The Encyclopedia of World War II Spies

Much of the information provided in The Encyclopedia of World War II Spies was researched from recently declassified OSS (Office of Strategic Studies) documents obtained from the National Archives, known as "Record Group 226." According to the author, it would take several lifetimes to review all of the material. What Kross has done in this work is put in an A-Z alphabet a selection of the unsung heroes, villains, organizations, terms, and spy rings of the U.S., German, Italian, and Japanese espionage industry of the war years.Entries include well-known spies, such as professional baseball player and scholar Morris "Moe" Berg, who worked for the OSS in the 1940s and in his most important assignment almost killed Werner Heisenberg, one of the lead German scientists working on the atomic bomb in Germany. There is also an entry on James Bond's creator, Ian Fleming, a commander in the British navy who, with his own band of raiders, carried out espionage missions behind the lines.Other entries include Venona, a project begun during the war to break the code of all of the Soviet diplomatic messages being sent from the U.S. to Moscow. A major achievement of this project was the discovery that the Soviets had penetrated the Manhattan Project. More examples of entries are: Enigma machine, Navajo code talkers, and OSS truth drug project.Although other titles, such as Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage (1997), cover all aspects of espionage, this is the only one that focuses on World War II. Although its value as a reference tool is somewhat hampered by the lack of cross-references, it is a recommended purchase for public libraries where an interest in World War II and spies is evident.