Widows

by Corson

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1 rating, 3.00 average rating, 1 review (more data...)

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published

1989 by Macdonald Co(publ)ltd(englan

binding

Hardcover, 576 pages

isbn

0356178838 (isbn13: 9780356178837)

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All ratings | 3 stars (1) | avg 3.00

all | this edition

Nathan rated it:

01/15/08

bookshelves: cia, cia-angleton, history-crime

Read in January, 2008

recommends it for: People who look over their shoulders, J. J. Angleton.

John Paisley may or may not have been a KGB mole. Authors William Corson, Susan Trento and Joseph Trento don't prove that as conclusively as they'd like to have proven it in "Widows - Four American Spies, The Wives They Left Behind and the KGB's Crippling of American Intelligence". What is fact, though, is that Paisley worked for CIA and was involved with several intelligence bungles, and had a peripheral connection to the Watergate burglars. One day, Mr. Paisley decided to kill himsel...more John Paisley may or may not have been a KGB mole. Authors William Corson, Susan Trento and Joseph Trento don't prove that as conclusively as they'd like to have proven it in "Widows - Four American Spies, The Wives They Left Behind and the KGB's Crippling of American Intelligence". What is fact, though, is that Paisley worked for CIA and was involved with several intelligence bungles, and had a peripheral connection to the Watergate burglars. One day, Mr. Paisley decided to kill himself. How, one wonders, does a longtime CIA veteran kill himself? Well, first he takes his sailboat out for the night, and takes some classified files with him, then he straps a bunch of weights on himself, sits on the bow of the boat, shoots himself in the back of the head behind the ear, making sure not to get any blood anywhere, and then he falls off the boat and, with the help of the weights, sinks to the bottom. Officially ruled a suicide. Sounds odd, but hey, this is the world of espionage, and there are plenty of strange suicides out there. Take Ralph Sigler, for example. He was a spy for the Army and FBI, and then a double agent. By the end of his story, it is likely that the Russians thought he was working for us and we thought he was working for them. He got a little bummed by all this, and decided to kill himself. How, one wonders, does a longtime double agent kill himself? Well, he gets really, really drunk, somewhere, but leaves no trace of where he got drunk, then he beats himself up, by himself, from inside a locked room, then he strips some wire from a lamp and wraps it around his arms, flips the switch with his elbow, and electrocutes himself. Officially ruled a suicide. There's also Nick Shadrin. Shadrin defected to the United States and got so chummy with everyone that it wasn't long before he was hanging out with intelligence heads, congressmen and testifying before HUAC about the evil commie plots to take over the west. Then one day he up and vanished, only to show up again years later at the funeral of the Soviet Admiral whose daughter he had married. All of this is mixed up in a confusing story of incompetence on the part of western intelligence services, a KGB spy operation of some sort, and the ultimate duping of the FBI into giving the Soviets all the military and technological secrets they needed to build their stellar Navy. Corson has experience in military intelligence, and he brings a spy's eyes to the articulate arguments laid out in "Widows". However, despite the extensive footnotes, references and the more than 500 interviews completed to research the work, the end conclusions are murky, at best. The authors acknowledge this in the introduction, explaining that they are presenting one of many possible theories. One suspects that the complex tales of John Paisley and Ralph Sigler, and particularly the odd story of Nick Shadrin, can never be fully told by anyone who hasn't seen a lifetime's worth of classified files. It does, however, stand out in that its events, whether interpreted correctly or not, make clear the need for a sound counter-intelligence division in our intelligence agencies. We'd better fill it with paranoid schizophrenics, too. Because nobody else is going to be able to follow this insanity.

NC...less

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