Description: In the two years between the end of World War II and the creation of the CIA the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), the understaffed and under-resourced remnant of America's wartime clandestine intelligence service, struggled to provide Washington policy-makers with information about the postwar international system. Despite its limitations, SSU accurately identified the Soviet Union as an emerging threat to the interests and values of the United States and the postwar international system anticipated by Washington.
Brief description: David Alvarez is professor emeritus of politics at Saint Mary's College of California and a former scholar-in-residence at the National Security Agency. He has published many books, including three with Kansas: Secret Messages: Codebreaking and American Diplomacy, 1930-1945; Spies in the Vatican: Espionage and Intrigue from Napoleon to the Holocaust; and The Pope's Soldiers: A Military History of the Modern Vatican.
At the time of his death in 2009 Eduard Mark was senior historian in the Office of Air Force History. He published a number of groundbreaking articles on Cold War history as well as two books, Aerial Interdiction: Air Power and the Land Battle in Three American Wars and Defending the West: The United States Air Force and European Security, 1946-1998.Review Quotes:
"The last big piece of missing American intelligence history--how the United States confronted aggressive Soviet intelligence organizations throughout Europe during the critical years between 1945 and the founding of the CIA in 1948--has been filled in by David Alvarez and Eduard Mark. This is an important book that should be in every serious library."--Tom Powers, author of Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda
"David Alvarez has written an original and well-constructed book that throws light on a vital but hitherto neglected period in the history of American intelligence. His account of the work of the Strategic Services Unit is clearly written and credible, and historians will now have to take seriously his thesis that the Unit influenced President Harry Truman's strategic thinking."--Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, author of In Spies We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence
"Spying Through a Glass Darkly will interest historians of both the American intelligence community and the origins of the Cold War. It is a fitting tribute to the memory of late Eduard Mark by his co-author David Alvarez."--Wilson D. Miscamble, C.S.C., Professor of History, University of Notre Dame
"A fascinating story for anyone interested in espionage and its role in the beginning of the Cold War."--Loch K. Johnson, author of A Season of Inquiry Revisited: The Church Committee Confronts America's Spy Agencies