Raymond J. Batvinis's Books

The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence

By: Raymond J. Batvinis

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The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence

By: Raymond J. Batvinis

As the world prepared for war in the 1930s, the United States discovered that it faced the real threat of foreign spies stealing military and industrial secrets-and that it had no established means to combat them. Into that breach stepped J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Although the FBI's expanded role in World War II has been well documented, few have examined the crucial period before Pearl Harbor when the Bureau's powers secretly expanded to face the developing international emergency. Former FBI agent Raymond Batvinis now tells how the Bureau grew from a small law enforcement unit into America's first organized counterespionage and counterintelligence service. Batvinis examines the FBI's emerging new roles during the two decades leading up to America's entry into World War II to show how it cooperated and competed with other federal agencies. He takes readers behind the scenes, as the State Department and Hoover fought fiercely over the control of counterintelligence, and tells how the agency combined its crime-fighting expertise with its new wiretapping authority to spy on foreign agents. Based on newly declassified documents and interviews with former agents, Batvinis's account reconstructs and greatly expands our understanding of the FBI's achievements and failures during this period. Among these were the Bureau's mishandling of the 1938 Rumrich/Griebl spy case, which Hoover slyly used to broaden his agency's powers; its cracking of the Duquesne Espionage Case in 1941, which enabled Hoover to boost public and congressional support to new heights; and its failure to understand the value of Soviet agent Walter Krivitsky, which slowed Bureau efforts to combat Soviet espionage in America. In addition, Batvinis offers a new view of the relationship between the FBI and the military, cites the crucial contributions of British intelligence to the FBI's counterintelligence education, and reveals the agency's ultra-secret role in mining financial records for the Treasury Department. He also reviews the early days of the top-secret Special Intelligence Service, which quietly dispatched FBI agents posing as businessmen to South America to spy on their governments. With an insider's knowledge and a storyteller's skill, Batvinis provides a page-turning history narrative that greatly revises our views of the FBI-and also resonates powerfully with our own post-9/11 world.

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Page Count

344

Publisher

University Press of Kansas

Published Date

ISBN 10

0700616535

ISBN 13

9780700616534

Agent Link

The Spy Erased from History

By: Raymond J. Batvinis

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Agent Link

The Spy Erased from History

By: Raymond J. Batvinis

Agent Link: The Spy Erased from History examines the life of Willaim Wolfe Weisband. It tells the story of his KGB recruitment and working with codebreakers at the top-secret Army Security Agency. The book reveals his motivations for spying, the extent of America’s losses, how he was caught, and the consequences of his treachery.

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Page Count

355

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield

Published Date

ISBN 10

1538184915

ISBN 13

9781538184912

Hoover's Secret War against Axis Spies

FBI Counterespionage during World War II

By: Raymond J. Batvinis

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Hoover's Secret War against Axis Spies

FBI Counterespionage during World War II

By: Raymond J. Batvinis

The world was at war, America precariously poised on the sidelines. But already a second secret war was well underway with the United States very much in the thick of it. While he fought on the home front to consolidate the FBI's intelligence gathering power, J. Edgar Hoover was conducting an all-out campaign to make his agency America's first foreign espionage service--a campaign that would lead to an uneasy alliance with British intelligence in a brilliantly successful operation to undermine Germany throughout the Second World War. While pieces of the story have been told before, only now, in this work by FBI historian and former agent Raymond Batvinis, does this crucial chapter in the history of World War II, and of the FBI, received its full due. Taking up the tale begun in his acclaimed Origins of FBI Counterintelligence, Batvinis mines a wealth of heretofore untapped resources to expose Hoover's remarkable connivances and accomplishments in concert--and occasionally contention--with the Allies in outsmarting German intelligence. Hoover's Secret War opens up a world of spy rings, secret and double agents, surveillance, codes and ciphers, wire taps, microdots, mail drops, invisible ink, radio transmissions, and deception and disinformation as it tracks the warring nations spreading their intelligence tentacles throughout Europe and North and South America. As it documents the rocky evolution of the FBI's relationship with Britain's vaunted M15 and M16, the book brings to light the feud between Hoover and William Stephenson, director of the British Secret Intelligence Service's U. S. operation, BSC. Batvinis reveals how the agency gained access to ULTRA intelligence, thanks to the British decryption of the ENIGMA code, along with the strenuous efforts to keep the Germans in the dark about it. He uncovers eye-opening details of the FBI's participation in the famed "Double-Cross System, which effectively "turned" German agents against the Fatherland, among them a flamboyant, larger-larger-than-life playboy, a world famous French flyer, and a lecherous Dutchman. Batvinis tells for the first time how the Bureau manipulated these agents, and how it transmitted deceptive information critical to the Normandy landings, the Allied invasion of the Marshall Islands, and the atomic bomb program, among other matters. Rich with secrets and surprises worthy of the finest spy fiction, this true story of espionage and counterintelligence gives us our first clear look at the secret second world war, and a significant moment in history--for the FBI, for America, and for the world.

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Page Count

352

Publisher

University Press of Kansas

Published Date

ISBN 10

0700619526

ISBN 13

9780700619528

The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence

By: Raymond J. Batvinis

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The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence

By: Raymond J. Batvinis

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

344

Publisher

University Press of Kansas

Published Date

ISBN 10

0700616535

ISBN 13

9780700616534

Hoover's Secret War against Axis Spies

FBI Counterespionage during World War II

By: Raymond J. Batvinis

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Hoover's Secret War against Axis Spies

FBI Counterespionage during World War II

By: Raymond J. Batvinis

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

352

Publisher

University Press of Kansas

Published Date

ISBN 10

0700619526

ISBN 13

9780700619528

Agent Link

The Spy Erased from History

By: Raymond J. Batvinis

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Agent Link

The Spy Erased from History

By: Raymond J. Batvinis

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

355

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield

Published Date

ISBN 10

1538184915

ISBN 13

9781538184912

Book's by Raymond J. Batvinis

The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence

The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence

Agent Link

Agent Link

Hoover's Secret War against Axis Spies

Hoover's Secret War against Axis Spies

The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence

The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence

Hoover's Secret War against Axis Spies

Hoover's Secret War against Axis Spies

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