Top Secret: Clandestine Operations, Book 1

First off if your looking for a Tom Clancy type of novel, then it’s best you keep on looking. Like many of Griffin’s novels it’s a swift read. It flows nicely keeping the readers attention. It also relates and marries parts of another of Griffin’s series, Honor Bound. Top Secret is the first in this series of novels and is pretty good. My personal feeling is that his novels were better (maybe more focused) before his son started writing with him (like I said my opinion). As a post-WWII setting, as in real life, things can get/got a little chaotic. Trying to stay ahead of our buddies the Russian’s (our new enemy) as well as the desk ‘weenies’ (who don’t like thinking out of the box) can be challenging. Mr. Griffin’s characters have to navigate these treacherous waters while trying to accomplish their mission.Like many of Griffin’s novels his characters seem to be formula driven. The main character is usually a tall, handsome person who has many talents. They have flaws which include a distain for his higher ups or authority in general. They are usually jumped up in rank by multiple steps due to some act of heroism they’ve done. They also seem to have large sums of money which ends up helping out their cause without much thought to re-imbursement. They usually have a person of high rank who keeps them from getting cut off at the knees from their bosses (who normally would hang an underling out to dry for the simplest missteps). Their life usually has gone through some major tragedy that both strengthen and weakens them at the same time. This tragedy also prevents them from seeing problems that are sometimes staring them in the face until they’ve messed up pretty good. Their character, while rebellious of authority, is basically honest as the day is long. Like I said it’s a formula that Mr. Griffin excels at.That being said I like his series and have read most of them. If you want an easy read that doesn't require the intensity of a Clancy novel then Mr. Griffin is your guy.

Young lieutenant Jim Cronley plunges without preparation or warning into a world of high-stakes gray areas. For better or for worse he joins the spy world when, on a courier mission to Argentina, he gets sucked into one of the postwar’s most sensitive secrets: that the U.S. is helping German spies flee to Argentina. Operating on the Eastern front, they gained far more experience against Russian spies than Americans have. Wartime makes strange bedfellows, as does the brewing Cold War.We met Cronley near the end of Griffin’s “Honor Bound” series, where the OSS battled the Nazis trying to establish refuges in Argentina, and dealt with sometimes pro-Nazi local politics.When Cronley helps seize uranium from a captured Nazi sub, he knows too much to leave the game. He’d gone through some intelligence training, but had been pulled out of it halfway through and sent to understaffed occupation forces because he spoke German. Now given a medal and a promotion, he’s assigned to oversee a most sensitive chore: the secret guarding of General Reinhard Gehlen, head of Abwehr on the Eastern Front, his men and their families.I’ve read several Griffin military and intelligence series and those familiar with his style know how much it’s not about war. Little actual combat takes place in them. Meanwhile he develops his characters, who talk, scheme and move around as Griffin explains their world, using their rank, guile and familiarity with procedures and regulations to outwit bureaucratic heavies and make something good happen.They knock back innumerable Scotches (for Cronley here, it’s Jack Daniel’s) in innumerable meetings in innumerable hotels and clubs, flying around in innumerable aircraft to innumerable bases. They are privy to secrets, debating what they must do if they know them and whether it’s better not to know them. Someone knows the president. Someone’s always been seconded from one branch of the service to another and can use the ambiguity to his advantage. Someone’s always a pilot. Someone’s always rich, connected and binational, fluently speaking various languages. (That’s Cronley here; he’s Texan but his mother is German. His father fought with future OSS chief William Donovan in World War I. He flies because he was taught as a kid by the hero of “Honor Bound”, Clete Frade, Cronley’s childhood friend.)There will be long passages where Griffin eats up pages with lengthy recaps of previous books. The recap here of “Honor Bound”, as Frade tells it to Cronley, takes fully 5 percent of this book. There are always rangy Texans, smart little Jews and enormous black guys in the room.The pattern develops here once again. Why then are these books - military/spy novels with so little action - so good? it’s because foreground and background swap roles. Griffin keeps us busy with Cronley - a shattering love tragedy and then an affair with a senior officer’s wife occupying him as he tries to take over a highly sensitive operation way over his head - and with all the military detail - the attention to rank, generals’ perks, who wears what uniform, who defers to whom and how, the vehicles, the weapons - but this foreground is really the backdrop for what they talk about. The large and fascinating historical events in the background make the stories compelling, because they make you realize why the plot matters, and because Griffin retells them often with different spins or inside information than you’ve heard about before.The Gehlen Org, kept secret for years, became a controversial part of postwar history once disclosed. It’s 1945: Nazi crimes have just been exposed but we’re trying to help these guys escape? The Soviet Union was our ally and now they’re suddenly our enemy? It seems to take the shine off the victory we’d just won. How much evil can you pretend to ignore?In “Honor Bound”, Griffin’s Argentina contains good Germans and bad Germans. The latter were Nazis, obviously. The former tended to be heel-clicking aristocrats fleeing lands about to be confiscated by the Communists. They have Old World manners and senses of honor, they reach uneasy accommodation with the Nazis after the latter’s takeover but continue to hate them, they regard Hitler and his boys as thugs. Hitler needs their military expertise and credibility after he seizes power. Some join the Von Stauffenberg plot to assassinate Hitler. In history, they definitely existed.Cronley’s world, now in October 1945, is much more one of gray areas. Gehlen and his men aren’t necessarily aristocrats. But are they Nazis?The Abwehr was the most Nazi-resistant part of the entire German government. Admiral Canaris secretly kept doors open to the West during the war, Canaris would later be brutally tortured and executed after Von Stauffenberg’s bomb failed to kill Hitler. Gehlen’s group was part of the Abwehr.The Eastern Front, though, was a place of many horrors and their hands can’t possibly be clean. They’re not the SS, but there are some true believing Nazis and a few SS among them.And the Communists really do pose a serious threat globally, something Truman has already recognized by October 1945 but that Western liberals will be slow to face. (As of 2017, a lot of them still deny that it was ever the case.)Cronley is put in command of the secret Bavarian installation where the Gehlen group is being kept. He’s now formally part of the Army Counter Intelligence Corps but actually in a secret unit destined for the not-yet-formed CIA, the OSS having just been disbanded. Juggling the Gehlen Org in the interim between the two agencies is the kind of bureaucratic swamp that Griffin excels at exploiting in his stories.Cronley must deal with his hard-edged superior, Colonel Mattingly; with Gehlen and his deputy, whom people still address by their ranks even though the regime they served no longer exists; and with his own men, wondering whether this rookie is up to it.Some inside the U.S. military - represented here by the Jewish Colonel Schumann, an inspector general, and Griffin mentions the real-life Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau - are outraged by rumors of the Gehlen project, and determined to expose it.Cronley faces an immediate crisis. A Soviet spy has been caught, about to transmit the Gehlen men’s identities back to Moscow. Someone in their own ranks is a traitor. Gehlen’s men interrogate the spy, hoping he’ll give up the name. They’re sweating him and will certainly shoot him later because he knows too much. Mattingly will look the other way.How much realpolitik is too much? Who’s really in charge of these prisoners? Will Cronley go along with it? Is he too soft for the intelligence world he just joined? If he sees a different direction to take, do his youth and inexperience invalidate his views?Griffin is fair to all sides here, focusing on our young naif’s initiation into a murky no-man’s-land between espionage, war and politics. He must rapidly learn to think on his feet and stay ahead of adversaries coming from multiple directions.

