• Operation Snow

  • How a Soviet Mole in FDR’s White House Triggered Pearl Harbor
  • By: John Koster
  • Narrated by: Michael Kramer
  • Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins
  • 4.2 out of 5 stars (275 ratings)

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Operation Snow

By: John Koster
Narrated by: Michael Kramer
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Publisher's summary

On December 7, 1941, the nation of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and prompted the United States’ entry into the bloodiest war in human history. Americans have long debated the cause of the bombing; many have argued that the attack was a brilliant Japanese military coup or a failure of US intelligence agencies or even a conspiracy of the Roosevelt administration. But despite the attention historians have paid to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the truth about that fateful day has remained a mystery - until now.

In Operation Snow: How a Soviet Mole in FDR’s White House Triggered Pearl Harbor, author John Koster uses recently declassified evidence and never-before-translated documents to tell the real story of the day that FDR memorably declared would live in infamy. Operation Snow shows how Joseph Stalin and the KGB used a vast network of double agents and communist sympathizers - most notably Harry Dexter White - to lead Japan into war against the United States, demonstrating incontestable Soviet involvement behind the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

A thrilling account of espionage, mystery, and war, Operation Snow will forever change the way we think about Pearl Harbor and World War II.

John Koster is a columnist for World War II magazine and a former newspaper journalist. His work has also appeared in Military History, American Heritage, American History, and other publications. Koster is a US Army veteran and award-winning author.

©2012 John Koster (P)2012 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

"I found Operation Snow to be...irresistible.... The attack exacted a terrible toll on both countries and changed the world forever. It is important to understand why that happened. Koster has made a significant contribution." (Admiral Ronald J. Hays USN (Ret), former commander-in-chief of the Pacific Forces)
"To paraphrase Cicero, a nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious, but, as a rule, it cannot survive treason from within, especially when the traitor - in this case Harry Dexter White - is allowed to lead the fools and the ambitious. The US survived. It’s a cautionary tale - the exception that proves the rule." (Thomas K. Kimmel, Jr., former FBI agent, Pearl Harbor scholar, grandson of Admiral Husband Kimmel)
"Fascinating.... What a book! The House Un-American Activities Committee transcripts are arresting in their exposure of White’s duplicity." (Louise Barnett, PhD, professor of American studies, Rutgers University, author of Atrocity and American Military Justice in Southeast Asia)

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PUT IT IN THE FILE BLAMING FDR FOR PEARL HARBOR

THIs is a very poorly evidenced argument that an alleged Soviet mole dissuaded FDR from reaching a peace agreement with Japan that might have prevented Pearl Harbor. Koster alleges that Harry Dexter White (a Jew. said with minimal evidence to be "Stalin's man in Washington") caused his boss Henry Morgenthau (another Jew) to persuade Roosevelt to ignore supposedly reasonable Japanese peace offers and thus precipitated the attack. On the basis of FDR's setting aside of a decrypted Japanese message on the eve of Pearl Harbor and saying "this mean's war" the President is implicitly accused of discerning and allowing the intended attack. Morgenthau's resistance to coming to terms with Germany following the July 1944 assassination attempt gets him blamed for causing The Battle of the Bulge. Koster clearly doesn't appear to like FDR or his anti-Nazi Jewish or liberal advisors, including Harry Hopkins. He variously describes FDR as a "lightweight," "vindictive," and the heir to a fortune partly made by selling opium in China. This book deserves a place as a special on Fox News. I will put it in my file of "right-wing attacks on FDR and Chamberlin for causing WWII." Narrator Michael Kramer reads it with a hard-bitten tone that suggests conspiracies everywhere.

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12 people found this helpful

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Informative but fails to make its case

This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?

