Mark Piesing's Blog, page 3
February 16, 2025
Listen to me on this weeks ABC Radio’s FutureTense podcast: Nuclear tombs and the distant discourse of danger
“A series of massive underground tombs for nuclear waste are currently under construction.
They’ve taken decades to plan and build and they’re designed to house the world’s nuclear waste for millennia to come.
So where are they being built? How safe will they be? And how to devise a toxic waste warning sign that will make sense to people living tens of thousands of years from now?
Also, the latest research on how climate change is beginning to impact on internal migration within countries.
Guests
Mark Piesing — a UK-based freelance journalist
Dr Shastra Deo — Nuclear semiotics expert and author, School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland
Professor Raya Muttarak — Professor of Demography, University of Bologna (Italy)
Lisa — a climate-concerned resident of South-east Queensland
Further information
Mark Piesing’s article: How to build a nuclear tomb to last millennia“
I also wrote two very well received piece about Nuclear Semiotics here
How to build a nuclear warning for 10,000 years’ time (BBC Future)
How Do We Warn Future Generations To Avoid Our Nuclear Waste (National Geographic)
Listen to me on the History Rage podcast talking about the Forgotten Pioneers of Polar Exploration!
“Prepare to journey into the icy realms of Arctic and Antarctic exploration in this chilling episode of History Rage.
Host Paul Bavill is joined by historian and author Mark Piesing, as they dive into the frosty depths of polar exploration history beyond the well-trodden tales of Scott and Shackleton. Mark, the author of “N4 Down: The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia,” brings a fresh perspective on the lesser-known explorers who braved the harsh polar climates.
Episode Highlights:
– Mark Piesing’s Journey: Mark shares his unconventional path to becoming a historian and his passion for uncovering overlooked stories in aviation and polar exploration.
– The Overlooked Explorers: Discover the stories of Fritjof Nansen, Elijah Kent Kane, and Louise Boyd, among others, who made significant contributions to polar exploration yet remain in the shadows of their British counterparts.
– The Global Race to the Poles: Explore the motivations and challenges faced by explorers from various nations, including the Norwegians, Italians, and Russians, in their quests for polar glory.
– The Role of Aviation: Delve into how aviation pioneers like Roald Amundsen transformed polar exploration, challenging the traditional narratives dominated by sledges and dog teams.
– The Shackleton and Scott Obsession: Mark passionately critiques the overemphasis on Shackleton and Scott in British polar history, advocating for a broader recognition of international contributions.
Join us for an eye-opening exploration of polar history that challenges the conventional narratives and highlights the diverse and daring figures who ventured into the unknown. For more on Mark’s work, grab a copy of his book “N4 Down: The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia” and follow him on Twitter @MarkPiesing.”
Listen to it
Spotify
February 13, 2025
Read my last opinion piece for The Bookseller: Servant or master? Are AI tools changing the way we write?
Read my latest comment piece for The Bookseller magazine in full below, or the original online here.
I open Grammarly and upload a chunk of a chapter, and soon it queries a word I have used. It is an archaic word, but I like it and want to keep it, so I click “dismiss”. Moments later, it queries it for a second time, and I again dismiss its suggestion. Then it does it one more time, and again I dismiss it – and it does it again, and I have quickly found myself in a battle of wills with the tool that is meant to be helping me.
Shamefully, I can feel the lazy human in me wanting to click “accept” to make it go away. Grammarly also gives a performance score for the quality of writing in each document and the gamer in me wants to get my overall score close to 100. In that moment, I realise that these artificial intelligence (AI) tools may change – in fact, are changing – the language we use in our books, and even who is the author of a book. With this, I have stepped right into a controversial topic in the writing community – and beyond. After all, the editor and director of the Oscar-nominated film The Brutalist recently caused controversy when the team behind it admitted that AI was used to “enhance” the Hungarian accent taken on by the two lead actors in the film.
I appreciate that the use of AI as a tool for writers is a relatively minor worry in an industry where AI technology to make many people redundant, including authors. Indeed, as I wrote the pitch for this piece my agent received a letter from HarperCollins asking me to allow my book N-4 DOWN to be used to train AI. I refused. For authors, this is a very troubling issue.
