Stealing Secrets, Telling Lies: How Spies and Codebreakers Helped Shape the 20th Century

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Summary: Key Spies and Codebreakers of the Twentieth Century
Review: Crisply written accounts of spies and codebreakers who helped shape turning points in the history of the last century.

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Summary: Unusual Book....
Review: I really enjoyed Gannon's book. He wrote about areas that I knew very little about. The fact that the Polish Cryptanalysts were able to reverse engineer the Enigma machine with the help of the French who managed to get keys from a spy. The poles never got the credit they deserved for this, when they gave the Brits an Enigma machine the Brits made up several cover stories, i.e. the Poles hijacked a German army truck and stole the machine.
The book dispells the notion that the Allies were reading German communications line for line. There were several periods when the British did not have the German keys and in several cases they had to steal them from obscure weather stations that the Germans had near the Artic.
The book is very factual and concise. The author does not try to impress the reader with his knowledge.