PROPAGANDA GIRLS: The Secret War of the Women in the OSS brings the underknown role women play in Intelligence to light

PROPAGANDA GIRLS: The Secret War of the Women in the OSS
LISA ROGAK
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook edition, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: The incredible untold story of four women who helped win WWII by generating a wave of black propaganda.

Betty MacDonald was a 28-year-old reporter from Hawaii. Zuzka Lauwers grew up in a tiny Czechoslovakian village and knew five languages by the time she was 21. Jane Smith-Hutton was the wife of a naval attaché living in Tokyo. Marlene Dietrich, the German-American actress and singer, was of course one of the biggest stars of the 20th century. These four women, each fascinating in her own right, together contributed to one of the most covert and successful military campaigns in WWII.

As members of the OSS, their task was to create a secret brand of propaganda produced with the sole aim to break the morale of Axis soldiers. Working in the European theater, across enemy lines in occupied China, and in Washington, D.C., Betty, Zuzka, Jane, and Marlene forged letters and “official” military orders, wrote and produced entire newspapers, scripted radio broadcasts and songs, and even developed rumors for undercover spies and double agents to spread to the enemy. And outside of a small group of spies, no one knew they existed. Until now.

In Propaganda Girls, bestselling author Lisa Rogak brings to vivid life the incredible true story of four unsung heroes, whose spellbinding achievements would change the course of history.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I think most of us know who Marlene Dietrich was; I thought Betty MacDonald was the author of The Egg & I, but that's not the case; none of the others caused even a flicker of recognition.

This, my fellow Murrikans, is not an accident. As covert-operations experts, it was never likely that the four women here...with one obvious exception...would become household names. Even Dietrich's wartime service, though, is very much downplayed and undercredited in biographies of her remarkable life. The others...well...I know we'll all clutch our collective pearls when we learn that they were passed over for promotions given to men they trained. Shocking, no?

Lisa Rogak has set out to tell the details, insofar as available, of the women whose lives were offered in service during a huge global war. The aftermath was predictably enough not glorious. The women are, I'm afraid, not part of the broader public record; that makes keeping track of them in this narrative of their covert activities a matter of noting names. No archive of their careers exists (pace Marlene), so we have little personality development. From divergent beginnings, they converge on a bored, rebellious attitude they are all entitled to. It just does little to keep their characters separate in one's mind. It doesn't help my sense of them as people that, based on the title, I was expecting more or less a Bletchley Park kind of ethos for them to operate together, as more or less a unit, to develop. Nothing could be further from the truth...they barely ever crossed paths and were not in the same kind of circumstances within the propaganda operation.

It's not so much a flaw in my mind as an inevitable consequence of the manner in which these women were treated as fungible, expendable units where their male colleagues were noticed and promoted...often on the backs of the women's efforts. The effect of propaganda on one's enemies is, obviously, a subject of great national importance in today's online world. I shudder to think what a popular entertainer of Dietrich's stature could do with social media at her command. Any one of these rumormongers, these evidence-fakers, these insiders-turned-enemies could do astonishing amounts of damage given free rein on the internet.

Heaven knows their descendants are. We ignore the ways and means of the past at our peril. We're still seeing these techniques used, as refined, against us now.

Why I couldn't reach a fifth star was really down to niggles, like the sort-of-faceless grievance ball the women turned into as I read along. It wasn't avoidable, I understand that we're dealing with people who didn't leave huge divots in the lawn of History here. It was, however, a distraction, so that's why this well-written, researched, and obviously very personally meaningful to the author story doesn't get its optimal five full stars.

TWO SPIES IN CARACAS, Moisés Naím's novel of the world-changing coup d'etat in Venezuela, translated by Daniel Hahn

TWO SPIES IN CARACAS
MOISÉS NAÍM (tr. Daniel Hahn)
AmazonCrossing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of The End of Power comes an edge-of-your-seat political thriller about rival spies, dangerous love, and one of history’s most devastating revolutions.