AI tools help an author check spelling, punctuation and grammar, speed up research, create more realistic dialogue – and even write better stories. According to Tony Thorne, a language consultant at Kings College London, right now the danger is not only that AI may write like human authors, but that authors will be “nudged” by these tools to write like AI, “using a neutral language that is much less rich and where rewritten texts may lack the writer’s idiolect”.
For while these tools are very sophisticated and Thorne “[doesn’t] have any problem” with their use in the early stages of writing a book, they can struggle with replicating overall “style and tone and voice and stance”. “I can testify that these are very difficult to teach from human to human, what style is good and what isn’t, and it relies on the incredible sorts of subtleties that only come with consciousness, which they don’t have,” Thorne says.
My own experience of Grammarly has made me far more cautious about using these tools in the future, even though their use will become hard to avoid; Microsoft Word keeps suggesting changes as I write this. But what do other authors think?
Clare Buss is non-traditionally published sci-fi and fantasy (SFF) author and deputy editor of Write On! Magazine. “I think AI tools can be a great addition to a writer’s toolkit,” she says. “But I’ve never been a quick adopter of anything, so it’s unlikely I’ll dive into actively using AI in my writing.”
Librarian and author of the acclaimed YA novel Scareground (Neem Tree Press) Angela Kecojevic has “always viewed” Grammarly as a basic editorial tool and not as an AI assistant like Chat GPT. “Grammarly does offer a sense of security, and it does help tidy up my work,”Angela says. “However, I try to avoid using its suggestions for general text improvement; I think I’m comfortable enough to stick (mostly) with my own choices and not risk messing up my style and voice.”
The very fact that most of the authors I approached were willing to talk about using AI tools suggests their use is on its way to becoming more normalised in our community
Other authors have, with a great of deal caution, gone further. “I’m extremely cautious about using AI in any writing process,” says Tom Chatfield, tech philosopher and author of Wise Animals(Picador), “partly because all good writing is also rewriting, rethinking and bound up with the struggle to find your own words for things. But I do sometimes make use of LLMs (Large Language Models) to help me ’talk through’ an idea, research, play with ideas, pick holes in my own and others’ work, put myself in readers’ shoes, check I understand something, find a way into a topic, consolidate notes and synopsise others’ work”.
One fiction author I spoke to, who didn’t want to be identified, is thinking about trialling an AI app currently under development that will, without the use of the Cloud, analyse a manuscript so that the author can ask what their characters might do in certain situations, resolve plot issues and spot inconsistencies. But it needs very good prompting to come up with useful answers.
Some writers have had a more negative experience of using these tools. “While AI tools can be helpful in synthesising and looking up information, I have used AI tools before to ask for references on specific topics and the responses have been completely wrong, citing real authors but journal titles that simply did not exist,” says Melissa Hogenboom, science journalist and author of upcoming Breadwinners (Canongate). “Prompting the AI tool to provide something more accurate didn’t work. This made me realise we cannot depend on these tools for accuracy.”
A number of the writers I spoke to felt they lacked the skills to use these AI tools. Others I talked with have stronger views. “I much prefer to analyse research material and write the narrative myself,” says historian Helen Fry, author of Women in Intelligence (Yale University Press). “Whilst AI is important for so many fields today, it is important not to lose our cognitive creative skills. If we write our books without the aid of AI, I believe we are giving something special to humanity that is rooted in experience.”
AI may well be the future of the publishing industry, says Alex Larman, books editor of the Spectator (world edition) and author of several historical biographies, most recently Power and Glory: Elizabeth II and The Rebirth of Royalty (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), but that does not mean that “real-life, human writers should regard it with anything other than suspicion, even trepidation”.
“I’ve never knowingly used any AI tools while researching my books,” he tells me, “because I am arrogant – or experienced – enough to believe that I will always have a better connection with my subject than an algorithm can. I have no doubt that AI will change writers’ lives beyond recognition, but am unable to see this as a good thing; instead, I fear that it will steal the soul from this most human of professions”.
