Until now, the important and interesting problem tackled by Lawrence Weinbaum has not been discussed in a thorough study. The history of co-operation between Polish governments and the New Zionist Organization, whose course might seem appropriate to the plot of an action-adventure film, was sometimes mentioned in the biographies of such Jewish politicians as Vladimir Jabotinsky, Menachem Begin, and Abraham Stern. Among Polish writers, Władysław Pobog-Malinowski devoted the most attention to this issue. He maintained close contacts with the 1930s establishment. In his Najnowsza historia polityczna Polski, ii (London, 1956), Malinowski used information obtained from leading Sanacja (movement to ‘clean up’ Parliament after 1926) politicians. As long as the archives remained inaccessible, it was difficult to verify this data, which consequently had to be treated very carefully.

Lawrence Weinbaum engaged in a wide-ranging archival investigation, with the most important sources being the seldom examined collection of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Archiwum Akt Nowych (Archive of Modern Documents) in Warsaw and documents in the Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv. His work also makes use of copies of documents from the Foreign Office (the private archives of Mr Shmuel Katz in Tel Aviv) and material from the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem.

The collected documents disclose certain important gaps, especially the author's lack of familiarity with material in Polish military institutions. For the New Zionist Organization, the General Staff and Military Intelligence were the partners next in importance to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was the army that organized training courses for Jewish fighters and was involved in arms sales. The archives of Polish Military Intelligence, closed to historians for several decades, were made available in 1990 (contrary to the author's belief, the material in the Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe (Central Military Archive) in Warsaw is hardly ‘extremely scanty’).

Since the events described in the book had a broad international context, similarly interesting results can be expected from research carried out in archives of other countries. British and German intelligence and American authorities were certainly interested in the activities of the New Zionist Organization.