I am an anti-communist. I am very informed and the topic interested. Koster makes the case that Soviet agents - one in particular Henry Dexter White was responsible for Pearl Harbor. Henry Dexter White served as an agent of influence for Stalin. He is a very evil man, but who dropped those bombs on Pearl Harbor? Who took those pictures of Japanese atrocity in Nanking? Who starved those boys in Bataan? This book informs us of the Japanese perspective, miscalculations and exposes the racism of Americans vis a vis the Japanese. The Soviets did benefit greatly by the war and Henry Dexter White influenced FDR through Morganthau. But the vary evidence Koster lays before us in his book convicts the Japanese more than anyone else. Koster states that Japan was unstable, wanted peace with China and America. The decision to use war as a means to create stability inside Japan was a Japanese one. Efforts to make peace with China and the United States had to come from Japan. As much as I hate the Soviets and admire Japanese culture, the decision to go to war was a Japanese one.

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8 people found this helpful

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Laughably stupid attempt to revise history

Author presents a smattering of thoroughly disconnected historical facts and a large body of Japanese lies to make the case that (known) traitor Harry Dexter White somehow "made the Japanese attack the United States."

He calls the Japanese depredations in Korea and China in the 1930's "generally preferable" to those countries own self determination, the rape of Nanking "exaggerated" and the Bataan Death March "American propaganda." He also somehow believes that the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor was "forced by the US." This despite the fact that what he calls a US ultimatum "that started the war" asked nothing more or less of the Japanese than what both the League of Nations and the United States had said all along would be required to end the US oil embargo: withdrawal from Manchuria.

But this isn't new; the Japanese revisionists, in manner typical of spouse abusers have, for almost 80 years now, defended the attack on Pearl Harbor with no declaration of war as "look at what *you* made me do." It's complete rubbish, and someone claiming to write history should be ashamed of this, and other attempts to rehabilitate this vicious regime.

But then, pure stupidity enters the picture. That a second level treasury official was responsible for producing the "ultimatum" that "forced" Japan to attack the US on the basis of a single meeting with an NKVD handler is about as dumb as it gets.

There are much better treatments of the Communist infiltration of FDR's administration which was pervasive, deep and undeniable.

There are much better treatments of the plausibly available foreknowledge and deliberate refusal of FDR to warn career military commanders of the impending attack by the Japanese in order to drag an isolationist nation into the war.

This is neither. This is a laughably preposterous collection of non sequiturs and falsehoods.

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5 people found this helpful

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Strange take on History

This text says things that are factually difficult to prove. The story is interesting but not compelling and when the author minimizes the death from The Bataan March and the Rape of Nanking his credibility went out the window. This poor take on history!

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4 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Challenges the accepted narrative and rightly so

Amazing how one little man could turn history in such a direction. Satan is not a sleep.

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3 people found this helpful

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Don't Miss This One

Fantastic book that casts the second WW - and ultimately the Cold War - in an entirely new light. Love the narrator's voice. Short book, easy read. Brilliant.

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2 people found this helpful

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Fun story. Don't take it too seriously.

Don't read this as history. It's closer to a fun conspiracy theory, based on wild conjecture or character hit job against someone long dead. It reads well as a thrilling conspiracy theory.

As a history it falls short. There are sparse sources. it contains defenses of Japanese imperialism, including defences for the Japanese in the rape of Nanking. McCarthyism abounds in this book and virtually all major problems in this history are the product of incompetence in the American left wing or by deliberate Communist plots.

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1 person found this helpful

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Very Interesting

a it of unknown history is revealed and it can get a little tedious with all the details

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1 person found this helpful

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Extremely interesting

A just brilliant history around an American traitor.
So much history araound that time in the world.
Gave me info about a person it did not know about, and just so much more around the world history of the time .
Very educational!
Well read, as well!

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Revisionist History

Book was interesting, and certainly thought provoking; but biased.

The author recommends looking at a historian’s bias when reading an essay, and that is an important point when listening to this book.

I would only recommend this book to someone with a more that a passing interest in WWII history and who has an aversion to conspiracy theories.

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1 person found this helpful