Spy story

The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939-1945 review – Max Hastings’s entertaining yomp

Max Hastings’s 25th book is a lively, entertaining, but uneven yomp through espionage and code-breaking in the 1940s, which aims to cut through the clouds of mythology and establish just what contribution the cloak-and-dagger boys made to the outcome of the war. After an exhaustive tour of the shadow world, it concludes that intelligence made some difference – but not much. Perhaps one thousandth of 1% of the vast volume of traffic turned the scales on the battlefield.