Robin Moore papers (MS.2011.046)

Biographical / Historical

Robert Lowell "Robin" Moore, Jr. was born October 31, 1925 in Boston to Eleanor Turner Moore and Robert Lowell Moore. Moore was raised in Concord, Massachusetts. During World War II he served as a nose gunner in the U.S. Army Air Corps, flying combat missions in the European Theater. For his service, he was awarded the Air Medal. Moore graduated from Harvard College in 1949, and one of his first jobs was working in television production and then at the Sheraton Hotel Company co-founded by his father, Robert Lowell Moore. While working in the hotel business in the Caribbean, he recorded the early days of Fidel Castro in the non-fiction book The Devil To Pay.

Thanks to connections with Harvard classmate Robert F. Kennedy, Moore was allowed access to the U.S. Army Special Forces to write about this elite unit of the United States Army. General William P. Yarborough insisted that Moore go through special forces training in order to better understand "what makes Special Forces soldiers 'special'." Moore trained for nearly a year, first at "jump school" for airborne training before completing the Special Forces Qualification Course or "Q Course", becoming the first civilian to participate in such an intensive program. Afterward, Moore was assigned to the 5th Special Forces Group on deployment to Vietnam. His experiences in-country formed the basis for The Green Berets, a bestseller that helped secure him international acclaim (see United States Army Special Forces in popular culture).

During the 1970s and 1980s Moore travelled widely spending time in such places as Dubai, Iran, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Russia. Having gathered the information needed he wrote The Crippled Eagles (later published as The White Tribe ) and The Moscow Connection . Due to political controversy, The Crippled Eagles was rejected by publishers and did not appear until the early 1990s. He also wrote the non-fiction books Rhodesia and Major Mike (with U.S. Army Major Mike Williams) and many screenplays for television and movies.

Moore travelled to Uzbekistan in December 2001 to research the CIA-Northern Alliance war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, publishing the account in the bestseller The Hunt for Bin Laden: Task Force Dagger . Shortly after the publication of The Hunt for Bin Laden , controversy arose over the veracity of the book, particularly regarding the involvement of J. Keith Idema. Idema, who was one of Moore's major sources, provided what later proved to be fabricated accounts of his exploits. In order to portray himself as having a greater role in the operation, Idema apparently went as far as to rewrite much of Moore's and Chris Thompson's text prior to publication under the direct authorization of Random House editor Bob Loomis. Special Forces soldiers who were on the mission (including those whom Moore interviewed) disputed Idema's claims. Moore eventually disavowed The Hunt for Bin Laden and the book remains out of print.

In 2003, continuing his interest in writing about the war on terror, Moore traveled to Iraq to research Operation Iraqi Freedom and the downfall of the Saddam Hussein regime for his book, Hunting Down Saddam . He recently completed The Singleton: Target Cuba with Ret. USASF Major General Geoffrey Lambert, a novel about Fidel Castro and biological warfare.

He was married five times, but for 32 years to his fourth wife, Russian-born singer Mary Olga Troshkin, who died of cancer on April 9, 2005. The next year, he married British-born Helen Kirkman, whom he had met in Jamaica in 1958, at a Special Forces convention in Nashville, Tennessee. He is survived by her and two daughters.

At the time of his death on February 21, 2008, Moore was residing in Hopkinsville, Kentucky (home to Fort Campbell and the 5th Special Forces Group) where he was working on his memoirs as well as three other books.

Citation: "Robin Moore." Wikipedia 31 May 2014. Accessed 05 June 2014.