Historians still argue about the winners and losers of the Vietnam War, but there were two undoubted losers: the Republic of Vietnam—commonly known as South Vietnam—and its army, generally known as ARVN. The soldiers of …
The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s 1932-1943, edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky. Fitzroy MacLean’s superb autobiography, Eastern Approaches, is most famously recalled for his exploits in the Balkans, during the Second …
The New Spymasters: inside espionage from the Cold War to global terror, by Stephen Grey Despite the continuing value of intelligence methods like telecommunication interception and satellite imagery, when operating against a shadowy terrorist group—especially …
Part of my summer reading has been British naval historian Geoffrey Till’s excellent 2014 book Understanding victory: naval operations from Trafalgar to the Falklands. At first glance it doesn’t seem to offer much to anyone …
Momentous global and domestic events between 1963 and 1975 revealed the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation to be deeply flawed as it struggled, often in vain, to combat subversion in a changing world. John Blaxland’s second …