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Book Review | “IN THE MOUTH OF THE LION” by J. Guenther
J. Guenther
I was privileged to receive this novel brilliantly authored by J. Guenther. This book transports you back to the days many of your relatives lived through – to the European Theater of WWII – the war that changed the world.
You will find easy reading and rest assured, no previous military or secret service experience or knowledge is required. This work has been tirelessly researched by the author and it shows. You’ll find characters you recognize, and should you not be familiar with their history, there are short bios in the rear of the story.
Allen Dulles: being in charge of the OSS, (predecessor of the CIA), at the Bern, Switzerland office.
Mary Bancroft: employee of the OSS and girlfriend to Dulles, after reading one of the agency’s handbooks, felt qualified to set off into the excitement and danger of being a spy. In my opinion, she was perhaps an exaggerated example of how that generation went above and beyond for the sake of trying to correct what was horribly wrong with the world.
Dr. Carl Jung
Just imagine driving eminent psychologist, Carl Jung, into Germany to meet with and psychoanalyze Adolph Hitler himself!!
Just when you feel the suspense is over, more questions arise to intrigue you – you stay riveted, turning page after page, as even more familiar names come on the scene in this well-paced adventure.
I’ll say no more of the story for fear of divulging too much – and it’s up to you, but I couldn’t help but have an Ah-Hah moment at the very end.
I should add, that at the very end of the book is also a psychological explanation of Hitler’s “voice”, of which I found very interesting.
I recommend this book to all.
“IN THE MOUTH OF THE LION”, by: J. Guenther
To reach J. Guenther or simply purchase a copy of “IN THE MOUTH OF THE LION”, or any of his other books _____HERE @ WordPress or @ Amazon HERE
OR: Here at Goodreads
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Current News –
The Navy has announced the names of the cruisers that it wants to decommission as part of the latest budget proposal, as well as confirming that all the Freedom-class littoral combat ships — including one that is less than two years old — are headed for scrap.
USS Bunker Hill (CS-52)
A Navy spokesman confirmed that the five cruisers slated for the cut are: USS Bunker Hill (CG-52), USS Mobile Bay (CG-53), USS San Jacinto (CG-56), USS Lake Champlain (CG-57) and USS Vicksburg (CG-69).
The Navy also confirmed that all of its Freedom-class littoral combat ships — the USS Fort Worth (LCS-3), USS Milwaukee (LCS-5), USS Detroit (LCS-7), USS Little Rock (LCS-9), USS Sioux City (LCS-11), USS Wichita (LCS-13), USS Billings (LCS-15), USS Indianapolis (LCS 17) and USS St. Louis (LCS-19).
11 of the ships slated for decommissioning are less than 10 years old and singled out the USS St. Louis as being less than two years old and two of the 24 ships as “currently in modernization.”
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Military Humor –
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Farewell Salutes –
Emile Alito Jr. – New Orleans, LA; US Navy, WWII, USS Mt. McKinley, radioman
Rockwood T. Benjamin – New Haven, CT; US Coast Guard, WWII / US Army, Korea, Sgt.
OUR FLAG
Courtesy of: Dan Antion
La Vern Buist – Mendon, UT; US Army, WWII, PTO, 1879th Aviation Engineer Battalion
Michael W. Caldwell – Quincey, IL; US Army, Vietnam, 82nd Airborne Division, Silver Star
Aubrey Churhman – KS; US Army Air Corps, WWII, C-46 & 47 pilot
Joseph F. Coda (103) – Lodi, NJ; US Army, WWII, Bronze Star
Norman C. Glenn – Garden City, SC; USMC, WWII
George Kittel – Brooklyn, NY; US Army, WWII, ETO
Verl E. Luzena (100) – Bradford, OH; US Army Air Corps, WWII, ETO, Signal Corps, cameraman
Nehemiah Persoff – brn: ISR; US Army, WWII, Special Services (Entertainment unit) / Beloved actor
Elvin L. Phillips – Salt Lake City, UT; US Army Air Corps, WWII, ETO, Sgt. # 19011888, B-24 gunner, 66th BS/44h BG/8th Air Force, KIA (Bucharest, ROM)
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The 4th Spy at Los Alamos – conclusion
Los Alamos and the Seborers
The new documents show that Mr. Seborer worked at the heart of the implosion effort. The unit that employed him, known as X-5, devised the firing circuits for the bomb’s 32 detonators, which ringed the device. To lessen the odds of electrical failures, each detonator was fitted with not just one but two firing cables, bringing the total to 64. Each conveyed a stiff jolt of electricity.
A major challenge for the wartime designers was that the 32 firings had to be nearly simultaneous. If not, the crushing wave of spherical compression would be uneven and the bomb a dud. According to an official Los Alamos history, the designers learned belatedly of the need for a high “degree of simultaneity.”
David Greenglass, Los Alamos spy
Possible clues of Mr. Seborer’s espionage lurk in declassified Russian archives, Mr. Wellerstein of the Stevens Institute said in an interview. The documents show that Soviet scientists “spent a lot of time looking into the detonator-circuitry issue,” he said, and include a firing-circuit diagram that appears to have derived from spying.
