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- Verified Buyer
A defected Russian spy and his family are safe in Argentina, but an attempt is made to kidanp two of Jimmy Cronley’s people. Most of the abductors are killed, but it’s clear the NKVD is retaliating for the spy’s extraction.The next attempt is against someone higher up the ladder. Faced with Soviet demands to return the spy Likharev and his family, Cronley decides to disobey orders to do it, but also must find another way to get the American hostage back.He digs into the background of his newly-met Alsatian cousin, involved, he thinks, in the Odessa operation helping Nazis escape to Argentina.Cronley’s real opponents in this series are the other American bureaucracies determined to kill off or take over the fledgling CIA. The Army’s G2 intelligence branch, the Pentagon and the FBI are all pitted against it. Getting dirt on the very junior officer who commands its European branch would help immensely.Cronley’s unorthodox methods and loose-cannon reputation give them plenty of fodder to work with, and will they find out about his affair in the first book with an officer’s wife who turned out to be a Soviet spy? Questions about the couple’s death won’t go away. While fending off bureaucratic heavies, Cronley still needs help from them for his spy ops.Griffin does a good job here with the ambiguities of this era, when a wartime ally became a Cold War enemy, when onetime enemies became allies, when Jewish Americans and others are outraged that Nazis are not being prosecuted more aggressively, and when the U.S. and Russia are competing for Nazi scientists and their rocket technology.The Jewish officer and his wife probing into Cronley’s activities turned out to be Soviet spies. But one of Cronley’s top staffers keeping the secrets is himself Jewish. So is an NKVD agent who doubles for the Mossad and works with Gehlen. The Abwehr extracted Jewish Communists from concentration camps and let them escape to Palestine in exchange for information from the NKVD. And that agent still helps him.I found one thing unreal here. This series involves the keeping of a most sensitive secret: that the Nazi foreign intelligence group opposing the Russians has defected in its entirety to the Americans, their sources still in place. It needs to be kept secret to keep the Russians from taking countermeasures, and also to avoid the political fallout.But Cronley quickly takes newcomers into his confidence when he thinks they they can be useful and trusted. You lose track of the number of times some private or pilot or WAC is suddenly read into the program. Yes, Cronley builds the motley crew a Griffin protagonist typically gets, but this also creates numerous security risks. Suspicions of Russian moles going back to the first story have not yet been put to rest.Plus Cronley has fallen into bed not once, not twice but three times with different women who learn more than a few secrets, and the first, Rachel Schumann, was a damaging spy. Cronley’s latest conquest is an AP reporter. It’s cute and entertaining, and she plays ball, but I don’t see a real-world spook getting within a mile of her.
