From Christopher Dickey, the author of "Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South" and "Securing the City," this site provides updates and footnotes on history, espionage, terrorism, fanaticism, policing and counterinsurgency linked to Dickey's columns for The Daily Beast and his other writings; also, occasional dialogues, diatribes, and contributions from friends.
From Peter Beard to Cold war spies, the French resistance, and Sir Richard Francis Burton—some of my "long reads" of recent years.
Lockdown Weekend Reading: Forays Into Friendships and History
Over the last few years I have written quite a few rather personal pieces, some of them exploring friendships, some of them bits of history that interested me, some of them both. I am thinking of reading some of them aloud as a sort of informal podcast. If you have a preference, let me know.
They are posted here by publication date in reverse chronological order dating back to 2016, which means the subjects appear random, but one might discern certain threads that run through them.
Trapped in my apartment I pulled Joan's books off the shelf. I wanted to learn again from her meticulous observation of detail, character and setting, and her great sense of irony.
Many of us worldwide are stuck at home, which means it's the perfect opportunity to escape with a great travel book. Our first selection? Aldous Huxley's "Along the Road."
The most powerful reporters—and spies—in America were haunted by the death of Mary Meyer, President Kennedy's murdered lover. They knew her well. What secrets were in her diary?
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.
The only training she ever got as a spy was from her lover. But Elizabeth Bentley managed to manipulate the most feared secret police agency in the world—and intimidate the FBI.
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.
In 1987, Trump attacked Reagan's deployment in the Gulf to protect 'ships we don't own, carrying oil we don't need destined for allies who won't help.' He may still feel that way.
The president, born the year after the war ended, does not remember and probably does not want to know what brought it on or what it was fought to end.
Schoolteachers, archeologists, linguists and mathematicians worked on the Venona project breaking unbreakable Soviet code from WWII. They were heroes. But some had deep regrets.
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.
Her beauty was legendary, her fortune enormous, and he was notoriously thick. She made him emperor, but she's been written out of history as a tragic whore. She deserves better.
Given a large fortune by one lover, Harriet Howard ditched him and used it to help her new lover return to France, get elected president, and fund the coup that made him emperor.
The Musée d'Orsay houses a work that still shocks visitors, a painting that united one of the 19th century's most controversial painters with one of its most dissolute gentlemen.
I was looking for a muse, and found in her eyes a gateway to the past, an icon for the present. Victorine Meurent was the painter's star model but remained an enigma for 150 years.
Christopher Dickey's father wrote the novel on which 'Deliverance' was based—and, during filming, Dickey saw Reynolds the womanizer, wit, and actor desperate to be taken seriously.
A newly published short story by the iconic American author, set in WWII Paris, grew out of a "moveable feast" very different from the one he had lived there in the 1920s.
These three journalists died investigating mercenaries tied directly to an oligarch and an intelligence agency indicted by the Mueller probe in the U.S.
The Castros claimed Cuba was never into drug smuggling, then they said it quit. But their own operations were nothing compared to the ones they helped facilitate in Venezuela.
Richard Francis Burton was one of the great adventurers of the Victorian era, and a spy. But several weeks just before the Civil War are curiously missing from his life's account.
One of the world's great adventurers—and a Resistance spy—Jacques Cousteau warned me 25 years ago that humans were reaching the point of no return on environmental destruction.
Before he was a world-famous spy and translator, Richard F. Burton was sent into the boy brothels of Karachi so the British could conquer all of India.
Brave women helped downed Allied flyers escape the Germans. But more than that, they showed Hitler's white nationalists they would not surrender, would not submit.
On February 28, I will be speaking at the College of Charleston about "Spying in the Blood: Gertrude Sanford Legendre's Privilege, Patriotism, and Espionage." I'll also look back at the work of her grandfather, Henry Shelton Sanford, who ran the Union's secret services in Europe during the Civil War. This is my recent article about Legendre, "The Socialite Spy Who Played So Dumb She Outsmarted the Nazis," which drew heavily on the digitized archives at the college.
On March 2, it will be my honor to speak at the Charleston Library Society about my book, Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South, and the way the confidential dispatches of Consul Robert Bunch in the 1850s and '60s may relate to the present. (Much vital research for the book was conducted at the Library Society.)
In that same talk I want to have some fun looking at people Consul Bunch almost certainly knew, but did not write about, including the slave Robert Smalls, a harbor pilot who stole the CSS Planter and turned it over to the blockading fleet, and Saint-Lo Mellichamp II, keeper of the Morris Island lighthouse in the early 1850s. Great characters with probable but, alas, undocumented connections.
As I looked back over the stories I've written for The Daily Beast this year, I was struck by how many of them were historical. Most were published under the rubrics of our regular Cloak & Dagger and Lost Masterpieces features, which are long reads that run on the weekends. But most of them also have some relevance to current events, especially the resurgence of fascism and Nazism, whether we call the new movements white nationalism, the alt-right, or just Donald Trump on Twitter.
Angels of the Resistance in Nazi Paris
Brave women helped downed Allied flyers escape the Germans.... MORE
On February 28, I will be speaking at the College of Charleston about "Spying in the Blood: Gertrude Sanford Legendre's Privilege, Patriotism, and Espionage." I'll also look back at the work of her grandfather, Henry Shelton Sanford, who ran the Union's secret services in Europe during the Civil War. This is my recent article about Legendre, "The Socialite Spy Who Played So Dumb She Outsmarted the Nazis," which drew heavily on the digitized archives at the college.
