Raymond J. Batvinis

The codename was “WALLFLOWER” and according to noted British military historian Nigel West, it was the “most treasured possession” of the British Security Service. When finally released to the world in 2007 after decades under lock and key in the MI-5 director – general’s office safe, World War II and Cold War historians around the…

Shortly before midnight on December 12, 1941, not yet a week since the surprise Japanese attack on America’s naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Judge Mortimer W. Byers asked jury foreman, Edward Logan, to rise and read the verdict. Only a day before, in Berlin’s Reichstag, Adolf Hitler had announced to the world that Germany…

The world was at war, America precariously poised on the sidelines. But already a second secret war was well underway. While he fought on the home front to consolidate the FBI’s intelligence gathering power, J. Edgar Hoover was conducting an all-out campaign to make his agency America’s first foreign espionage service–a campaign that would lead…

The intelligence and counterintelligence dimensions of the Second World War are replete with fascinating tales of courage, treachery, and intrigue.  IWP adjunct professor Raymond Batvinis brings to light one such story in his essay on the wartime exploits of FBI (and later CIA) officer Louis C. Beck.

As the world prepared for war in the 1930s, the United States discovered that it faced the real threat of foreign spies stealing military and industrial secrets-and that it had no established means to combat them. Into that breach stepped J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Although the FBI's expanded role in World War II…