| Industry | Publishing |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | |
| Owner | The Reader's Digest Association |
Reader's Digest Press was a United States publisher of the mid-1960s to early 1980s, owned by The Reader's Digest Association. It published full-length, original non-fiction books, often concerning military or political topics. (It thus differed from the better-known Reader's Digest Condensed Books.) Its works were sometimes distributed by Thomas Y. Crowell Co.
Books published by Reader's Digest Press include Secrets & Spies: Behind the Scenes Stories of World War II in 1964. Covering the war from the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941, to Japan's surrender on August 15, 1945, this collection of espionage accounts and anecdotes included pieces by Walter Lord, Edwin Muller, Gordon W. Prange and others, and illustrations by Paul Calle and Guy Deel. Individual stories include "The Hunt for a Spy" and "Hitler's Undercover Invasion", accounts of German attempts at espionage inside the United States; "Jungle of Hidden Friends," a narrative of OSS agents who coalesced native Burmese warriors against Japanese forces in Burma; and "The Great Ambush", the story of the behind-the-lines battle for Italy's freedom from Nazi dominion. Other topics explored include Great Britain's secret transportation of its gold reserves to Canada in the threat of a German invasion; narrow escapes, such as the Great Escape from a German POW camp; and the repair of a crashed fighter plane by a company of Philippines-marooned American airmen for one final mission against Japan. [1]
Espionage or spying is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information or divulging of the same without the permission of the holder of the information. A person who commits espionage is called an espionage agent or spy. Spies help agencies uncover secret information. Any individual or spy ring, in the service of a government, company or independent operation, can commit espionage. The practice is clandestine, as it is by definition unwelcome. In some circumstances it may be a legal tool of law enforcement and in others it may be illegal and punishable by law. Espionage is a method of gathering which includes information gathering from non-disclosed sources.
The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was a wartime intelligence agency of the United States during World War II, and a predecessor to the Department of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The OSS was formed as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branches of the United States Armed Forces. Other OSS functions included the use of propaganda, subversion, and post-war planning. On December 14, 2016, the organization was collectively honored with a Congressional Gold Medal.
Spy fiction, a genre of literature involving espionage as an important context or plot device, emerged in the early twentieth century, inspired by rivalries and intrigues between the major powers, and the establishment of modern intelligence agencies. It was given new impetus by the development of fascism and communism in the lead-up to World War II, continued to develop during the Cold War, and received a fresh impetus from the emergence of rogue states, international criminal organizations, global terrorist networks, maritime piracy and technological sabotage and espionage as potent threats to Western societies. As a genre, spy fiction is thematically related to the novel of adventure, the thriller and the politico-military thriller.
The Venona project was a United States counterintelligence program initiated during World War II by the United States Army's Signal Intelligence Service, which ran from February 1, 1943, until October 1, 1980. It was intended to decrypt messages transmitted by the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union. Initiated when the Soviet Union was an ally of the US, the program continued during the Cold War, when it was considered an enemy.
Richard Sorge was a German journalist and Soviet military intelligence officer who was active before and during World War II and worked undercover as a German journalist in both Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan. His codename was "Ramsay". A number of famous personalities considered him one of the most accomplished spies.
Books on cryptography have been published sporadically and with highly variable quality for a long time. This is despite the tempting, though superficial, paradox that secrecy is of the essence in sending confidential messages — see Kerckhoffs' principle.
Rupert William Simon Allason is a former Conservative Party politician in the United Kingdom and professional author. He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Torbay in Devon, from 1987 to 1997. He writes books and articles on the subject of espionage under the pen name Nigel West.
John Daniel Barron was an American journalist and investigative writer. He wrote several books about Soviet espionage via the KGB and other agencies.
Since the late 1920s, the Soviet Union, through its GRU, OGPU and NKVD intelligence services, used Russian and foreign-born nationals as well as Communist, and people of American origin to perform espionage activities in the United States. These various espionage networks had contact with various U.S. government agencies, transmitting to Moscow information that would have been deemed confidential.
Lieutenant General Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov was a member of the intelligence services of the Soviet Union who rose to the rank of lieutenant general. He became involved in several famous episodes, including the assassination of Leon Trotsky in 1940, the Soviet espionage program which obtained information about the atomic bomb from the Manhattan Project, and Operation Scherhorn, a Soviet deception operation against the Germans in 1944. His autobiography, Special Tasks, published in 1994, made him well known outside the USSR, and provided a detailed look at Soviet intelligence and Soviet internal politics during his years at the top.
Harvey Elliott Klehr is a professor of politics and history at Emory University. Klehr is known for his books on the subject of the American Communist movement, and on Soviet espionage in America.
Invasion literature is a literary genre that was popular in the period between 1871 and the First World War (1914–1918). The invasion novel first was recognized as a literary genre in the UK, with the novella The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer (1871), an account of a German invasion of England, which, in the Western world, aroused the national imaginations and anxieties about hypothetical invasions by foreign powers; by 1914 the genre of invasion literature comprised more than 400 novels and stories.
Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Bin Laden is a book by CNN investigative journalist and documentarian Peter Bergen. It was published in November 2001, two months after the September 11 attacks, and was a New York Times Best Seller in 2001.
Gordon Thomas was a British investigative journalist and author, notably on topics of secret intelligence. Thomas was the author of 53 books published worldwide including The Pope's Jews, Secret Wars and Gideon's Spies, with sales exceeding 45 million copies. Thomas got the scoop on the nationalisation of the Suez Canal for the Daily Express in 1956. He was a cousin of the poet Dylan Thomas.
George Donald King McCormick was a British journalist and popular historian, who also wrote under the pseudonym Richard Deacon.
Michael Smith, born in 1952, is a British author who specializes in spies and espionage. He is also the Bletchley Park Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford, and a former member of the board of the Bletchley Park Trust.
Thailand in World War II officially adopted a position of neutrality until the five hour-long Japanese invasion of Thailand on 8 December 1941 which led to an armistice and military alliance treaty between Thailand and the Japanese Empire in mid-December 1941. At the start of the Pacific War, the Japanese Empire pressured the Thai government to allow the passage of Japanese troops to invade British-held Malaya and Burma. The Thai government under Plaek Phibunsongkhram considered it profitable to co-operate with the Japanese war efforts, since Thailand saw Japan – who promised to help Thailand regain some of the Indochinese territories which had been lost to France – as an ally against Western imperialism. Axis-aligned Thailand declared war on the United Kingdom and the United States and annexed territories in neighbouring countries, expanding to the north, south, and east, gaining a border with China near Kengtung.
Bernard Charles Newman was a British author of more than 100 books, both fiction and non-fiction. An historian, he was considered an authority on spies, but also wrote books concerning travel and politics. His fiction included mystery novels, science fiction and children's books.
Spying, as well as other intelligence assessment, has existed since ancient times. In the 1980s scholars characterized foreign intelligence as "the missing dimension" of historical scholarship." Since then a large popular and scholarly literature has emerged. Special attention has been paid to World War II, as well as the Cold War era (1947–1989) that was a favorite for novelists and film makers.
The Green Turtle is a fictional character, a superhero published by Rural Home Publications. He first appeared in Blazing Comics (1944), and was created by Chinese-American cartoonist Chu F. Hing.
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