Venezuela, 1992. Unknown colonel Hugo Chávez stages an ill-fated coup against a corrupt government, igniting the passions of Venezuela’s poor and catapulting the oil-rich country to international attention. For two rival spies hurriedly dispatched to Caracas—one from Washington, DC, and the other from Fidel Castro’s Cuba—this is a career-defining mission.

Smooth-talking Iván Rincón of Cuba’s Intelligence Directorate needs a rebel ally to secure the future of his own country. His job: support Chávez and the revolution by rallying the militants and neutralizing any opposing agents.

Meanwhile, the CIA’s Cristina Garza will do everything in her power to cut Chávez’s influence short. Her priority: stabilize the greatest oil reserves on the planet by ferreting out and eliminating Cuba’s principal operative.

As Chávez surges to power, Iván’s and Cristina’s paths cross. Soon they’re caught in the fallout of a toxic political time bomb: an intrepid female reporter and unwitting informant, a drug lord and key architect in Chávez’s rise, and Iván and Cristina themselves. With everything at stake, the adversaries find themselves at the center of a game of espionage, seduction, murder, and shifting alliances playing out against the precarious backdrop of a nation in free fall. A thrilling fictional story based on unimaginable real-life events.

I RECEIVED THIS DRC FROM AMAZON PRIME'S FIRST READS PROGRAM. THANK YOU.

My Review: Spying? Romancing? Weeelll...not quite as much as I'd been expecting based on the title. What there was of espionage was centered on the mechanics and motivations for spying on one's neighbors. The Americans have this corporately-coveted giant lake of petrochemicals close to them...the Cubans need the fuel...and the Venezuelans need food, medicine, the basics.

No one gets what they expected to get because Hugo Chávez (quite obviously the author's bête noire) steps in the big, fat middle of things out of nowhere and shits all over the players. He's nobody in the hierarchy's opinion. He comes from nowhere. He's got no family pull. He's got a crap education. The author posits that he's a mentally ill striver. As he's dead, and was considered an enemy by the US Government's right-wing intelligence community, I'm inclined to put that down to politically motivated retrospective diagnosis.

Whatever! I didn't mean to get so bogged down in the material I think surrounds the story. The on-the-page story is heavy on Hugo, light on spies, and still manages to be about the reasons spying happens in a way that was very interesting to read. The role of Pablo Escobar and his money in Chávez's rise, the massive betrayals that are inherent in any leader coming to power and seeing the perspective from inside instead of outside, and the hilarious (if terrifying) reality that "we" know about 5% of what is actually going on when "we" are making our decisions, all made the read worth my time to pursue. I'm afraid the prose wasn't lulling me into turning the pages:

"I'm warning you, the president's ambitions are no longer local or regional. He wants international influence. He already has the oil production in his hands. and he'll spend whatever is necessary to make the world pay attention. This black gold will finance his socialist expansion. Hugo's narcissism is global now!"

A spy reporting to her Washington-based boss wouldn't be terribly likely to use an exclam. Or to be so bluntly undiplomatic. She wouldn't be employed for long.

"The moment is approaching for you to serve the revolution. When {the thing happens}, it's essential for Cuba that you, comrade Nicolás Maduro, {do the thing}."

The future {doer of the thing}, as anointed by Fidel, smiled yet said nothing; both men knew he had nothing to say. And there was no need.

So, does the author think Cuba runs the show or does he think Cuba runs the show. I mean, there was no time at which socialism and Cuba and Fidel and Hugo weren't all presented in the dimmest, dankest dungeon-light.

The world spins on, though, and the focus of the story leaves the international stage to light on the two spies in Caracas. They've met, fallen in love, and begun to weave a tissue of lies that looks like a life together if you squint at it just right. Iván, the Cuban scion of a powerful political family, and Cristina, an illegal Mexican immigrant whose life prepared her for a career in espionage with the CIA, fall *whomp* in love. I don't know why, and the author doesn't tell us. They just do.

