Gershom Gorenberg, "War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East" (Public Affairs, 2021)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Schneider Zalman Neufeld
Guest: Gershom Gorenberg, author of War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East
Date: January 26, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores Gershom Gorenberg’s book War of Shadows, delving into the secret intelligence and codebreaking battles that shaped the North African and Middle Eastern theaters of World War II. The discussion covers Nazi ambitions in the region, Allied cryptography breakthroughs, espionage drama on all sides, and the downstream consequences of these clandestine struggles. Neufeld and Gorenberg weave together military, political, and human stories from a tense period when the outcome of global conflict was anything but certain.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

How Close Were the Nazis to Conquering the Middle East?

• Gorenberg’s inspiration originated from a friend’s story about the British evacuation from Palestine, underscoring how precariously close the Axis came to conquering the Middle East (02:53).
• Italy, under Mussolini, initiated the front in North Africa, seeking a "new Roman Empire" (04:36).
• Hitler dispatched Rommel and the German Panzer Corps to rescue failing Italians, which then became a plan to sweep across the Middle East (06:08).

The Vichy French Role and Shifting Colonial Control

• After France's surrender, Vichy-controlled territories in the Middle East (Syria, Lebanon) and North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) became potential Axis strongholds (06:20).
• Britain sent forces to seize Syria and Libya, turning them over to Free French leadership (06:55).

The Enigma Machine and Allied Cryptography

• Gorenberg describes Enigma’s technical sophistication and why the Germans considered it unbreakable (07:59).
  • Enigma had “a number which you would write as a 5 followed by 92 zeros” for possible wirings (10:36).
  • Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski was the first to crack its method, then handed the secret to the British before WWII (12:20).
  • Bletchley Park, the British codebreaking center, built on the Poles’ achievement and became “this hyper-secret high-tech startup whose business was breaking Enigma” (13:40).

Alan Turing’s Role

• Turing designed a machine to test Enigma settings rapidly, not single-handedly breaking the code (14:15).
  • "Turing’s work was... part of a team... his major contribution is he came up with the design for a machine..." (14:16).
• Gordon Welchman improved Turing’s design.
• Key codebreaking involved exploiting repeated German phrases (“nothing to report”, “Heil Hitler”), which was a security flaw due to overconfidence in Enigma (15:45).

Axis Espionage: Italian Successes in Code Theft

• Italy’s codebreaking agencies lagged technologically, but were adept at infiltrating embassies (17:20).
  • Through clandestine safecracking and forging keys, Italy secured codebooks from embassies, even within the Vatican (18:20).

The Nazi Final Solution’s Looming Threat to the Middle East

• An SS Einsatzkommando, led by veteran exterminator Walter Rauff, was dispatched to prepare genocide operations against Jews in Egypt, Palestine, and potentially beyond (21:39).
  • “His assignment was to carry out what the SS called executive measures, which essentially meant mass murder...” (22:38).
• The plan was thwarted only by the British victory at El Alamein (24:06).

Jewish Community Responses in Palestine

• Despite British-imposed immigration restrictions (the “White Paper”), the mainstream Jewish leadership in Palestine supported the Allied war effort as “my enemy’s enemy is a greater enemy” (24:53).
• A radical minority, Lehi (the Stern Gang), briefly sought support from Axis powers but had negligible impact.

Jewish-British Intelligence Collaboration

• German-born Jews in Palestine formed commando units, posing as German soldiers for deep raids (27:18).
• British Special Operations Executive trained Jewish militias in partisan tactics in anticipation of a Nazi victory in Palestine (28:17).

Major Personalities

Erwin Rommel

• Rommel, often portrayed heroically, “worshipped Hitler” and was deeply involved in Nazi operations (30:35).
• His alleged involvement in the July 1944 plot against Hitler is historically debated; his suicide was coerced by the regime to avoid public embarrassment (32:50).

Haj Amin al-Husseini

• Palestinian nationalist and former Mufti of Jerusalem; collaborated with Axis, mostly as a Nazi propaganda tool—not as a shaper of policy (33:48).

King Farouk of Egypt

• Farouk, young and inexperienced, played both sides; suspected of tipping German intelligence about British moves (36:04).
• British ultimately orchestrated a governmental coup to secure Allied interests, but this undermined both Farouk and the new pro-British administration, sowing seeds for future upheaval (37:30).

Historical Agency, Contingency, and Research

• Gorenberg underscores the anxious uncertainty of wartime decision makers, who “had to guess... and the stakes were enormous” (39:18).
  • “They did not know how it was going to turn out... as if they knew the spoilers... but they didn’t.” (40:30)

Research Methodology & Challenges

• Still-classified British intelligence papers, archival fragments in Italy, Germany, Israel, and private collections: Gorenberg stitched together his narrative from scattered documentary puzzle pieces (42:06).
  • “Putting together jigsaw puzzle pieces that had been scattered across half the globe...” (43:30)

Human Weakness as the Perennial Flaw

• Even “unbreakable” codes were rendered vulnerable by simple human errors—poor embassy security, passwords written down, etc.—a vulnerability just as present today (46:17).

