The Traitor of Arnhem

One of the great pleasures of heading to the library is picking up an unexpected book of interest, often on the new books shelf. Recently I found there a new book entitled The Traitor of Arnhem, by Robert Verkaik. I have been interested in the battle of Arnhem ever since seeing the movie “A Bridge Too Far” back in 1977, and this book threads a spy story into the narrative of the battle. Actually, it presents two spy stories, one of which was briefly discussed in the Cornelius Ryan history of the same title that the movie was based upon. This first story was that of the double or triple agent Christiaan Lindemans, who was a Dutch resistance fighter who visited a German HQ in Holland two days before the battle started and evidently leaked information about British armor positions as they prepared to move north towards Eindhoven.

The second story involved an intelligence source that was almost completely forgotten until Verkaik started researching his book. Three days before the battle started (i.e. on 14 September 1944) a German spymaster in Stockholm received information via a diplomatic pouch about an upcoming airborne operation in Holland involving the British 1st Airborne and the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions. The following day the spymaster received more detailed information about the plans in a set of microdot photos, and this information was communicated to the German field commanders by 17 September, when the battle started. The source for the intelligence was a shadowy figure somewhere in the heart of the British state who was going by the name of Agent Josephine.

A mole in British intelligence. This is starting to sound like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy territory. This isn’t entirely coincidental. John le Carré, who wrote Tinker and many other fine spy stories, worked in British intelligence from the late 1950s until the early 1960s, the period when the Cambridge Five spy scandal came to light. Before reading Verkaik’s book, I didn’t realize that the Cambridge Five spies were actively passing information onto the Soviet Union during World War II, prior to the Cold War.

Who was Agent Josephine? Verkaik presents a lot of circumstantial evidence that this was one of the Cambridge Five spies, namely Anthony Blunt. Of the Cambridge Five spies, Blunt’s reputation fared the best, and he kept his career as an art historian going well into the 1980s. But perhaps he was as dastardly as the others.

One wonders what le Carré would have thought of Verkaik’s book. At any rate, this just got me to reread Tinker and rewatch bits of the 1979 TV series starring Alec Guinness, always a fun thing.