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 Colin Beavan is the author of Fingerprints: The Origins of Crime
Detection and the Murder Case that Launched Forensic Science. He has
written for numerous national magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly,
Esquire, Men's Journal and Wired, and received his doctorate from the
University of Liverpool in England. He lives in New York City with his
wife, the journalist Michelle Conlin, and their daughter Isabella
View the schedule of Colin Beavan's book tour appearances
Watch a video of Colin Beavan discussing Operation Jedburgh
Read about why Colin Beavan wrote
Operation Jedburgh
Read the
magazine article written by Colin Beavan that led him to write
Operation Jedburgh
Why Colin Beavan Wrote Operation Jedburgh
"My grandfather Gerry Miller was a big wig in the CIA
who in the 1960s was whisked off for secret meetings in the White House
and elsewhere. He would never tell anybody in our family why. After he
died, my sister asked our grandmother about his career. Even she could
only say: 'I just knew I wasn’t supposed to ask.'
"After my grandmother died, I became obsessed with
finding out what my grandfather had done. By this time, the CIA had been
accused of so many misdoings: illegal assassination attempts, instigating
revolutions around the world, installing vicious military dictators. What
part in all this had my grandfather played, I wanted to know?
"During my investigations I discovered that he had
risen to be one of the five most powerful men in the CIA during the 1960s
and that he must have been involved in all the CIA’s most unsavory
actions. But I also discovered that my grandfather was the chief of
special operations for the OSS in London during World War II. In that
capacity, I realized, he was in overall charge of US operations to arm the
French Resistance, perhaps the most noble covert action in the United
States’s now long and shady covert operations history.
"I had known that my grandfather had been in the OSS
but all he would ever tell me was: 'All I did was give the real heroes
their suicide pills as they climbed on the airplanes to parachute into the
occupied territories.' Operation Jedburgh became my quest to
discover the most noble part of my grandfather’s—and indeed the United
States'—covert operations career."
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