Foreign Affairs. January-February 2020

Recent Books

January/February 2020 183

he was caught, tried, and jailed, before

escaping from prison in London and

making his way to Moscow—where he

still lives on a kgb pension.

The Resistance in Western Europe, 1940–

1945

BY OLIVIER WIEVIORKA.

TRANSLATED BY JANE MARIE

TODD. Columbia University Press,

2019, 512 pp.

The French historian Wieviorka master-

fully analyzes the resistance to the

German occupations of Belgium, Den-

mark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and

Norway during World War II. The

results were mixed. For the Allied

powers, resistance groups offered invalu-

able intelligence, as well as escape routes

for downed pilots. On the other hand,

their sabotage had little economic

impact, and anti-Nazi propaganda

campaigns helped shape public opinion

but did not spark broader insurrections.

The Americans and the British faced a

tricky task in assisting resistance groups

in ways that maximized their value to

the war effort but didn’t incite reprisals

against vulnerable civilians. Although it

presents a broad tableau, the book

recognizes the particular circumstances

and factors that formed the resistance in

each country, including the agendas of

governments in exile, bureaucratic

squabbles within various groups, and the

personal qualities of the brave indi-

viduals who accepted the immense risks

that came with fighting the Nazis.

Betrayal in Berlin: The True Story of the
Cold War’s Most Audacious Espionage
Operation
BY STEVE VOGEL. Custom House,
2019, 544 pp.

For one year spanning 1955 and 1956,
British and U.S. intelligence services
were able to—literally—tap into top-
secret Soviet and East German military
communications. Engineers dug a
tunnel a quarter of a mile in length
from the U.S. zone of divided Berlin to
the Soviet zone in order to splice into
underground communication wires.
Intelligence historians have traditionally
claimed that what was called Opera-
tion Gold produced no information of
value because George Blake, a Soviet
mole in British intelligence, warned the
kgb about the project before it even
began. According to this view, the Soviets
would not have allowed conversations
of any substance to be intercepted. In this
riveting and vivid account of the
episode, Vogel demonstrates convincingly
that a lot of valuable information was
in fact obtained from the tunnel, largely
because the kgb wanted to protect
Blake from exposure and so decided to
maintain the fiction that the Soviets
were oblivious to the intrusion. At the
heart of the book is Blake’s own remark-
able story, which Vogel tells with some
sympathy, if not approval. It reads like a
Hollywood screenplay: a young Dutch-
man escapes the Nazis; joins the United
Kingdom’s Secret Intelligence Service,
or MI6; is captured by North Korean
forces during the Korean War; and
decides, while in captivity, to become a
Soviet agent. In that role, Blake was
responsible for many betrayals. Eventually,