The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers, and Guerrillas, 1939-1945

Written by Max Hastings

Narrated by Steven Crossley

From one of the foremost historians of the period and the acclaimed author of Inferno and Catastrophe: 1914, The Secret War is a sweeping examination of one of the most important yet underexplored aspects of World War II—intelligence—showing how espionage successes and failures by the United States, Britain, Russia, Germany, and Japan influenced the course of the war and its final outcome.

Spies, codes, and guerrillas played unprecedentedly critical roles in the Second World War, exploited by every nation in the struggle to gain secret knowledge of its foes, and to sow havoc behind the fronts. In The Secret War, Max Hastings presents a worldwide cast of characters and some extraordinary sagas of intelligence and resistance, to create a new perspective on the greatest conflict in history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: May 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9780062430977

Max Hastings

Max Hastings is the author of twenty-eight books, most about conflict, and between 1986 and 2002 served as editor in chief of the Daily Telegraph, then as editor of the Evening Standard. He has won many prizes, for both his journalism and his books, the most recent of which are the bestsellers Vietnam, The Secret War, Catastrophe, and All Hell Let Loose. Knighted in 2002, Hastings is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of King’s College London, and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He has two grown children, Charlotte and Harry, and lives with his wife, Penny, in West Berkshire, where they garden enthusiastically.

Reviews for The Secret War

[dramman_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Highly detailed account of unconventional warfare 1939-45. The author does not shy away from questioning the military value of many of the actions, by all sides during WWII, while paying full tribute to the individual stories of bravery and sacrifice.

[stevesmits · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A thorough history of secret operations during WWII, this book, as the title conveys, examines secret and covert activities of the belligerents. It describes the successes and failures in human intelligence, code-breaking and guerrillas of the British, Germans, American, Russians and Japanese. A key analytical point relating to all intelligence and subversive approaches undertaken by the warring countries is that the impact of such activities, while often important, was by no means decisive to the final outcome of the struggle; that without the strength of force to act on intelligence militarily intelligence would not be determinative of victory or defeat. Intelligence was very often too late or unreliable or ignored by operational and strategic decision makers. In some instances, though relatively few, intelligence did enable major campaign or battle successes, notably at D-Day, the Battle of Midway and the submarine attacks on Japanese merchant fleet, but these successes were offset by the stupendous failures experienced by ignoring the clear signs of the Nazi's intention to invade of Russia (which was widely forecast but dismissed by Stalin), by Operation Market Garden's misread of German strength in Holland and the Battle of the Bulge.Signals intelligence and code-breaking was the most impactful of the three variants of secret activities. The British and Americans were most adept at this highly technical mode of intelligence work. The author concludes that the "Ultra" code-breaking system developed by the British and copied by the Americans was of the highest utility to strategic and operational efforts. The Germans had limited success as did the Russians (mostly low level signals) and the Japanese almost none. The Russians made most use of human intelligence (spying) with its international networks of spies and informants in Europe and America; there is, for instance, a close review of the passing of information related to the Manhattan project. The Germans had almost no success in this dimension, their few spies "turned" by the British into false reporters.Guerrilla activities were of least effect. The support of resistance campaigns in occupied countries, while perhaps morale-building, played an insignificant part in the war effort. Quite often behind the lines operations only resulted in the death of operatives or, through coercion, using the spies as double agents. There was an aura of "romanticism" about guerrilla efforts that resulted in activities that could be considered farcical if not for the loss of the lives of the players. The author is most critical of the American OSS for its wild and ill-conceived subversion.The author's conclusion is sound that the value secret activities should not be overestimated in terms of the magnitude on strategic or tactical aspects of the war.

[aadyer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A very, very good, wide ranging and comprehensive review of intelligence services and the role of the secret services in World War Two. Very easy to read in large part, the only complexity involves the fact that Hastings refers to so many individuals there is an unfortunate tendency to lose track of who they are all and what they did. Interesting asides and intelligent analysis of particularly, the great intelligence failures, of the era, abound. This is an interesting, fascinating and insightful book with very little to complain about. Interesting especially for the dedicated reader, this too would have value for the general reader of he period, or of espionage.