Greenglass implosion diagram
The diagram shows an implosion bomb. Several labels of the schematic diagram appear first in English, then Russian. In a 2012 analysis, Mr. Wellerstein described the order as “betraying their obvious roots in espionage.” The English labels include “Power Supply” and “Fusing Unit.” In a follow-up analysis, Mr. Wellerstein concluded that Igor Kurchatov, the head of the Soviet bomb project, drew the schematic for Lavrenty Beria, the head of Stalin’s secret police.
The Soviet diagram was dated June 1946, four months after Mr. Seborer left Los Alamos. It shows pairs of wires running from an electrical controller to detonators on the bomb’s exterior — a clear echo of the American reliance on redundant firing circuits.
The main appeal of implosion was that it drastically reduced the amount of bomb fuel needed. The dense metals were hard to obtain and far more valuable than gold. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were roughly equal in destructiveness — but fuel for the Nagasaki bomb weighed just 14 pounds — one-tenth the weight of the fuel for the Hiroshima bomb. The secret of implosion thus represented the future of atomic weaponry.
Slowly, nuclear experts say, bomb designers cut the plutonium fuel requirement from 14 pounds to about two pounds — a metal ball roughly the size of an orange. These tiny atomic bombs became enormously important in the Cold War, because their fiery blasts served as atomic matches to ignite the thermonuclear fuel of hydrogen bombs.
The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed some 80,000 people. But hydrogen bombs can pack 1,000 times the destructive energy — a terrifying fact of atomic life that generated widespread fear of mutual annihilation. A single SS-18 missile, the Cold War’s deadliest Soviet weapon — Western intelligence agencies called it Satan — could easily fire 10 or more hydrogen warheads halfway around the globe.
If the 1956 documents shed light on Mr. Seborer’s crime, they do little to explain why the United States kept the nature of his job and likely espionage secret for 64 years.
One possibility was domestic politics. Several atomic spy scandals shook the nation in the early 1950s, staring with the arrest of the first Los Alamos spy. His testimony led to the capture of the second, and to the execution of the Rosenbergs. The anti-Communist hysteria of the McCarthy era reached a fever pitch between 1950 and 1954. President Dwight Eisenhower, who had put himself above the fray, began to fight back with information leaks and administrative fiats.
Morris and Jack Childs, 1954
The story of Oscar Seborer’s atomic espionage is found in a few dozen easily overlooked pages scattered among tens of thousands of pages of FBI files released in 2011. The rest comes from partially released FBI files on Oscar and Stuart that document Operation SOLO, the codename for the FBI’s recruitment and direction of two communist brothers, Morris and Jack Childs, as informants inside the senior leadership of the Communist Party, USA, (CPUSA) from 1952 until 1980.
Mr. Klehr of Emory said it was late 1955 when the F.B.I. first uncovered firm evidence that Mr. Seborer had been a Soviet spy, prompting the inquiry that led to the Los Alamos correspondence of Sept. 1956. A presidential campaign was then underway, and the last thing President Eisenhower needed was another spy scandal. The same held true in 1960, when Mr. Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, fought John F. Kennedy for the White House.
He noted, too, that much F.B.I. information about the Seborers had come from a hugely successful undercover operation known as Solo, which had infiltrated the American Communist Party in the 1950s and continued the monitoring as late as 1977. Most likely, the bureau wanted to do nothing that might risk revealing the identities of its informants.
While the F.B.I. remains tight-lipped, the C.I.A. has shown considerable pride in helping publicly unmask the fourth spy at wartime Los Alamos, perhaps in part because more than seven decades have now passed since Mr. Seborer first entered the secretive site in the New Mexico wilderness.
On Jan. 24, the intelligence agency gave Mr. Klehr and Mr. Haynes an award at C.I.A. headquarters in Virginia for an outstanding contribution to the literature of intelligence. Mr. Klehr, 74, said he and his colleague were delighted with the official recognition of their work. Even so, he said the two men foresaw a need for more research, despite having stumbled on the Seborers seven years ago and having already done much to unveil the hidden drama.
“There’s still a lot to learn,” he said.
This article was condensed from the records of the CIA.
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Military Humor –
WAS KILROY A SPY TOO?!!!
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Farewell Salutes –
Kathleen Condliffe – Waipukurau, NZ; WAAF # 82629
Donald Emmons Sr. – Bay Minette, AL; US Navy, WWII
Paul Gualtieri – Prairie Village, KS; US Army Air Corps, WWII, SSgt., 58th Bomber Wing, radar
John Kildow – Post Falls, ID; US Navy, WWII / US Air Force, Korea
Betty McAdams – Albion, PA; US Navy WAVE, WWII
George T. Millson – Snobomish, WA; USMC, WWII, Korea / US Air Force, Vietnam
Dewey Partin – MIddleboro, KY; US Army Air Corps, WWII, CBI
Dorothy Romer – Mindin, NE; US Army WAC, WWII, nurse
Ronald E. Shay – King City, OR; US Army Air Corps, WWII, PTO, 674th Artillery/11th Airborne Division
Miguel Villalon – Brownsville, TX; US Army, combat engineer, Bronze Star, Purple Heart
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Research for Stefaan….. click on images to enlarge.
