The extraordinary life of Jay Lovestone is one of the great untold stories of the 20th century. A Lithuanian immigrant who came to the USA in 1897, he rose to leadership in the Communist Party of America, only to fall out with Moscow & join the anti-Communist establishment after WW2. He became one of the leading strategists of the Cold War, being described as 'one of the five most important men in the hidden power structure of America.' Lovestone was obsessively secretive. It's only with the opening of his papers at the Hoover Institution, the freeing of access to Comintern files in Moscow & the release of his 5700-page FBI file that biographer & Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Morgan has been able to construct a full account of the remarkable events of his life. The life described is full of drama & intrigue. He recounts Lovestone's career in the faction-riven communist world until he was spirited out of Moscow in 1929 after Stalin publicly attacked him for doctrinal unorthodoxy. As he veered away from Moscow, he came to work for the American Federation of Labor, managing a separate union foreign policy as well as maintaining his own intelligence operations for the CIA, many under the command of the counterintelligence chief James Angleton. He also associated with Louise Page Morris, a spy known as 'the American Mata Hari,' who helped him undermine Communist advances in the developing world & whose own significant espionage career is detailed. Lovestone's influence, always exercised from behind the scenes, survived to the end of the Cold War & the USSR's demise. A Covert Life has all the elements of a classic spy thriller: surveillance operations & stings, love affairs & bungled acts of sabotage, many thoroughly illegal. It is written with the easy hand of a fine biographer (Washington Post Book World called Ted Morgan 'a master storyteller') & provides a history of the Cold War & a glimpse into the machinery of the CIA while also revealing many hitherto hidden details of the superpower confrontation that dominated postwar global politics.