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    Three Minutes to Doomsday: An Agent, a Traitor, and the Worst Espionage Breach in U.S. History
    Three Minutes to Doomsday: An Agent, a Traitor, and the Worst Espionage Breach in U.S. History
    Three Minutes to Doomsday: An Agent, a Traitor, and the Worst Espionage Breach in U.S. History
    Audiobook9 hours

    Three Minutes to Doomsday: An Agent, a Traitor, and the Worst Espionage Breach in U.S. History

    Written by Joe Navarro

    Narrated by George Newbern

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    An intense cat-and-mouse game played between two brilliant men in the last days of the Cold War, this shocking insider’s story shows how a massive giveaway of secret war plans and nuclear secrets threatened America with annihilation.

    In 1988 Joe Navarro, one of the youngest agents ever hired by the FBI, was dividing his time between SWAT assignments, flying air reconnaissance, and working counter-intelligence. But his real expertise was “reading” body language. He possessed an uncanny ability to glean the thoughts of those he interrogated.

    So it was that, on a routine assignment to interview a “person of interest”—a former American soldier named Rod Ramsay—Navarro noticed his interviewee’s hand trembling slightly when he was asked about another soldier who had recently been arrested in Germany on suspicion of espionage. That thin lead was enough for the FBI agent to insist to his bosses that an investigation be opened.

    What followed is unique in the annals of espionage detection—a two-year-long battle of wits. The dueling antagonists: an FBI agent who couldn’t overtly tip to his target that he suspected him of wrongdoing lest he clam up, and a traitor whose weakness was the enjoyment he derived from sparring with his inquisitor. Navarro’s job was made even more difficult by his adversary’s brilliance: not only did Ramsay possess an authentic photographic memory as well as the second highest IQ ever recorded by the US Army, he was bored by people who couldn’t match his erudition. To ensure that the information flow would continue, Navarro had to pre-choreograph every interview, becoming a chess master plotting twenty moves in advance.

    And the backdrop to this mental tug of war was the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the very real possibility that its leaders, in a last bid to alter the course of history, might launch a devastating attack. If they did, they would have Ramsay to thank, because as Navarro would learn over the course of forty-two mind-bending interviews, Ramsay had, by his stunning intelligence giveaways, handed the Soviets the ability to utterly destroy the US.

    The story of a determined hero who pushed himself to jaw-dropping levels of exhaustion and who rallied his team to expose undreamed of vulnerabilities in America’s defense, Three Minutes to Doomsday will leave the reader with disturbing thoughts of the risks the country takes even today with its most protected national secrets.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateApr 18, 2017
    ISBN9781508237099
    Author

    Joe Navarro

    For twenty-five years Joe Navarro was a Special Agent with the FBI in the area of counterintelligence, and he was a founding member of the FBI’s elite National Security Division Behavioral Analysis Program, which focused on the behavior of spies, terrorists, and criminal behavior. Since retiring, Navarro has lectured widely on nonverbal communication and has been featured in major media outlets throughout the world. He is the author of Three Minutes to Doomsday and the international bestseller What Every BODY Is Saying. You can find him at JNForensics.com.

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    Reviews for Three Minutes to Doomsday

    4.5/5

    52 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Really enjoyed the insight into body language and telling behavior.
    • 5/5
      Spellbinding account that kept my attention to the very end. Excellent narration added to the experience.
    • 4/5
      When it comes to books, non-fiction typically isn't something I'm interested in. Lately though, I've found a few from that genre that have piqued my interest, most notably former FBI Agent Joe Navarro's Three Minutes to Doomsday, Andrew Leatherbarrow's Chernobyl: 01:23:40, and another upcoming novel entitled The Radium Girls by Kate Moore. The latter two of these books I'll discuss at another time, because this review is about Navarro's latest book, detailing the final moments of the Cold War and the arrests of Clyde Conrad and Rod Ramsey.

      I was born in the late 90s, so this particular espionage case is not something I had any knowledge about prior to opening Navarro's book. All I knew was that it took place shortly before I was born and had extremely high risks associated with it. Given my tastes in crime, movies, and most fiction, this seemed to be something that would appeal to my interests and I was not wrong. In this account of Joe Navarro's pursuit of Rod Ramsey against attempts at hampering the investigation by the FBIHQ and Washington Field Office, readers discover just how terrifying close we came to a crushing defeat with the information sold by Conrad and Ramsey.

      The build-up to Ramsey's arrest, trial, and conviction is agonizingly slow, which is quite suiting given that the process itself was not only flawed by those higher up in rank than Navarro, but nearly crippled by inaction. It was easy to feel Navarro's tension and frustration, while simultaneously granting readers that may prefer fiction over non-fiction a very human-like perspective of an account that might have seemed uninteresting.

      The only nitpick I truly have is how unclear the passage of time is. Whether or not this was intentional, I do not know. I just know that I prefer clear indications of time's passing. Other than that, it is clear from his style of writing that Former Agent Navarro is, first and foremost, a gentleman in every aspect of the word.

      Joe Navarro's memoir of this espionage case is mind-numbing and terrifyingly well-written and I would like to thank NetGalley, Scribner, and Joe Navarro for this advanced copy for the purpose of review. Not only that, I would like to thank Former Agent Joe Navarro especially for his service to our country, and his drive to fulfill his duty to his fellow Americans first and foremost.