The Value – and Limits – of Intelligence

• Intelligence impact hinges on clarity, open-minded commanders, and the resources to act:
  • Japanese codebreaking before Pearl Harbor (“all the warnings in the world aren't useful if you can’t or won’t act on them”) (50:34).
  • Allied victory at El Alamein and at Midway are “textbook cases” of intelligence tipping the scales (53:40).
• History lacks control groups; we cannot ever know “what would have happened” otherwise (55:17).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Gorenberg on Nazi confidence in Enigma:

  “Enigma was unbreakable. It was perfectly secure. What happened was, it was perfectly secure as long as... somebody didn’t look at the problem in a different way.” (10:49)

• On the uncertainty of historical outcomes:

  “We tend to look at the past through the lens of what we already know as if everybody already knew the spoilers, as if they knew what the next paragraph of history was going to be. But they didn’t.” (40:30)

• On the problem of human error in technological security:

  “The flaw in all of these great machines is that they are used by human beings. The technology gets better and better; the human beings are the same human beings.” (48:44)

• On the historian’s limits:

  “History is not a scientific lab. There is no control group. You can't run the war twice, once with this information and once without it.” (55:17)

• On forgotten heroes:

  “Inside of those forgotten stories are forgotten people who were incredible heroes.... I dedicated my book to the memory of forgotten heroes.” (59:00)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:53 – Gorenberg’s motivation and research journey
• 04:36 – Italian and German plans for the Middle East
• 06:20 – Vichy French territories and British responses
• 07:59 – The Enigma machine explained
• 14:15 – Turing’s contribution and codebreaking teamwork
• 17:20 – How Axis powers infiltrated Allied communications
• 21:39 – Nazi plans for the Final Solution in the Middle East
• 24:53 – Jewish political and military alignment in Palestine
• 27:18 – Jewish participation in Allied intelligence and commando raids
• 30:35 – The real Erwin Rommel and his Nazi ties
• 33:48 – Haj Amin al-Husseini’s collaboration with the Nazis
• 36:04 – King Farouk’s equivocation and British intervention
• 39:18 – The policymaker’s dilemma and historical contingency
• 42:06 – Archival challenges and methodology
• 46:17 – Human error as the Achilles’ heel of security
• 50:34 – Limits of intelligence, and successes at El Alamein and Midway
• 55:17 – The impossibility of historical “what-if” analysis
• 56:51 – Gorenberg on the broader lessons and changing histories

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Conclusion

Gorenberg and Neufeld’s conversation reveals the deep interconnections between espionage, human error, and historical contingency in shaping the outcomes of WWII in the Middle East. The episode emphasizes both the drama of secret intelligence operations and the vulnerability and unpredictability inherent in all technological and political undertakings. Gorenberg’s meticulous archive work and narrative flair highlight the contributions of many—especially the unsung and largely forgotten—who shaped the fate of the modern Middle East.

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For listeners interested in WWII, intelligence history, the Middle East, or the interplay between technology and human weakness, this episode—and Gorenberg’s book—are highly recommended.

Transcript

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

Hello everybody.

[Marshall Poe]

This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

Welcome to New Books Network. I'm your host, Schneider Zalman Neufeld. As World War II raged in North Africa, General Erwin Rommel was guided by an uncanny sense of his enemy's plans and weaknesses. In the summer of 1942, he led his Axis army swiftly and terrifyingly towards Alexandria with the goal of overrunning the entire Middle East. Each step was informed by detailed updates on British positions. The Nazis somehow had a source for the Allies greatest secrets. Yet the Axis powers were not the only ones with intelligence. Allied cryptographers worked relentlessly at Bletchley park, breaking down the extraordinarily complex Nazi code enigma. From decoded German messages, they discovered that the enemy had a wealth of inside information. On the brink of disaster, a fevered and high stakes search for the source began in War of Codebreakers, Spies and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle east, published by public affairs in 2021. Gershom Gorenberg tells the cinematic story of the race for information in the North African theater of World War II, set against intrigues that span the Middle East. Gershom Gorenberg is a columnist for the Washington Post and a senior correspondent for the American Prospect, as well as an adjunct faculty at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. I'm so glad his new book has brought him to our program. Welcome, Gershom.

[Gershom Gorenberg]

It's a pleasure to be with you.

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

So let's get started. Tell us a little bit about your background and what led you to write this book.

[Gershom Gorenberg]

Well, I'd done three previous books about Middle east, more specifically Israeli history. I was looking for a new story and one day I had a conversation with a old friend of mine who told me that during World War conversation over my table in Jerusalem. And he told me that during World War II his father had been a British officer and the British army wanted to evacuate his mother from Mandatory from British ruled Mandatory Palestine because the Axis was on the verge of conquering the entire Middle east and the British army was evacuating the families of its officers. And this brought home to me something that I'd known in a vaguer sense, but not so sharply, which was how close close the Axis and specifically the Nazis actually came to conquering Palestine and the rest of the Middle east during World War II. So I said, this is a story I want to know more about. This is a story worth exploring. And that's what led me into the research. And it led me into an incredibly intense, even obsessive years of looking through, searching out archival material to put together this story, which became, as I worked on it, more and more a story not just of a military conflict, but of a espionage conflict.

