Voices Under Berlin: The Tale Of A Monterey Mary

Now available: a special Tenth Anniversary Edition with bonus material to celebrate ten years of continuing reader demand. Look for it here on Amazon.

Voices Under Berlin: The Tale of a Monterey Mary is the tale of one of the early skirmishes of the Secret Cold War told with a pace and a black humor reminiscent of that used by Joseph Heller (Catch-22) and Richard Hooker (M*A*S*H*). It is set against the backdrop of the CIA cross-sector tunnel operation to tap three Russian telecom¬munications cables in Berlin in the mid-nineteen-fifties.

It is the story of the American soldiers who worked the tunnel, and how they fought for a sense of purpose against boredom and the enemy both within and without. One of them is the target of a Russian “honey-trap,” but which one? Kevin, the Russian transcriber, Blackie, the blackmarketeer, or Lt. Sheerluck, the martinet?

The other end of the tunnel is the story of the Russians whose telephone calls the Americans are intercepting. Their end of the tale is told in the unnarrated transcripts of their calls. They are the voices under Berlin.

• Dr. Wesley Britton, author of Spy Television, Beyond Bond: Spies in Fiction and Film, and Onscreen and Undercover: The Ultimate Book of Movie Espionage, calls Voices Under Berlin “a spy novel that breaks all the molds," adding that "in the tradition of Greene and Ambler, 'Voices Under Berlin' contains many literate qualities that make it a work of special consideration, worthy of an audience much broader than that of espionage enthusiasts or those interested in Cold War history. In fact, one indication of the book's quality is that it was among the award winners at the 2008 Hollywood Book Festival, a very rare honor for a spy novel."

• Po Wong writing at bookideas.com says “Kevin is a hero in the mold of McMurphy, the rebellious asylum inmate who is the protagonist in Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Kevin manages to do his job despite the blind obedience to stringent regulations that frequently overrides common sense and intelligence in large military operations, and despite the widespread ineptness around him. … Voices under Berlin is a coherent, funny, and often sardonic look at real espionage work. The detail is so realistic that you may find yourself wondering, as I did, whether this is a novel or the memoirs of an actual intelligence agent. Of course, if you’re looking for James Bond, you won’t find him here. What you will find is a fascinating account of what it must have been like to be toiling away at an important but often dreary job underneath the streets of Berlin during the Cold War years.

• Midwest Book Review says one of the things that sets this novel apart is “the author’s combining a genuine gift for humor with a deft literary astuteness in telling a story that fully engages the reader quite literally from first page to last.”

Winner of six book awards.

Also by this author:

• Berlin in Early Cold-War Army Booklets
• The Day Before the Berlin Wall: Could We Have Stopped It? — An Alternate History of Cold War Espionage
• Berlin in Early Berlin-Wall Era CIA, State Department, and Army Booklets
• Reunification: A Monterey Mary Returns to Berlin
• Berlin in Détente-era Berlin Brigade Booklets

T.H.E. Hill served with the U.S. Army Security Agency at Field Station Berlin in the mid-1970s, after a tour at Herzo Base in the late 1960s. He is a three-time graduate of the Defense Language Institute (DLIWC) in Monterey, California, the alumni of which are called “Monterey Marys”. The Army taught him to speak Russian, Polish, and Czech; three tours in Germany taught him to speak German, and his wife taught him to speak Dutch. He has been a writer his entire adult life, but now retired from Federal Service, he writes what he wants, instead of the things that others tasked him to write while he was still working.

Also by this author:

• Berlin in Early Cold-War Army Booklets
• The Day Before the Berlin Wall: Could We Have Stopped It? — An Alternate History of Cold War Espionage
• Berlin in Early Berlin-Wall Era CIA, State Department, and Army Booklets
• Reunification: A Monterey Mary Returns to Berlin
• Berlin in Détente-era Berlin Brigade Booklets