troisoiseaux

I recently got around to listening to the cast album for Operation Mincemeat, a new-ish musical about the 1943 British deception operation to disguise the planned Allied invasion of Sicily by planting false documents on a corpse, which I can only describe as "what if Team Starkid wrote a British version of Hamilton?" (Which I don't mean in a bad way! It's not going into my Spotify rotation, but I'd like to see it at some point during its Broadway run.) Obviously, after that, I had to read Ben Macintyre's nonfiction account Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory— it's a doozy of a spy story, stranger than fiction at every turn, from the sheer bonkers Rube Goldberg Trojan Horse of the whole idea to the farcical period where German spies in Spain were trying to get their hands on the documents and the British were pretending like it was of utmost important that they didn't, while also trying to make sure that they did - since that was, you know, the entire point - to the fact that operation mastermind Ewen Montagu's own brother was a Russian spy. (Which explains a subplot of the musical I couldn't quite piece together from the cast album.) I'd actually first encountered this particular bit of spy history during my middle school spy phase, and I remember being enchanted by how they'd conjured up this whole fictional persona down to the stuff in his pockets; it occurred to me this time that they'd essentially reverse-engineered a mystery, with puzzle pieces laid out to be pieced together into the intended misinformation: one of the carefully drafted letters sent by the doomed courier was included solely for a passing reference to sardines as A Clue that the second choice for the planned invasion discussed in the other letters was Sardinia (and definitely not Sicily). It is completely wild that this actually worked.

Anyway! While the plot and characters of the musical Operation Mincemeat appear to be a particularly tongue-in-cheek fictionalization of the actual events and people involved, I genuinely got a little choked up to discover that one of the lines from its song Dear Bill - And why did we meet in the middle of a war? / What a silly thing for anyone to do - is a line from an actual letter the actual Hester Leggatt wrote to "Bill" from his fiancée "Pam."

Continued my Year of Nonfiction About Spies with Ben Macintyre's The Spy and the Traitor, about Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer who turned double agent for Britain's MI6 in the 1970s-80s, and may or may not have been unmasked to the Soviets by American double agent Aldrich Ames— despite the framing in the title and the blurb, there's some hedging and heavy reliance on "what probably happened" when the book actually gets to this part. ( Read more... )

Re-read Thus Was Adonis Murdered and The Shortest Way to Hades by Sarah Caudwell, the first two of her mysteries featuring Oxford Don Hilary Tamar and a group of young tax/property/estate barristers as Hilary's collective Watson, which are on my list of capital-B Beloved Books: splendidly plotted whodunit meets epistolary travelogue (Venice and the Greek islands, respectively) meets Wodehousian comedy, and unsubtly, casually queer. Julia Larwood is a darling of my heart, character of all time.

Read Among Others by Jo Walton, after discovering it via mrissa's essay Book Clubs with My Imaginary Friends; it's an epistolary, fantasy coming-of-age novel, in the form of a diary chronicling 15-year-old Mori's first year after losing her twin sister and being sent to an all-girls boarding school. I thought the fantasy aspect was very cool— the idea of magic as operating by chain reaction, and relatedly, the balance of "Mori as an unreliable narrator who perhaps thinks more things are Because Of Magic than they are" with "but magic is real"— and I liked how the details of the way magic worked, what happened to Mori's sister, what was up with their mom, etc., were revealed slowly, layer by peeled-back layer. As a Book About Books, Mori's taste is heavily sci-fi, which meant that I did not get a lot of the allusions, but even so, her love for those books rang true, especially the way she thought about life through the lens of her favorite books— e.g., expressing her desire for belonging through the concept of "karass" from Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle.

Read Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, as the obvious follow-up. Interesting! Weird! I can see how this influenced Walton's novel, in both the ways actually cited (e.g., Mori's "karass") and, more abstractly, in the magic-as-the-butterfly-wings-that-flapped way. (Relatedly, it also occurs to me that Walton's approach of "magic is real but there's narrative ambiguity as to whether magic is happening" is reminiscent of Mary Renault's approach to the gods in The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea, and Mary Renault is also a reoccurring reference in Among Others...?)

