I am caught today between two topics. I don’t think they are related, but maybe I will see that they are as I write this post.

First, I want to tell you that I will accept your congratulations for finishing reading Ladislas Farrago’s The Game of the Foxes, all 659 pages. It’s a fascinating book and, for some reasons (although I am not sure what they are), an important one. It tells the stories of British, German and American spying in the years before and during World War II. It was written after certain German archives were opened to scholars, allowing Farrago to see things that had been hidden from view, and to get a picture of the extensive spying that occurred that never could have been seen before.

I pretty much doubt that the type of spying that went on the 1930s and 1940s goes on now. We now rely more on technology.

As you probably know, we have been watching the eight years of Homeland, which fictionally deals with CIA activity, largely in Europe and the Middle East. While there are a few undercover agents in the story (such as the husband of the American Ambassador to Germany, who it turns out is working for Iran), the plots are not at all based on networks of spies ferreting out information that they hope is factual and turning it over to their handlers.

But in World War II years, there was an unbelievable amount of it, and this book outlines the big picture, and is also filled with fascinating stories of individual spies, some successful, many not so.

I will just give a bare outline (I am not going to remember details, anyway). During the pre-war years (1933-1939), the Germans set up quite a network of undercover agents in the United States. It was not difficult to do this for a couple of reasons. First, the U.S. was filled with individuals who had immigrated from Germany and still had ties with their homeland. Second, spying for Germany was not necessarily at that time spying against the United States, because the United States and Germany were not at war with each other, and were not official enemies. Thirdly, the United States was not using great efforts to root out German spies. And fourthly, Germany paid well.

There were two basic types of spies recruited by Germany during those years. The most important I would call technical spies. These were people who worked for enterprises that manufactured items that were important for military use. Items that Germany did not have. It must be remembered that Germany, with its military history and with loss in World War I, was carefully monitored to ensure its keeping with restrictions on military development implemented as part of the Treaty of Versailles, and subsequent agreements. There was a lot that we knew how to do, that Germany did not. So photographs, drawings, and outlines of manufacturing techniques were very important.

At the same time, there were other spies that I would consider sociological spies. Their job was to survey American culture and especially American feelings towards Europe, towards Germany, and towards its own government.

And then, of course, at a higher level, there were the individuals who were the handlers of both of these groups, whose job it was to make sure the information collected got to Germany, who monitored the performance and trustworthiness of each spy, to make sure they did not know more than they needed to about each other, and to recruit new agents.

As time went on, Germany’s priorities switched. The technical spying, while it did continue, was not as important as the Germans developed their own expertise. But spying within the U.S. government and military became more important. For several years before the U.S. got into the war, the question was whether the U.S. was going to enter the war, and when it would being doing so. And before it entered the war, when we were nominally a neutral country, was the United States secretly supporting the allies, and how, and could that support be disrupted?

Germany was putting agents in Britain just as it was putting agents in the United States. A⁹nd Britain (much more than the United States) was putting agents in Germany. But sometimes these agents were not what they were cracked up to be. A large segment, perhaps the majority, of German agents placed in Britain were, or became, double agents, serving Britain as well as Germany, and serving Britain much better. It’s an interesting story, how a Brit recruited by Germany had second thoughts and became an agent of the British. For the Germans, he became the individual who would meet Germany’s new assets (often just after they were parachuted into the country) and quickly find a way to blackmail them into becoming part of the Double Cross (XX) system.

And you learn that not all spies are careful or good, that it was hard to tell good information from bad (and the wrong choice often made), and that there was both success and failure. The Germans, Farrago determined, failed more than the Allies. The Germans were not aware that their agents in Britain were mainly double agents, they were caught unawares when the Allies invaded North Africa and, in spite of that, were fooled by deceptive British actions designed to hide the date of D-Day, and where the British and American troops would land in Europe. The Nazi bureaucracy was also complex, and there were competing German spy networks stumbling over and competing with each other.

Interestingly, although spies got caught and paid the price (sometimes the ultimate price) for their activities, there was no violence described in the book. No one was injured or killed as result of what they were asked to do. And while some of the spies were poor, uneducated men with no real chance for success in their society or with a grudge as to what had already happened to them, many were sophisticated, educated, suave, wealthy men, and there were many equally sophisticated and educated women, generally young and attractive, who used their desirability to help them reach their goals.

The book contains much more than I have conveyed to you in these few paragraphs, and because it goes into such detail, and contains very detailed notes and sources, this book is a great resource for anyone interested in any of the many people whose activities are described.

You would think that, after reading 659 pages about spies, I would choose another topic for my next book. But, no. I am now going to start reading Getting Smarter. If you can’t tell a book by its cover, can you tell it by its name? Getting Smarter is a memoir by Barbara Feldon, otherwise know as…..Agent 99.

I will just mention my second topic. I can pick it up later in more detail, after I get a chance to think about it more. It is about the relationship of the Democratic Party to Israel. It appears that the Republican Party is 100% pro-Israel, primarily based on the number of Christian Nationalists/Christian Zionists in the G.O.P., and that this has attracted some Jewish voters, especially members of the Orthodox communities, and many very wealthy (and therefore visible) Jews. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, is the more traditional home of the majority of American Jews, but a sizeable number of Democrats are what are now known as “progressives”, who have disdain for the way Israel has been handling itself and/or support, at least to some extent, the Palestinians under occupation either to free themselves from occupation or in some cases to displace Israel one way or another. The disaffection of the progressives from the Democratic Party could influence Republican victories no matter how generally unacceptable the Republican candidates may be, and the disaffection of Jewish voters would hurt the Democratic fundraising, and would threaten Democratic victories in a number of states, including swing states, with sizeable numbers of Jewish votes.

What should the Democratic Party do?