We’re so excited to announce that two Casemate titles and one Savas Beatie title have been selected for the National Press Club Book Fair & Authors’ Night in Washington, DC on November 10th!
This event is open to the public, and will be held at the National Press Club at 5:30pm. Learn more about the event and purchase your tickets here>>>
Below, check out the three featured books, and learn more about the authors who will be attending this event.
Special Forces Berlin
James Stejskal
It is a little-known fact that during the Cold War, two U.S. Army Special Forces detachments were stationed far behind the Iron Curtain in West Berlin. The existence and missions of the two detachments were highly classified secrets.
The massive armies of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies posed a huge threat to the nations of Western Europe. US military planners decided they needed a plan to slow the juggernaut they expected when and if a war began. The plan was Special Forces Berlin. The first 40 men who came to Berlin in mid-1956 were soon reinforced by 60 more and these 100 soldiers (and their successors) would stand ready to go to war at only two hours’ notice, in a hostile area occupied by nearly one million Warsaw Pact forces, until 1990.
Their mission, should hostilities commence, was to wreak havoc behind enemy lines, and buy time for vastly outnumbered NATO forces to conduct a breakout from the city. In reality it was an ambitious and extremely dangerous mission, even suicidal. Highly trained and fluent in German, each man was allocated a specific area. They were skilled in clandestine operations, sabotage, intelligence tradecraft and able to act if necessary as independent operators, blending into the local population and working unseen in a city awash with spies looking for information on their every move.
Special Forces Berlin was a one of a kind unit that had no parallel. It left a legacy of a new type of soldier expert in unconventional warfare, one that was sought after for other deployments including the attempted rescue of American hostages from Tehran in 1979. With the U.S. government officially acknowledging their existence in 2014, their incredible story can now be told.
James Stejskal served for 23 years with Special Forces, including two tours in Berlin, retiring as a Chief Warrant Officer 4. He then served 13 years with the CIA as a senior Operations Officer (Case Officer) in Africa, Europe and Asia. He is now a military historian and conflict archaeologist. This is his second book.
On the Frontlines of the Television War
Yasutsune “Tony” Hirashiki & Terry Irving
“Tony Hirashiki was simply one of the best television cameramen to cover the Vietnam War. His soaring video, often acquired only at great personal risk, gave wings to even the most mundane narration. For those of us who worked with him he was also a source of gentleness and joy in a place where both were in terribly short supply.” – Ted Koppel, Former Nightline anchor ABC
On The Frontlines of the Television War is the story of Yasutsune “Tony” Hirashiki’s ten years in Vietnam—beginning when he arrived in 1966 as a young freelancer with a 16mm camera but without a job or the slightest grasp of English and ending in the hectic fall of Saigon in 1975 when he was literally thrown on one of the last flights out.
His memoir has all the exciting tales of peril, hardship, and close calls as the best of battle memoirs but it is primarily a story of very real and yet remarkable people: the soldiers who fought, bled, and died, and the reporters and photographers who went right to the frontlines to record their stories and memorialize their sacrifice. The great books about Vietnam journalism have been about print reporters, still photographers, and television correspondents but if this was truly the first “television war,” then it is time to hear the story of the cameramen who shot the pictures and the reporters who wrote the stories that the average American witnessed daily in their living rooms.
An award-winning sensation when it was released in Japan in 2008, this book been completely re-created for an international audience. In 2008, the Japanese edition was published by Kodansha in two hardback volumes and titled “I Wanted to Be Capa.” It won the 2009 Oya Soichi Nonfiction Award-a prize usually reserved for much younger writers—and Kodansha almost doubled their initial print run to meet the demand. In that period, he was interviewed extensively, a documentary was filmed in which he returned to the people and places of his wartime experience, and a dramatization of his book was written and presented on NHK Radio. A Kodansha paperback was published in 2010 with an initial printing of 17,000 copies and continues to sell at a respectable pace.
“Tony Hirashiki is an essential piece of the foundation on which ABC was built. From the day he approached the Bureau Chief in Saigon with a note pinned to his shirt saying he could shoot pictures to the anxious afternoon of 9/11 when we lost him in the collapse of the Twin Towers (and he emerged covered in dust clutching his precious beta tapes,) Tony reported the news with his camera and in doing so, he brought the truth about the important events of our day to millions of Americans.” David Westin, Former President of ABC News
Yasutsune “Tony” Hirashiki was an ABC News cameraman from 1966 to 2006. In those four decades he became legendary, consistently known as the best cameraman in the company and certainly the guy you wanted next to you if you were walking into danger. During his time in Vietnam, he was present at virtually every major event. Since then he has worked in danger zones around the world.
Terry Irving probably carried some of Tony’s newsfilm in the early 1970s when he was a motorcycle courier for ABC News. He then went into a career in TV news, spending four decades covering news in war zones like Beirut, South Africa, and El Salvador; tragic disasters from Indonesia to New Orleans; and political stories across the US. He has earned a number of awards including: 4 National Emmy Awards, 3 Peabody Awards for Significant and Meritorious Achievement, and 4 Columbia University DuPont Awards (including the first ever gold baton awarded.)
Foxtrot in Kandahar
Duane Evans
Kandahar. The ancient desert crossroads and, as of fall of 2001, ground zero for the Taliban and al-Qa’ida in southern Afghanistan. In the northern part of the country, the U.S.-supported Northern Alliance (the Afghan organization opposed to the Taliban regime) has made progress on the battlefield, but in the south, the country is still under the Taliban’s bloody hold and al-Qa’ida continues to operate there. With no “Southern Alliance” for the US to support, a new strategy is needed if victory is to be achieved. Veteran CIA officer Duane Evans is dispatched to Pakistan to “get something going in the South.” Foxtrot in Kandahar is his story.
Evans’s unexpected journey from the pristine halls of Langley to the badlands of southern Afghanistan began within hours after watching the horrors of 9/11 unfold during a chance visit to FBI Headquarters. It was then he decided to begin a personal and relentless quest to become part of the US response against al-Qa’ida. Evans’s gripping memoir tracks his efforts to join one of CIA’s elite teams bound for Afghanistan, a journey that eventually takes him to the front lines in Pakistan, first as part of the advanced element of CIA’s Echo team supporting Hamid Karzai, and finally as leader of the under-resourced and often overlooked Foxtrot team.
Relying on rusty military skills from his days as a Green Beret, and brandishing a traded-for rifle, Evans moves toward Kandahar in the company of Pashtun warriors—one of only a handful of Americans pushing forward across the desert into some of the most dangerous, yet mesmerizingly beautiful, landscape on earth. The ultimate triumph of the CIA and Special Forces teams, when absolutely everything was on the line, is tempered by the US tragedy that catalyzed what is now America’s longest war. Evans concludes his memoir with an analysis of opportunities lost in the years since his time in Afghanistan.
Brilliantly crafted and fast-paced, Foxtrot in Kandahar: A Memoir of a CIA Officer in Afghanistan at the Inception of America’s Longest War fills a major gap in the literature of the war’s critical and complex early months. It is required reading for anyone interested in modern warfare, complicated tribal politics, and the ancient land where they intersect.
Duane Evans is a former CIA officer with field tours on four continents to include serving as Chief of Station, CIA’s most senior field position. He is the recipient of the Intelligence Star for valor and the Career Intelligence Medal. Prior to joining the Agency he was a U.S. Army Special Forces and Military Intelligence officer. A graduate of New Mexico State University, he is also the author of the acclaimed espionage novel North from Calcutta.
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