[majackson-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Secret War by Max Hastings (2016)The first major chapter took an effort for me to read…as it estimated the espionage capabilities of England, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, Japan, and the United States before the war, along with detailing the characters—spies, handlers, important personages. It's difficult for me to keep these names straight—especially since pseudonyms and name changes are a given for the spy world. You cannot identify the nationality of anyone from their name, or their country of birth; nor can you tell for whom they're spying. Some spies are competent and some are horrendously incompetent. And, for the most part, the Soviets were the only ones that had a security section of any value (although it's primary focus was identifying internal dissidents rather than foreign threats). But very little of this mattered because none of the countries paid much attention to what their spies were telling them anyway.In general I continued to have difficulty remembering who was who, and what country they were spying for at any particular moment. Not that there weren't interesting, amusing…and occasionally exciting…stories. It was more that there was no focus on one country, or one espionage ring, or one set of code-breakers. This book is so general and inclusive that I found myself dizzy from the "who did what, when and where for whom" details. Considering the scope of the book—the entire espionage/spy environment of the entire world between about 1939 and 1945—I'm not going to fault the author. I'm just letting you know how the book affected me.And this is not to say I was bored reading the many stories—although I was certainly disheartened by the incredible extent of stupidity, laziness, thoughtlessness, vileness, stubbornness and idiocy of both the Axis and Allies in the war. There were very few heroes.Here's are some cogent descriptions of a few of the major characters: "Pavel Sudoplatov's reward for organizing Trotsky's killing in August 1940…was an appointment…to head the NKVD's 'Administration for Special Tasks', officially responsible for 'sabotage, kidnapping and assassination of enemies', a job description worthy of Ian Fleming's novels."Let me admit here that I had no clue that SMERsh was an actual Soviet secret agency, and not an invention of Ian Fleming. Jack Masterman, described as the "orchestral conductor of the British Double Cross system" has written that "…it is a truism of historical research that when dealing with diplomatic conversations and the rumours of embassies, we are in the very realm of lies."And here is one of my favorite examples of the Max Hasting's bold understatements: "Although he [Churchill] often baulked at assessments which did not conform to his own views, unlike the dictators [Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini] he never questioned the right and duty of the chiefs of staff and their intelligence officers to speak their minds. He was a critical force in making Britain's secret services the least ineffective in the world."A short anecdote that illustrates one of the author's more entertaining tendencies to slip in some of the traditional British understated humour is his retelling of a Soviet agent's assessments (not that the Soviets weren't capable of an honest analysis of their own capabilities; it's just that they were punished severely if the wrong person heard such): Quoting a letter from Mikhailov Kartashev, a soviet NKVD agent in Kiev, to Pavel Sudoplatov, an important NKVD organiser—and assassin, "Dear Pavel Anatolievich! This letter is a private one since the issues below are not within my direct competence. I don't take part in the operation of our organs in Kiev… All the information below has been obtained without reference to officials of the People's Commissariat, and is thus strictly truthful… It is hard to say who is performing worst, but it is clear that the work of our organisations is less than brilliant."And neither did the Americans escape this understated chastisement: "Most citizens of democracies accept that part of the tariff imposed for freedom is that their defences against subversion and treachery are less comprehensive and effective than those of a totalitarian state, and such a price usually seems worth paying. Yet the FBI's incompetence was astonishing. Its agents charged with monitoring Soviet activities showed themselves less than astute."Here's an illustrative anecdote described by one Soviet agent: Alexander Feklisov wrote about the FBI agents sent to tail the Soviet agents in his memoirs: "Tails were probably selected from young men reared in small towns, who would start working against us after two or three months' training. One could see straight away that they were provincials—by their clothes, the guilty, larcenous look in their eyes; their clumsiness. They felt lost when they realized that they had been spotted, and didn't know what to do. They would turn away, or walk quickly into the first building they saw."I have a vision of the hapless G-man turning quickly away in his embarrassment and slamming his face into the nearest building with a thud.Feklisov further describes how they would play with these 'tails' by walking straight towards them just to watch them flee in embarrassment.It's possible that the primary lesson to take away from this book, that may make it well worth the reading by appropriate government and/or military officials is that "Here, as everywhere, the unchanging reality was that intelligence alone was useless, unless sufficient force was available at sea, in the sky, or on the ground to use secret knowledge effectively."In order for information to be useful it must be a) timely; b) read by the right people; c) sufficiently and purposely acted upon. One of the major problems for the Nazis, toward the end, was that even though they knew exactly what the Allies were planning, and how to foil those plans, they no longer had the where-with-all to capitalize on the knowledge—neither troop strength nor weapons capability.Do I recommend this book? Not for the casual reader. But if you really want to gain a grander understanding of what it meant to be a spy during WWII—and can tolerate the ultimate disappointment of the truth—this is the book for you.

