputin and Churchill. He often is portrayed as a master spy, a “man who never made a mistake”—the living prototype of James Bond. But Reilly’s real exploits exceeded anything credited to fictional Bond. Born into a Polish Jewish family as Salomon Rosenblum, he embarked on an amazing, daring and often bewildering career in which he assumed the persona of an Irish-named British gentleman along with many other identities. He was a slightly different person to every man who knew him and every woman who loved him.

Using “the System” (betting on all sides while manipulating the odds to maximize his own profit), Sidney Reilly was as much a master criminal as spy and amassed a fortune through the ruthless bartering of influence and information. He was employed and feared by capitalists and commissars alike. Was he a dedicated anti-communist, the Soviet’s first “mole,” or simply an unscrupulous con man? Even his end is an enigma: did the Soviets shoot him in 1925, or did he live to scheme on for many years to come? Reilly’s career offers a window into the pre- and post-WWI era’s secret underworld of political and economic intrigue and reveals a side of recent history that most works overlook or avoid.

Stalin is a Genghis Khan, an unscrupulous intriguer, who sacrifices everything else to the preservation of power … He changes his theories according to whom he needs to get rid of next… Nikolai Bukharin

Joseph Stalin was not a peasant in the classical Russian sense of the term but his origins were certainly mean. Like most who claw their way to the top of a political machine he had no scruples about how he used the machine’s members and no dedication to its principles – self aggrandisement and consolidation of power were his only guiding lights. While we tend to think of the Soviet State in terms of a single personality from Lenin to Putin the truth of the matter is that each leader has had a set of apparatchiks to do their bidding. We have illustrated this entry with members of Stalin’s Politburo – many of whom survived him – but only one of who succeeded him – the true Russian peasant Khrushchev. All of these men served 20 years or more and while most are unknown to us they embody the proof that even tyranny can not exist without administrators.

Voroshilov, Kliment

Master of the house : Stalin and his inner circle  Oleg V. Khlevniuk ; translated by Nora Seligman Favorov  New Haven : Yale University Press, 2009  Hardcover. 1st ed. and printing. xxv, 313 p. ; 25 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 273-302) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG

Molotov, Vyacheslav

Based on previously  unavailable documents in the Soviet archives, this  book illuminates the secret inner mechanisms of power in the Soviet Union during the years when Stalin established his dictatorship.  Khlevniuk focuses on the top organ in Soviet Russia’s political hierarchy of the 1930s — the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party — and on the political and interpersonal dynamics that weakened its collective leadership and enabled Stalin’s rise.

Mikoyan, Anastas

Khlevniuk’s research challenges existing theories of the workings of the Politburo and uncovers many new findings regarding the nature of alliances among Politburo members, Sergei Kirov’s murder, the implementation of the Great Terror, and much more. The author analyzes Stalin’s mechanisms of generating and retaining power and presents a new understanding of the highest tiers of the Communist Party in a crucial era of Soviet history.

Khrushchev, Nikita

Kalinin, Mikhail

Kaganovich, Lazar

Andreyev, Andrey

This is the President of the United States speaking. Through the marvels of scientific advance, my voice is coming to you via a satellite circling in outer space. My message is a simple one: Through this unique means I convey to you and all mankind, America’s wish for peace on Earth and goodwill toward men everywhere… Dwight David Eisenhower

HISTORIC VIEW OF THE VEREIN FUER RAUMSCHIFFAHRT, 1930. LEFT TO RIGHT: RUDOLF NEBEL, FRANZ RITTER, UNKNOWN, KURT HEINISCH, UNKNOWN, HERMANN OBERTH, UNKNOWN, KLAUS RIEDEL, WERNHER VON BRAUN, UNKNOWN, KLAUS RIEDEL HOLDS EARLY VERSION OR MODEL FOR THE MINIMUM ROCKET, ‘MIRAK’.

A ball, a dog, and a monkey : 1957, the space race begins  Michael D’Antonio  New York : Simon & Schuster, 2007  Hardcover. 1st ed. and printing. 306 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. [263]-291) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG   

Photograph shows people walking by a model of Sputnik III at the USSR Exhibition in Sokolniki Park, Moscow, next to the American National Exhibition.

When the Soviet Union launched the first orbital satellite, Sputnik I, Americans panicked. The Soviets had nuclear weapons, the Cold War was underway, and now the USSR had taken the lead in the space race. Members of Congress and the press called for an all-out effort to launch a satellite into orbit. With dire warnings about national security in the news almost every day, the armed services saw space as the new military frontier. But President Eisenhower insisted that the space effort, which relied on military technology, be supervised by civilians so that the space race would be peaceful. Meanwhile, the Soviets put a dog inside the next Sputnik, and Americans grew more worried as the first animal in space whirled around the Earth.

Explorer 1 First U.S. Satellite

Throughout 1958 America went space crazy. UFO sightings spiked. Boys from Brooklyn to Burbank shot model rockets into the air. Space-themed beauty pageants became a national phenomenon. The news media flocked to the launchpads on the swampy Florida coast, and reporters reinvented themselves as space correspondents. And finally the Army’s rocket program succeeded. Determined not to be outdone by the Russians, America’s space scientists launched the first primate into space, a small monkey they nicknamed Old Reliable for his calm demeanor. And then at Christmas time, Eisenhower authorized the launch of a secret satellite with a surprise aboard – President Eisenhower’s Christmas Message.