A Very Principled Boy: The Life of Duncan Lee, Red Spy and Cold Warrior

With access to Soviet archives, former CIA officer Bradley delivers an engrossing biography of Lee (1913–1988), who spied for the U.S.S.R. throughout WWII and was never arrested. Lee, the son of a Protestant missionary, was an idealist who became a communist while at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar between 1935 and 1938. Lee joined a posh Wall Street law firm to conceal his party membership and later became a special assistant to OSS Director William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, a flamboyant war hero, when F.D.R. chose him to head the new intelligence service in 1942. Aware of a potential intelligence bonanza, Soviet agents appealed to Lee for help, and he obliged. But despite Bradley’s efforts, Lee remains a perplexing figure: a workaholic nerd with a purely abstract devotion to world revolution, whose commitment to espionage frightened him. He refused to steal documents, always delivering information verbally. The resulting absence of written evidence proved a godsend to Lee when suspicions arose soon after he quit in 1945. In Bradley’s anticlimactic, but still gripping finale, Lee resumes his career and prospers, despite a nerve-wracking, unsuccessful 13-year campaign by the FBI, Congress, and the Justice Department to indict him. (Apr.)