A Spy Among Friends

For some time Ben Macintyre has been one of my favorite history authors. With books such as Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal (excerpt here), Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, and Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies (review here, excerpt here), he has written several books now on the absurdity that took place during WWII British spycraft.

His most recent book takes a step forward in history. In A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, Macintyre moves on to the Cold War. As highlighted in the previous books, British counterintelligence was so strong that they were able to capture every last German spy in the country. Yet during this same period, it was a virtual sieve for the Soviets.

Many of the British intelligence officers were in the pay of the Soviet Union both during and after the war. Most famous among them was Kim Philby, the agent who for a time served as the head of the division responsible for spying on the Soviet Union.

For decades, Philby lived a double life, deceiving even his closest friends, most notably MI6's Nicholas Elliot and the CIA's James J. Angleton. And that is the angle that Macintyre takes in this book: how Philby deceived his friends and, even more broadly, how the good old boys friend network within MI6 shielded him from suspicion.

These British operatives all grew up together. They went to school together. They knew each other's parents. They were all good British stock. Many were fools, most were alcoholics. But they were fellow aristocrats, and because of this, their trust for each other, and their continued employment, was based on cultural elements deeper than job performance. It was simply unthinkable that one of them could be a spy, so for a long time it was unthought regardless of the evidence. The very people Philby was deceiving provided his strongest shield.

This is what makes this book so different from the other three Macintyre has written about the British intelligence agencies. In Zigzag, Mincemeat, and Double Cross, the British are the sharp and intelligent heroes hilariously exploiting the cracks in the strict yet bumbling German hierarchical system where no one wants to be the bearer of bad news. Those stories are great fun, where the British keep pulling off greater and greater capers and the Germans keep falling for them.

A Spy Among Friends inverts that narrative. Here is an agency so welded to its aristocratic classism that it cannot see its own weaknesses. And although his writing is once again excellent, this book has a decidedly different tone. In contrast to the prior comedies, this story is a drawn out tragedy as again and again Philby escapes detection. Where the prior books exposed British culture's superiority to the German system, this one zeroes in on its weaknesses. One could almost say that the common theme through all these books is never underestimate the power of office culture. The very same loose camaraderie that helped win WWII proved to hamstring the agency during the Cold War. And that is what made Philby's betrayal so great--more than being a spy, he had been a friend.

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Sports and spycraft

Tomorrow is the Super Bowl; that epitome of the American sporting world. But I’m not going to talk about football. Instead this post is about cricket. And spycraft.

Ben Macintyre, in Double Cross, makes the following observation about the British connection between sports and spycraft:

The relationship between cricket (that most English of sports) and spying (at which the British have always excelled) is deep rooted and unique. Something about the game attracts the sort of mind also drawn to the secret worlds of intelligence and counterintelligence—a complex test of brain and brawn, a game of honor interwoven with trickery, played with ruthless good manners and dependent on minute gradations of physics and psychology, with tea breaks. Some of the most notable British spies have been cricketers or cricket enthusiasts. Hitler played cricket, but only once. In 1930 it was claimed that, having seen British POWs playing in southern Germany during the First World War, the Nazi party leader asked to be “initiated into the mysteries of our national game.” A match was played against Hitler’s team, after which he declared that the rules should be altered by the “withdrawal of the use of pads” and using a “bigger and harder ball.” Hitler could not understand the subtlety of a game like cricket; he thought only in terms of speed, spectacle, violence. Cricket was the ideal sport on which to model an organization bent on stumping the Führer.

Which makes me wonder, what does the American love of football say about our methods of spycraft?

"Inception" in practice

The film Inception explores what it takes plant an idea that a target’s mind that the target believes is his own. The process involves infiltrating dreams, and the story itself blurred fiction and reality. By the end, both the target and the audience could no longer distinguish between the two.

The film itself is a work of fiction. But showing that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, British intelligence pulled off the same concept in WWII (minus the dream part). The target was Adolf Hitler. The event was the Normandy Invasion. And the exercise was a smashing success: large numbers of German troops did not move to repel the Normandy landing. Instead, they waited for an assault that would never come, tied down by a force that didn’t exist. The story is told in Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies.

