In the years after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement brought an end to decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, it gradually became clear that intelligence work — not military units or heavy policing — had been the key to the peace. But cloak-and-dagger tactics have their price, especially for those seeking truth in the wake of terrible violence. In FOUR SHOTS IN THE NIGHT: A True Story of Spies, Murder, and Justice in Northern Ireland (PublicAffairs, 338 pp., $32), the journalist Henry Hemming tells the story of a murdered British spy and considers the sometimes tragic choices made by people in the employ of government agencies like MI5.
The facts make for an exciting, at times astonishing read. By the mid-1990s, there were hundreds of intelligence officers in Northern Ireland trying to infiltrate the Irish Republican Army, the paramilitary organization that had fought British rule since World War I. Eventually, one in three senior I.R.A. operatives was compromised in some way.
The ethical demands on British handlers were never straightforward: “They had to ask themselves repeatedly the same question,” Hemming explains. “Will I save more lives if I act on this intelligence, or if I don’t?”
Perhaps the most fraught response to that question came in the form of Freddie Scappaticci, one of the book’s antiheroes. In the 1980s, Scappaticci reportedly served as a leader of the Nutting Squad, an I.R.A. group responsible for rooting out and, often, killing suspected informers. Scappaticci was also alleged to have been a British mole and double agent, code name Stakeknife, who oversaw the torture and murder of dozens of I.R.A. informers, including a fellow British agent named Frank Hegarty, all of which, Hemming suggests, he may have done with the British government’s blessing in the name of protecting other sources.
Scappaticci, who denied everything, died in 2023, before his crimes could be fully investigated. That same year, the British Parliament passed a bill granting amnesty to militants accused of killings during the Troubles on the condition that they cooperate with an investigatory commission. Hemming’s book is an evenhanded account of the clandestine murders that still haunt so many. “The truth will not always lead to peace or reconciliation,” he writes, “but it is hard to heal without it.”
When U.S. forces entered Germany after World War II, reports circulated of a Nazi “truth drug” called LSD. In the following years, fear rippled through the C.I.A. that the Soviets would weaponize the substance and the U.S. government rushed to unlock its secrets. Paranoia has haunted psychedelics ever since. In TRIPPED: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age (Mariner Books, 226 pp., $29.99), the journalist and novelist Norman Ohler shows how pernicious these early associations have become.
Ohler’s earlier book “Blitzed” persuasively detailed the contradictions in the Nazi regime’s war against — and heavy abuse of — narcotics. In “Tripped,” the evidence that the Third Reich used LSD for any serious purpose is slim: Germany’s leading biochemist, Richard Kuhn, had ties to the Swiss lab that first synthesized LSD and he received a shipment of ingredients that could have been used to make it. In 1945, the drug might also have been tried as an interrogation tool at Dachau.
What is clear, however, is that after the war Berlin was awash in narcotics. Arthur Giuliani, an agent with the recently formed U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was dispatched to clean things up. He adopted the Nazi regime’s “strict policy of prohibition,” Ohler writes, accepted advice from an ex-Gestapo agent and eventually recommended “Nazi drug laws wholesale.”
When Giuliani returned to the United States in the ’50s, he was tasked by the C.I.A. with dosing unsuspecting Americans with LSD, supposedly in an effort to prove the drug’s investigatory powers. In the same decade, Giuliani’s boss, Harry J. Anslinger, took inspiration from the Nazi narcotics strategy Giuliani had embraced to help push draconian sentencing minimums into U.S. laws and seed what would become the war on drugs.
Ohler’s book is at once a jaunty history of psychedelics, and a fascinating lament that the double-pronged legacy of Nazi drug policy — zero tolerance and weaponization — so severely limited research into their medicinal properties. “Let the scientific findings guide us in how we move forward,” he argues, “not the ideologies of yesterday.”
For all the resources devoted toward subterfuge and manipulation, sometimes intelligence agencies are simply beholden to the integrity of private individuals. Such is the case in Earl Swift’s HELL PUT TO SHAME: The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America’s Second Slavery (Mariner Books, 419 pp., $32.50), in which a federal investigation of peonage rests on the testimony, and courage, of a Black field boss.
Decades after abolition, white farmers short on workers routinely paid the fines of Black men in local jails and illegally forced them into a brutal system of labor that could last for years. In 1921, acting on a tip, two agents from the Bureau of Investigations (the precursor to the F.B.I.) visited a farm in Georgia and started asking questions. Weeks later the bodies of Black men chained to bags of rocks began turning up in local rivers.
With the sensational trial that followed as a centerpiece, Swift assembles a blunt portrait of the racial injustice coursing through America and of the organizations that rose to fight it. He incorporates the stories of people like James Weldon Johnson, the first Black leader of the N.A.A.C.P., and the Georgia governor Hugh Dorsey, both of whom were galvanized by these events to pursue change.
The narrative is sometimes obscured by the intricacies of courtroom proceedings, but Swift shines a powerful light on the practice of debt slavery, and notes that it persists to this day as human traffickers continue to coerce immigrants to work on farms across the United States.
Swift also compellingly elevates the voice of one man who told the truth. Stymied at first, federal agents were astonished when Clyde Manning described being forced to help his employer murder 11 men, all of them peons on the farm. Though he stood to be held responsible for the deaths as well, Manning was nonetheless unflinching in his testimony. The result, in that time and place, was nearly unthinkable: A few weeks after the first bodies of the workers were found, Swift writes, “an all-white jury convicted the white man who killed them, principally on the testimony of a Black man.”
