The Walls Have Ears The Greatest Intelligence Operation of World War II
Yale, £18.99, hardback, 320 pages
As covert intelligence techniques go, ‘ply them with expensive food and alcohol and secretly record their conversations’ certainly sounds like it might work. The Allied ‘secret listeners’ campaign, which essentially did just that, ran throughout World War II and led to thousands of German prisoners being persuaded to yield their deepest secrets – including new technology and the latest battle plans. Helen Fry’s latest book tells this extraordinary story with the help of new archive material and interviews with some of the people involved. The fact that the project remained undiscovered for decades after the war ended makes the episode all the more remarkable.