Type of bind: Audio Cassette
Dewey Decimal Number: 359.984
Format: Bargain Price
ISBN number: 1404227849
Label: HarperAudio
Manufacturer: HarperAudio
Quantity: 4
Printing Date: March 01, 1999
Publishing house: HarperAudio
Sale Popularity Level: 959666
Studio: HarperAudio
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
For decades American submarines have roamed the depths in a dangerous battle for information and advantage in missions known only to a select few. Now, after six years of research, those missions are told in Blind Man's Bluff, a magnificent achievement in investigative reporting. It reads like a spy thriller -- except everything in it is true. This is an epic of adventure, ingenuity, courage, and disaster beneath the sea, a story filled with unforgettable characters who engineered daring missions to tap the enemy's underwater communications cables and to shadow Soviet submarines. It is a story of heroes and spies, of bravery and tragedy.
Amazon.com Review:
Little is known--and less has been published--about American submarine espionage during the Cold War. These submerged sentinels silently monitored the Soviet Union's harbors, shadowed its subs, watched its missile tests, eavesdropped on its conversations, and even retrieved top-secret debris from the bottom of the sea. In an engaging mix of first-rate journalism and historical narrative, Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew, and Annette Lawrence Drew describe what went on.
'Most of the stories in Blind Man's Bluff have never been told publicly,' they write, 'and none have ever been told in this level of detail.' Among their revelations is the most complete accounting to date of the 1968 disappearance of the U.S.S. Scorpion; the story of how the Navy located a live hydrogen bomb lost by the Air Force; and a plot by the CIA and Howard Hughes to steal a Soviet sub. The most interesting chapter reveals how an American sub secretly tapped Soviet communications cables beneath the waves. Blind Man's Bluff is a compelling book about the courage, ingenuity, and patriotism of America's underwater spies. --John J. Miller
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
This "history" of US submarine espionage since World War II reads more like a string of anecdotes and episodes. The stories are fascinating and a few of them are even historically important, but I'm not sure this is an "important" book as the New York Times Book Review is quoted on a cover blurb.
Yet it is fun to read, holds your interest, and does present some new material not publicly documented elsewhere. For example, a central portion of the book is about the undersea cable tapping of Russian military telecommunications that began in the 70s and continued through the early 90s. These were buried cables visited just off the the Northern and far Eastern coasts of Russia where US subs anchored over the cable, placed taps on the line, and came back months later to collect the taps and tapes and leave new ones.
Rated by buyers -
The book is a great even if parts are inaccurate or fictionalized (I have no way of knowing for sure, but I would be surprised if everything happened exactly as presented. Have you ever experienced an event and then read an account of the same event in the newspaper?).
My complain is with audible.com. I thought I could download the book instead of buying the CDs or cassettes. I wanted to listen to it as I was exercising or travelling. I thought the file would be MP3, WMA, or something I could transfer to my MP3 player. No, the file is in a proprietary format (.aa) that requires the AudibleManager software. That would not be a problem except that the software kept crashing with the message "AudibleManager Application Executable has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience." I was never able to play the audiobook. To their credit, audible refunded my money but only after I wasted hours trying to make it work. Again, the book is great, but be aware that audible downloads may not play.
Rated by buyers 
-
This book, along with a clutch of mass-market WW II paperbacks, has sat in a corner for 8 years or so. I picked it up last Saturday and read it in a day. A real page turner with dense factual content and hair-raising stories. In the tradition of the best non-fiction, the truth here is stranger and more compelling than fiction. Hats off to the submariners -- I hope they're still out there, quietly ruining bad guys' days.
Rated by buyers -
Having served on a U.S. submarine I found this to be a fasinating story that the American people should hear. America and Russia were so close to a not so cold of a war many times during the Cold War.
Rated by buyers -
This book was both suspenseful and interesting account of spying under the waves. While I find most Submarine books be overly simplified in the operation of the sub it's self the same is true here. While more detail is given by the author in our activities of taping the underwater telephone and data cables of the Soviets, more detailed technical information would have been helpful to me. Still an engaging book, which through it's pages let me to yet more books, it was well worth the read. While it might just be me but I want to know more of how the sub got to where it was going rather then just the fact that it did. Then again I like stereo instructions.
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