ISTANBUL INTRIGUES A True-Life Casablanca <i> by Barry Rubin (McGraw Hill: $18.95; 301 pp.) </i>

Istanbul in World War II was a place where mortal enemies sat at adjacent candlelit tables, eating oysters and listening to Gypsy orchestras. Here in a city poised strategically between Occident and Orient, many covert battles vital to the outcome of the war were fought. In “Istanbul Intrigues,” Barry Rubin describes the crisscrossing lives and deaths of players from 17 different intelligence agencies, both Allied and Axis, in complex games of international espionage.

During 1940 and 1941, Hungary, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Greece all fell before the German war machine. Istanbul became a neutral center for dazed refugees, black marketeers, spies and diplomats who observed social niceties while discussing slaughter. Other neutral capitals (Madrid, Lisbon, Stockholm, Berne) were also intelligence battlefields, but none, according to Rubin, were as great a hotbed as Istanbul, Germany’s back door to the Middle East and the Allies’ secret passageway into occupied Europe.

Among the many colorful characters who populate these pages is the self-important George V. Earle III, an American with a “penchant for publicity and trouble.” The Germans spent endless energy trying to discover Earle’s secret mission, finally concluding that he was head of all U.S. intelligence for the Balkans. In reality, Earle “was not worth all this trouble. The OSS had wisely decided he was too unreliable to be given access to its codes, safes and intelligence. This in no way stopped him from having a wonderful time spreading rumors, drinking and flirting . . . tirelessly sending Roosevelt gifts picked up in the bazaar and flattering letters hinting at his availability for a Senate seat.”

Rubin, among other occupations a senior research fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, states that “Istanbul Intrigues” is a work of nonfiction based on interviews and extensive research, much of it in recently opened archives. The style of the book, however, is much closer to that of historical fiction, since Rubin gives no clue as to how he has drawn his conclusions: no footnotes, few attributions, only a bibliography. Instead, he weaves the material together in a single fabric, which makes the book eminently readable, if somewhat suspicious to more scholarly readers. Such artful weaving lends an air of invention to the tale, especially as the content is so close to familiar spy thrillers and films such as “Casablanca.”