A Very Principled Boy
The Life of Duncan Lee, Red Spy and Cold Warrior
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Duncan Chaplin Lee was a Rhodes Scholar, patriot, and descendent of one of America's most distinguished families -- and possibly the best-placed mole ever to infiltrate U.S. intelligence operations. In A Very Principled Boy intelligence expert and former CIA officer Mark A. Bradley traces the tangled roots of Lee's betrayal and reveals his harrowing struggle to stay one step ahead of America's spy hunters during and after World War II.
Exposed to leftist politics while studying at Oxford, Lee became a committed, albeit covert, member of the Communist Party. After following William "Wild Bill Donovan to the newly formed Office of Strategic Services, Lee rose quickly through the ranks of the U.S. intelligence service -- and just as quickly gained value as a Communist spy. As one of the chief aides to the head of the OSS, Lee was uniquely well placed to pass sensitive information to his Soviet handlers, including the likely timeframe of the D-Day invasion and the names of OSS personnel under investigation for suspected communist affiliations.
In 1945, one of Lee's former handlers confessed to the FBI and named Lee as a Soviet agent. For the next thirteen years, J. Edgar Hoover would tirelessly, but futilely, attempt to prove Lee's guilt. Despite being accused of treason in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, the increasingly paranoid Lee miraculously escaped again and again. In a move to atone for what he had done, Lee later became a Cold Warrior in China, fighting Mao Zedong's communists. He died a free but conflicted man.
In A Very Principled Boy, Bradley weaves a fast-paced cat-and-mouse tale of misguided idealism, high treason, and belated redemption. Drawing on Lee's letters and thousands of previously unreleased CIA, FBI, and State Department records, Bradley tells the unlikely story of a spy who chose his conscience over his country and its dark consequences.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With access to Soviet archives, former CIA officer Bradley delivers an engrossing biography of Lee (1913 1988), who spied for the U.S.S.R. throughout WWII and was never arrested. Lee, the son of a Protestant missionary, was an idealist who became a communist while at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar between 1935 and 1938. Lee joined a posh Wall Street law firm to conceal his party membership and later became a special assistant to OSS Director William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan, a flamboyant war hero, when F.D.R. chose him to head the new intelligence service in 1942. Aware of a potential intelligence bonanza, Soviet agents appealed to Lee for help, and he obliged. But despite Bradley's efforts, Lee remains a perplexing figure: a workaholic nerd with a purely abstract devotion to world revolution, whose commitment to espionage frightened him. He refused to steal documents, always delivering information verbally. The resulting absence of written evidence proved a godsend to Lee when suspicions arose soon after he quit in 1945. In Bradley's anticlimactic, but still gripping finale, Lee resumes his career and prospers, despite a nerve-wracking, unsuccessful 13-year campaign by the FBI, Congress, and the Justice Department to indict him.