[bevok-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Lloyd Report on German oil resources estimated that by December 1940 the aerial bombing campaign had achieved a 15% cut in German oil availability. This would have been news to the Nazi leadership, who at the time were unaware that the allies were engaged in a systematic bombing campaign. Intelligence on the state of the German economy, as Max Hastings discusses in The Secret War was one of the weakest areas, little helped by the all-important interception and decryption of Axis communications. Additionally, the RAF was the agency which probably had the weakest use of intelligence.
The other area of allied espionage which was lacking was ‘humint’ – intelligence derived from human sources i.e. spies and informants in Germany. Hastings outlines how the Russians were so much more effective in harnessing dissidents in Germany, mostly through ideological commitment to the Communist cause. Despite this, however, this magisterial history of espionage, cryptology and resistance (emphasis on the first two) firmly presents the allied intelligence as far more effective.
Britain in particular benefitted considerably from its ability to extend its pool of talent beyond the military and established intelligence services for the duration, recruiting a range of brilliant talent from academic institutions. Additionally, the culture of openness meant that the results of intelligence were able to be honestly reported to the military and politicians. Although they did not always take the notice they should have there were none of the aberrations of the Soviet and Nazi leadership, where unpalatable truths had to be suppressed, or in the instance of events such as the many predictions of Barbarossa, willfully ignored.
Max Hastings book is sweeping, without being encyclopedic. As befitting a veteran journalist and author of over twenty books, his prose is well written without being intrusive and the research is broad, encompassing secondary works, memoirs and research in the Russian archives. Hastings applies a sensible amount of skepticism to the almost compulsive mix of fact and fiction in most of the spies accounts. He also avoids the temptation to become enthralled by the drama and derring do, and repeatedly steps back to look at how much realistic operational or strategic benefit was derived. The answer usually was not that much. He is especially dismissive of much of the sabotage and ‘behind the lines’ activity of OSS and SOE.
Hastings finds many shortcomings of MI6, and is very dismissive of its head Stewart Menzies. He relates how someone who knew him at school could not believe “‘how so unbelievably stupid a man could have ended up in such a position”. The main reason MI6 had any credibility whatsoever was the fact that the Ultra sigint programme was under its control, although Hastings gives little credit to Menzies for its success.
He offers a balanced view of the value of Ultra as well. Many historians have allowed themselves to wax superlative about Bletchley Park, making claims such as that it was the single most important breakthrough in winning the war. Hastings points out how fitful its beginning was, and “that the signals intelligence war, certainly in its early stages, was less lopsided in the Allies’ favour than popular mythology suggests”. A significant theme is that raw sigint wasn’t enough on its own. Often doubts developed about its apparent flaws when correct information was later rendered irrelevant when individuals like Hitler changed their mind. Additionally, even timely information about events such as the impending invasion of Crete failed to make a difference to events. Then of course all the intel in the world was valueless if there was insufficient force to take advantage of it. Hastings reminds us, for example that “it is quite mistaken to view the Battle of the Atlantic exclusively as a struggle between Bletchley and the B-Dienst – here, as everywhere else, hard power was vital”.
There are some areas that receive surprisingly little coverage – for example the “Double Cross” programme and the pre-D Day deception, however Hastings argues that they have been well covered elsewhere. A lot of the material on the Soviet side will be fresh for most general readers, and the limited Japanese information can be attributed to the lack of primary research as he points out. This book provides a fresh, well written and balanced assessment of the Secret War, and is highly recommended..

[neddludd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Astounding is a word that fits this work. The author has created a comprehensive assessment of how, during WWII, the UK, US, Italy, Russia, Germany, and Japan utilized various intelligence tactics and how the data gained was either ignored or immediately used in operations. The UK was probably the most successful with its Bletchley Park facility; there, brilliant mathematicians and other academics succeeded in breaking the German code created by what the Nazis considered their unbreakable Enigma coding machine. This achievement was a vital component in the Allied victory. The Russians excelled at "humint," or spies. Yet, since reports were filtered through the paranoid mind of Stalin, much was ignored: including multiple alarms raised over the coming German invasion in 1941; Stalin ignored the all. It seems rather incredible now how robust the Soviet spy networks were in the US and UK; the democracies, on the other hand, decided not to conduct any espionage in Moscow since they deemed it unethical to spy on an ally. Here, the point is that Stalin was looking past the end of the war to Russia conflict with the bourgeois democracies, while the US and UK were only fighting WWII. The Japanese, following their early victories, essentially discounted intelligence. Both the US and UK established new organizations to focus their black initiatives: in the US, the OSS was the predecessor to the CIA. In the UK, SOE was created as a direct competitor to MI-6. Sometimes, and especially in Asia, competition between the OSS and SOE became more heated than any activities against the Japanese. A fascinating detail is the leftist quality of many of the original OSS field officers; they were, for example, totally anti-colonialist, which meant conflicts between the agency and both Britain and France. In Indochina, the OSS arranged for an SOE plane carrying French special forces to be shot down to prevent the colonial powers from gaining strength. The book is filled with surprising details and revelations, and names names. It also renders judgments on the abilities and accomplishments of intelligence personnel. The level of specificity is, in fact, the book's only flaw. The level of detail sometimes overwhelms the larger story.

