As part of my continuing efforts to read more books from the back catalogues of my favourite authors, I have recently read ‘The Innocent’ by Ian McEwan which tells the story of Leonard Marnham, a twenty-five-year-old British Post Office engineer who has been recruited to work in Berlin in the mid-1950s as part of Operation Gold, a joint Anglo-American top secret project which involved building a tunnel under the Russian sector of Berlin in order to tap communication lines. When Leonard falls in love with an older German divorcee, Maria Eckdorf, their relationship soon becomes entangled with the operation with far-reaching consequences. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Cold War
The Innocent by Ian McEwan
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A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre
After reading two excellent novels in recent months about Soviet spies recruited at Cambridge University – Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan and Red Joan by Jennie Rooney – I was intrigued by Ben Macintyre’s biography of Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge Five spies recruited by Arnold Deutsch in the mid-1930s. Philby worked for Britain’s secret intelligence service (SIS or MI6) during the Second World War and the early years of the Cold War before his activities as a double agent for the NKVD and KGB were finally uncovered in 1963.
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Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
‘Sweet Tooth’ by Ian McEwan tells the story of a young woman called Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) who is recruited by MI5 after she finishes studying at Cambridge University in the early 1970s. She is assigned to an operation named Sweet Tooth in which a cultural foundation is set up to offer financial assistance to writers who speak out against communism. However, her romantic relationship with one of the young writers involved in the project, Tom Haley, starts to complicate things. Continue reading
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