By Kevin Seabrooke

Naval Intelligence’s “Operation Underword” extended to the five boroughs and New Jersey, for the help of surprisingly patriotic career criminals.

Mark Harmon, who starred as Leroy Jethro Gibbs on NCIS for 18 seasons, has teamed up with Leon Carroll for a series of books, Ghosts of Honolulu (2023) and Ghosts of Panama (2024), highlighting cases of the predecessor of the NCIS.

Harmon and Carroll humanize the men who made the world a safer place—that the public was never supposed to know about.

Ghosts of Sicily: The True Story of the Naval Intelligence Agents Who Courted the Mob to Fight Nazis in America and the Battlefields of Italy (Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Harper Select, New York, NY, 304 pp., 2026 $29.99 HC)