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Blind Man's Bluff
- The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage
- Narrated by: George Wilson
- Length: 15 hrs and 47 mins
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Publisher's Summary
No espionage missions have been kept more secret than those involving American submarines. Now, Blind Man's Bluff shows for the first time how the navy sent submarines wired with self-destruct charges into the heart of Soviet seas to tap crucial underwater telephone cables. It unveils how the navy's own negligence might have been responsible for the loss of the USS Scorpion, a submarine that disappeared, all hands lost, 30 years ago. It tells the complete story of the audacious attempt to steal a Soviet submarine with the help of eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes and how it was doomed from the start. And it reveals how the navy used the comforting notion of deep-sea rescue vehicles to hide operations that were more James Bond than Jacques Cousteau.
Blind Man's Bluff contains an unforgettable array of characters, including the cowboy sub commander who brazenly outraced torpedoes and couldn't resist sneaking up to within feet of unaware enemy subs. It takes us inside clandestine Washington meetings where top submarine captains briefed presidents and where the espionage war was planned one sub and one dangerous encounter at a time. Stretching from the years immediately after World War II to the operations of the Clinton administration, it is an epic story of daring and deception. A magnificent achievement in investigative reporting, it feels like a spy thriller but with one important difference: Everything in it is true.
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What listeners say about Blind Man's Bluff
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Bearthecat
- 2024-05-21
A pretty dull book considering the exciting subject matter
I couldn’t wait to dig into this as I have a deep fascination with submarines, especially the espionage angle. Unfortunately for about 75% of the book, I struggled to stay intrigued as the performance was quite dull, as was the first half of the book’s stories. For such brilliant subject matter, this could have been so much better than it was. Mundane historical accounts that went on far too long without any sense of what must have been an exciting time in naval espionage. It’s a shame because I was so very excited and really wanted to like this book. Unfortunately it was like a long lecture by an uninspired professor in University.
Read Erik Larson’s, Dead Wake for a brilliantly written true story about submarines during WW2, or Iron Coffins by Herbert Werner. For fiction The Hunt For Red October by John Clancy or Das Boot (book or film).
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