 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com Little is known--and less has been published--about American submarine espionage during the Cold War. These submerged sentinels silently monitored the Soviet Union's harbors, shadowed its subs, watched its missile tests, eavesdropped on its conversations, and even retrieved top-secret debris from the bottom of the sea. In an engaging mix of first-rate journalism and historical narrative, Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew, and Annette Lawrence Drew describe what went on. "Most of the stories in Blind Man's Bluff have never been told publicly," they write, "and none have ever been told in this level of detail." Among their revelations is the most complete accounting to date of the 1968 disappearance of the U.S.S. Scorpion; the story of how the Navy located a live hydrogen bomb lost by the Air Force; and a plot by the CIA and Howard Hughes to steal a Soviet sub. The most interesting chapter reveals how an American sub secretly tapped Soviet communications cables beneath the waves. Blind Man's Bluff is a compelling book about the courage, ingenuity, and patriotism of America's underwater spies. --John J. Miller Average Customer Rating:  
Excellent Reading!
| Customer Rating: | | This book is a real eye opener. If you are interested in military books, particularly NAVY material, this is a must read. I have family in the NAVY and they'll tell you, this is the real deal. Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage |
An Excellent Account
| Customer Rating: | | Having participated in the submarine service during the Cold War in the 1960's, I found this to be an accurate and excellent accounting of many of the things we experienced. This is a well researched and book of experiences that I didn't think I would ever see published in my lifetime. |
Hmmm . . . how does this relate to my little booklet, Treasures?
| Customer Rating: | Through some weird twist of fate, these reviews are appearing as though they relate to a 16-page booklet that I wrote in 1991 entitled "Treasures: Splendid Survivors of the Golden Gate International Exposition," which has as its subject the fate of a group of sculptures and a terra cotta fountain which are the sole free-standing remainders of the art on Treasure Island from the world's fair held there in 1939-1940.
Hmmm . . . I really ought to re-publish it and see if anyone would buy it from Amazon. |
Anecdotal history of US submarine epionage
| Customer Rating: | This "history" of US submarine espionage since World War II reads more like a string of anecdotes and episodes. The stories are fascinating and a few of them are even historically important, but I'm not sure this is an "important" book as the New York Times Book Review is quoted on a cover blurb.
Yet it is fun to read, holds your interest, and does present some new material not publicly documented elsewhere. For example, a central portion of the book is about the undersea cable tapping of Russian military telecommunications that began in the 70s and continued through the early 90s. These were buried cables visited just off the the Northern and far Eastern coasts of Russia where US subs anchored over the cable, placed taps on the line, and came back months later to collect the taps and tapes and leave new ones. |
Good book - audible.com failed
| Customer Rating: | The book is a great even if parts are inaccurate or fictionalized (I have no way of knowing for sure, but I would be surprised if everything happened exactly as presented. Have you ever experienced an event and then read an account of the same event in the newspaper?).
My complain is with audible.com. I thought I could download the book instead of buying the CDs or cassettes. I wanted to listen to it as I was exercising or travelling. I thought the file would be MP3, WMA, or something I could transfer to my MP3 player. No, the file is in a proprietary format (.aa) that requires the AudibleManager software. That would not be a problem except that the software kept crashing with the message "AudibleManager Application Executable has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience." I was never able to play the audiobook. To their credit, audible refunded my money but only after I wasted hours trying to make it work. Again, the book is great, but be aware that audible downloads may not play. |
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