The Red Orchestra

This is at once an exciting adventure story and an excellent analysis of a modern intelligence operation. Agents and their contacts provided information; long-range radios enabled its rapid transmission. Soviet espionage against the Third Reich began in 1938, when veteran communist activist Leopold Trepper was assigned to create an information network. Recruiting sympathizers and resisters in France, the Low Countries and eventually Germany, until 1943 Trepper kept remarkably accurate data flowing to Moscow through his radio operators-the ""pianists,"" dubbed the Red Orchestra. Then the Orchestra's transmitters were traced and monitored, and the organization was destroyed. Trepper, once captured, collaborated with the Gestapo, then made an escape. Most of those who had trusted him were executed. Trepper made his way back to Moscow, where because of his brief collaboration with Germany, he was imprisoned until 1954. In 1957, he returned to his native Poland; in 1974, he emigrated to Israel. He died in 1983. (Apr.)