My Latest Cloak & Dagger essays, All In One Place

My latest Cloak and Dagger essays, all in one place:

DUBIOUS BATTLE

Did Novelist John Steinbeck Spy for the CIA in Paris?

During the same summer that he wrote “The Amiable Fleas,” now published in English for the first time, the American author also appears to have been gathering intel for the Agency.

Steinbeck's residence in 1954

Previously:

CLOAK AND DAGGER

The Spy Who Started the Cold War

Igor Gouzenko was a lowly Soviet cipher clerk when he turned the world order upside down in 1945. Nobody could have predicted the espionage hysteria his defection would unleash.

CHRISTOPHER DICKEY

CLOAK & DAGGER

The Great Russia Witch Hunt (of 1949)

Was a top State Department aide truly a Soviet spy? Or did Richard Nixon and the right find a convenient victim?

CHRISTOPHER DICKEY

ENDSPELL

The Codebreakers Who Exposed Soviet Spies–and Fed Paranoia

Schoolteachers, archeologists, linguists and mathematicians worked on the Venona project breaking unbreakable Soviet code from WWII. They were heroes. But some had deep regrets.

CHRISTOPHER DICKEY

BEHIND ENEMY LINES

The Allied Spies Who Paved the Way for D-Day

Secret agents—women and men—died making it possible for the Allies to storm through France. It's time to remember them.

CHRISTOPHER DICKEY

‘WORSE THAN MURDER’

Could Secret Cables Have Saved Ethel Rosenberg?

Even as Ethel Rosenberg was strapped into the electric chair for spying for Moscow in 1953, decrypted cables might have spared her. But they were released only decades later.

CHRISTOPHER DICKEY

УМНИЦА

The ‘Red Spy Queen’ Who Shocked America—and the Soviets

Elizabeth Bentley died in 1963 a “frumpy New Englander.” But in the 1940s she had managed to manipulate the most feared secret police agency in the world—and intimidate the FBI.

CHRISTOPHER DICKEY