While they're reassessing their loyalties to their respective agencies, they watch History take its inevitable course. Crappy people and dreadful deeds and a giant choking cloud of misery finally envelop the two, already unsettled in their minds by Love, and cause them to try to...unoficially retire, let's say.

This does not go well.

Betrayal. Back-stabbing from many angles. Lots of terrible things are about to happen to Iván and Cristina, when she decides that she doesn't want to die screaming. She pulls out her trump card, plays it...and that's when the ugly turns mean. The ending of the book involves the worst, least excusable sort of cruelty to both of them. And it's not like there was no way it could happen. It has already, earlier in the book, in slightly different form.

What? It's a spy story! You were expecting the characters to take Pilates together and Iván to knit a baby blanky for their first-born while Cristina solves the mysteries of sourdough? This book's author might have a lot of right-wing axes to grind, but the book has its head on straight when it comes to Realpolitik! Henry Kissinger got nothin' on Author Naím in that regard.

I've given it three-and-three-quarters stars. In my world, that is quite respectable. I don't keep reading books that aren't rewarding me. There are too few eyeblinks left to waste 'em. So, while I'm not yodeling the praises of this gorgeous artifact of genius, I'm here to tell you that I didn't even once think, "you know what? Pearl-Ruling this bad boy now."

Considering my Pearl-Rule pages-to-read count is down to thirty-eight, that should tell you all you need to know.

EUROPE IN WINTER, a rare series novel that exceeds its predecessors

EUROPE IN WINTER
DAVE HUTCHINSON (The Fractured Europe Sequence, #3)
Solaris Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Rudi, the former chef-turned-spy, returns on a mission to uncover the truth—in a fractured Europe utterly changed by the public unveiling of the Community.

Union has been forged and the Community is now the largest nation in Europe; trains run there from as far afield as London and Prague. It is an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity. So what is the reason for a huge terrorist outrage? Why do the Community and Europe meet in secret, exchanging hostages? And who are Les Coureurs des Bois? Along with a motley crew of strays and mafiosi and sleeper agents, Rudi sets out to answer these questions—only to discover that the truth lies both closer to home and farther away than anyone could imagine.

***AT THE AUTHOR'S BEHEST, REBELLION SENT ME A TREE BOOK OF THIS TITLE FOR REVIEW***THANKS GUYS***

My Review: The rarest read in a series-heavy publishing landscape is the sequel that improves on the previous books. This books is one of those rare birds. It might just be unique, I'd have to really dig deep in the wetware to be positive, because it's better than the previous books *because of* the previous books. My reviews of EUROPE IN AUTUMN and EUROPE AT MIDNIGHT tell part of the story.The twists and turns of the lives the characters are asked to lead are definitely in the best Cold-War-spy tradition. The patches of somewhat puzzling prose that seem to indicate that a different book has dropped into the one you were reading are exactly that...and this is what finally makes the series so deeply engrossing, twisty, and unputdownable.

Now then. The entire focus of my reviews is always why. Why did I read this book, why do I think you should (or shouldn't) read this book, why do I rate it the way I do...and here I'm going to make my "why" extremely explicit: This book, this series, this concept of reality, is much more than escapist entertainment. The author has done a good deal of deep thinking about the world, how it got where it is, why it's not some other way than it is. He's taken that thinking, those long dark tea-times of the soul, and rendered them into sophisticated, witty (Putingrad! HA!) tales of great subtlety. The interconnections among the volumes are, for those with good memory mapping, sometimes physically jolting. For the run-of-the-mill reader there's no loss of forward momentum, no sense of being at sea; for the more savvy reader, there's an added frisson of pleasure and often amusement. Make no mistake, there is not one non-sequitur in the series. Sometimes you'll need a minute to see if that's an echo or a whisper. Whichever you decide it is, you're right. Much like reality, these books won't dictate your perception of them; the author has laid many a trail through this forest. His mapping skills are, well, hard to equal. We're not talking Rand McNally here, and even the USGS topologists' skills are tested.

