A fantastic spy story with all the intrigue of a Le Carre novel, about Ana Montes, a Cuban spy within the US intelligence community who was trying to stay one step ahead of her sister, also a government official. One of the greatest spy stories you’ve never heard.
CODE NAME BLUE WREN:
The True Story of the Hunt for America’s Most Dangerous Female Spy
by Jim Popkin
Hanover Square Press, early 2023
(via Javelin)
In the aftermath of 9/11, Ana Montes was arrested by federal authorities after 17 years of feeding American secrets to the Cuban government.
The Cubans made a habit out of selling US intel to the highest bidders – Russia, Venezuela, Iran – and Ana Montes was a generous supplier of some of our nation’s biggest secrets. Her offenses were so grave she is called the most dangerous female spy in American history, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted her executed. The hunt for this dangerous spy – an operation codenamed BLUE WREN – has been an obsession for journalist Jim Popkin, who has written about this case in publications such as the Washington Post. He has unprecedented access to key characters in this story, including Ana’s sister, Lucy, who worked for the FBI. Lucy’s job: identifying Cuban spies.
This is a story about ideology, about betrayal, about the supersecret world of espionage (which the Cubans have mastered), and about two sisters who chose two very different paths.
Popkin’s cover story for the Washington Post Magazine, “The Queen of Cuba,” was selected as a “Page-Turner” by the New Yorker and named one of the “Great Post Reads” by the Washington Post.
A dramatic adaptation is already in the works.
Jim Popkin is a writer whose investigative articles and reports have appeared in the Washington Post Magazine, Newsweek, WIRED, Slate, The Guardian, Washingtonian and on National Public Radio.
Email replies that show up a week later. Video chats full of “oops sorry no you go” and “can you hear me?!” Ambiguous text-messages. Weird punctuation you can’t make heads or tails of. Is it any wonder communication takes us so much time and effort to figure out? How did we lose our innate capacity to understand each other?
Before becoming the face of the White House Coronavirus Task Force and America’s most trusted doctor, Dr. Anthony Fauci had already devoted three decades to public service. Those looking to live a more compassionate and purposeful life will find inspiration in his unique perspective on leadership, expecting the unexpected, and finding joy in difficult times. With more than three decades spent combating some of the most dangerous diseases to strike humankind – AIDS, Ebola, COVID-19 – Dr. Fauci has worked in daunting professional conditions and shouldered great responsibility. The earnest reflections in these pages offer a universal message on how to lead in times of crisis and find resilience in the face of disappointments and obstacles. Filled with inspiring words of wisdom, this profound book will offer readers a concrete path to a bright and hopeful future.
Lucas Goodgame lives in a small town in Pennsylvania, a community that has been torn apart by a recent tragedy at the local movie house. Everyone in town sees Lucas as a hero—everyone, that is, except Lucas himself. Lucas spends his time writing letters to his former Jungian analyst Karl, and he insists that his deceased wife Darcy visits him every night in the form of an angel. It is only when 18-year-old Eli, a young man who the community has ostracized, begins camping out in Lucas’s backyard that an unlikely alliance forms and the two begin a journey to heal their neighbors and, most importantly, themselves.
When former piano prodigy Saskia Kreis returns home to Milwaukee after her mother’s unexpected death, she expects to inherit the family estate, the Elf House. But with the discovery that her mother’s will bequeathed the Elf House to a man that Saskia shares a complicated history with, she is forced to reexamine her own past—and the romantic relationship that changed the course of her life—for answers. Can she find a way to claim her heritage while keeping her secrets buried, or will the fallout from digging too deep destroy her?