Show Me a Hero - Hardcover

Allbeury, Ted

3.98

86 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0892964332 ISBN 13: 9780892964338

Publisher: Mysterious Pr, 1994

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From his early childhood, the noble ideals of communism shine like a beacon to Andrei Aarons. Instilled in him by his Russian-Jewish father, his love for the Party flourishes into steadfast devotion, and as a young man still in his twenties, he captures the attention of Party insiders. Recognizing the value of his unique ability to persuade the "doubters," they send him to America to help further their cause.
All the while maintaining the cover of a middle-class New York City bookseller, Aarons finds that his role gradually shifts from voice of the Party to full-fledged secret agent. Through it all, the bright light of Lenin's dream leads him unflaggingly on.
And then, years later, the dream comes to a devastating end.
His ears are flooded with shocking stories of corruption, greed, and murder in far-off Moscow. His most respected mentors, once as impassioned about the dream as he was, are now utterly disillusioned. The noble goals of communism are gone, they tell him - absent entirely from the agenda of Stalin and the Party. Power is the only principle left. They bitterly renounce the Party, and urge Aarons to do the same.
Back in Moscow, the reports from Aarons's network continue to flow in. For years. For decades. The Cold War will surely be won, thanks to the greatest Soviet agent of all time. But there is one thing that Stalin, that Khrushchev will never know: Andrei Aarons is known as "A" to Harry Truman and "Andy" to Jack Kennedy - just two of the many presidents to whom he continually serves as an adviser.

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About the Author:

Ted Allbeury (1917–2005) was an intelligence officer with Great Britain's Special Operations Executive during World War II; afterward, he ran agents between East and West Germany. Allbeury's firsthand Cold War experiences enliven his espionage novels, and he was praised by the New York Times Book Review as "a most knowledgeable chronicler of espionage " and by Booklist as "a master of the genre."

From Kirkus Reviews:

Prolific thriller specialist Allbeury (A Time Without Shadows, 1991, etc.) backtracks in a rather nostalgic bit of historic fiction about a loyal communist who spent his life in the US spying for a glorious USSR that never existed. ``Based on truth'' and covering a cold war that has ended, leaving no doubt about the outcome, this is more memoir than thriller. Motherless little Andrei Aarons follows his father, a Jewish glove-maker and loyal communist, into Parisian exile in the last days of the Romanovs. Spotted as a comer by the Bolsheviks on their way to power, Andrei gets sent to spy school and a lifetime assignment as the Soviet man on the scene in New York, where, with his loyal communist French wife, he sets up as a bookdealer and political spy. Although he's expected to run the usual nuts-and- bolts espionage and crack the whip over the American communist cells, his specialty is soon seen to be his ability to read the Americans and interpret them for the leaders in Moscow. Admiring the optimistic Americans among whom he lives but steeped from infancy in the purest Communist theory, the keenly analytical Aarons is uniquely able to understand and predict US opinion on and reaction to anything the Muscovites might come up with, including the treaty with Nazi Germany. When WW II ends and Stalin's expansionist madness increases, Aarons, who has never lost the communist vision, becomes concerned for world peace and--thanks to the machinations of a Wall Street lawyer and a Franco-Russian CIA employee--steps into a role as personal interpreter of the Russians for Truman and then, years later, for Kennedy. He seems to have been largely and frequently responsible for the avoidance of WW III. Allbeury, a Briton, never gets American speech nailed down, but his heart's in the right place. This is gentle reading for pensioned cold war soldiers. -- Copyright �1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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