Description
Heaphy has retired from teaching at SUNY. Now, thanks to some declassified material, he can tell the story of his involvement in the early 1950s in a presidential plan to encourage Moroccan nationalists to break free of France so that America could use the North African country as a place to install weapons. At the time of the McCarthy hearings and the beginnings of the Cold War Heaphy was in military Intelligence. His story, told in narrative form with some conversations recreated and some characters disguised, reads like a Cold War thriller, complete with secret meetings, turncoats, torture, cannibalism and a deaf-mute masseuse. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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Legerdemain is the true story of a young undercover operative for the U.S. Air Force during the Truman-Eisenhower Administrations who was sent on a mission to wrest French Morocco from the French colonial system and bring it into the American sphere of influence. The purpose was to insure Moroccan air bases for the Strategic Air Command which was vital for a retaliatory strike against the Soviet Union. The story underlines President Truman's disregard for French friendship and is willing to risk it for the sake of U.S. security. The disregard is further illustrated by the secret storage of atom bombs in French Morocco which was completely unknown to Charles DeGaulle, President of France. The story unveils the working of undercover operatives of Britains MI6, Israel's Mossad, America's CIA, France's Security Services, the Soviet Union's KGB as well as the French Foreign Legion set against the exotic backdrop of the alleyways, coffee houses and bathhouses of Casablanca, the exotic fairs of Marrakech, the settings of privilege in Cairo and the mountainside villages of Cypress. The author's experience also takes him through Berber villages in the Atlas Mountains and Foreign Legion outposts on the apron of the Sahara. Through it all, the author unfolds Islamic thinking of that period and sets it as a prelude to the affairs of the Twenty First Century.
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