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In the Enemy’s House: Howard Blum with Tim Weiner

Historian Howard Blum chronicles a recently declassified counterintelligence mission and the FBI agents behind “the greatest secret of the Cold War.”

In 1946, a linguist and codebreaker named Meredith Gardner discovered that the KGB was running an extensive network of spies inside the United States; the goal was to infiltrate American intelligence and steal the nation’s military and atomic secrets. Over the course of the next decade, he and a young FBI supervisor named Bob Lamphere worked together on Venona, a top-secret mission to uncover the Soviet agents and protect the Holy Grail of Cold War espionage—the atomic bomb.

Blum’s new book, In The Enemy’s House, traces Gardner and Lamphere’s efforts to follow a trail of clues that helped them identify the Soviet agents one by one, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Lamphere and Gardner began to suspect that the KGB’s campaign—dubbed Operation Enormoz by Russian Intelligence headquarters—had buried a mole deep in the American intelligence community who was feeding information on Venona to Moscow. The agents raced to locate the mole and prevent the Soviets from fulfilling Nikita Khrushchev’s purported threat against America and capitalism: “We shall bury you!”

Joined by Tim Weiner, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Enemies: A History of the FBI, Howard Blum discusses how this chapter of Cold War history transformed the American intelligence community.











When: Mon., May. 14, 2018 at 6:30 pm
Where: New York Public Library—Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library
476 Fifth Ave. (42nd St. Entrance)
212-340-0863
Price: Free
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Historian Howard Blum chronicles a recently declassified counterintelligence mission and the FBI agents behind “the greatest secret of the Cold War.”

In 1946, a linguist and codebreaker named Meredith Gardner discovered that the KGB was running an extensive network of spies inside the United States; the goal was to infiltrate American intelligence and steal the nation’s military and atomic secrets. Over the course of the next decade, he and a young FBI supervisor named Bob Lamphere worked together on Venona, a top-secret mission to uncover the Soviet agents and protect the Holy Grail of Cold War espionage—the atomic bomb.

Blum’s new book, In The Enemy’s House, traces Gardner and Lamphere’s efforts to follow a trail of clues that helped them identify the Soviet agents one by one, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Lamphere and Gardner began to suspect that the KGB’s campaign—dubbed Operation Enormoz by Russian Intelligence headquarters—had buried a mole deep in the American intelligence community who was feeding information on Venona to Moscow. The agents raced to locate the mole and prevent the Soviets from fulfilling Nikita Khrushchev’s purported threat against America and capitalism: “We shall bury you!”

Joined by Tim Weiner, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Enemies: A History of the FBI, Howard Blum discusses how this chapter of Cold War history transformed the American intelligence community.

Buy tickets/get more info now