Summary of Gordon Corera's The Art of Betrayal

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The Iron Curtain was not just a political concept or rhetorical device, but a tangible barrier that was rising mile by mile. It was a dangerous time for those seeking to cross it, as they would face death if they were caught.
#2 The Czechoslovak army was being integrated with the Soviets, and Mašek had information on it. He was a simple man, and extracting more detail was painfully slow. But after two and a half weeks, his life had yielded up forty-five pages of double-spaced typed notes.
#3 After the war, Vienna was left in a state of limbo, between life and death, East and West, for years. The city was a crossroads for those escaping the Iron Curtain and a route in for those seeking to penetrate it.
#4 The Soviets unveiled a memorial to the Red Army in the central Schwarzenbergplatz. The city was a hollowed-out shell of its imperial self. The destruction was not as complete as that inflicted on Berlin, so the still-standing but skeletal façades gave the city the feel of a film or theatre set.

Sujets

• Histoire
• General officer
• Military
• General
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 11 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822505452
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Gordon Corera's The Art of Betrayal
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The Iron Curtain was not just a political concept or rhetorical device, but a tangible barrier that was rising mile by mile. It was a dangerous time for those seeking to cross it, as they would face death if they were caught.

#2

The Czechoslovak army was being integrated with the Soviets, and Mašek had information on it. He was a simple man, and extracting more detail was painfully slow. But after two and a half weeks, his life had yielded up forty-five pages of double-spaced typed notes.

#3

After the war, Vienna was left in a state of limbo, between life and death, East and West, for years. The city was a crossroads for those escaping the Iron Curtain and a route in for those seeking to penetrate it.

#4

The Soviets unveiled a memorial to the Red Army in the central Schwarzenbergplatz. The city was a hollowed-out shell of its imperial self. The destruction was not as complete as that inflicted on Berlin, so the still-standing but skeletal façades gave the city the feel of a film or theatre set.

#5

The desire to capture post-war Vienna on celluloid came from the Hungarian-born film producer Alexander Korda, who had scouts access to places otherwise hard to reach. Smollett, a Times correspondent, knew the city inside out.

#6

The setting for the climactic scene in Greene’s Viennese screenplay was provided on the penultimate day of his first visit by a young British intelligence officer. The officer explained that he had seen a reference to underground police and thought this meant secret police.

#7

In 1934, Philby went to help the Communist cause in Austria. He fell in love with a leftist activist named Litzi, and they became lovers. He later said that he married her just to provide her with a way out. But those who saw the couple at the time were convinced that their love was real.

#8

In June 1934, Philby was recruited by the Communist cause. He had said there were other sons of functionaries at Cambridge who shared his views, and he would soon provide a list.

#9

Philby was a master at hiding his Communist past, and he publicly began to disavow it. He had skilfully glided up the ranks of the British Secret Service, and betraying those around him came easy to him.

#10

The Third Man, a film based on the novel by Graham Greene, was inspired by the relationship between Greene and Philby. It was not long after Greene’s visit that the CIA chief could stand on the city’s streets and watch Orson Welles film his scenes.

#11

In the Austrian town of Graz, another twenty-year-old member of Field Security was discerning the cadences of loyalty and betrayal. He would draw on his experiences to create a fictional world that would define the public understanding of the British Secret Service.

#12

The British had similar problems with their agents. One agent codenamed Dandelion was being run as a double agent against the Soviets until he explained that his Russian case officer wanted him to go to South America and needed money to continue his work there. He was a fraud.

#13

Vienna was a place to take risks and play spy games because it was isolated from the other three zones. The city was divided into four sectors, one for each power. The exception was the First District, the old medieval Innere Stadt or inner city, which was policed collectively by four men in a jeep.

#14

Cavendish was a young officer who was assigned to Vienna to recruit agents. He was imbued with the brash self-confidence that comes from youth and membership in the secret world.

#15

The life of a junior MI6 officer in Vienna was taken up with the routine work of maintaining an infrastructure for espionage. There was also the work of recruiting support agents, the musicians in the beer cellars, the hotel porters, and the taxi-drivers who could be useful in operations.

#16

Cavendish was also tasked with building a stay-behind network in case Austria was overrun by the Red Army. This involved recruiting sleeper agents and burying weapons and communications systems that would be activated only in the event of Austria being overrun.

#17

Cavendish was also spending time with the American girls he was dating, which distracted him from his work. The British intelligence agency had no sources inside the Soviet Union, so they had to rely on defectors to provide them with information.

