- Hardcover: 752 pages
- Publisher: John Murray Publishers Ltd (5 July 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0719554233
- ISBN-13: 978-0719554230
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16.8 x 6.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 934,622 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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More About the Author
Product Description
Christopher Andrew
Rivetting, and essential reading not only for intelligence specialists but for everyone interested in the Cold War and British-American relations
John Booth, Tribune
Aldrich's meticulously factual account of British and American spookery...is hugely impressive
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First Sentence
Wing Commander George Keat of the RAF encountered Soviets forces for the first time in Austria on 1 October 1945, Germany and Austria had been partitioned among the Allies and his task was to take over control of Schwechat Airfield from the Red Army Air Force, and report on what he found there. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Wing Commander George Keat of the RAF encountered Soviets forces for the first time in Austria on 1 October 1945, Germany and Austria had been partitioned among the Allies and his task was to take over control of Schwechat Airfield from the Red Army Air Force, and report on what he found there. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Very in depth and captures the mood of the time well. Not a book you would sit down and read cover to cover, but if you are a student of a particular time or researching an incident of the era then this is a good reference work. It should be on the shelf of anyone with an interest in the Intelligence War in the Cold War.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Excellent & incredibly readable. Very wide coverage of subject matter, with detailed analysis of all aspects of his material.
Important to remember that this only covers the early Cold War & only covers the US & UK perspective.
Highly recommended; a quick read despite its size
Important to remember that this only covers the early Cold War & only covers the US & UK perspective.
Highly recommended; a quick read despite its size
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2 reviews
8 of 11 people found the following review helpful
recent reviews submitted by a UK reader
2 July 2002
Format:Hardcover
Max Hastings in The Sunday Telegraph `Books of the Year' 2 December 2001 >
The Hidden Hand by Richard Aldrich (John Murray) is as good an account of Cold War Intelligence between 1945 and 1962 as we are likely to get for some time.
George Walden in The Evening Standard 23 July 2001 >
From riveting case-histories of individual operations to the furious intrigues of the transatlantic intelligence community , from the unsung role of the low-level agent to the evolution of electronic espionage - everything is here ... Aldrich has a gift for conveying a sense of living history, combing colourful detail of this or that episode with the grand strategies that drove the intelligence men.
Cal McCrystal in The Financial Times 1 July 2001 >
What makes Aldrich's book so delightful is its abundance of marvellous anecdote ... Miles Copeland, the CIA's new station chief in Cairo at the time of the Suez crisis, had little time for US ambassadors and was a bit of a cowboy. As station chief in Syria in 1950 Copeland was blamed for a series of army coups that "eventually led to an increasingly pro-Soviet dictatorship". He was moved to Cairo after a wild party during which guns were fired through the ceiling. Indeed, an Aldrich sub-theme is the extent to which British and American secret agents frequently unnerved their own governments more than the regimes they were supposed to monitor subvert or liberate.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Another British spin on Cold War espionage
21 Feb 2010
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Richard Aldrich is another British historian of intelligence who offers lots and lots of data, fact as well as myth, and adds his own opinions to sort of freshen the materiel. His 740-page The Hidden Hand is preceded by Stephen Dorrill's MI6 and several works by Christopher Andrew and some of Andrew's co-authors; he credits both Dorrill and Andrew for their support for his own project.
Aldrich tries to debunk some of the myths that are carried from one U.K. published espionage history to another - none more prevalent than that Harold Adrian Philby's betrayals destroyed much of the MI6 and CIA/OPC covert and often fatal dispatching of East Bloc exiles to do political mischief in their homelands, such as driving Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha to history's ashheap. By Aldrich's brief light, Philby was too important a spy for the KGB to allow him to be much involved in secret shoot-'em-ups. While it is to his credit for not totally swallowing the British - and too often American - myth about Philby, he misses some important details that grew the Philby legend; did Burgess truly courier Philby's purloined top secret papers to KGB case officers in New York City?
One overall element that bothered this writer is Aldrich's themantic approach. Too often a reader has to overuse the index to maintain one thread or another coherently. That is not to say the book is badly written, for it is not; rather it is merely inconvenient. In fact, there was little if any of the obvious mistakes that gatherers of huge volumes of factoids too often make. Finally, for this American, there is reason to credit Aldrich for his obviously huge amount of research effort. One must assume that he visited such backwater American presidential archives as the Truman Library at Independence, Missouri, and its even more isolated neighbor, the Eisenhower Library at Abilene, Kansas.
With both the British and American governments moving to release ever more Cold War era documents, there seems a certainty that more volumes on the fascinating 1950s West-East faceoff will surely be turned out. One can only hope that the myths that make up the history of Cold War intelligence 60 years after its beginning will one day be debunked by an availablity of solid evidence rather than merely by an author's guesswork.
Aldrich tries to debunk some of the myths that are carried from one U.K. published espionage history to another - none more prevalent than that Harold Adrian Philby's betrayals destroyed much of the MI6 and CIA/OPC covert and often fatal dispatching of East Bloc exiles to do political mischief in their homelands, such as driving Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha to history's ashheap. By Aldrich's brief light, Philby was too important a spy for the KGB to allow him to be much involved in secret shoot-'em-ups. While it is to his credit for not totally swallowing the British - and too often American - myth about Philby, he misses some important details that grew the Philby legend; did Burgess truly courier Philby's purloined top secret papers to KGB case officers in New York City?
One overall element that bothered this writer is Aldrich's themantic approach. Too often a reader has to overuse the index to maintain one thread or another coherently. That is not to say the book is badly written, for it is not; rather it is merely inconvenient. In fact, there was little if any of the obvious mistakes that gatherers of huge volumes of factoids too often make. Finally, for this American, there is reason to credit Aldrich for his obviously huge amount of research effort. One must assume that he visited such backwater American presidential archives as the Truman Library at Independence, Missouri, and its even more isolated neighbor, the Eisenhower Library at Abilene, Kansas.
With both the British and American governments moving to release ever more Cold War era documents, there seems a certainty that more volumes on the fascinating 1950s West-East faceoff will surely be turned out. One can only hope that the myths that make up the history of Cold War intelligence 60 years after its beginning will one day be debunked by an availablity of solid evidence rather than merely by an author's guesswork.
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