A tremendous book to add to my Hastings library. My reading on the secret war up till now had been largely confined to the well-known individual tales of derring-do, with little idea of their true significance or how they fitted into the big picture. Several of these rated a few lines at best (Agent Zig-Zag, Operation Mincemeat, Ill Met by Moonlight and others), either because their global significance was marginal or because the story had already been well told by others, who are listed in the bibliography.
This book gives you the big picture, along with many individual stories ranging from the heroic, tragic or harrowing through to the comically incompetent. As ever, Hastings' mastery of his huge canvas is superb. There are inevitable shifts forwards and backwards in time as a particular story is followed through, while others reappear later on. Observations like “The betrayal of the Manhattan Project by British and American informants was the most important espionage story of the war”, and the realisation of how easily the Allies' penetration of Enigma might have been carelessly betrayed by the Soviets, stop you in your tracks.
I soon found myself flagging his observations and insights – the sorts of things that might not show up later on an index-search - with ½ inch post-it notes. By the end, the book was littered with them. These included the observations that captured material became worthless if its originators discovered it was in enemy hands, knowledge not being enough unless matched by power, the distinction between secrets and mysteries, the appropriateness of distinguishing relative intelligence skills by culture rather than nationality (“Many of the finest intelligence officers of all nationalities were Jews”) and many, many more.
Hastings writes with a mordant wit, for example the observations about the relative success of the Soviet Union and Nazis in recruiting British spies (“...if the Abwehr had dispatched to Britain a few Nazis with passable table manners and some skill as fly-casters or grouse shooters, they would have been invited to all the best houses” and, of a hare-brained scheme by an IRA Nazi sympathiser for amphibious landings near Derry: “...he offered no advice about how the Royal Navy's objections to such a venture might be overcome.”). The Japanese high command “sought to conduct the war they wanted, rather than the one they had got”.
In support of on of his main conclusions, that all the great achievements of intelligence in the war were the result of sigint, not humint, he quotes Hugh Trevor-Roper: “Of all the great intelligence triumphs of the was not one was directly or exclusively due to the Secret Service proper”. For me, the role of Trevor-Roper, who knew more about the Abwehr than they did themselves, was one of the great surprise revelations of this book – remembering him as I do as a remote and rather scary history professor in the late '60s. Choicest of all HT-R quotes comes near the end: "All [German] strategy, and all decisions of policy and interpretations of acts, became increasingly dependant on the arbitrary whims of a group of ignorant maniacs”.
And, finally, one can only wonder at the wording of a leaflet dropped on Hanoi by the American OSS: “We are shortly coming to Indo-China to free you, but we do not act like the French, who are only coming to oppress you, we are your true liberators”.
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The record suggests that official secrecy does more to protect intelligence agencies from domestic accountability for their own follies than to shield them from enemy penetration.Highlighted by 234 Kindle readers- The day job of many intelligence officers is to promote treachery, which helps to explain why the trade attracts so many weird people.Highlighted by 175 Kindle readers
- Perhaps one-thousandth of 1 per cent of material garnered from secret sources by all the belligerents in World War II contributed to changing battlefield outcomes. Yet that fraction was of such value that warlords grudged not a life nor a pound, rouble, dollar, Reichsmark expended in securing it.Highlighted by 138 Kindle readers
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Top reviews from United Kingdom
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- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 October 2015
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 September 2015
Top reviews from other countries
- William C. MahaneyReviewed in Canada on 4 May 2017
he relegates little space to SOE-Special Operations Executive-oddly omits mention of key players like Vera Atkins (Director Fren
- John D. CofieldReviewed in the United States on 27 July 2016
"All things are always on the move simultaneously."
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