| Portion of title |
World War II and the rise of American intelligence |
| Variant title |
World War two & the rise of American intelligence |
| Contents |
1. Friends in desperate need -- 2. The British come calling -- 3. Gentleman headhunters make a placement -- 4. J. Edgar Hoover -- 5. The oil slick principle -- 6. Spying or riding to the sound of the guns? -- 7. Army cipher brains -- 8. More Wall Street lawyers -- 9. Navy cipher brains -- 10. Reorganizing naval intelligence -- 11. Army and navy codebreakers in Washington -- 12. Jeeping into action -- 13. Traveling the world -- 14. The OSS, the NKVD, and the FBI -- 15. Breaking codes, forging links -- 16. Admiral Dönitz's unintended contribution to allied victory -- 17. Intelligence and the main event -- 18. A dream come true -- 19. Allen Dulles's nearly private war -- 20. When doing "swell work" wasn't enough -- 21. An end and a beginning. |
| Abstract |
"The entire vast, modern American intelligence system--the amalgam of three-letter spy services of many stripes--can be traced back to the dire straits the world faced at the dawn of World War II. Prior to 1940, the United States had no organization to recruit spies and steal secrets or launch covert campaigns against enemies overseas and just a few codebreakers, isolated in windowless vaults. It was only through Winston Churchill's determination to mobilize the US in the fight against Hitler that the first American spy service was born, built from scratch against the background of the Second World War. In Need to Know, Nicholas Reynolds explores the birth, infancy, and adolescence of modern American intelligence. In this first-ever look across the entirety of the war effort, Reynolds combines little-known history and gripping spy stories to analyze the origins of American codebreakers and spies as well as their contributions to Allied victory, revealing how they laid the foundation for the Cold War--and beyond." --publisher's website. |
| General note | Includes bibliographical references (pages 457-467) and index. |
| Genre/form | History. |
| ISBN | 9780062967473 (hardback) |
| ISBN | 0062967479 (hardback) |
