The Foreign Service Journal, November 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2014 35 cialized in the Middle East. His first CIA posting was to Dhahran, where his cover was as a Foreign Service commercial officer. A gifted intelligence officer and incorruptible, Ames became the most important U.S. authority on the Middle East. He estab- lished connections with critical Arab figures, including an early back channel to Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. Tragically, he was killed at the age of 49 in the April 1983 terrorist attack on Embassy Beirut. As it happens, Kai Bird’s FSO father was posted with his fam- ily in Dhahran at the same time as Ames. The author’s personal familiarity with the topography of his protagonist’s life and his access to many who knew and worked with Ames greatly enrich his prodigious and detailed research, making The Good Spy a powerful and engaging page-turner. (For a detailed review, see the October FSJ .) Kai Bird won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2005 biography of J. Rob- ert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus (Vintage Books, 2006), and is the author of amemoir, Crossing MandelbaumGate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and the Israelis , 1956-1978 (Scribner, 2010). Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture and Their Atlantic World Alliance Ronald Angelo Johnson, University of Georgia Press, 2014, $24.95/paperback, $21.34/Kindle, 216 pages. Diplomacy in Black and White is the first work to explore the 1798-1801 alliance between American President John Adams and Toussaint Louver- ture, leader of the slave revolt in the French colony of Saint- Domingue that culminated in the elimination of slavery there and the founding of the Republic of Haiti. Author Ronald Johnson delves into the rich history of the Americans and Haitians of the time, and explains how these two revolutionary peoples played significant roles in shaping the Atlantic world. The book recounts the U.S. Navy’s first military mission on behalf of a foreign ally, as the United States moved to support Haitian revolutionaries during the conflict. The shared