It is hard to tell how representative this limited sample of authors’ voices is on this topic. Authors of literary fiction may also feel AI has no place in their tool kit. But the very fact that most of the authors I approached were willing to talk about using AI tools suggests their use is on its way to becoming more normalised in our community.
A bestselling non-fiction author I spoke to on condition he wouldn’t be identified goes further. “Every author I knows uses Grammarly and I suspect that most writers are using AI for research, ideas and refining their writing”, he tells me. “The stigma associated with using AI tools is disappearing fast”.
Another publisher and author I caught up with told me simply that the use of these tools is a necessity. Indeed, The Brutalist has been nominated for 10 Oscars, despite their use of AI. But in the end, it will be readers who decide whether they want their books written by AI, written with the help of AI, stamped guaranteed free of AI or all three. Some may not even care.
Curious, I open Grammarly and click the “write with generative AI feature” and then “identify any gaps”. It comes up with four disturbingly decent prompts. I close the app down. What do I do now?
February 3, 2025
My book N-4 DOWN has now been published in English, Italian, Polish and Russian!
One of my highlights of 2024 was the publication of my nonfiction book N-4 DOWN the Hunt for the Arctic airship in Polish, Italian, Russian, and English! 
Sadly, the terms for a German edition couldn’t be agreed.
Find out more about my book N-4 DOWN https://amzn.eu/d/b62OS9C.
Read my latest for The Spectator (World)…My Books of the Year 2024
Last year, I reviewed several books for The Spectator (World ed), and it was fantastic to be asked late last year by the Books Editor for my Books of the Year 2024.
Please read below for my The Spectator’s Books of the Year 2024 – or the original by clicking on this link!
December 19, 2024
I was on Irish radio talking about the deepest hole we have ever dug!
I was recently on Moncrieff on Ireland’s News Talk radio chatting about the deepest hole we have ever dug!
The race for green energy solutions has forced many countries to consider the potential of geothermal heat. This approach will require the digging of some of the deepest holes on Earth in order to harness that heat.
Currently, the deepest mermaid hole on the planet is the Kola Superdeep Borehole at a whopping 12.2km deep, but it has its origin in the cold war era, long before people were seriously considering this sort of power.
So, why was it dug?
Mark Piesing is a Journalist & Author who has written about the hole. He joins Seán to discuss.
Just published in The Smithsonian’s Air and Space magazine: Plumes and Planes!
I will publish the full text of my latest feature for The Smithsonian’s Air and Space magazine later, but in the meantime you can read all 5 double pages of it…
November 24, 2024
My latest for BBC Future: How to build a nuclear tomb to last millennia.
Nuclear waste remains toxic for thousands of years. How do you build a storage facility that will keep it safely buried for millennia?
In the Summer, I visited an underground nuclear laboratory in the Champagne region of France. Here is the article it inspired.
Read my latest feature for BBC Future in full below, or read the original by clicking on this link.
It is a chilly day early in the summer. But 1,500ft (450m) beneath the rolling hills of the Champagne region in northeastern France, it feels much warmer.
This facility’s fluorescent lights are bright, and the air is dry. I can taste the dust in the atmosphere. The heavy emergency respirators I have to lug with me are a reminder of the dangers I might face this far underground.
Then I start to become disorientated by the rough, criss-crossing rocky passages of the underground laboratory, the hum of hidden electronic equipment and the lack of people. How do I get back to the lift?
I turn a corner, and there in front of me is a huge chamber, so large that I think for a moment that I have stumbled into a tomb of the pharaohs. But it hasn’t been built by the Ancient Egyptians. It was instead carved out of the rock as a burial place for some of the most radioactive substances on Earth: intermediate and high-level nuclear waste.
How do you go about designing, building and operating structures that take decades to plan and even longer to build, that operate over centuries and must survive for 100,000 years, and that contain some of the most dangerous materials on the planet?
Four hours’ drive east of Paris, the 2.4km (1.5 miles) of tunnels are home to countless scientific experiments, construction technique testing and technological innovations. France’s National Radioactive Waste Agency (Andra) needs these to demonstrate to the regulators if it is to be awarded a licence to build a geological disposal facility (GDF) next to the tunnels.
