An Affair of Spies
An Affair of Spies
By: Ronald H. Balson
Ronald H. Balson, author of Once We Were Brothers, has written another WWII novel. Once We Were Brothers focused on familial relations between a Jew and a Nazi during WWII intertwined with a mystery of identity in the present day.
However, An Affair of Spies has a different WWII focus. As the title suggests, it is a book of espionage. But not just any espionage— these agents are sent to evaluate the Nazis’ nuclear bomb program.
Though most of the main characters are fiction, many of the events surrounding the story are based on truth and I enjoyed all the Google trails it sent me on. (My search history is a bit bizarre right now and I may have used the term nuclear too many times…)
I think that’s what I liked most about this book—Balson’s attention to and inclusion of historical elements. Especially having recently read Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Bomber Mafia, which doesn’t talk about nuclear bombs but the creation of bomb sightings, precision bombing, and napalm, it was interesting to learn about this side of the bomb.
Somehow WWII books still teach me new things.
This was an action driven book that was less intense than it would seem, but still interesting and suspenseful.
Brief Summary
Nathan Silverman is a Jew who managed to leave his home of Berlin, Germany, before things got too bad. But his parents and sister had to remain. He signed up for the US army as soon as he was able and was placed at the secret Ritchie Camp with other displaced Germans to prepare to help the US forces with interrogation and navigating the foreign areas.
But instead he is recruited to exfiltrate a German physicist who wishes to defect and provide the US with valuable knowledge of the German nuclear program.
Nathan will go on his mission with Dr. Fischer, a physicist who will be able to determine if the information the defector has is trustworthy and legit. To his surprise Dr. Fischer is a female— Allison— which of course puts the romantic spin on an otherwise prototypical WWII mission.
Can Nathan and Allison get in and out of Berlin without getting caught AND succeed in getting top secret information AND a defector out with them? AND can Nathan find his family alive and help them escape too? The stakes are high and more than once they must improvise their plans!
The History
I love learning things about history. So I’m dedicating a section of my review to talk about some of the things discussed/included in the book. If you don’t care about history, you can skip this part.
With all the WWII books I’ve read, I had not heard of the Ritchie Boys! It was a large group of German-speaking immigrants or Jewish refugees.
Wikipedia says, “They were used primarily for interrogation of prisoners on the front lines and counter-intelligence in Europe because of their knowledge of the German language and culture. They were also involved in the Nuremberg trials as prosecutors and translators…. A classified postwar report by the U.S. Army found that nearly 60 percent of the credible intelligence gathered in Europe came from the Ritchie Boys.”
Many historical figures surrounding these events and known for significant scientific discoveries and achievements were used in the story:
Dr. Leo Szilard
Lise Meitner
Otto Hahn
Dr. Robert Oppenheimer
Enrico Ferm
Albert Speer
The ALSOS mission and the Manhattan Project were real. The ALSOS mission successfully put German research personnel, including Hahn and Heisenberg which were mentioned in the book, into custody.
The Manhattan Project was the team tasked with creating an atomic bomb.
To determine how far along other countries were in this race, they needed to know what their access to uranium ore was, how and where they transported it; what their method of separating the uranium isotopes was; if they had a working reactor; if they had seen a chain reaction; their access to heavy water or graphite blocks, etc. (Do I sound like an intelligent scientist?)
Hitler obtained access to a lot of uranium ore through Czechoslovakia.
The ALSOs mission did recover a reactor in Haigerloch. But, as the book portrayed, the actual threat of the Nazi nuclear program was as Balson wrote it.
It sounds like the Nazi’s reactor that exploded in 1942 is only theorized to have been sabotaged so that part was a bit fictionalized by Balson.
Amos Alonzo Stagg Field, an used football stadium at the University of Chicago really did house the first nuclear reactor—called the Pile— underneath it. It was the site of the first artificial nuclear chain reaction and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965.
Balson briefly mentions the MS St. Louis ship that attempted to bring over 900 (mostly Jewish) passengers and refugees seeking asylum to Cuba. I wanted to know what came of it so here’s what I found: All but 22 were denied entry to Cuba. The US also did not allow them to disembark. Canada, likewise, denied them entry. The ship returned to Britain and between England, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands they were given a place to go. Historians estimate that about 200 of those people ended up being murdered during the Holocaust. Finally in 2012 and 2018, the US and Canada respectively issued formal apologies for their failure to help all of those people.
The Twentieth Century Limited train from Chicago to New York was a real train that took 20 hours to travel between the two cities. Sounds like a fun trip.
Allison’s fictional character was from Iowa. Her father had 250 acres east of Ames to farm corn. (This is close to where I live!) She went to Iowa State University. Historically speaking, it was fun to find out that an ISU physical chemistry professor named Frank Spedding was recruited to oversee some of the nation’s top atomic chemists as part of the Manhattan project.
