MixedLondon Review of Books (UK)There isn’t much new material in An Impeccable Spy, with the exception of Stalin’s crude marginal notes on the Sorge file, but it does confirm and expand on information included in earlier accounts, some of it from the records of Soviet military intelligence, which haven’t been made generally available ... The short biographical sketch of [Jan Karlovich] Berzin in An Impeccable Spy contains some mistakes, but Matthews’s most important error is to seek to distinguish Berzin from the people he recruited. They, he claims, were idealists, dreamers, intellectuals, well-meaning types. Berzin, in contrast, was a ruthless, violent protégé of Dzerzhinsky, head of the much feared Cheka. Wrong. All the major achievements of the Fourth Department, as Soviet military intelligence came to be known (penetration of the British Foreign Office and intelligence in the 1920s, the creation of the Rote Kapelle, or Red Orchestra, which had spies in the highest echelons of the German military both in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe, and Sorge’s astonishing successes in Japan in the 1930s), were planned in detail by Berzin.
Lawrence Wright
PositiveThe Guardian\"Wright is a New Yorker journalist who knows how to take care of his prose and construct a seductive narrative. His book is a skilful reconstruction of the lives of the main characters involved in what is now an old story ... Wright has employed the vacuum-cleaner approach, collecting all the published material, sifting through it and then conducting dozens of interviews and doing a great deal of cross-checking ... There is a missing piece in the puzzle. What is virtually absent in The Looming Tower is anything on the al-Qaida presence in Bosnia from 1993-95. Despite the fact that one of the more important documents Wright obtained was \'a collection of memos, letters and notes that were taken from an al-Qaida computer captured in Bosnia,\' he chooses not to write about it. This is a great pity.\
