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Howard Blum

Biography

Howard Blum

Howard Blum is the author of the New York Times bestseller and Edgar Award winner AMERICAN LIGHTNING, as well as WANTED!, THE GOLD OF EXODUS, GANGLAND, THE FLOOR OF HEAVEN, IN THE ENEMY'S HOUSE, NIGHT OF THE ASSASSINS and THE SPY WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. Blum is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. While at the New York Times, he was twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. He is the father of three children, and lives in Connecticut.

Howard Blum

Books by Howard Blum

by Howard Blum - Nonfiction, True Crime

Tennent “Pete” Bagley was once a rising star in America’s spy aristocracy. But the star that burned so brightly exploded when Bagley --- who suspected a mole had burrowed deep into the agency’s core --- was believed himself to be the mole. After a year-long investigation, Bagley was finally exonerated, but the accusations tarnished his reputation and tainted his career. When Bagley’s daughter Christina, a CIA analyst, married another intelligence officer who was the son of the man who had played a key role in the investigation into Bagley, it caused a painful rift between the two. But then came former CIA officer John Paisley’s strange death. Pete launches his own investigation that takes him deep into his own past and his own longtime hunt for a mole.

by Howard Blum - History, Nonfiction

The year is 1943, and the three Allied leaders --- Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin --- are meeting for the first time at a top-secret conference in Tehran. But the Nazis have learned about the meeting, and Hitler sees it as his last chance to turn the tide. So a plan is devised --- code name Operation Long Jump --- to assassinate FDR, Churchill and Stalin. Immediately, a highly trained, hand-picked team of Nazi commandos is assembled, trained, armed with special weapons and parachuted into Iran. With no margin for error and little time to spare, Mike Reilly, the head of FDR’s Secret Service detail, must overcome his suspicions and instincts to work with a Soviet agent from the NKVD (the precursor to the KGB) to save the three most powerful men in the world.

by Howard Blum - History, Nonfiction

In 1946, genius linguist and codebreaker Meredith Gardner discovered that the KGB was running an extensive network of strategically placed spies inside the United States, whose goal was to infiltrate American intelligence and steal the nation’s military and atomic secrets. Over the course of the next decade, he and young FBI supervisor Bob Lamphere worked together on Venona, a top-secret mission to uncover the Soviet agents and protect the Holy Grail of Cold War espionage --- the atomic bomb. But they began to suspect that a mole buried deep in the American intelligence community was feeding Moscow Center information on Venona. They raced to unmask the traitor and prevent the Soviets from fulfilling Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s threat: "We shall bury you!"

by Howard Blum - Biography, History, Nonfiction

Betty Pack was charming, beautiful and intelligent. As an agent for Britain’s MI-6 and then America’s OSS during World War II, these qualities proved crucial to her success. THE LAST GOODNIGHT is the remarkable story of this “Mata Hari from Minnesota” and the passions that ruled her tempestuous life --- a life filled with dangerous liaisons and death-defying missions vital to the Allied victory. For decades, much of Betty’s career working for MI-6 and the OSS remained classified. Through access to recently unclassified files, Howard Blum discovers the truth about the attractive blond, codenamed “Cynthia.”

by Howard Blum - History, Nonfiction

When a “neutral” United States becomes a trading partner for the Allies early in World War I, the Germans implement a secret plan to strike back. A team of saboteurs devise a series of “mysterious accidents” using explosives and biological weapons to bring down vital targets. New York Police Inspector Tom Tunney, head of the department’s Bomb Squad, is assigned the difficult mission of stopping them.