ISU had some of the equipment and space that they needed to study the structure of metals. They came up with an efficient way to purify uranium and brought an 11 pound brick of it to Chicago, eventually supplying the Chicago Lab with tons of uranium for their testing. Obviously there is also a building named after this guy.
One of the bombing raids Nathan and Allison endure while in Berlin was a real mission meant to take out a ball bearing plant. In the book Allison questions- “Six hundred men and sixty planes lost for a ball bearing plant?” If you want to understand the significance of the ball bearing plant, read The Bomber Mafia!
During one of the bombing raids the book talks of the Berlin Zoo being hit and animals escaping. I wanted to know if this was true. The Berlin Zoo did get bombed multiple times and most of the animals were killed by the blasts, but there was not some big escaping. The few animals that managed to get out were chased down and shot.
I learned that X-rays are also called Roentgen rays because Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen who “produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range known as X-rays or Röntgen rays.” (Wikipedia) Then he got element 111 named after him— roentgenium— which is a radioactive element with multiple unstable isotopes. I’m sure it’s not because Roentgen himself was unstable amiright?
The Science
If you don’t care about how a nuclear bomb works, you can skip this section.
I thought Balson did a pretty good job of talking about the science of the nuclear bomb in a way readers can understand. Here are some snippets to help you visualize how these bombs get made. Thankfully, it sounds harder than I originally realized.
“Today we know that certain heavy elements with an odd atomic mass, like uranium-235 or plutonium-239, when bombarded with a neutron, will absorb that neutron and split.”
“uranium-235 will absorb the neutron, change the element into barium, and release 2.4 other neutrons, creating heat and energy in the process.”
“There are only a few places on Earth where uraninite is found in abundant enough quantities to be mined: Canada, Russia, and the Congo are major sources… Uranium in its oxidized state is ninety-nine percent of the isotope uranium-238… Separating out the U-235 is called enriching the uranium.” (So only 1% of uranium ore that is mined is the needed uranium-235 isotope.)
“Simply put, physicists theorize that if you bombard an atom of uranium-235 with a neutron, you can cause a nuclear fission; that is, the atom will break apart, split. That splitting will release other neutrons which will bombard other uranium atoms causing other fissions, releasing quite a bit of heat and energy. We call that a chain reaction. If the amount of uranium is large enough, what we call a critical mass, and if the chain reaction is allowed to continue, it can cause quite an explosion.”
If you’re REALLY interested in how these bombs work, you can look at THIS How Stuff Works article.
Comments
I’m now going to have to visit Tiergarten and the Palace of Versailles at some point. I looked up pictures! Also regarding Versailles: the book mentioned how the Germans were stealing art from the museums. If you want a story surrounding that, read Mastering the Art of French Murder.
There were a few things I didn’t like.
At one point in the story, Nathan gets help from ‘a friend’ when he’s in a tight bind. But we never really find out why. I wish we would have gotten a more satisfying connection point there and reason for why the ‘helper’ was there doing what he did. Feels like a loose end that wasn’t tied up well.
Nathan mentions several times that he doesn’t trust Gunther (the defector) because of memories he has from growing up. This seemed like it was going to foreshadow something, but it ended up being anti-climactic. I wish there would have been a twist added in between Gunther and Nathan’s father that would have spoken to Nathan’s distrust. After all, Gunther passed off Nathan’s father’s work as his own, was a class-A liar, and took advantage of Nathan’s father’s willingness to bail him out multiple times. Just wish there could have been a little more karma there.
It also seemed like the prep for this mission was a bit insufficient. There were several times where Nathan asked his superior questions and essentially the answer was- ‘I don’t know. I’m sure you’ll figure it out.’ It seems like especially for such a top secret and important mission they would be a little more thorough in providing contingency plans and cover stories for their new identities as they enter NAZI GERMANY. But maybe that’s just me.
Oh, that reminds me. Nathan’s stream of consciousness is mostly just questions. It was his most feminine quality I think haha.
Recommendation
I really enjoyed this book. I appreciated that it didn’t have much profanity and had no sexual content. I loved the attention to history and learning about the ‘nuclear’ aspect of the war.
I would recommend this book if you enjoy reading WWII novels or learning history. However, this was not a book that really Wow’d me. It’s possible it’s because I was interrupted a lot while reading and didn’t get to read many long chunks at a time. It’s always harder to get as invested in books that way.
I can’t really think of a specific reason NOT to read this book but it’s not going to be the best WWII novel out there. I feel like it won’t top your list but you also won’t be disappointed in it.
Now I feel like my recommendation is a bit lame. Really I think most people will enjoy this book, don’t let my qualifiers scare you off!
[Content Advisory: no f-words, 10 s-words; no sexual content]
**Received an ARC via NetGalley**
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