Uncovering the Layers of Deception

Some historians argue that World War II was won by sheer industrial capacity. The United States and its allies could produce more planes and tanks and Jeeps than the Axis nations; this was enough to decide the conflict. The efforts of spies and code-breakers, generals and dogfaces on both sides only ratified that decision.

Such an antiheroic view has never found much favor with the public. It subordinates the individual to vast impersonal forces, and nobody likes that. Hence the enduring popularity of thrillers, which celebrate the importance of the lone man or woman on whose guts, brains and derring-do the fate of the world depends.

An example: “The Unlikely Spy,” the first novel by Daniel Silva, who produces public affairs TV programming for CNN. The individual on whose tweedy shoulders the success or failure of the Normandy invasion rests is Alfred Vicary, a history professor and chess maven recruited by his friend Winston Churchill to serve in MI5, Britain’s counterintelligence agency.

History tells us that the Allies were able to confuse the Germans about where the D-day landings would take place. In addition to the real invasion force in England, a dummy army of a million men was created, generating its own radio traffic. Wooden mock-ups of weapons were built to deceive observers from the air. False information was fed to Berlin by captured German agents who had been “turned,” under threat of execution, by spymasters like Vicary.

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Silva’s premise is this: Suppose Germany’s Abwehr intelligence agency, led by Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, inserted a few elite agents into England before the war and left them inactive, awaiting orders? In the winter of 1944, Canaris is suspected of disloyalty to Adolf Hitler and is under pressure to learn the Allies’ invasion plans. So he activates one of those agents.

She is Anna Katarina von Steiner, a beautiful, ruthless Prussian aristocrat disguised as an English war widow, Catherine Blake. Her mission: Seduce Peter Jordan, an American engineer who is overseeing the building of huge floating concrete structures for the invasion.

If the Germans can confirm that the structures are meant to be part of an artificial harbor, they will know that the D-day landings will be on the open beaches of Normandy rather than at the established ports of the Pas de Calais. The war may not be lost--Silva oversells this idea--but the road to victory will be longer and bloodier.

Can one woman explode all the Allies’ elaborate deceptions? Or can Vicary--whose only clue that she even exists is a brief, intercepted radio transmission--stop her in time?

The chase leads from the paranoia-riddled spy headquarters of both sides to the warehouses of the London mob to the bleak Norfolk coast. Bodies pile up, and Silva keeps the suspense keen as the advantage shifts back and forth between the good guys and the Nazis.

Silva’s characters aren’t of John LeCarre quality, but by thriller standards they are fairly complex. (The gentle Vicary, for example, is spurred into his own acts of ruthlessness by the memory of his failure as a young intelligence officer in World War I.) Where Silva excels is in period detail and atmosphere--the damp, grimy exhaustion of wartime England; the corrosive mistrust that spreads even among people who are supposed to be on the same side.

What lifts “The Unlikely Spy” a bit above the ordinary is a closing revelation that undercuts the heroics in the rest of the novel. The posturing of Vicary’s blimpish superior, Sir Basil Boothby; Vicary’s own chess game with his German counterparts; von Steiner’s skillful maneuvering; the inspired act of a teenage hostage, Jenny Colville; the cameo appearances by Churchill and Gen. Dwight Eisenhower--nothing looks quite the same once we penetrate the deepest, most cynical layer of deception.

It’s as chilling, finally, as any theory about the primacy of assembly lines over human beings. Never mind that it all happens in a good cause.