Secret war for Europe : Dossier of Espionage

Of the many espionage books hitherto published, few outside the realms of fiction have effectively conveyed the atmosphere of the world of spies. The Secret War for Europe is the authentic, chilly reality..

For two years Louis Hagen spied on the spics of Europe, his own cover a job with a major film company. Although he left Germany in 1936, Hagen has maintained top-level contacts in East and West Germany, and through them he was able to compile a dossier of case-histories of this strange underworld, probing the various spy networks which operate throughout Europe, all of which tangle and cross in Germany.

Among the most remarkable stories is that of General Reinhard Gehlen, retiring head of the West German Federal Intelligence Service. In a meeting with the author, he discussed the place of intelligence in international politics at the present time and in the future. During World War II Gehlen had built up an elaborate organisation as German chief of intelligence on the Eastern front, and which, almost incredibly, he maintained intact at the end of the war with a network of agents inside Soviet Russia, subsequently putting it at the service of the CIA and the West German government.

In an equally revealing chapter the author describes with intimate knowledge the life of Otto John, ex-chief of West German counter espionage, whose much-published "defection" to the East still remains an enigma. Other stories include that of KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky, who defected to the West and confessed to two political murders, with a cyanide pistol, which no one knew had been committed; top-ranking West German politician Alfred Frenzel, who betrayed NATO defence secrets to the East on an unprecedented scale; Walter Linse, the mild mannered West German lawyer who was brutally kidnapped and taken to the East, never to be seen again; and finally, as a demon stration of how espionage hysteria can be exploited by ruthless politicians, an authorita tive account of the notorious Spiegel affair, which rocked the West German government. In a terminal chapter, Louis Hagen sums up the contemporary state of espionage and its role in providing a constant two-way flow of information between East and West, which he sees as one of the strongest contributors to the maintenance of peace in Europe in the present situation.

Each of these stories reads as excitingly as any thriller. Louis Hagen writes with insight, humour and an uncanny knack of getting inside the minds of the agents, men and women. These, together with his superb narrative skill, make his book one of the most notable exposures of espionage today.

Louis Hagen was born in Berlin in 1916, and after being interned in a concentration camp at the age of 17 came to Britain in 1936. In World War II he became a glider pilot and wrote a best-selling memoir of his experiences, Arnhem Lift. After the war he worked as a journalist, concentrating on Germany, and wrote several more books. He is now managing director of a firm which specialises in children's films. Sir Kenneth Strong, who contributes a Foreword, has had wide experience in the field of intel ligence and was Eisenhower's Chief of Intelligence from 1943 to 1945.