Jason Bell will be visiting from the University of New Brunswick to share his new book, Operation Sparrow: The Incredible True Story of the Spies Who Tricked Hitler and Won the War. Local author Nicholas Reynolds will join Jason in conversation. His new book, Ortiz’s War: The Allies’ Secret Weapon Against the Nazis in France, was released in August.
This is special Saturday afternoon event on October 3rd at 3pm at Fonts Books in McLean.
Jason Bell, PhD, is an American academic who received his doctorate from Vanderbilt University. He has served as a Fulbright Professor in Germany, and has taught at several universities in the United States, and in Belgium and Canada. He was the first scholar granted exclusive access to Winthrop Bell’s classified espionage papers (the subject of Cracking the Nazi Code). He is a professor of philosophy at the University of New Brunswick.
Nicholas Reynolds has worked in the field of modern history off and on for 40 years, with some unusual detours. Freshly minted PhD from Oxford University in hand, he joined the Marine Corps in the 1970s, serving as an infantry officer and then as an official historian. As a colonel in the Reserves, he was Officer in Charge of Field History, deploying historians around the world to capture history as it was being made. For many years, he worked at CIA, most recently as the historian for the CIA Museum, where he drafted the strategic plan for the next decade and wrote a foundational monograph as well as shorter pieces and many labels. He still believes he has held the best two niche jobs in the US Government. Leveraging his experience, he has taught at the Naval War College, Johns Hopkins University, and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.