Geological disposal facilities for nuclear waste are, or will be, some of the largest underground structures humanity has ever built. They are planned, in development, about to start construction or about to open in the UK, France, Sweden, Finland and around 20 other countries. 
France’s nuclear waste agency Andra will need to prove their planned storage facility is safe before it’s granted a licence (Credit: Andra)
Finland was the first country in the world to build a deep geological disposal facility for spent fuel, and it has now conducted the first stage of the trial disposal of the fuel. In Sweden, construction of a GDF is about to start at Forsmark, two hours’ drive north of Stockholm, and a similar facility, Ciego, is expected to be built in France relatively soon. In Britain a possible site for such storage has yet to be chosen.
GDFs are epically large, expensive and controversial underground structures designed to contain the most radioactive and long-lived waste produced by the nuclear industry. Currently stored on the surface in facilities such as that at Sellafield in the UK, and at La Hague in France, this waste can include components of nuclear reactors, graphite from reactor cores, spent fuel and the liquid byproduct from the reprocessing of spent fuel from nuclear reactors.
On a computer screen, the plan for any GDF like this looks like a huge, multi-level nuclear shelter. But the process of designing, constructing and operating such a facility occurs on a timescale that is suitably pharaonic. Like the workers who built the pyramids, many of the engineers working on these monumental structures will never see their work completed.
It is easier in some countries than others to find a site
“The licensing for one of these high-level waste disposal facilities takes over 20 to 30 years – we haven’t seen any country taking less time,” says Jacques Delay, my guide and a scientist at the facility in France, “and then the operation will last for around 100 years before it is sealed.” After that, there will be hundreds of years of monitoring of the site.
“The key to siting a GDF is to find a suitable site and a willing host community,” says Amy Shelton, a principal community engagement manager for the UK’s Nuclear Waste Services (NWS). “But everything starts with the geology.”
In countries across Europe, engineers such as Shelton pore over the available geological data for a potential location to see if the rocks buried around 500m to 1km (1,650 to 3,300ft) down are suitable to confine nuclear waste for more than 100,000 years. Rocks like granite and clay are the best for this. But there may be simply not enough data to make a safe decision.
A promising site may turn out to be too close to vital aquifers that supply fresh water to local communities, or to the side of a valley, which in 10,000 years’ time may mean it’s at risk from an advancing glacier, and the hunt has to start again.
In countries like Finland, it’s easier to find sites to build storage facilities because of the lack of seismic activity (Credit: Tapani Karjanlahti/ TVO)
It is easier in some countries than others to find a site. “The Swedish [and Finnish] bedrock is in terms of seismic activity very stable,” says Anna Porelius, communications director at SKB, the organisation which manages Sweden’s nuclear waste. “It has been a continuous entity… for more than 900 million years. In addition, no new fracture zones form anymore.”
Sometimes the human geography is the problem. “Many of the communities who volunteered were absolutely unrealistic, such as they were too close to suburbs of Paris,” says Delay. “Imagine building a nuclear waste disposal facility in Harrow or Wimbledon!”
Communities volunteer to host a GDF for reasons such as the promise of much-needed investment and well-paid jobs. Their consent is needed at every step of the way. This may in turn depend on their experience of the nuclear industry to date.
In Britain that experience hasn’t been the best. In Finland, it is a different story. “We have been making nuclear electricity since the late ’70s,” says Pasi Tuohimaa of Posiva Oy, Finland’s nuclear waste disposal company. “People know the safety culture; they have family members and neighbours who have been working on the site. So they understand about waste.”
This timescale means it’s impossible to know if we will be using this technology in 20 to 200 years’ time – Jacques Delay
Get this wrong, and demonstrations against a GDF can quickly erupt. “During the process in Sweden, SKB learnt valuable lessons about the importance of a positive response to its plans from the local population,” says Porelius. “Protests took place in a number of places and at Almunge… against SKB’s [test] drillings.”
Given the problems in finding a site, it may seem easier, and cheaper, to store this nuclear waste in a disused mine, as Germany did in the 1960s and 1970s with its low-level radioactive waste. “It’s a perfectly understandable and natural question to ask: ‘Well, we’ve got these things, so why don’t we reuse them?'” says Neil Hyatt, the chief scientist at NWS. “But they have not been built for our purpose – or for the long term, or with nuclear safety in mind.”
