Donald McCormick (1911–1998)

Far from “the definitive biography” promised on the cover, this is a breezy , and at times, superficial read that falls more to the side of personal memoir than biography. McCormick was a junior colleague of Fleming in the Navy and later at the Sunday Times so naturally most of the text focuses on those periods. Several of the incidents and people highlighted in this book don’t appear in other Fleming biographies, which raises some questions. Some of the Fleming connections seem tenuous and based on a fair amount of conjecture and supposition. Probably one for Fleming completists rather than a general audience.… (more)

Purists will object at once that it should be Kempeitai, a single word; that the Kempeitai were not, strictly speaking, an intelligence service; and even if they were, they were one of many in Japan. Purists will find that this is only the start of the problems with this book.

What struck me right off the bat is Deacon's insistence that the Japanese have always been extremely good at the spy game, with a (to Deacon) admirable willingness to honor their spies. This does not quite jibe with more scholarly sources, starting with John Prados and Ken Kotani, who find that Japanese intelligence during the Second World War was starved of resources and relatively amateurish. But then Deacon focuses almost completely on espionage, which, truth be told, was probably the least important source of intelligence during the Pacific War; it is possible the Japanese did have a flair for it, little good that it did them in the end.

In fact, Deacon comes off as something of an apologist for Japan and the Japanese. For example, he seems to think the Americans should have minded their own business in the Far East and that it was really the fault of the United States, or perhaps the League of Nations, that there was a war in the Pacific. He particularly lost me with:

"Colonel Tsuji was one of the most dynamic of the younger Army officers and, for a time at least, had been a member of the Society of the Cherry and a supporter of the East Asia League theories of that secret organization. However, he was never one of the extreme nationalists ..."

Not an extreme nationalist? You mean this Colonel Tsuji? http://www.pwencycl.kgbudge.com/T/s/Tsuji_Masanobu.htm

Deacon also goes on at length about how the Thought Police were merely making an understandable effort to stamp out radicalism and used gentle, paternal, corrective approaches whenever possible. As a previous generation might have said, gag me with a spoon.

Nor is Deacon entirely reliable. He judiciously opines that the assassination of the Tsar's family at Yekaterinburg did not actually take place. I found myself using Wikipedia -- Wikipedia! -- as a reality check as I read this book. In fact, this was probably the most useful thing about the book; it pointed me at interesting stories, and then Wikipedia pointed me at reliable sources on them.

That's not to say that there aren't a great many potentially interesting stories here that Deacon is telling more or less correctly. But here we get to the truly fatal sin of this book: It's boring. It's a mishmash of spy anecdotes with surprisingly little context and no analysis. It almost takes skill to make spy stories this dull.

Recommended only if you're short on kindling for your fireplace.… (more)

Deacon’s book may not be the best biography of Oldfield, but I have to trust him owing to his experi-ence and his demonstrated knowledge of British Security Services. In WWII, Oldfield joined the military and became a sergeant in Field Security in Egypt, Palestine and Syria. He was commissioned in 1943 and posted into the Intelligence Corps. His service was spent mostly at the Cairo headquarters of SIME (Security Intelligence, Middle East) where his talent was spotted by Brigadier Douglas Roberts.… (more)