Of all the Griffin series I've read, I've never seen two flow together without skipping a beat like HONOR BOUND (which tells us the story of Cletus H Frade, USMCR and his adventures in Argentina with the OSS) and "Clandestine Operations", which develops the character of Jimmy D. Cronley, USA, who'd been introduced to us in the last book of HONOR BOUND. I'd picked up this first book of "Clandestine Operations" expecting three short books that would kind of putter out the way "Presidential Agent" did; I'd just finished reading it, quite disappointed to be left hanging so about the story of Carlos G Castillo. As I started to read "Top Secret"; some names flashed right back from HONOR BOUND, and I was happy that it appeared that "Clandestine Ops" is picking up the story line that the Griffins left me hanging with in HONOR BOUND. Besides Jimmy, Clete Frade, Col Mattingly, and Tiny are all back, telling us the story of what happens to Operation Ost during the transition of the OSS to the CIA under President Truman. I'm not going to be any more of a spoiler; "Top Secret" needs to be read _AFTER_ you read HONOR BOUND. Sure, the HONOR BOUND series gets recapped in "Top Secret" (come on, this is the Griffins we're talking about here); but accurately and consisely, and takes us right to the heat developed at Kloster Grunau and how Operation Gehlen nearly blows up in the faces of all. I thought it was a pretty good read -- I'd taken a several-month break to read "Presidential Agent" -- and am now looking forward to the next two volumes in "Clandestine Ops"; mostly because I felt that HONOR BOUND had ended prematurely. It's getting familiar: I also felt that "Presidential Agent" ended prematurely, and hope that we see a follow-on series that tells us more about what happened to Colonel Castillo.

I really enjoy the earlier books by WEB Griffin, but lately they seem to contain much repetitive mterial. Often the build-up is good but the end rushed. That is one of the problems with this book. This should have been the final volume of the 'Honor' series not a new one. Sorry to be disappointed but for me it is back to The Corps and the first six books in The Brotherhood of War series.

A very readable book, continuing on from earlier activities of 'Clete' in Argentina during the war, a return to to style of earlier books. These W.E.B Griffin books are an education in the difference between the U.S services, and the U.K !

I truly enjoyed this first in a new series novel, however I hope it doesn't mean the end of the "Cletus Frade" series or even the Presidential Agent series.

good read

Well planned very little repitition from book one. Good research shows in the writing on how the CIA came into existence. Looking forward to book three

Fantastic read on book 2 now

A great and exiting book. I love it.

Incllined to be a bit repetative

very good

This was bought as a Christmas gift

Excellent read

Much improved after some very poor books in the recent past. Getting back to his old standards

Once again this author produces a belter!

Ich, wie viele andere Leser, war von den letzten Büchern von W.E.B. Griffin ziemlich enttäuscht!Mit Top secret war ich überhaupt nicht enttäuscht. Das Buch ist im Grunde eine Fortsetzung der "Honour Bound"-Reihe mit dem Fokus auf einen neuen Hauptdarsteller und ist ganz angenehm zu lesen.Das einzige, was man am Griffin vorwerfen kann, ist dass das Ende zu abrupt kommt. Man merkt, wo er hin will, man ahnt, was passieren könnte und auf einmal, Ende, wobei ich mir da noch mehr hätte wünschen können.Hat mir jedoch sehr gut gefallen!Gebe das Buch daher 5 Sterne!

Nothing else to say. In keeping with the other books by this author. Will look forward to the next volume.