"Need to Know"

About the Book

Chad Britter and Joyce Apfelbaum are, respectively,  aeronautical engineer and library assistant at a defense  research and development organization in 1952.  They  experience a conventional, happy courtship and marriage of no  importance to the world at large.  The one spiceful episode  of their lives is recognition and exposure of an arrogant  coworker who is feeding classifed information to an Israeli  spy out of admiration for Israel.  Both Israel and the CIA  know that the spy is a double agent, acting for the Soviet Union.  Israel needs to catch the spy's Soviet contact; the CIA only wants the spy exposed on all counts, for the Israelis to deal with as their traitor.  Pivots of the story  are the questions of who needs to know what, and the crucial  pivot is the CIA's briefing of Joyce so that she can publicly  and spitefully denounce the spy as the "husband" who has  abandoned her.  Score: U.S.A. 1, Israel 0, spies 0.

About the Author

Gilbert S. Bahn is a retired engineer and current free-lance historical researcher with a storyteller’s imagination. Characters form, incidents occur, lifelines develop, and then a story gets committed to paper. His first novel was begun over forty years ago and went on the shelf while he pursued his career in research and development, turning out over 30 technical papers, four books, and an international technical journal which he founded and edited for five years. During that period, as a Boy Scout leader, he also conceived Stories from a Hundred Campfires, a work still in progress. Upon retirement he conducted an exhaustive study of conservative Democratic Senators targeted by FDR for defeat in the 1938 primary elections. Recently he has concentrated on historical demography. Writing fiction is his form of relaxation.