The Bottom Line: A sensational must-read cold war spy thriller inspired by true events.
Set in 1948, Operation Nightfall: The Web of Spies opens in Northwest Poland. As the country shifts toward Communist rule, the Polish Home Army has been dissolved, and its members face persecution in what can only be described as a purge. But in the shadows, and with the assistance of American and British intelligence, a resistance movement is afoot.Â
The action opens as Russian Colonel Yuri Sokolov, a sinister officer with analytics skills that would rival Sherlock Holmes, investigates a reported act of brutality. He finds the body of a young man who had been stabbed and scalped. Another victim, who had been riding a motorcycle, was decapitated. Sokolov quickly deduces that the men were the victims of a taut-wire trap set by a woman. Knowing that insurrection can spread like cancer, he urges the local Polish commander to round up everyone in town in order to eliminate the perpetrator and everyone she is connected with. He ends his tutoring session with a threat: “You don’t want me involved…I always win…no matter how many people have to die.”
It’s a promising introduction to Sokolov, who is one of the book’s most memorable characters. Author Karl Wegener – a Russian linguist, intelligence analyst, and interrogator who served in the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force Reserves, and the Intelligence Community during the Cold War – manages a huge cast of characters, many of which are inspired by real people. In the book’s gripping first 100 pages, we are privy to clandestine operations at British intelligence operations headquartered in London’s Citadel, morse code transmissions received in the dead of night near Buckinghamshire, and the scathing post-war resentment of ordinary citizens in a Polish market.Â
After careful world-building, we are introduced properly to Strategic Operations Executive (SOE) operative Luba Haas and MI6 agent Natalie Jenkins. Haas, glamorous, tough and deadly with a knife, is a fictional character inspired by the real-life figure Krystyna Skarbek, one of the first female agents of the SOE during World War II. Jenkins is half-polish and fluent in the language, a factor that launches her from the typing pool to high-stakes field work.Â
Both women enter Poland to aid the insurgency. As they soon discover, their mission has been compromised. Haas and Jenkins find themselves on the run, chased by forces acting under Sokolov’s direction. From the book’s midpoint, the narrative transitions from a methodical simmer to a chess match with torrents of blistering action. It’s all quite riveting, but most intriguing are the details that only someone of Wegener’s experience could add. In a world where we can summon detailed topographical maps with just a few keystrokes, Wegener revisits a time when a pre-war Polish forestry map was far more valuable than anything the Red Army possessed. And at a time now, when encrypted messages can be handled by software, the painstaking care required to create, send and receive a simple coded message in 1948 is brilliantly recreated in the book.
For fans of cold war history and spy fiction, Operation Nightfall: The Web of Spies is simply unmissable.Â
