The Good Spy

I had never heard of Robert Ames until I received this book as a Christmas present. Yet in The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, Kai Bird tells the remarkable story of a remarkable man, made all the more so by his down-to-earth ordinariness.

Bob Ames joined the Army in 1956 after graduating from college. Four years later he was recruited by the CIA, where he worked until he was killed in the Beirut embassy bombing on April 18, 1983. His specialty was the Middle East. Put another way, Ames joined the CIA when Eisenhower was president and served the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations. And in The Good Spy, Bird elegantly captures the complexities of this highly turbulent area, and our foreign policy, in an understandable fashion.

In a moment of realization that the world is smaller than we think, Bob Ames was killed in Beirut, the same city where Kim Philby was confronted. In an even weirder twist, Bob owned a trunk that had formerly belonged to Kim's father. Yes, the world of espionage is small, and even people who belong to different eras are connected.

What Ames excelled at, and what made him such an effective spy, was his ability to make friends and understand people and cultures. Contrary to the image of the spy as a quasi-military agent, Ames used his espionage and intelligence work to promote and further peace. His detailed intelligence work, and ability to create back-channel communications to people that the US government could not publicly admit it was talking to, helped to diffuse or contain situations before they escalated to military engagements.

Peace in the Middle East may be elusive, but so far, at least for the United States, Israel/Palestine has not become another Vietnam due in part to the work of Ames and people like him. It's easy to look at conflict zones and wish they were better; more difficult, yet just as important, is realizing that they could be much worse. The Good Spy demonstrates how certain ordinary people, often acting invisibly, can bring a sense of calm to tumultuous times. Robert Ames was such a person, and his murder in 1983 was a blow to both our foreign policy and peace.

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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.