Book Review: Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre

Upon finishing Agent Zigzag by the same author a month ago, I started right away on Operation Mincemeat. I usually take less than a week to finish a paperback of 600 pages. However, April and May have been particularly busy months, and the weekends were no different. There was always one obligation after another. I was surprised to note that I took one month to finish Agent Zigzag and another month to finish Operation Mincemeat. At the rate I'm reading, it's going to take me more than one lifetime to finish all the books I have!

Operation Mincemeat was the codename of a very bizarre deception carried out by the British Intelligence to fool the Nazis. One of the person involved in the deception was Ian Fleming who was in Room 35 of the Admiralty, the nerve center of British naval intelligence. He later went on to write the James Bond spy novels.

And his colleague, Charles Fraser-Smith, was the inventor who provided Ian Fleming with equipment for his more outlandish plans. Needless to say, Charles Fraser-Smith was responsible for the character 'Q' in the James Bond novels while 'M' was based on Admiral John Godfrey.

The deception involved getting a corpse with no family and dressing it up as an officer and floating it off to the Spanish shores with planted intelligence documents to fool the Germans about the Allieds' invasion plans. I particularly enjoyed the first half of the book. Stephen King couldn't have been more macabre. 

Bentley Purchase came up with a solution. "I've got it," said the coroner. "We'll get an electric fire and thaw out the feet only. As soon as the boots are on we'll pop him back in the refrigerator again and refreeze him. 

The mouth of the corpse has fallen open. The skin around the nose has sunk, and the upper part of the face appears discoloured. The fingers of the left hand are bent, as if clawing in pain.

"....a person was formally pronounced dead without ever having been alive."

I don't normally quote paragraphs from the books I read, but those passages just stuck in my mind. Read together with Agent Zigzag and The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva, one has a better understanding and appreciation of how a war could be won even before it actually began. History lesson has never been so interesting, dead bodies do tell tales. And now I'm going to start on a fiction that has nothing to do with war....time to take a break from history. Should I read The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson or Snow by Orhan Pamuk, or......

Book Review: Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre

A friend who read a review that I had written on The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva suggested that since I enjoyed reading about British double-cross espionage during World War II I might like Agent Zigzag, a true account of love, espionage and betrayal . And she was right. 

While I had learned a fair bit about how the British concocted a very daring and remarkable deception plan to deceive the Nazis, Agent Zigzag completed my 'education' and I knew all the spy masters by name now, if not their complete personality, on both the British and German sides. Well, almost, anyway. There is one more deception, a very famous dead body operation called Operation Mincemeat, which I will write a review on when I'm finished with it.

Eddie Chapman was the most unlikely hero I had ever come across. He began his life as a criminal and was a member of the Jelly Gang who used chewing gum to stick the gelignite to the safes on their heists. 

And yet, he was also a gentle criminal. He abhorred the use of violence in his crimes. He was also a very charming young man, and made friends easily, both of the female and male gender. This was a man with two fiancées at the same time! 

He was serving a sentence in Jersey when the Nazis took control of the island. And so began a story that was more astounding than fiction. His British handlers codenamed him 'Zigzag' due to his erratic personality.

The book's account is taken from documents released by the British Secret Service MI5 to the UK National Archives in 2001 and is a must read for fans of espionage. 

Book Review: The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva

"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended to by a bodyguard of lies" ~ Sir Winston Churchill

When I accessed my blog today, I was shocked to see that the last post was more than a month ago. Time flies without the courtesy of a memo. And what have I been doing for the past one month? Well, I'm not going to bore you with the minute, mundane details of my life. Suffice to say, I was minding my own business, and perhaps a friend's or two's.....yes, I can be quite interested in my friends' lives, to put it mildly.  

Hang on....what has that got to do with a book review post? Nothing. I'm just rambling.

When I buy books, I tend to stick to authors I know. Reading can be a rather expensive hobby in Malaysia, if you are a voracious reader like me, so it makes sense to stick to what you know. However, when a book is given to you for free, you are less picky. And that was how I got my first chance to read Daniel Silva's works, a free Kindle e-book, courtesy of a friend "S".

To be honest, The Unlikely Spy isn't his first book that I've read. I read The Confessor, and liked it enough to take the trouble to google him and found that The Unlikely Spy was his first book, published in 1996, and which some of his fans think is still his best work yet.

While some of the characters and events are fictional, The Unlikely Spy is based on very real events during World War II. The very complex and detailed deception conjured up by the British Intelligence totally fascinated me. Imagine producing fake army tanks, fictitious army units, and so on. It's one big massive deception that rivals Hollywood blockbuster movies. 

The story was cinematic in its scope. I felt I was watching a Hollywood blockbuster instead of reading an e-book on the small Kindle screen. I was so involved in the story that I took the Kindle with me to the treadmill when it was time to work out at the gym. It's definitely a page-turner and if you would like to learn how the British fooled the Nazis and caused Hitler to make all the wrong decisions, pick up this book. The book is based on Operation Fortitude  

Book Review: Night by Elie Wiesel

Books. Some are hard to put down. Some make you laugh. Some make you cry. And then there are some that make you think very deeply. Night by Elie Wiesel falls into this last category.

Although the first edition of this book was published in September 1960, and Oprah Winfrey selected the book for her book club in January 2006, hubby and I only came to know of this book a week ago by chance.

We were in our room at Resorts World Hotel at Genting, watching Vision Four, an in-house video channel, and it was showing an old documentary of Elie Wiesel giving an acceptance speech for his Nobel Prize for this book.

The book is about the author's experience in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald at the height of Holocaust and toward the end of the Second World War. He was sixteen years old when the US Army finally liberated Buchenwald.

What got me thinking deeply was that in the book, every human value, every moral was destroyed. Would anyone dream of abandoning their parent, whom they had clung to tenaciously  for the past one or three years to avoid being separated suddenly wished that the parent would die so that they would be free to have a better chance at survival? Or would a loving child jump on the father and beat him to death so as to grab that piece of bread crumb from him? Would a child who would retaliate against anyone who so much as laid a finger on his father lie quietly in a bunk above the same father and listened to him being beaten to death by the soldiers for fear of attracting the blows upon himself?

These are not the unfilial, rebellious children. But circumstances, or to be more exact, the horrors of the concentration camps have changed them. The human survival instinct kicked in. It became a "each man for himself, there is no fathers, no brothers here".

I kept asking myself, would I become like one of them, too, if I am in that situation? I don't know, since I haven't been through any suffering. I really hope I can rise above that selfish human instinct to survive, but I sure hope I don't live to experience it to get the answer.

The book was written in an easy-to-read narrative, and if I have a Book Club like Oprah Winfrey, I too would select it for my club and encourage everyone to read it. If nothing else, at least the reader will learn something: When there's a conflict, we must take sides. To remain silent is not being neutral. Being silent is condoning the actions of the oppressor and further victimizing the oppressed. The world was silent, and in being silent, a monster (Hitler) came into being.