Spies in conflict in contemporary Europe

A review of A Foreign Country, by Charles Cumming

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Although its pace picks up sharply about two-thirds of the way through the book and builds to a crescendo at the end, A Foreign Country is the slowest-paced and most contemplative of Charles Cumming’s spy stories.

MI6 agent Thomas Kell has been sacked because of what he believes to be political expediency by the Old Guard now running the shop. Assigned to collaborate with American operatives in Iraq interrogating prisoners, he was forced to take the rap when they turned to torture to extricate information from a British citizen. He has been out of work for months and feeling sorry for himself, “his loyalty to the newly minted high priests of SIS . . . close to nonexistent. ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend,’ he thought, remembering the words of E. M. Forster, ‘I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ For the first time in his life, that notion made sense to him.”

When Kell is called up “out of the cold” by one of the Old Guard to investigate the shocking disappearance of an old friend, SIS Chief-designate Amelia Levene, he is confronted with Forster’s dilemma. He chooses friendship, pursuing Amelia’s trail and keeping his bosses in ignorance. As Kell digs more deeply into the mystery, he comes face to face with a crew of renegade agents of the French secret service (the folks who sank the Rainbow Warrior), with the future of the United Kingdom at stake.

A Foreign Country is a complex tale that interweaves threads of deadly inter-service rivalry and the secrets hidden in Kell’s and Levene’s past. Both characters are fully realized, warts and all, and their stories unfold against a thoroughly credible backdrop of intrigue in contemporary Europe and North Africa.

A Foreign Country is the sixth spy novel Charles Cumming has written since 2001. In this blog I have previously reviewed A Spy by Nature (the first of the six),  The Spanish Game, The Trinity Six, and Typhoon. (Links will take you to those reviews.)

Operation Double Cross: a new spin on why the Normandy invasion succeeded

A review of Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, by Ben McIntyre

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Americans’ views of the Second World War have been dominated by films, books, and television specials about the role that U.S. troops played in the fighting. Even today, more than half a century after the war ended, we tend to believe that it was our ingenuity and industrial might and the sheer guts and persistence of American soldiers and sailors that defeated Nazi Germany — and, to borrow a phrase from the preceding Great War, “made the world safe for democracy.” This is just one of a great many signs of our insularity and the widespread belief in the so-called exceptionalism of our nation.

However, serious historical studies have long since established the truth that Stalin’s Soviet Union carried a much larger burden than ours. It was the German defeat at the monumental Battle of Stalingrad (July 1942 – February 1943) that was the true turning point in the European war. That victory alone cost the Red Army more than 1.1 million casualties; in the war as a whole, 26.6 million Soviets died. (U.S. deaths totaled 418,500.) And research in more recent years, as hitherto secret archives have been opened to the public, has revealed the seminal role of the British Secret Intelligence Services, both MI5 (counterespionage) and MI6 (foreign intelligence) that made possible the success of the U.S.-led Normandy Invasion on D-Day (June 6, 1944).

If you have even a cursory knowledge of World War II, you’re probably familiar with the names George Patton, Omar Bradley, and Dwight Eisenhower. It’s highly unlikely, however, that you’ve ever come across any mention of Elvira Concepcion Josefina de la Fuentes Chaudoir, Roman Czerniawski, Lily Sergeyev, Dusko Popov, Juan Pujol Garcia, and Johnny Jebsen. In their own way, these six European double agents who were “turned” or recruited by the British played roles as large as those of any American general in the success of the invasion that opened up the Western Front.

Because British intelligence, working through these six extraordinary individuals in the Double Cross System, managed to mislead the Germans about the date and place of the invasion, McIntyre writes, it “was a military sucker punch. Senior German commanders were not only unprepared but positively relaxed.” Everyone in a key position on the Nazi side, including Hitler himself, had bought the elaborate deception that kept powerful German forces locked up elsewhere, expecting Anglo-American invaders in Norway, the French Atlantic coast, and, most of all, in the Pas de Calais peninsula in Northern France, convinced that the Normandy action was simply a diversion. As we all know, of course, the real Normandy invasion was a desperate and bloody battle nonetheless, anything but a certain victory for the Allies. Eisenhower and Montgomery, who led the invasion force, later acknowledged that if the Germans hadn’t been fooled, if they had reinforced their troops on the line in Normandy, the invasion might well have ended in a massacre of Allied troops.

As Ben McIntyre writes in Double Cross, “the D-Day spies were, without question, one of the oddest military units ever assembled. They included a bisexual Peruvian playgirl [who was heir to a guano fortune], a tiny [and fanatically patriotic] Polish fighter pilot, a mercurial Frenchwoman [who loved her little dog Babs more than any person], a Serbian seducer, . . .  a deeply eccentric Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming,” and a Danish-German Anglophile whose sideline business of currency and commodity manipulation would have put Catch 22‘s Milo Minderbender to shame. What is most astonishing about the highly unlikely stories McIntyre tells in this detail-filled account is that they’re all true.

Double Cross is McIntyre’s third book about British intelligence during World War II. His previous books — Operation Mincemeat (reviewed here) and Agent Zigzag — relate equally improbable exploits, which are nonetheless also completely true. The earlier books, both bestsellers, were fascinating to read, filled with all the tension of superior thrillers. In Double Cross, McIntyre attempts to tell a vastly more complex tale, encompassing a veritable army of characters, both British and German, and a bewildering sequence of interconnected events. He comes up short. There’s simply too much going on for any but the most retentive reader to follow all six threads. I was nearly two-thirds of the way through the book before I could even keep all the spies straight, let alone the ever-changing cast of their handlers on both sides.

Although Double Cross is a little difficult to follow at times, it’s still a thoroughly enjoyable and often surprising read. You can be the life of any party for months, retelling the story of the British carrier pigeons who played a special role in Operation Double Cross, or the one about the Spanish chicken farmer working for MI5 who fabricated the identities of an army of sub-agents, fed the Abwehr with thousands of pages of entirely fictitious reports — and received a German Iron Cross for his courageous and resourceful efforts to defend the Fatherland.