A Very Principled Boy ─ The Life of Duncan Lee, Red Spy and Cold Warrior

Duncan Chaplain Lee was an unlikely traitor. A Rhodes Scholar, patriot, and descendent of one of America’s most distinguished families, he was also a communist sympathizer who used his position as aid to intelligence chief ?Wild Bill” Donovan to leak critical information to the Soviets during World War II. As intelligence expert Mark A. Bradley reveals, Lee was one of Stalin’s most valuable moles in U.S. intelligence, passing the KGB vital information on everything from the D-Day invasion to America’s plans for postwar Europe. Outwitting both J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy, he escaped detection again and again, dying a free man before authorities could prove his guilt.

A fast-paced cat-and-mouse tale of misguided idealism and high treason, A Very Principled Boy draws on thousands of previously unreleased CIA and State Department records to reveal the riveting story of one of the greatest traitors of the twentieth century.

Mark A. Bradley is a former CIA intelligence officer and is currently serving as an attorney in the United States Department of Justice’s National Security Division. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Washington & Lee University, he holds a Master of Arts in Modern History from Oxford University (which he attended as a Rhodes scholar) and a law degree from the University of Virginia. He has contributed to the Washington Post, the Washington Lawyer, and Naval Proceedings.