Military Review English Edition March-April 2016 | Page 133

BOOK REVIEWS

A VERY PRINCIPLED BOY: The Life of Duncan
Lee, Red Spy and Cold Warrior
Mark A. Bradley, Basic Books, New York, 384 pages

P

etraeus, Cartwright, Sterling, Kiriakou,
Manning, Snowden—these are military and
civilian officials who, admittedly, reportedly,
or as revealed after conviction in a court of law, provided classified information to those without requisite
security clearances or a need to know. Recipients
included lovers, journalists, and—perhaps directly
or eventually—foreign intelligence services. Former
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director David
Petraeus paid a fine, and he remains on probation.
Jeffrey Sterling, a former midlevel CIA officer, was
prosecuted and sentenced to prison. With regard to
the case of former Marine Gen. James Cartwright, the
information that would have been needed to be released in support of a court proceeding was, reportedly, deemed too sensitive. While critics have suggested
nefarious motivations for this variance in prosecution,
this is not the first time our leaders have struggled
with how far to go in prosecuting espionage.
Such is the setting for Mark Bradley’s A Very
Principled Boy: The Life of Duncan Lee, Red Spy and
Cold Warrior. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
was the predecessor of the CIA, and in 1943, Duncan
Lee worked in the office of OSS director William
“Wild Bill” Donovan.
J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) knew Lee was also a Soviet spy and investigated him extensively, but Lee died a free man in 1988.
How did he get away with this when others did not?
Mark Bradley, himself a former CIA officer, taps
into declassified primary and secondary sources for
Principled Boy, providing readers with a valuable
examination of this ultimately feckless counterintelligence prosecution, hobbled as it was by internecine
politics and national security concerns.
Things went awry for Lee when his second Soviet
NKGB (Soviet secret police) handler, Elizabeth
Bentley, with whom he claimed to have had a sexual
relationship, voluntarily provided detailed information to the FBI about the network of spies she ran,
including Lee. It seems obvious what should have
MILITARY REVIEW  March-April 2016

then happened: the FBI’s star witness provides enough
information to allow the FBI to investigate Lee fully,
collect additional damning evidence, and prosecute
him in a court of law. As the reader learns, Lee quite
cleverly committed his information to memory and
only delivered it verbally to his NKGB handlers. As
such, the FBI had no “smoking gun” documents to use
in court as evidence of his betrayal.
The FBI did, however, have the Venona transcripts—decrypted Soviet communiques that confirmed Lee’s identity as a Soviet source and corroborated Bentley’s information. Even so, and perhaps
as a result of parallels to current cases, U.S. national
leadership at the time decided that the revelation of
its intelligence capabilities—specifically, the ability to
decrypt Soviet communiques—would do more damage than the value gleaned from its use in a criminal
court proceeding.
This is where Principled Boy gets interesting—not
so much for the information Lee was reported to have
provided or his motivations, but rather for the government’s inability to prosecute. Over the years, Lee
was able to keep his story straight enough, and FBI
surveillance never was able to identify any incidents
in which he conducted espionage. Lee thus benefited
from the officials’ appropriate concerns regarding
inadvertently providing sources and methods to
Soviet intelligence, raw politics, Cold War national
security excesses (McCarthyism), and the intercession of high-level supporters. Donovan, who hired
Lee in the first place and who may have been as much
or more interested in preserving his own reputation,
continued to support Lee even as Bentley’s revelations surfaced and the FBI and State Department
took steps to deal with Lee. The section of Principled
Boy that addresses Ruth Shipley, director of the State
Department’s passport office, and her Ahabian efforts
to refuse Lee a passport, are quite entertaining, especially if you have any direct experience dealing with
government bureaucracy.
The reader interested in a detailed history of
Cold War espionage, and looking for useful lessons
related to today’s counterintelligence challenges,
will find A Very Principled Boy thought provoking
and informative.
John G. Breen, PhD,
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas
131