Richard Wires – författare

Unlike other works, America in the Sixties looks at the era from the perspective of new leftists, liberals, and conservatives, providing readers with the opportunity to see this seminal decade more fully and richly than they could before. It includes the manifestos of both the Students for a Democratic Society and the Young Americans for Freedom, the most prominent radical and conservative student groups of that era, as well as the words of prominent liberals and moderate Republicans, such as Hubert Humphrey and Dwight D. Eisenhower. In addition to selections by the well-known individuals of that era, such as Jerry Rubin and Tom Hayden, it contains pieces by figures often associated with other times, like the Reverend Billy Graham, Ronald Reagan, and Strom Thurmond. Seeking to immerse readers in the decade's key issues in a balanced manner, it includes President Johnson's, General William Westmoreland's, and the AFL-CIO's defense of the Vietnam War as well as Dr. Benjamin Spock's and Paul Potter's criticism of it.The book covers the civil rights movement, Vietnam, the counterculture, and the women's movement. It looks at some of the 1960's most memorable moments, from the Cuban missile crisis and President Kennedy's assassination to the moon landing and the New York Mets' World Series victory in 1969. A statistical appendix, with data on the economy, the cost of consumer goods, trends in popular culture, and important legal developments, complements the documents.

The episode of the opportunistic valet of Britain's ambassador to neutral Turkey during World War II—dubbed Cicero for the eloquence of the top-secret material he appropriated from his employer Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen and sold to the Nazis—is a staple of intelligence lore. Yet this remarkable and sometimes comical story has often been recounted with little regard for the facts, most prominently in the popular film Five Fingers. Now, historian and former intelligence officer Richard Wires presents the first full and objective account of the Cicero spy episode, offering closure to past discrepancies and credible solutions to remaining mysteries. Copiously documented, The Cicero Spy Affair provides readers with the true chronology of events and places them in an international context. It is a story set in the hotbed of intrigue that was wartime Turkey, replete with a dramatic car chase, a series of colorful mistresses ever loyal to their lover the spy, and an old-school British ambassador whose documents are photographed at night as he plays the piano in the drawing room and/or slips into a sleeping pill-induced slumber.Despite the affair's amusing aspects, it is also a sobering tale in which there are no winners and from which there are serious lessons to be learned. Germany never made use of the highly sensitive British documents it obtained during this crucial four-month period of the war because the handling of the information was caught up in a bitter and wasteful personal rivalry between Ribbentrop and Schellenberg. It was sheer luck for the British that their war effort did not sustain any significant damage. For, while the book states definitively that security regarding the Allied invasion of Normandy was not breached in the Cicero affair, Germany did gain a potential advantage concerning campaigns in the Aegean and the Balkans. This embarrassed the British greatly, especially since Cicero walked away a free man. However, the greedy valet—the most highly paid spy in history at that time—did not achieve his goals, either; he discovered some years later that the British banknotes he insisted on as payment were counterfeited by the Germans as part of a larger counterfeiting project. Cicero died a desperate man, deeply in debt—a fitting anticlimax for an espionage episode resulting in neither bodily injury nor strategic impact, but in humiliation on all sides.