Customer Reviews

Stealing Secrets, Telling Lies: How Spies & Codebreakers Helped Shape the Twentieth Century

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I really enjoyed Gannon's book. He wrote about areas that I knew very little about. The fact that the Polish Cryptanalysts were able to reverse engineer the Enigma machine with the help of the French who managed to get keys from a spy. The poles never got the credit they deserved for this, when they gave the Brits an Enigma machine the Brits made up several cover stories, i.e. the Poles hijacked a German army truck and stole the machine.
The book dispells the notion that the Allies were reading German communications line for line. There were several periods when the British did not have the German keys and in several cases they had to steal them from obscure weather stations that the Germans had near the Artic.
The book is very factual and concise. The author does not try to impress the reader with his knowledge.

This is a rare wonderful, non-sensationalized, well-documented account of the influence of intelligence efforts--from traditional spying, through cryptology and high tech--on political and military currents in the 20th century. A notable aspect of the overarching story is the regularity with which credit for intelligence successes has been misappropriated by the ambitious and ruthless.

Crisply written accounts of spies and codebreakers who helped shape turning points in the history of the last century.

The book reads like a collection of magazine articles, with each story largely independent of the others. It also has an index, notes organized by chapter and a separate bibliography. So, if you wish to learn more about (say) the liberation of Poland, Gannon's sources are right at hand.

My only problem is that it was published before the latest volume about Enigma, "The Secret in Building 26," which describes how the US Navy picked up what Bletchley Park did not have resources for. The Americans industrialized decryption in 1943 with more than a hundred "bombes" -- the key recovery machines first envisioned by the Poles -- running around the clock and usually providing quick decryption of German naval messages. One of the hazards of writing about the history of cryptology is the risk that your conclusions will soon be superseded.

Gannon has done a fine job of showing how cryptology, espionage and disinformation repeatedly changed the direction of history in the 20th century.