Caught Red Starred

Book excerpt: Based on two years of research, a Master's Thesis "Two Front War Between the Wars" and a lecture series entitled "Caught Red Starred", Curtis B. Robinson's first book narrates, analyzes, and reconstructs the shadowing and the apprehension of members of the Woolwich Spy-Ring in Britain in the closing days before the Second World War. Here is the story of an of the observation of shady characters like Percy Glading and his friends by a the Secret Service with the help of a double agent informant who managed to infiltrate the spy-ring undetected. Their goal was to assist Joseph Stalin in his plans to elevate the Soviet Union to the status of world power by - in the days before the bomb was the measure for power - creating a powerful naval force, as prescribed by Alfred Thayer Mahan. Utilizing some of the latest documents to be declassified as well as an abundance of other archival materials, and written from the perspective of behind a desk at MI5, he argues that the Woolwich case provides a clear demonstration that it was not only the duty of secret servicemen to uphold the Official Secrets Act by, in this case, attempting to deny naval secrets to the Soviet Union who under Stalin was undergoing an ambitious rearmament program, but also to confront their ideological enemy - the communist movement in Great Britain.