The Traitors

by Alan Moorehead

Charles Scribner's Sons published 1952. Edge wear and a few small rips to dust jacket. Dust jacket has few small liquid drop stains, and sun fading on jacket spine area. Cover, cover edges, and pages in nice shape.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1952

About the author

Alan Moorehead was lionised as the literary man of action: the most celebrated war correspondent of World War II; author of award winning books; star travel writer of The New Yorker; pioneer publicist of wildlife conservation. At the height of his success, his writing suddenly stopped and when, 17 years later, his death was announced, he seemed a heroic figure from the past. His fame as a writer gave him the friendship of Ernest Hemingway, George Bernard Shaw and Field Marshall Montgomery and the courtship and marriage of his beautiful wife Lucy Milner.

After 1945, he turned to writing books, including Eclipse, Gallipoli (for which he won the Duff Cooper Prize), The White Nile, The Blue Nile, and finally, A Late Education. He was awarded an OBE in 1946, and died in 1983.

Reviews

[Celia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first Alan Moorehead book I've had the privilege to read, and it is such a clear, concise, and thoroughly interesting piece of journalism that I look forward to reading many more.

This volume covers the backgrounds, motivations, and techniques of three atomic scientists who betrayed the West by passing atomic information to the Soviet Union in the 1940s. Allan Nunn May was a native British national, Klaus Fuchs was a German-born British national, and Bruno Pontecorvo was an Italian-born British national. Fuchs's megalomania was particularly fascinating to explore. Backdropped by the war between the largely Fascistic Axis Powers and the unholy alliance of democratic and Communist Allied Powers, their stories are both specific to their time, yet worth considering today.

"As in every other country, the long-range object of the Communists was, of course, to destroy the liberals as well as the right wing, but that was something which [the liberals] would not see clearly for many years to come."

Throughout their stories, one gets glimpses of early Soviet Cold War espionage tactics and feels the undercurrent of the author's frustration with the instability of the new atomic world. This staggeringly out-of-date description of atomic protocol (observed by him on a visit to an atomic facility in England) left me breathless with horror:

"You can advance, if you wish, to the [atomic] pile itself and touch it. You can pick up a rod of uranium in your hand."

Apparently, radioactive poisoning was not the concern that it is today! (Incredulous emphasis is my own.)

In conclusion, Moorehead left us some insights still relevant for today's American society:

"The eternal equation continues: the greater the prosperity of a democracy, the smaller the revolutionary Communist Party; the greater the absence of fear, the fewer the traitors."

"In the ideal state, which is perfectly prosperous and secure, the only threat that can come is from the anarchist, the man who glories in chaos and change for its own sake..."

Way to spit facts, Moorehead.

[Desirae · Rating 3 out of 5]

The beginning especially presented some really fascinating storytelling, but then became somewhat tedious in the middle parts, and then was compelling toward the end.