Earlier in the war, British intelligence (MI5) had come to the startling conclusion: they had captured every single German spy in the entire nation. Many were locked up or executed, while a smaller number were persuaded to turn double-agent. They would continue to pose as spies, but would only report what MI5 told them to.

At first, the spies were used to confuse the Germans and monitor what German intelligence wanted. But as the war progressed, the MI5 expanded their horizons. Would it be possible, they wondered, to use this network of spies to plant a false idea in Hitler’s mind? And so a major part of Operation Fortitude was born. The mission was to convince Hitler that Calais, and not Normandy, was the target for invasion.

The plot was layer of falsehood upon layer of falsehood to a degree that makes Inception look straightforward. It involved real generals commanding fake armies, and look-alike actors taking tours as real generals. There were entire rings of spies that didn’t exist, as well as inflatable tanks (they had a tendency to want to blow away) and wooden decoy airplanes. Part of the plan was infiltration of Germany’s carrier pigeon network, and for a while the spies were demanding so much money from their German handlers (which MI5 promptly pocketed) that MI5 turned a profit on the operation.

But it was not all fun and games. Freelance agents who saw profit in selling fake stories to the Germans invented their own rings of fictional spies, and there was always the danger that an independent report would accidentally hit on the truth. And the spies themselves were a motley crew, with divided loyalties and a warped sense of morality. Outside of war, the entire group would have likely ended up in prison.

And of course, there was always the German side. The information presented by the spies needed to be straightforward enough that the Germans would arrive at the desired conclusion, but not so obvious as to raise suspicions that the spies were controlled. Some German officers had a great gift for not scrutinizing any information—often for personal reasons. Many were corrupt or just downright lazy. Others were harder to fool, either out of a desire to win the war or to cover the fact that they were simultaneously plotting against Hitler as part of the Stauffenberg conspiracy.

Ben Macintyre does not disappoint in telling this story. As in all his books, he highlights how history is driven by people, their quirks, and their responses to the planned and unplanned events in their lives. He also revels in the absurdities of counterintelligence. We now have the advantage of knowing that the Normandy invasion was a success, but the planners in this book had no such knowledge. Reality was often lost during the spy-game of double and triple crossing, and they were ultimately not sure if Hitler had taken the bait until the invasion started.

In fact, it is possible that those with the greatest advantage were the spies themselves. They simply invented their own reality. Were one to consider moral fiber, character, or loyalty, these men and women were not heroes in the ordinary sense of the word, but then there was nothing ordinary about them. However, in the time of crisis—especially for one of them—they did something truly heroic. It is quite possible that, but for the false ideas they planted in Hitler’s head, the Normandy invasion would have failed.

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One should always have a conjurer on staff...

Yesterday I received my copy of Double Cross, the new book by Ben Macintyre, who is one of my favorite historical writers. This book tells the story of the group of spies (and the counterintelligence efforts) who successfully convinced Hitler that the D-Day invasion would land at Calais, rather than Normandy.

I plan to write a review after I have finished the book. In the meantime, here's a sample of Macintyre's writing from one of his other books on WWII spies:

When he first offered to contribute his magical skills to the war effort, [professional conjurer Jasper Maskelyne] was dismissed as a showman (which he was) and put to work entertaining the troops. But eventually General Archibald Wavell, the imaginative commander of British forces in North Africa, realized that Maskelyne’s talents might be applied to the battlefield. Maskelyne was sent to the Western Desert, where he assembled “the Magic Gang,” possibly the most eccentric military unit ever formed, whose members included an analytical chemist, a cartoonist, a criminal, a stage designer, a picture restorer, a carpenter, and a lone professional soldier to fill out the military paperwork. The gang set about bamboozling the enemy. They built fake submarines and Spitfires, disguised tanks as trucks, and successfully hid part of the Suez Canal using a system of revolving mirrors and searchlights that created a blinding vortex in the sky nine miles wide. 

