Name: An officer and a spy
ISBN: 9780385349581

An officer and a spy

"Robert Harris returns to the thrilling historical fiction he has so brilliantly made his own. This is the story of the infamous Dreyfus affair told as a chillingly dark, hard-edged novel of conspiracy and espionage. Paris in 1895. Alfred Dreyfus, a young Jewish officer, has just been convicted of treason, sentenced to life imprisonment at Devil's Island, and stripped of his rank in front of a baying crowd of twenty-thousand. Among the witnesses to his humiliation is Georges Picquart, the ambitious, intellectual, recently promoted head of the counterespionage agency that "proved" Dreyfus had passed secrets to the Germans. At first, Picquart firmly believes in Dreyfus's guilt. But it is not long after Dreyfus is delivered to his desolate prison that Picquart stumbles on information that leads him to suspect that there is still a spy at large in the French military. As evidence of the most malignant deceit mounts and spirals inexorably toward the uppermost levels of government, Picquart is compelled to question not only the case against Dreyfus but also his most deeply held beliefs about his country, and about himself. Bringing to life the scandal that mesmerized the world at the turn of the twentieth century, Robert Harris tells a tale of uncanny timeliness--a witch hunt, secret tribunals, out-of-control intelligence agencies, the fate of a whistle-blower--richly dramatized with the singular storytelling mastery that has marked all of his internationally best-selling novels"

What Hacker News says

matthewmcgDec 2021

I like to follow a thematic thread with books and movies. Here are a few recent ones that might interest the HN crowd:

* water issues/climate change in the Southwest:

  - *Chinatown* (film)
 
  - *The Water Knife* by Paolo Bacigalupi (sci-fi novel, described as "*Chinatown* meets *Mad Max*)

  - *The Cadillac Desert* by Marc Reisser (nonfiction, part of a plot element in *The Water Knife*

  - *Cadillac Desert* PBS documentary[1]

* Dark espionage thrillers:

  - *The Night Manager* by John LeCarre (novel, honestly not one of his best)

  - *The Night Manager* (TV miniseries--much better than the book!)

  - *The Ghost Writer* by Robert Harris (novel)

  - *The Ghost Writer* (movie)

  - *An Officer and a Spy* by Robert Harris (excellent and extensively researched historical novel, based on the Dreyfus Affair in Paris circa 1900)

  - *J'Accuse (An Officer and a Spy)* (movie)

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkbebOhnCjA

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LucJan 2014

According to the footer, "Robert Harris is the author of a forthcoming novel about Georges Picquart, “An Officer and a Spy.” ".

Actually, it appears to be out since September: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00COMWJG0/

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gwernDec 2013

> Author doesn't seem to know what the difference between a sigint organization NSA/GCHQ and a Humint one is or even what the difference between an officer and a spy is.

To the contrary, he specifically contrasts humint with sigint: "

Spying may be worthwhile in cases where it is very hard or very costly to produce misleading information. Two potential cases are those of code-breaking in wartime, where the number of messages an enemy needs to send is so large that their validity can be checked fairly easily, and that of a secret weapon, where the information produced by spies can be checked by actually making the weapon."

> Both GCHQ and NSA can point to successes as can all the major players in the spy game would Stalin have got the bomb so quickly without spies.

To the contrary, he specifically addressed Stalin's bomb: "On the face of it, the reaction to the atom spies seemed justified. The atom bomb was a weapon that could destroy the world (and perhaps still will) and the science on which it was based was popularly associated with the genius of Albert Einstein. Surely, the only way the Russians could create such a weapon was to steal the secrets of the West....But once the existence of the bomb was known, any competent team of physicists, with access to the right resources, could duplicate it...The secrets passed by Western spies probably saved them a year or so in their research program but did not fundamentally change anything. The Chinese, French, Israelis and others made their bombs without significant assistance from spies."

> Or the success of the XX committee.

To the contrary, a victory for the British necessarily meant a defeat for the Nazis, a Nazi defeat only possible because they tried to use humint: "Yet the actual achievements of these shadowy regiments were unimpressive. In most cases, espionage agencies can cloak their failures in secrecy, but the defeat of the Nazis paved the way for a look at the record of one of the most-feared espionage networks in history. The Hitler regime made numerous attempts to infiltrate spies into Britain and to recruit British agents. As far as can be determined from the German records, all were captured and many were ‘turned’, being induced or forced to transmit disinformation to Berlin."

> And do you think binladen would not have been found and killed if it wasn't for spies run by CIA officers?

Sigint, again. Not that bin Laden's death really mattered aside from the documents captured and the symbolic victory.

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