For the first time, a Navy SEAL tells the story of the US's clandestine operations in North Vietnam and the Congo during the Cold War. Sometime in 1965, James Hawes landed in the Congo with cash stuffed in his socks, morphine in his bag, and a basic understanding of his mission: recruit a mercenary navy and suppress the Soviet- and Chinese-backed rebels engaged in guerilla movements against a pro-Western government. He knew the United States must preserve deniability, so he would be abandoned in any life-threatening situation; he did not know that Che Guevara attempting to export his revolution a few miles away. Cold War Navy SEAL gives unprecedented insight into a clandestine chapter in US history through the experiences of Hawes, a distinguished Navy frogman and later a CIA contractor. His journey began as an officer in the newly-formed SEAL Team 2, which then led him to Vietnam in 1964 to train hit-and-run boat teams who ran clandestine raids into North Vietnam. Those raids directly instigated the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. The CIA tapped Hawes to deploy to the Congo, where he would be tasked with creating and leading a paramilitary navy on Lake Tanganyika to disrupt guerilla action in the country. According to the US government, he did not, and could not, exist; he was on his own, 1400 miles from his closest allies, with only periodic letters via air-drop as communication. Hawes recalls recruiting and managing some of the most dangerous mercenaries in Africa, battling rebels with a crew of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, and learning what the rest of the intelligence world was dying to know: the location of Che Guevara. In vivid detail that rivals any action movie, Hawes describes how he and his team discovered Guevara leading the communist rebels on the other side and eventually forced him from the country, accomplishing a seemingly impossible mission. Complete with never-before-seen photographs and interviews with fellow operatives in the Congo, Cold War Navy SEAL is an unblinking look at a portion of Cold War history never before told.

Cold War Navy SEAL: My Story of Che Guevara, War in the Congo, and the Communist Threat in Africa

Biographies & Memoirs

Hawes, James M

Mary Ann Koenig

Historical

Skyhorse

Speak for England

Brian Marley, winner of Britain’s ultimate reality TV show, survives a helicopter crash only to find himself in the midst of a jungle-island village founded by survivors of another plane crash—one that took place in 1958. With rescue imminent, Brian discovers that the seemingly idyllic community—modeled after pre-Sixties England and overseen by a stern Headmaster—is founded on a far more sinister premise. Satirical and insightful, Speak for England is a story of the clash between English cultures separated by fifty years of history. The Observer called James Hawes 'the funniest British novelist writing today'. Speak for England proves it, over and over again.

Literature & Fiction

Humor & Satire

Lawson Library

James Hawes' wonderful new novel begins with its protagonist Brian Marley, a divorced, ineffectual teacher, all alone in a jungle about to die live on television. A reluctant contestant on Brit Pluck, Green Hell, Seven Figures, the ultimate reality TV show, Marley has somehow managed to outlive his rivals and win two million quid. Except that the helicopter sent to bring him back to civilization has crashed, and he's on his own, with a portable camera, at the foot of a monstrously tall cliff. He has no option but to start climbing...To his astonishment, Marley doesn't die, although the world he finds at the top of that cliff is remarkably like an Englishman's version of heaven. T here's cricket and rugger, the Union Jack, plucky boys, pretty girls, a tough but fair headmaster - an entire miniature civilization created by the surviving passengers from Comet IV, an airliner which vanished in 1958 carrying a jolly gang of youngsters to a public schools jamboree in Australia. Believing that they were one of the first casualties of World War III, they have survived in their jungle fastness for nearly fifty years, sustained by the Book of Common Prayer and good old English values. Hawes' telling of this tale is as tellingly funny as anything he has ever written, but when Brian's rescuers do find him at last, when the world of the Daily Star confronts that of the Eagle, when the Prime Minister, spotting an opportunity for a sound-bite, meets the Headmaster, the novel shifts gear into a glorious satire worthy of Evelyn Waugh. The Observer called James Hawes 'the funniest British novelist writing today'. Speak for England proves it, over and over again.

MACADAM/CAGE.

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Books by Hawes, James M