For his greatest trick, Maskelyne helped win the Battle of El Alamein by creating an entire array of “tricks, swindles, and devices” to convince Erwin Rommel that the British counterattack was coming from the south, rather than the north. In 1942, the Magic Gang built over two thousand dummy tanks and constructed a bogus water pipeline to water this phony army. The half-built pipeline was easily spotted from the air, and the slow progress of its construction seems to have convinced the Germans that no attack was possible before November. Rommel went home on leave, and the attack started October 23.  

~Ben Macintyre, Agent Zigzag, 152-53

History with a face

We've all read the stereotypical history book: dull, dry, and lots of meaningless dates. I won't name names, but I've read books full of fascinating information which still put me to sleep. Those are the books that only have a market because they are assigned in classrooms. I almost said they are only read because they are assigned, but I don't want to overstate my case.

And then there's good history. Those stories that draw you in, that show that history is not about dates and events, but about people doing stuff. Important stuff, unimportant stuff, smart stuff, or stupid stuff - it's all about what people do or don't do.

There are lots of authors able to tell these stories, but my favorites are those authors that focus on the little-known events behind or parallel to the significant events. And my favorite author to tell these stories is Ben Macintyre.

Macintyre introduced me to Major William Martin of the Royal Marines, the officer who perished in a airplane accident during World War II and whose body washed ashore with copies of the Allies' invasion plans for Europe. Plans which fell into the hands of Germans and revealed the entire Allied strategy.

Except that there was no William Martin and the plans were faked, planted to hide the real invasion. Using new recently discovered and recently declassified information, Macintyre tells this story in Operation Mincemeat.

He also tells the story of Eddie Chapman, the Frank Abagnale of WWII, who was recruited by the Nazis to serve as a spy in England. Upon completing his training and landing in England, he promptly turned himself in (to the nearest farmer, no less) and became a double agent. He was so successful that he was awarded the Iron Cross from Germany for his service.

In a third book, Macintyre tells the story of Adam Worth, the true-life inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Moriarty. Worth successfully changed his identity several times, ran an international criminal syndicate, and was ultimately tracked down by the Pinkerktons.

Other books that I haven't read (yet) tell about the sister of Friedrich Nietzsche who went to Paraguay start her own racially pure German colony, the story of the first American in Afghanistan and his attempt to establish himself as king, and the story of a group of British soldiers hidden behind enemy in France in WWI for over a year.

But those may just have to wait. For I just found out that Macintyre has another book being published this summer. And Double Cross promises to be just as good as the others:

On June 6, 1944, 150,000 Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy and suffered an astonishingly low rate of casualties. D-Day was a stunning military accomplishment, but it was also a masterpiece of trickery. Operation Fortitude, which protected and enabled the invasion, and the Double Cross system, which specialized in turning German spies into double agents, deceived the Nazis into believing that the Allies would attack at Calais and Norway rather than Normandy. It was the most sophisticated and successful deception operation ever carried out, ensuring that Hitler kept an entire army awaiting a fake invasion, saving thousands of lives, and securing an Allied victory at the most critical juncture in the war. 

The story of D-Day has been told from the point of view of the soldiers who fought in it, the tacticians who planned it, and the generals who led it. But this epic event in world history has never before been told from the perspectives of the key individuals in the Double Cross System. These include its director (a brilliant, urbane intelligence officer), a colorful assortment of MI5 handlers (as well as their counterparts in Nazi intelligence), and the five spies who formed Double Cross’s nucleus: a dashing Serbian playboy, a Polish fighter-pilot, a bisexual Peruvian party girl, a deeply eccentric Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming and a volatile Frenchwoman, whose obsessive love for her pet dog very nearly wrecked the entire plan. The D-Day spies were, without question, one of the oddest military units ever assembled, and their success depended on the delicate, dubious relationship between spy and spymaster, both German and British. Their enterprise was saved from catastrophe by a shadowy sixth spy whose heroic sacrifice is revealed here for the first time. 

With the same depth of research, eye for the absurd and masterful storytelling that have made Ben Macintyre an international bestseller, Double Cross is a captivating narrative of the spies who wove a web so intricate it ensnared Hitler’s army and carried thousands of D-Day troops across the Channel in safety.

I can't wait.

Post by Nicholas Bolzman.