Certainly, mines were not built with the precision needed for the storage of high-level nuclear waste. “The ramp down to the bottom of the repository is estimated to take… five years to complete,” says Porelius. “That is a very long time compared to traditional mining operations.”
If a GDF is built where there are still mineral resources to exploit then the chance that the “nuclear tomb” will be disturbed in the future is increased, regardless of whether there is currently mining activity. The last tin mine closed in Cornwall in 1998, but 26 years later Cornish Lithium is planning to extract lithium from the historical mining district due to the demand for electric vehicles.
It might also simply be easier to construct a new purpose-built facility for nuclear waste. “In Finland we are used to building underground to escape the weather,” says Tuohimaa. “Building a new facility allows us to plan the whole site from scratch.”
Britain is investigating a proposed waste site which would include a containment facility under the sea (Credit: Nuclear Waste Services)
Unlike, say, designing a new Airbus airliner, there are few examples to follow when it comes to designing a GDF. Still, it’s clear the design will also be all about the geology.
“The design of a GDF is primarily shaped by the thickness of the rock formation,” says Delay, “which in this case [of France’s planned GDF] is enough for just one level rather the two or three or four as originally planned.”
Then there is the nature and volume of the waste, and the amount of heat it generates. Intermediate waste produces less heat and so it can be stored safely, with containers stacked relatively close together in large vaults. High-level nuclear waste produces a great deal more heat, and must be stored in small amounts, far apart.
There is also the need for physical barriers to stop radiation from escaping from the GDF, which can range from the design of the containers to the type of rock that surrounds it. But critics fear these barriers may fail over time.
Lifts can seem an attractive way to haul the waste down to its final resting place around 500m (1650ft) underground, but that raises alarming scenarios of a container stuck in a lift or lifts plummeting to the bottom of a shaft. A ramp with a slope of around 12% may be safer because systems can be put into place to stop a sledge running out of control. It may be best to build both.
One solution to the challenge of building a GDF is to work on a shared design with other nations. This is what the Swedes and Finns did, and they called it the KBS3. “They knew wherever they dig the rock is going to be hard so… the choices were basically laid out for them already,” says Hyatt. “Whereas we [in the UK] are still choosing the target geology.”
The designers’ biggest headaches may result from a simple equation: the speed of technological change versus the length of the project. “This timescale means it’s impossible to know if we will be using this technology [to contain the waste] in 20 to 200 years’ time,” says Delay. “But we have to demonstrate today that we have a solution to these problems in the future.”
The facilities have to be robust enough to keep waste safely contained for tens of thousands of years (Credit: Tapani Karjanlahti/TVO)
French engineers have built a funicular for a 4km (2.5 mile) ramp to prove the safety features needed to stop a runaway container. They have also shown how a robot like Boston Dynamics’ autonomous robot dogs could “without any human intervention be used to move waste canisters knocked out of place by an unexpected event like an earthquake,” says Delay.
The engineers have, he adds, even developed a robot to “recover a cannister from a corroded cell” by crawling along the long, narrow, claustrophobic tunnels that will contain high-level nuclear waste. Its job will be to clear any blockage and pull the cylindrical waste containers to safety.
In Sweden, plans are further advanced. According to Porelius: “Sometime during the 2080s the repository will comprise something like 60km (37 miles) of tunnels with room for more than 6,000 copper canisters of spent nuclear fuel… The deposition of the nuclear waste will be done by custom-designed machines that can be remotely operated with great precision.
“Magne is one example of a prototype machine that we have built,” adds Porelius. “The machine will be used to place the copper canisters in the deposition holes 500m (1,650ft) down in the bedrock.”
More like this:
• The place where no humans will tread for 100,000 years
• How to build a nuclear warning for 10,000 years’ time
• The long shadow cast by Chernobyl
But technology rarely evolves how we expect it to. “It’d be foolish to think that you could rely on today’s technology in a facility with the timescale of a GDF,” says Hyatt. “So, we must design the facility to be repairable, upgradable, replaceable and resilient.”