[nbmars · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hastings contends in his preface to this quite detailed history that the contributions of espionage were not significant in WWII, at least not without factoring in the political will and military prowess to exploit any intelligence. He avers that perhaps only “one-thousandth of 1 per cent of material garnered from secret sources by all the belligerents in World War II contributed to changing battle field outcomes.” Yet that tiny fraction was of immense value.Nevertheless, he provocatively contends: “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.”There are a number of barriers to the success of spycraft. One is the large amount of information, misinformation, misdirection, and outright fabrications from which “pearls of revelation” must be extracted. Another is the reluctance of leaders to accept information that runs counter to their own beliefs, and the reluctance of intelligence agents to risk angering them (especially relevant when your boss was Stalin or Hitler). But leaders on all sides, Hastings reports, dismissed information that contradicted their preconceptions. Hastings quotes a journalist who noted wittily: “Career officers and politicians have a strong interest in cooking raw intelligence to make their masters’ favourite dishes.” A third is the problem that intelligence very often becomes out-of-date as soon as (if not before) it is received. Fourth, there may be a “failure of will”: i.e., even when you get the information, you may be unwilling or unable to act upon it for political and/or military reasons. Fifth, there is sometimes a reluctance to act upon information because it would reveal too much about decryption prowess in the case of signals intelligence, or it might compromise sources in the case of human intelligence. And finally, intelligence is often assessed and analyzed from the worldview of the those who receive the intelligence, without a full understanding that enemies might have radically different value systems.So, if much intelligence is of limited use, and if it doesn’t really matter unless it can be acted upon, what is to be gained from reading this very long, in-depth study of global intelligence efforts during World War II? The main reason is that it is just interesting. The topic has an undeniable appeal to those of us so long exposed to James Bond movies and Cold War thrillers. The book contains plenty of amazing and heroic vignettes, and a good look at military and political leaders from the side, as it were, in examining how they reacted to the information their agents gleaned. Evaluation: What sort of people are interested in risking their lives to spy against and inside of other countries in the midst of very dangerous wars? Who is willing to spy against their own country and why? And is all that risk and expense worth it? What purpose does it actually serve? This book provides detailed answers to all these questions and more.

[pierthinker · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Max Hastings is a well-known author of popular histories of the Second World War (WWII) era. In 'The Secret War' Hastings tells the story of the intelligence - spies and codebreakers - and 'special', or guerrilla, operations for all the major combatants throughout the War. Hastings puts more emphasis on the less well known activities in this area. So, for example, the activities of Bletchley Park and the breaking of the German Enigma codes is covered in less detail than the Russian spy rings operating in Germany and Western Europe throughout the War. Hastings is correct in this approach to re-balance the popular view which ascribes a great weight to the successes of Bletchley Park in the UK and Arlington Hall in the USA in codebreaking and the activities of the SOE and OSS guerrilla organisations and ignores the work undertaken in these areas by the other Allied forces, particularly Russia, and by the Germans.Hastings' book provides two important perspectives on the secret work of the War. The first is to focus more on the people involved and less on the tradecraft and mechanics of the work. In a book for the general reader this is a wise move and provides entertaining and frankly astonishing vignettes of the men and women involved in this dangerous work. The wonder is how any material of value was ever obtained through their action. This brings us to the second major perspective of the book, which is to look at the strategic, tactical and operational value of the intelligence gleaned or guerrilla action taken. Through many examples Hastings shows that intelligence is only as good as the analysis applied to it (through context and correlation, for example), its timeliness (many coded messages were broken only after the information in them would have been useful) and the extent to which the intelligence is used to conduct military operations. In this last regard, I take from Hastings that the Allies in general, and Britain in particular, were better at using intelligence to direct the War and its operations than the Axis powers, although he makes plain that there were success and failures, some spectacular, on both sides.Hastings seems to me to be ambivalent towards the value of these intelligence and guerrilla operations in the War. He unfailingly acknowledges and applauds the bravery, sacrifice and ingenuity of the combatants on all sides, but is less positive about the impact of their work on winning, shortening or even lessening the impact of the War overall. This is, I think, a valid position to take to offset the popular view, particularly in Britain, that the War was almost entirely won off the back of the Enigma codebreaking work in Bletchley Park. Vital, groundbreaking and imaginatively used though this work was, there were other contributors to eventual victory.This is a lengthy, well-researched (especially with regards veto the Russian activities) and well-written book.