Reviews for Stealing Secrets, Telling Lies: How Spies and Codebreakers Helped Shape the Twentieth Century

The average rating for Stealing Secrets, Telling Lies: How Spies and Codebreakers Helped Shape the Twentieth Century based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-08-12 00:00:00 Ruth Parnow A very fine read for those who might have an interest in spying, especially the field of signal intelligence and code-breaking. One comes away with a newfound respect for the pioneers in the SIGINT field when that great industrialized war began, World War One, and when the Enigma Machines first appeared, leading all the way to today's supercomputers. I had personal cold-war experience as a linguist and as a communications intelligence operator, and the book fills out the history of those arts rather well too in a very satisfying way. The rest of the book is a lot of spy versus spy stories written in fine detail, as evidenced by extensive footnoting and a huge bibliography. I am always in awe of the scholarship and effort that goes into writing such a history involving arcane, hard to access subjects and it is that attention to detail that keeps one going in these complex stories.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-05-07 00:00:00 Bobby Machado Pretty interesting collection of stories about spies and spying. Most of the work concentrated on the golden age of codebreaking - namely WWII, and the author did a good job of supporting his de-mythification of some of the most famous and fascinating cases. He did a good job of setting the context for codebreaking within the wider world of espionage, and finished up with some more modern examples of codebreakers and espionage. The writing was clear and concise, the narrative was exciting without tipping over into gee-whiz-spies! territory. I could have stood to read a few more, I was enjoying it so much. Definitely an interesting read.