Blackstock Paul W. The Secret Road To World War Two: Soviet Versus Western Intelligence 1921-1939

Quadrangle Books, 1969. — 384 p.The Secret Road to World War Two is really an amalgam of what might better have been two books, one dealing with clever and sinister deception and penetration operations conducted by Soviet intelligence against anti-Soviet Russian emigrés abroad, the other with the inept policies and miscalculations of the great powers, the blunders that led to the tragedy of the Second World War. The contrived joining of these two subjects contribute neither to lucidity nor to unity. This reader was left with the impression that Blackstock tried to make these dramatic spy stories more impressive through his references to the political and historical dynamics of the time. The work is divided into four major sections, each of which includes a string of episodes attributed by the author to a Soviet-Western war of wits between their services of intelligence and counterintelligence during the 1920's and 1930's. In each of the four parts Blackstock tries to bolster his thesis by data drawn from other Western writers and from official Soviet interpretations, with only an occasional note of skepticism about the latter.