The following book review is not about a genealogy book, instead it’s about an important period in American/Soviet history that was in the news nearly every day 1/2 century ago.
The Insider
A few days ago I finished reading another impelling book by my friend, Tom Fiske. Tom writes for GenealogyBlog.com and we stay in touch on a regular basis. So I’ve known for some time that this new book was coming out. During our correspondence over the last several years Tom would often comment about dealing with various super-secret government agencies, Sergei Khrushchev (Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s son), and others. He told me he was doing research for an upcoming book on an American who, with the United States backing, helped the Soviet Union with their fledgling space program. Yes – back in the bad old days when we had something called a “cold war.”
The story is about a gentleman whose specialty was “space medicine.” The man spent nine years of his life traveling to and from the USSR during the most heated years of what we all knew as the “space race.” His job was to help keep the Soviet cosmonauts alive – and he did a good job of it.
April 12 was the 50th Anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s orbit of the earth in Vostok 1, so we’ve been hearing a lot about him the last week. But what you haven’t heard is that the pilot and cosmonaut Gagarin was a friend of an American working under cover who just may have helped to keep him alive on that first space orbit of the Earth.
Officially, all this never happened, but Tad Benson (an alias) did his humanitarian work as a physician and scientist while receiving no recognition for his work. He told his story to Tom when he realized that he had but a short time to live. Tom says that “grudgingly, US intel agencies have admitted that Tad was one of their own during the Space Race years, but little else.”
The book is printed as a work of fiction because of the sensitive nature of the material, and the unwillingness of governmental agencies tell the story. There are probably classified documents out there somewhere, but they haven’t been revealed yet.
The Insider
