Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage by Sherry Sontag
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Here we have the exemplary stories of the use of submarines in the cold war as spying devices for the soviets. Undergriding this story is a celebration of American rationality and ingenuity in the face of bureaucracies and their financial vehicles in attempting to control cost. There is also no small celebration of the key heros in this story as they attempt to do what is right for the American people.
It’s interesting this was matched by the Soviet’s ability to infiltrate American society and get their own spy ring, collecting American secrets through good ‘ole fashioned spying than as Americans had with their tech.
This book does some good at separating the seamanship from the politics, as it tries to tell the Soviet side and relate it to the American side. In fact, with the end of the Cold War, we see a struggle of the Navy on both sides to keep their budgets by justifying it through each other’s armaments.
I suppose if we take the lesson seriously, it would be that institutional inertia counts more for technological innovation than political needs. Often though, as with intelligence agencies and the military the three are intertwined although we may seek to find one “running the show” more than the other two. Strangely, this book, in taking the military’s point of view for the individuals who risk their lives as uncelebrated heros for the intelligence community, would also point out much of the interference of the navy came from the intelligence community’s attempts to ask for the impossible. Not understanding tech and its current situation limits tech as much as it grows it.
There is no real sense of progress that can be found as production is neutral to progress even as progress relies on production.
All in all, an entertaining book to read, although I think I would have enjoyed it more if I was able to be more patriotic. But in a way the America and USSR of the cold war era is a different world/America than the one I know now. Information wars today are played out in a different field than one of submarines tapping phone lines. It’s much more likely this tapping would be done through internet servers than anything else. One day we will get a book on hackers working for the government.
That would be a very interesting read, much more than this, although the glimpse into this disappearing world has also been of great interest.