#18

The British intelligence agency, MI6, was able to help the British government get inside German codes and plans, which allowed Britain to turn their agents against them as part of the famous Double-Cross System. But as the gaze shifted from one enemy to another, it lost all focus.

#19

The head of station in Vienna was tasked with taking a strategic overview. He wanted to confront Soviet aggression, but he was not prepared to take the minimal risks of exploiting internal weaknesses in the Soviet Bloc by active political warfare.

#20

The British had a difficult time dealing with the amount of information that was being given to them. They would have to check the registration numbers of vehicles in a boxcar, and the Red Army soldiers who would urinate against the hoarding.

#21

The biggest ratline operating in Austria was the Jewish refugees arriving from the East. British intelligence placed spies among them to try and stop the routes.

#22

The British woman Daphne Park was one of the most remarkable scavengers of the refugee camps. She had grown up on a farm in Africa, and had decided she wanted to be a spy. She had carved out a role with the Special Operations Executive training French resistance agents.

#23

In Germany, the Americans were happy to take on people who had developed the V2 rockets that had bombed London. The Americans were particularly worried about the pattern of kidnapping, which suggested that Moscow was looking for help in building an atomic bomb.

#24

The Red Army had driven west at the end of the war, and as the Iron Curtain began to fall, thousands of refugees came. The Soviets wanted them all back, and they sent out their feared SMERSH teams to hunt for collaborators and enemies of the state.

#25

Vienna was a refuge for those fleeing Communism, and it was home to a bewildering series of front organizations representing the differing émigré groups. The Soviets were obsessed with these émigré groups and expended a lot of effort trying to target them.

#26

The Americans were newcomers to the intelligence game, but their rising influence was quickly evident in Vienna. They were paying enormous sums as retainers, and they were offering money to agents.

#27

The CIA was young and inexperienced, but it learned fast. It was in Vienna that the CIA finally managed to penetrate Russian intelligence, when they met a Russian officer named Pyotr Popov who worked for military intelligence.

#28

The CIA sent George Kisevalter to handle Popov, a bear of a man who had been born in Russia but whose family had never returned after the Revolution. They met a hundred times in the next six years.

#29

Anatoly Golitsyn, a KGB officer, was sent to spy on the British in Vienna. He was trained in surveillance, the use of informers, and the favorite Soviet tactic of provocation. He was tasked with eliminating the leaders of the anti-Soviet Russian émigré group, the NTS.

#30

In 1954, the KGB in Vienna was rocked by a defection. Major Pyotr Deriabin walked across the city to the Americans. He was placed in a coffin-like hot-water tank, which some holes for air bored into it. The tank was packed on the baggage cart of the Mozart Express train, which ran out of the city and through the Soviet zone and into the American zone.

#31

The Soviets recruited everyone they could from businessmen to barmaids. The British had one prime, unmatched source. It was not a human agent. If you walked down Aspangstrasse in 1950 near the main railway freight line, you would find an innocuous-looking boarded-up shop. Walk to the rear and you would find a bell, a steel door and a spyhole.

#32

The operation was the brainchild of Peter Lunn, who had taken over from George Kennedy Young as head of the MI6 station in Vienna. He had wanted to tunnel towards the cables, but the British and French sectors of Vienna were in the Russian zone.

#33

The Vienna Tunnel was a success. It allowed the British to hear all Soviet military calls and long-distance civilian calls going out to Bucharest, Sofia, Prague, and Budapest. It provided a lot of material on Soviet military activity.

#34

The Americans began working on their own plan in 1950, and sent the tapes to London to be processed. The translations were done in the grand setting of an MI6 office at 2 Carlton Gardens off Pall Mall by a mix of English merchants who had worked in St Petersburg and émigré Russians.

#35

In October 1953, Blake passed on details of the telephone tapping and microphone operations in Vienna to the Russians. He had been dating a secretary from the office, and her father made a remark about him never having a daughter marry a foreign Jew.

#36

The final demarcation lines between East and West in Europe were being drawn in 1955. The signing of the Austrian treaty led to a final, frenetic burst of activity for the spies. The CIA paid off an estate agent who was helping a senior KGB officer find a house, and had the property wired for sound.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

Anthony Cavendish was the MI6 officer in charge of the Baltic agents. He was tasked with establishing a safe house for them, and looking after them. His nava