The designers of a GDF must contend with one more complication: the principle of retrievability. In France there is a legal requirement that any waste that is deposited in the GDF during its operational phase can be retrieved safely. In Britain, it’s more a general guiding principle.
But the process of retrieval becomes progressively more difficult as each vault is sealed, until the entirely facility is sealed for good.
Others are more sanguine about it. “We are burying the fuel spent fuel for good, but there is also reversibility,” says Tuohimaa. “When it’s sealed, it’s sealed… but the world may look very different in 100 years’ time. ” For Delay, “when it’s sealed it is a question for society not technicians”.
In the end, the timescales are hard to grasp when it comes to nuclear storage, and these projects will take hundreds of years to complete. So what motivates these in-demand specialists today to work on a project they are unlikely to see completed?
“For most of us it’s the sense of purpose,” says Porelius. “None of us might see the project of the final repository completed, but what we do now and how well we execute the solution of nuclear waste affects the coming generations. Doing that well… gives us the motivation to go forward.”
—
November 12, 2024
Breaking news: My book N-4 DOWN has been published in Italian!
Breaking news!
My book N-4 DOWN the Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia has been published in Italian by Corbaccio (translated by Paolo Angelo Brovelli) with a fantastic new title and cover https://lnkd.in/eSUgrVuj
Find out more about N-4 DOWN https://lnkd.in/eTPPnFmj
Check out my latest book review for The Spectator: The powerful, brutal story of Polish resistance fighter Elżbieta Zawacka
Read my review of Clare Mulley’s Agent Zo in print and online by clicking here…
In May 1942, Agent Zo was in the home stretch after a long and risky mission that had placed her in Berlin, at the heart of Nazi Germany. As usual, she picked up a small stone and threw it at the second-floor window of her sister’s apartment in a grimy industrial city in occupied Poland, south of Warsaw. But no one in the flat turned on a light, the agreed signal. She threw another. Nothing happened.
With a mounting sense of unease, she knocked at the door of a first-floor apartment, and a pallid face appeared. The terrified neighbor told her that the Gestapo had appeared two days ago and arrested the occupants. “Get away, by God. They are here!” she urged.
Clare Mulley’s Agent Zo is the powerful, gripping and at times brutal true story of Polish resistance fighter Elżbieta Zawacka. Codenamed Zo, she crossed borders in occupied Europe more than a hundred times. She was the only woman to carry communications from the Polish Home Army to the government in exile in London, later qualifying as a member of the elite Polish Special Forces, the “Silent Unseen.”
For Mulley, Agent Zo is much more than just a story about one resistance fighter; it tells a wider story of Poland’s fight for survival, on a scale — and at a level of brutality — that the West often overlooks. A vicious fight began when Warsaw surrendered to Nazi Germany on September 27, 1939. By early 1942, Poles had created the 440,000-strong Polish Home Army, one of the largest such resistance armies in Europe. According to Mulley, it was the source of almost 50 percent of Allied military intelligence.
The book’s genesis comes from long interviews with Zo recorded by Polish journalist Andrzej Drzycimski, who had planned to write her biography, but passed the tapes to Mulley. The result is largely a straightforward chronological account of a dramatic life.
Blonde, blue-eyed Elżbieta Zawacka was the seventh of eight children born to a family in German Silesia; after World War One their town belonged to Poland. She grew up fluent in Polish and German, a skill that would later prove useful in her work as a spy. In the years after Poland’s independence in 1918, Zawacka studied mathematics at university — her tutor was one of the Polish mathematicians who later broke the Nazis’ Enigma code — and joined the Polish Women’s Military Training (PWK) organization, though women weren’t admitted into the regular army.
Through the PWK, Zawacka learned how to drive an ambulance, patch up wounded soldiers in the field and shoot down aircraft. In an intriguing subplot, Mulley hints that she even fell in love with one of her fellow cadets, Zofia Grzegorzewska, who gave her the confidence to fight and lead. Weeks before the German invasion in September 1939, Zofia was “slashed in two” by a train accident — an “accident” that Zawacka blamed on German agents provocateurs; tragedy is never far away in Agent Zo. Her codename, suggests Mulley, was adopted as a homage to her lost love.
