The terms "Gestapo" and "KGB" have taken on an ominous meaning in every modern language, and the apparatus behind them inspires universal terror. But while many there are many books about espionage, until now very little has been written about the history of secret policing which played such a grim role in the history of totalitarian movements of the 20th century.
Robert J. Stove begins his story of the evolution of secret police into a central institution of modern life with Sir Francis Walsingham, spymaster to Elizabeth I of England who created a network of secret agents and assassins to subvert the Queen's Catholic opponents. He ends it with a fascinating portrait of J. Edgar Hoover whose surveillance of "enemies within" tested American democracy.

At the heart of The Unsleeping Eye is a provocative narrative about the role of the secret police in the modern totalitarian state. Joseph Fouche, Napoleon's minister of police, made surveillance and informing into an art form ("Where there are three," Fouche once said, "I always have one listening") and coupled this surveillance with propaganda techniques that made it doubly effective. Stove describes the development of domestic surveillance in Russia, from the time of Ivan the Terrible, to its final refinement under Stalin, who brought Lenin's ideal of "organized terror" to perfection in collaboration with his brutal head of secret police, Lavrenti Beria. ("You bring me the man," Beria once said chillingly, "and I'll find you the crime.") He also shows how the Gestapo and other police organizations led by demented individuals like Heinrich Himmler defined the essence of Nazism, particularly in his deluded notion that "the members of the Gestapo are men with human kindness, human hearts, and absolute rightness."

The inside story of the secret policemen who defined the state of their art, The Unsleeping Eye takes us inside at the darkest corners of government. It is a story filled character and anecdote that leaves us wondering about the brave new worlds of manipulation and terror that may await us.