Camp MacKall
New Guinea
I heard back from one contact, Matt Underwood, last night – here is an excerpt from that letter…..
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Chick Parsons – Our Man In Manila
Charles ‘Chick’ Parsons
Charles Thomas Parsons Jr. was born in 1900 in Shelbyville, Tennessee, but his family moved frequently to avoid creditors. When young Charles was 5, his mother sent him to Manila for a more stable life with her brother, a public health official in the American-run government. The boy received his elementary education speaking Spanish at the Santa Potenciana School, a Catholic school founded in the 16th century.
He returned to Tennessee as a teenager and graduated from Chattanooga High School. He sailed back to the Philippines as a merchant marine seaman in the early 1920s and shortly got himself hired as a stenographer for Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood, a hero of the Spanish-American War On January 2, 1942, the Japanese Army marched into Manila unopposed.
Parsons retreated—only so far as his house on Dewey Boulevard, where he burned his uniforms and any other evidence that he was a United States Navy officer. But he held on to his Panamanian flag. Because of his experience in shipping and port operations, Panama’s foreign minister had named him the country’s honorary consul general to the Philippines. While the occupation authorities ordered that the 4,000 Americans in Manila be detained at the University of Santo Tomas, they left Parsons, his wife and their three children alone, believing he was a diplomat from Panama, a neutral country.
For the next four months, speaking only Spanish in public and flashing his diplomatic credentials whenever necessary, Parsons collected strategic information, including Japanese troop strengths and the names and locations of American prisoners of war
Visitors inside the dungeon used by Japanese forces for Allied prisoners
After the Jimmy Doolittle raid on Tokyo, the Japanese Army’s feared Kempeitai military police retaliated by rounding up all non-Asian men—including Parsons, diplomatic immunity be damned. They were thrown into a stone dungeon at Fort Santiago, the 350-year-old fortress within Intramuros, the colonial walled city where Chick had lived and played as a child.
After being tortured for 5 days, he was sent to the hospital with kidney problems. Still believing that Parson’s was Panama’s consul, him and his family were allowed to leave. By the time the Parsons family reached New York on August 27, the Navy had lost track of Chick—he was listed as missing in action.
The gate of Fort Santiago where Parsons played as a boy and held captive as an adult.
When MacArthur received word that his old friend was not MIA, he called Washington: “SEND PARSONS IMMEDIATELY.” Within a month, Chick was on a submarine headed for Mindanao. He gauged the guerrillas’ strength, established ground rules and united the Christian and Muslim fighters for a common effort of defense.
11 November 1943, Parsons was aboard another sub, the USS Narwhal, and delivered more food, medicine, weaponry and additional radio transmitters to expand the network of coastal watch stations.
By February 1944, Parson infiltrated the Philippines for 3rd time to continue keeping the guerrillas supplied as well as ferrying more than 400 American and foreign nationals to safety.
12 October 1944, a Catalina ‘Black Cat’ delivered Parsons and Lt.Col. Frank Rawolle of the 6th Army Special Intelligence. For 4 days they sent coded messages back to HQ and warned the guerrillas to pull back off the beaches. The Navy launched the main invasion on 20 October and the guerrillas joined up with the invading US Army.
Post-war Parsons back in Manila.
Peter parsons, son, said his father took but a few seconds to return to his prewar life and get back in business. He remembered his father smiling and waving as a ship brought the family back to Manila as though nothing had happened. We called him “Iron Man.”
Chick Parsons died in Manila on the afternoon of May 12, 1988, during his siesta. He was 88. His sons—Peter, Michael, Patrick and Joe—gathered for a funeral service there, and they laid him to rest in a grave next to Katsy, who had died eight years before. “He was hardly ever sick in his whole life,” Peter Parsons said. “When he died he was asleep”
This story was condensed from an article by Peter Eisner for the Smithsonian Magazine. To read the complete story…
Click on images to enlarge.
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Military Humor –
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Farewell Salutes –
Frank Amaral – Smithfield, RI; US Army, WWII
Haig Arakelian – Panama City, FL; US Army, WWII / US Air Force (Ret.)
Earl Baugh – Searcy, AR; US Navy, WWII, SeaBee
Tony Holbrook – Ontario, CA; US Army Air Corps, WWII
William Kunkel – NYC, NY; US Air Force, Korea
Catherine Murray (100) – Ft. Lauderdale, FL; USMC, WWII, MSgt. (ret.), 1st woman to retire from the Marine Corps
John Revill – Swanwick, ENG; British Army, WWII, ETO
Charles Saccamdo – Springfield, IL; US Army, 11th Airborne Division
Pearl Spurr – Bradford, CAN; CW Army Corps, WWII
Frank Wilkins Jr. – Georgetown, DE; US Army Air Corps, WWII, Captain, 599/397/9th Air Force
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Pacific Paratrooper 