Poland fell within a month of the invasion, and those who wanted to resist the Nazis had the choice of either fleeing to join the Polish armed forces regrouping in France (later Britain) or joining the secret Home Army. For a patriot like Zo, it was an easy choice; her place was at home.
Zo proved adept as a resistance fighter. She quickly learned how to disappear in a crowd, moving across occupied Poland without detection and evading Gestapo surveillance. She would have given the Mission: Impossible crew a run for their money with her penchant for disguises — she learned how to be a nun, a pregnant woman and a successful Nazi businesswoman, all disguises which helped her to set up safe houses and to recruit her own team of agents.
Her talent and success as an agent meant that she consistently crossed the borders of Nazi-occupied Europe as a resistance courier, carrying messages, guns and intelligence to “friends” in embassies in Berlin, and dollars to fund the Home Army back to Poland, sewn into the lining of her coats or hidden in luggage.
It is hardly surprising that Zo became the only woman to serve as an emissary of General Stefan “Grot” Rowecki, the Warsaw-based leader of the Home Army, who needed to communicate with the Allies. She was sent on a hazardous four-month trip across Europe, disguised as a German oil company executive, carrying microfilm hidden in a cigarette lighter to the exiled general staff of the Polish armed forces in London. That microfilm contained some of the first evidence of Hitler’s vengeance weapons — the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2, the world’s first ballistic missile. Crucially it also included some of the first evidence of the Holocaust, including the liquidation of the first Jewish ghettos in Europe. Many others who attempted the same journey simply disappeared; Zo’s organizational skills and daring seem to have complemented a fortunate dose of pure good luck.
With the stakes so high, Zo’s journey across occupied Europe becomes a thrilling and powerful section of Agent Zo. For one thing, the oil company she claimed to work for did not exist — it would have taken just one phone call to reveal her fake identity. She made her way across France hidden in the tender of a steam locomotive belonging to Vichy prime minister Pierre Laval, nearly drowning when the engine driver filled it with water. On another occasion she had to escape from a moving train, remembering from childhood adventure stories that jumping as high as she could might slow her momentum and protect her. Once, her own guide tossed her out a hotel window to evade Germans who were closing in.
The smugglers who took her across the Pyrenees into Spain left her for dead when Spanish border guards spotted them, and she was saved only by a young French man called Gilbert, who doubled back and rescued her. Mulley hints at a different kind of romance: Zo called Gilbert “a very brave boy” and said, “we like each other very much.”
She made it to London, but, as Mulley makes clear, Zo was more than just a courier. She was an enforcer — a role for which her stubborn, thorough and relentless personality made her ideal, even if some saw her as tactless. This was a potential problem, given the diplomatic necessity of resolving the issues the Home Army was having in communicating with London.
The messages the resistance risked their lives sending were not picked up quickly enough by the Poles in London, who had little understanding of what life in occupied Poland was like, often leaving couriers stranded in the field for days without orders, a delay that could be the difference between life or death. This was mirrored by growing anxiety, which Mulley captures perfectly, that the Polish government in exile, and by default the Home Army, would be pushed aside by the new alliance between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin — as, in fact, they were.
Zo succeeded in her various missions, and, desperate to return home, she rejected Britain’s entreaties to remain safely in the UK. Instead, she played a leading role in the ill-fated Warsaw Uprising, the first days of which she described as the happiest of her life. When defeat came, Rowecki’s earlier decree giving equal status to women fighting in the Home Army meant that many captured Polish women soldiers went to POW camps rather than the gas chambers. Zo, the great survivor, escaped and fought on.
In Agent Zo, Mulley has written a thrilling, consistently tense page-turner that achieves her goal of setting the record straight without ever becoming dry or preachy. Although some will find Mulley’s interest in the sex lives of the resistance fighters slightly racy, the book will appeal to the general reader looking for a true-life thriller with a difference, as much as to fans of World War Two and Polish history looking to learn more about the Polish resistance movement.
This article was originally published in The Spectator ’s November 2024 World editio
