It reads like an improbable Hollywood thriller: German spies are delivered to the East Coast via U-boat and there infiltrate wartime New York City, looking for atomic secrets. Yet this is exactly what happened in December 1944 as related by Gimpel, himself one of the spies. Captured and sentenced to hang by a U.S. military court, he was spared at the last moment by FDR's death and spent the next ten years in the Fort Leavenworth and Alcatraz prisons. Gimpel was eventually released on parole and repatriated to Germany, where he wrote this memoir (originally published in Great Britain in 1957 but never before published in America). With an air of a disillusioned realist, he still manages to play up the dramatic details of his unique spying career. The prose is noticeably stiff in its dated British translation, but as a first-person account of remarkable events it is revealing. However, a good chronology and illustrations would have been helpful. The Gimpel case is also examined in David Allen Johnson's Germany's Spies and Saboteurs and David A. Kahn's Hitler's Spies: German Military Intelligence of World War II. Recommended for strong World War II history collections.