In the Enemy's House: The Secret Saga of the FBI Agent and the Code Breaker Who Caught the Russian Spies Paperback – February 19, 2019

This book is a little hard to pigeon-hole. It purports to be a historical account of the Venona project, the effort by US intelligence agencies to decrypt secret communications sent by the Russians between New York and Moscow, and in the process determine the identities of spies working to steal information about the atomic bomb. However, it is much more than that. Despite the author’s claims that everything in the book is true and the details are indeed fact, it reads like one of the best historical fiction thrillers available today. Unlike some accounts of historical events written by authors with a surplus of knowledgeable but a paucity of writing ability, Blum is able to relay true events with amazing clarity and with a narrative that is paced correctly, builds suspense, contains action and excitement, and makes you think that the whole episode was so outrageous it could only be made up. Truth is stranger than fiction, they say, and this book is proof that real life spy adventures are just as exciting as the ones made up by Robert Ludlum.It begins near the end of WWII. Two men, an FBI agent and a genius analyst, who seem to be complete opposites in everything but determination, are thrown together to try to crack the code Russia is using to send its communications in secret. Through hard work and a strong sense of duty, and a bit of luck, they make headway and are able to read communications intercepts. Slowly, secrets begin to leak out, and eventually enough information is revealed that they are able to arrest and prosecute several of the most damaging spies in recent history.The two Americans are of course the main characters, but also included are a couple of Russians who are running the spy ring. All are portrayed as actual people, not super humans or uncaring robots, and much is revealed about their motivations, humanity, hopes, and fears. In fact, the Russian “Sasha” is portrayed as a real person with real thoughts and feelings, and acts just like you would expect an American intelligence officer to behave if placed in a similar role in Russia.The prose in this book may be described as ‘scholarly’, meaning that not only did the author do an immense amount of research, he wrote his findings in a style that at the same time is both entertaining and intensely grammatically correct. This is a book that is to be savored for its readability and for its revelation of true events. It should be read by anyone interested in spy history and Cold War events, and it will be appreciated by anyone who enjoys a well written, cohesive, exciting, thoughtful book that maintains your interest to the last page.

Great book, diminished by soft-headed thinking in the last chapters. The author grieves that the Rosenbergs were executed by a harsh judicial sentence. First, they could have cooperated and saved their lives. Second, as a result of leaking the A-bomb secrets, the Soviet Union felt empowered to engage in the Korean War costing thousands of UN/US troops and Korean lives. Third, no mention is made that Joseph Stalin was prepared to initiate a nuclear Third World War precisely because he had the A-bomb. Fourth, they knew the possible consequences of spying when they got into the game. No sympathy should be wasted on the Rosenbergs.

In a time when our nation is worried about Russian influence Howard Blum brings us a page turning history of how the FBI and the forerunner to the National Security Agency ultimately tracked down the Soviet spy rings operating in America. The book reads like the best of the spy novels. His heroes are FBI agent Bob Lamphere, a hard-drinking kid from Idaho and code breaker Meredith Gardner, a nerdy language expert from Mississippi. In these two people we have a very successful integration of human intelligence with signals intelligence.We learn that the Soviets understood the importance of an atomic bomb as early as 1940 and created Operation Enormoz to steal U.S. and British secrets with an elaborate spy network run by the KGB and staffed largely by American communists. Lamphere and Gardner get hints of this operation from coded transcripts of Soviet cables, but the single pad code system used by them was nearly impossible to break despite all of their efforts. Blum highlights that the U.S. code breaking operation was headquartered in Arlington Hall, a former girl’s finishing school in northern Virginia. It was largely staffed by female Ivy League graduates and one of them would become Gardner’s wife. Arlington Hall was the U.S. equivalent of Britain’s Bletchley Park.Lamphere and Gardner get three major breaks. First as the German army was at the gates of Moscow, the Soviet repeat a pad, a real no no. Then in 1945 Igor Gouzenko a code clerk in the Soviet embassy in Canada defects with information suggesting a vast spy network and that was followed by Elizabeth Bentley’s defection in same year. She worked as courier for the KGB who transferred information from the spies to their KGB handlers. Further the FBI benefitted from illegal “black bag” operations and in one case seized cable transcripts from the Soviet consulate in New York. Those transcripts became the basis of what is now known as the Venona Files. Soon Gardner was able to read the Soviet’s mail.Thereafter the FBI learns that the Soviets had three spies at Los Alamos. The German physicist Klaus Fuchs who delivered the guts of the A-Bomb plans to his handler was arrested in Britain. Ted Hall a 19 year old “wunderkind” physicist was never arrested because the FBI couldn’t use the Venona transcripts as evidence. And last there was David Greenglass, a machinist, who delivers diagrams for the lens implosion portion of the bomb. Greenglass is Julius Rosenberg’s brother-in-law and it was Rosenberg who was running a vast spy ring designed to steal electronic and nuclear secrets. He appears throughout the transcripts under his code name, but is not discovered until 1950.Julius Rosenberg along with his wife Ethel, become cause celebe’s among the American Left; both are convicted and sentenced to death for nuclear espionage. At the urging of both Lamphere and Gardner FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover wrote a letter to the judge to spare Ethel’s life, but to no avail. They both believed that Ethel played a small role in the espionage ring. In their disappointment both leave their agencies shortly thereafter.Howard Blum has told a very important story in a very compelling manner. The reader gets a real sense of how hard counter-espionage work is and how important luck is. Nevertheless as baseball executive Branch Rickey taught us. “Luck is the residue of design.” I highly recommend “In the Enemy's House” for both nonfiction and fiction readers.

It’s a good story from the Cold War days. Brings out well, the cat and mouse game between KGB and FBI.

This is a good read,,,but ,for me,,too much biographical detail,,from childhood to joining the F.B.I.,,,I ended up skipping twenty pages,,to get to ,,what I call the start,,Some people may be happy with all the biographical bits,,,but after a while,,it just got boring and I wanted to get to the grist,,,,Just my opinion,,,

Acceptable information somewhat boring at times not enough to understand FBI. Activity at the time. Anyway glad I read it