And that is at the heart of my pleasure in reading these books. I don't often have the opportunity to engross myself in the unfolding of a narrative across multiple volumes. The last time I can remember was the outstandingly complex world of Barsetshire, begun by Anthony Trollope and continued by Angela Thirkell. It makes me very sad that, since Mrs. Thirkell's death in 1961, no English author has seen the enormous potential of exploring social change through the lens of Barsetshire. Science fiction has multiple universes, some shared by authors with fans and others not; I was most recently bitterly disappointed in James S.A. Corey's The Expanse, which didn't live up to its deeply twisty promise until it made the leap to television. With the Fractured Europe Sequence, I am not left with the painful sense of failure to launch. The ideas are immense, the execution equals their scale, the scope does not show any signs of running out of Lebensraum.

In this entry, a few details need to be remarked on. One is aging. Our loosely conceived narrative universe contains time, and some of the main characters are experiencing its indignities and outrages. Some are quite remarkably not in sync with the world's idea of time. This is enough in itself for a dissertation. Rudi's life trajectory, set off for us in Poland at Max's restaurant in Europe in Autumn, has taken a timely twist that will repay the re-reader of the whole sequence. Another is the prominence of food: don't start this read if you're hungry or there will be near-obsessive levels of snacking. I speak from experience. In fact, I need to make groceries today because of this. Lastly, I bring up the nature of relationships in this world. Nothing is, or realistically can be, permanent; friends wander off, lovers leave, family? What's that when it's at home? Nations expand, contract, vanish, alter out of recognition, and all of it is the natural evolution of the fluid system we call culture. Like all evolution it can be speeded up or altered entirely by hybridization, selective breeding, or habitat destruction. A bleak thought. A hopeful fact. Both, and neither.

Much like life.

A final note: Today, the 19th of December, is Author Hutchinson's birthday. I planned this review to appear yesterday, a week before Yule, and held off a day to celebrate the day. This review will have to do in place of buying you a pint down at the Wolf & Bird, kind sir, as my thanks for creating and continuing to create such delightful entertainment out of the cloth reality hands you.

THE ADVENTURE OF THE CHEAP FLAT, Poirot episode & story

THE ADVENTURE OF THE CHEAP FLAT (Hercule Poirot short story; Agatha Christie's Poirot second season episode)
AGATHA CHRISTIE
Witness Impulse
99¢ Kindle Single, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A classic Agatha Christie short story, available individually for the first time as an ebook.

Poirot is fascinated by Hastings’ talk of an unusually ‘dirt cheap’ flat in an expensive part of London. With his suspicion aroused Poirot cannot resist investigating, much to Hastings’ dismay who thinks nothing of it…

My Review: The Kindle Single is 99¢; the Agatha Christie's Poirot episode from the second season is free on Acorn TV.

Honestly, Christie was a snobbish pill, wasn't she. Such a horrible opinion of Americans, of all foreigners apparently, and it makes some of her stuff not fun to read. This one, short as it is, caused me agita twice...the American chanteuse and the FBI agent in the filmed version are take-offs of Christie's musical-comedy versions of the New York Italian in the story...and the very Christie-ish withholding of knowledge from the reader. How does Poirot know about the espionage case? Ant any rate, I like the filmed version a good deal better. That's becoming the norm for me with Ma Christie.

This second-season one-hour episode is more fleshed out and fully realized than the story, as is to be expected; but it also offers a bit more fair play for the viewer than the reader, as we learn with Poirot and Hastings the workings of international "cooperation" involving the case. Still, the offensiveness of the American stereotypes prevents me from rating this any higher than I have, and honesty prevents me from giving in to my displeasure and downrating an involving and interesting episode in the TV series below this.

But I really want to.


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