More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 2 - November 23, 2024
—WINSTON CHURCHILL, Closing the Ring1
Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming, who would go on to write the James Bond novels. Fleming
Basil Thomson,
tutor to the King of Siam,
and excitable foreigners in need of British colonization.
the key to an effective deceit is not merely to conceal what you are doing but to persuade the other side that what you are doing is the reverse of what you are actually doing.
luminously intelligent.
Ewen reflected, “and, from time to time, work.” They did, however, find time to invent table tennis. Ivor was extremely good at Ping-Pong, and since the game had no real rules or regulations, he founded the English Ping Pong Association.
the Cheese Eaters League.
Prometheomys, the “Prometheus mouse,” and a lifelong
Ivor became close friends with Charlie Chaplin, whom he taught to swear in Russian.
He came to recognize individual German intelligence officers among the traffic and, as he had his former rivals in court, he “began to regard some almost as friends”52—“They were so kind to us unconsciously.”53
Stalin, meaning “man of steel,” was awarded the code name “Glyptic,” meaning “an image carved from stone.”
Graham Greene, a wartime intelligence officer in West Africa, based his novel Our Man in Havana, about a spy who invents an entire network of bogus informants, on the Garbo story.
The greatest writers of spy fiction have, in almost every case, worked in intelligence before turning to writing. W. Somerset Maugham, John Buchan, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, John le Carré: all had experienced the world of espionage firsthand. For the task of the spy is not so very different from that of the novelist: to create an imaginary, credible world and then lure others into it by words and artifice.
Brenda liked this
“wallet litter,” the little things everyone accumulates that describe who we are and where we have been.
“He was the world’s prize shit,30 but a genius.… I had enormous admiration for him as an intelligence brain and organiser—the more sincere as I loathed him as a man.”
In 1929, he began to correspond with Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik revolutionary expelled from the Communist Party and now living in exile on the Turkish island of Prinkipo.
and his mother-in-law, who was addicted to cheese and pickles even though these gave her chronic indigestion. “What is the use of living54 if you cannot eat cheese and pickles?” she asked.
Like most novelists, Montagu did not like the editing process.
the odd-looking German lepidopterist
“the tiniest jewel in the imperial63 crown … this strategic dot on the world’s map is not only a colony: it is also a garrison town, a naval base, a commercial port, a civil and military aerodrome, and a shop-window for Britain in Europe.”
Fraser-Smith possessed a wildly ingenious but supremely practical mind. He invented garlic-flavored chocolate to be consumed by agents parachuting
in order that their breath should smell appropriately Gallic as soon as they landed; he
As Freud once said, when asked about the significance of his ever-present pipe, “Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.” And sometimes a table-tennis ball is just a table-tennis ball.
“A complete absence of fresh fruit19 and vegetables from our dietary [sic] has brought on chronic constipation, but a great range of purges varying in propulsive powers have catered for all tastes,”
Psalm 39.
“I will keep my mouth as if it were with a bridle: while the ungodly is in my sight. Held my tongue, and spake nothing: I kept silence, yea, even from good words; but it was pain and grief to me.”
Glyndwr Michael had died without a single mourner. His funeral, as someone completely different, was carried out with full military honors and all the ceremony and solemnity Huelva could muster.
a Welsh Baptist in a Spanish Catholic grave, a derelict who had never worn a uniform accorded rank and honor, a man with no relatives (at least none who cared) invested with a parent to mourn him and buried with full military pomp by a grateful nation.
The inscription on his tomb would eventually read, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” the line from Horace’s Odes: “It is sweet and fitting to die for your country.”
A small, bespectacled aristocrat
Deception is a sort of seduction. In love and war, adultery and espionage, deceit can only succeed if the deceived party is willing, in some way, to be deceived.
Churchill was asked: “What do you think is going40 on in Hitler’s mind?” There was laughter, and Churchill replied: “Appetite unbridled.41 Ambition unmeasured—all the world!”
The trickiest aspect of lying is maintaining the lie. Telling an untruth is easy, but continuing and reinforcing a lie is far harder. The natural human tendency is to deploy another lie to bolster the initial mendacity. Deceptions—in the war room, boardroom, and bedroom—usually unravel because the deceiver lets down his guard and makes the simple mistake of telling, or revealing, the truth.
the elaborate fabrication had to be protected, buttressed, and fortified.
Sicily may be the most thoroughly invaded place on earth. From the eighth century B.C., the island has been attacked, occupied, plundered, and fought over by successive waves of invaders: Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Saracens, Normans, Spaniards, and British. But never had Sicily witnessed an invasion on this scale.
Surprise was essential; lack of it was potentially fatal.
“The English language needs a new descriptive29 noun to replace the hackneyed word armada,” he wrote. “As far as my night glasses would carry, I saw hundreds of ships following in orderly fashion.”
For Montagu, a special pleasure lay in the subsequent discovery that Hitler himself had fallen for the phony documents: “Joy of joys to anyone,4 and particularly a Jew, the satisfaction of knowing that they had directly and specifically fooled that monster.”
bedeviled by poor planning
shortly before the end of the war, described it as “a small classic of deception,46 brilliantly elaborate in detail, completely successful in operation.…
a telegram sent to Winston Churchill on the day the Germans took the bait: “Mincemeat swallowed rod, line and sinker.”55
This was a wonderfully surreal moment: the real Montagu addressing his fictional persona, in a work of filmic fiction, based on reality, which had originated in fiction.
Kühlenthal’s life perfectly exemplified what Juan Pujol, Alexis von Roenne, and Glyndwr Michael had already proven: it is possible to fit at least two people into one life.
