Book Reviews secretly fled to Moscow. Emilio Serini, a close associate of Pontecorvo in Paris in the late 1930s, emerged after World War II as a major figure in the Italian Communist Party. Close comments that after 1945 Serini “soon became an influential member of the Comintern” (p. 65). But in reality the Comintern (Communist International) had been dissolved in 1943. Close is likely referring to Serini’s role in the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), a different organization formed in 1947. In discussing Soviet nuclear espionage, Close refers to “another Los Alamos spy, Arthur Adams” (p. 311). Adams, a covert Soviet military intelligence officer, made unsuccessful attempts to recruit sources at the Manhattan Project’s Chicago facility, but he was never anywhere near Los Alamos or anyone who worked there. Close says the idea that “a communist fifth column was at work in the United States” was “paranoia” (p. 198). However, the release of the Venona decryptions in the mid–1990s, Vasili Mitrokhin’s Soviet intelligence archival notes in 2014 (after excerpts were released fifteen years earlier), and Alexander Vassiliev’s Soviet intelligence archival notebooks in 2009 has conclusively shown that in the 1930s and 1940s Soviet intelligence developed upward of 500 cooperating contacts in the United States—including an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (Harry Dexter White); an influential White House aide (Lauchlin Currie); two senior State Department officials (Laurence Duggan and Alger Hiss); the chief adviser to the director of the Office of Strategic Services (Duncan Lee); and several dozen midlevel personnel in the War Department, the Bureau of Economic Warfare, the Office of Strategic Services, the Justice and Treasury Departments, and dozens of military technology and industrial companies. Clearly the “communist fifth column” was not the “fantasy” (p. xiv) that Close thinks it was. ✣ ✣ ✣ Norman Polmar and Michael White, Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of K-129. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2010. 238 pp. Reviewed by Alla Kassianova, Tomsk State University (Russia) On 4 July 1974, the giant deep-sea mining vessel Hughes Glomar Explorer arrived at a location a few nautical miles from the intersection of 40∞N and 180∞E in the Pacific Ocean to spend the next few weeks ostentatiously engaged in “deep-ocean mining tests.” What was actually taking place 16,400 feet below the surface was the final stage of a six-year top-secret operation by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to recover the sunken nuclear-armed Soviet Golf-class submarine K-129. Code- named “Project Azorian,” the operation required expenditures roughly equal to the cost of the moon landing (around $500 million, the precise cost still undisclosed by the CIA). This carefully researched and well-documented account by Norman Polmar and Michael White in Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of K-129 reconstructs the remarkable technical and political aspects of the Azorian operation, as well as the Cold War ambiance surrounding it. 236