Wise, David. The Spy Who Got Away. New York: Random House, 1988. 289 pages.

The subtitle reads, "The Inside Story of Edward Lee Howard, the CIA Agent Who Betrayed His Country's Secrets and Escaped to Moscow." Wise was able to interview Howard, who defected to the USSR in 1985 while under FBI suspicion and surveillance for espionage. Wise also took full advantage of his many contacts in U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence to fill out the story, making the book particularly valuable for the names he included.

With all of the literature about the CIA over the past two decades, it is easy to forget that for the first half of the Agency's history, almost nothing was in the public domain. Washington journalist David Wise changed all of that with "The Invisible Government" in 1964. CIA director John McCone called in Wise and co-author Thomas Ross to demand deletions on the basis of galleys the CIA had secretly obtained. When that didn't work, the CIA formed a special group to deal with the book and tried to secure bad reviews, even though the CIA's legal counsel had found the book "uncannily accurate." As the unofficial dean of intelligence journalists, Wise is still working on future books from his Washington office.
ISBN 0-394-56281-X

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