Continued my "nonfiction about spies" kick with Jim Popkin's Code Name Blue Wren, about Ana Belén Montes, an analyst at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency who was arrested in 2001 for spying for Cuba since the 1980s— while her sister worked on a FBI task force to take down a Cuban spy ring in Miami. A quick, interesting read, although weakest when trying to take a psychological angle; the highlight was all of Popkin's sources from the different agencies involved in the investigation that ultimately caught Montes sniping about each other's versions of the story.

Still reading In the First Circle; just over the 50% mark. The narrative finally looped back around to the plot point introduced in the first chapter— in which a Russian diplomat calls the American embassy to warn them about a spy stealing nuclear secrets, only to be ignored because everyone is busy celebrating Christmas, and a bored young security officer fails to properly trace the call— although soon veered off again to follow the wife of one of the prisoners, a graduate student torn between loyalty to her husband and the risk of getting kicked out of her program if it's discovered that she's married to a convicted "traitor." (This is, so far, a particularly interesting subplot, as a peek into an aspect of Soviet life I haven't read about before: academia.)

I've also been reading One Man's Meat by E.B. White, a collection of essays from the 1930s-40s; I actually started around the same time as osprey_archer, but at my current pace of "pick it up once a week or so," I'm only 40% through. This is super interesting to read after having read Frederick Lewis Allen's Since Yesterday - a 1940 social history of the U.S. in the 1930s - last fall, since there's a fair amount of topical overlap, from a different perspective: where Allen mentions the 1939 World's Fair in New York as a sort of thematic bookend to his narrative of the 1930s, or discusses Francis Townsend and his proposal for a national pension plan as a social movement in response to the Depression, White writes with tongue firmly in cheek about his own visit to the World's Fair, or with a diarist's eye rather than a historian's about going to hear Townsend proselytize about his pension plan.

Read Agent Josephine by Damien Lewis, about Josephine Baker's work for France's Deuxième Bureau and Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (and the Free French) in, respectively, the years leading up to and during WWII: her superstardom was the perfect cover to gather information by mingling with people in high places, and to smuggle information to the British across international borders (in invisible ink on her music sheets or notes pinned to her underclothes!) because who would suspect/demand to search a globally famous performer swanning through checkpoints with a menagerie of exotic pets in tow?! This book was also more broadly about Allied intelligence and alliance-building efforts in North Africa ahead of 1942's Operation Torch (including recruiting and supplying smugglers to engage in intelligence-gathering and arms- and agent-running under the cover of "genuine" smuggling); Baker herself spent much of 1941-42 in a Casablanca hospital, battling peritonitis, but her private hospital room was a key rendezvous point for Allied agents.

Keeping to the theme, I'm reading Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends, about Kim Philby of the infamous "Cambridge Five" Soviet spy ring within the British intelligence services— although I've just read about how, ironically, early in Philby's career as a double agent, the Soviets were deeply suspicious of him, because 1. how did a self-professed communist get a job at MI6 so easily??? (answer: the vetting process was basically just some guy going "yeah, he's fine, I went to Eton with his dad") and 2. the information he was passing along didn't support their preconceived notions. (When tasked with informing the NKVD of the identities of all British spies in the Soviet Union, he came back with the - true! - answer that, actually, there weren't any, and also they were only #10 on Britain's list of intelligence priorities given, you know, WWII; the Soviet response was WELL, OBVIOUSLY HE'S LYING.) It's bypassed irony and landed on comedy of errors: "Philby was telling Moscow the truth and was disbelieved but allowed to go on thinking he was believed; he was deceiving the British in order to aid the Soviets, who suspected a deception and were in turn deceiving him."