The Secret War, by Max Hastings (HarperCollins, 2016). Tells the
stories of the opposing intelligence branches of the Allied and Axis
armies that fought World War II, their successes and many failures.
Contains many detailed and interesting portraits and stories of spies,
double agents, traitors, learned code breakers, informants, soldiers and
sailors, ordinary citizens. Often, their stories ended badly for them.
In
light of the current controversy over Russian hacking of our electoral
process, it was interesting reading about the massive efforts that
Stalin and his agents invested in penetrating not just the inner circles
of the Nazi German military and government, but of Britain and the
United States -- the Soviet Union's allies from 1941 to 1945. Kim
Philby, Anthony Blunt, and other moles in Britain's MI5 fed Stalin
thousands of secret documents during and after the war. In the United
States, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and dozens of others in the US
government sent crucial details about American technological and
military secrets to the Soviets, particularly about the atomic bomb,
enabling Stalin to build a nuclear weapon years sooner than he otherwise
could have. And Stalin was completely briefed on Western intentions and
strategies at Yalta. Hastings asserts that the US and Britain did not
invest the same clandestine resources against the Soviet Union until
long after the war -- after all, they were our allies. Hastings paints
an ugly picture of the Soviet spy system and its techniques. Vladimir
Putin and his Federal Security Service (FSB) agents appear to be simply
carrying on the work of their KGB and NKVD predecessors, perhaps in a
milder form.
Codebreaking is not a glamorous
pursuit, but Britain's ability to break the German Enigma machine
encryption code enabled British and American forces to read thousands of
German military orders and documents. It was an invaluable help in
defeating Hitler. These sections are not necessarily gripping reading,
however, and the sections devoted to the setup and functioning of the
Bletchley Park compound outside of London, where Alan Turing, Bill
Tutte, and the other puzzle solvers labored, are a bit of a slog. Yet
this work was essential to the war effort.
Hastings
weaves the story of the "Red Orchestra" through the narrative. This was
a group of Germans who spied on Germany and radioed information to the
Soviets. Several Red Orchestra members were communists. They were quite
successful for a time. I couldn't help but admire these men and women,
despite whatever naivete they possessed in regards to Stalin and the
Soviet system. They included two married couples, Libertas and Harro
Schulze-Boyzen, and Arvid and Mildred Harnack. They knowingly risked
their lives to help defeat Hitler and Nazi Germany. They were traitors
to their country -- so how should we regard them? How do modern Germans
regard them? The Abwehr (the Wermacht's secret intelligence branch)
eventually caught them. They were brutally tortured and executed.
There
are dozens of similar narratives, from all the countries involved. One
of the vivid achievements of this book is the complicated panorama of
the war that Max Hastings has constructed. He conveys the scope of what
was happening, of hundreds of different war theaters large and small, of
millions of people in all parts of the world, all of them moving to
their own separate, often tragic destinies.
By the time I
ended this 558 page book I didn't want it to end. I came to trust and
like Max Hastings, and wanted it to continue. Soon I'll pick up his book
about World War II, Inferno.
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