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

All right, well, it really is a fascinating tale that you, that you set out. So to set the stage a bit, what was Italy's and Germany's aspirations in the Middle east during World War II?

[Gershom Gorenberg]

They Italy began the opened the front in the Middle east with an invasion of Egypt from the Italian colony of Libya in 1940. And Mussolini's goal was to create a new Roman Empire, which meant ruling the Middle East. Libya and Ethiopia were already under Italian colonial rule. Mussolini sought to fill in the territory in between, which meant conquering Egypt and the Sudan and to continue on into the Middle East. The Roman Empire, of course, ruled the entire eastern Mediterranean, and that was in fact the entire Mediterranean. And Mussolini's goal was to turn the Mediterranean back into an Italian lake. When the Italian army found itself facing defeats at the hands of the British, Hitler decided that he couldn't take the risk of the British conquering all of North Africa and proceeding from there to southern Europe. And he sent his favorite general, Erwin Rommel and two divisions of the German Panzer Corps, the armored Corps, to Africa. And eventually that force grew in order to rescue the Italians. And eventually that grew into a German plan to sweep across the Middle east and Conquer the entire region.

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

Wow. To fill in the, the picture a drop more, what happened to French colonial possessions in the Middle east after Vichy France sided with Hitler?

[Gershom Gorenberg]

Well, first of all, in the early, in, in the early period after the French surrender and after essentially Vichy France became a German satellite. Lebanon, Syria and the French possessions in western North Africa, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia were all territories that were under the rule of a government which was aligned with the Axis in. As a result of that, the British eventually decided that they couldn't live with that risk and sent military forces starting out from Palestine and conquered Syria and Libya and turned those over to the Free Frank. And later in the war, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco became a major front between the Allies and the Axis.

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

Right. And at the heart of the story that you tell is the battle over the encryption or the deciphering of encrypted messages between the various powers and especially the German encryption machine, the Enigma. What was in, and briefly, what exactly was the Enigma machine and why did the Germans think that it couldn't possibly be broken?

[Gershom Gorenberg]

Well, the problem that all of the combatants faced at that stage of, of the development of warfare and technology was, and especially the Germans, because the whole German concept of war was blitzkrieg, fast moving war was how to communicate between their units. For the Germans, this was a particularly pressing issue because the lesson that they had learned from the Great War, which is to say World War I, is to avoid trench warfare, to move quickly. That meant moving armored forces very quickly to conquer a country. But those units had to keep in touch. And the only way to do that was by radio. But any message that you send by radio can be intercepted by the other side. It's like shouting it out to the world to send it by radio. So you needed a way to encrypt it, to encipher it, so that the, that your intended recipient could understand the message but that the enemy couldn't. The Enigma was a cipher machine. It was a machine that encrypted messages to satisfy this purpose. It was portable, it weighed 15 pounds. It looked like a typewriter. But if you typed a message into Enigma, if you typed a, a, a, a, a into Enigma, it would come out with a string of different letters. Because the way that Enigma worked is inside the machine there were three wheels that were constantly turning, and inside those wheels was wiring. And each time you pressed the key, an electronic pulse went from the keyboard through the wires and lit up another letter on a light board on the machine. And each time you press the key, the wheels also turned. So the next time you press the key, the wiring was different and a different letter popped up. Even if you pressed the same key over and over again, each time it would come up as a different letter. So the code clerk would take down that apparent gibberish that was lighting up on the lightboard and send it by radio. At the other end was another German clerk, usually soldier, who would take those letters and type it into his, usually his Enigma machine. And the original message would light up as long as the two machines were wired the same way and started in the same starting position. Here's the rub. The different number of ways to wire an Enigma machine is a number which you would Write as a 5 followed by 92 zeros, okay? And the number of ways to set up the machine at the beginning of your message was a number only slightly smaller. 150 quintillion possible ways to set it. So it was completely obvious to everybody involved, the Germans and also most of their enemies, that there was simply no way that the other side could test out all these combinations and find the correct settings for the machine and the correct wiring. And therefore, it was what we call today secure end to end encryption. It was utterly unbreakable. The Germans felt completely confident that the messages that they were sending over Enigma could never be read from the other side. In fact, even when they had evidence that somehow or another the enemy was onto them, had good intelligence on them, they always created for themselves an explanation of how this was happening that did not involve Enigma being broken, because Enigma couldn't be broken. Indeed, 30 years after the war, when it came out, the British actually found a way to read Enigma messages. Surviving German officers were sure that this couldn't possibly be true. Enigma was unbreakable. It was perfectly secure. What happened was it was perfectly secure as long as, first of all, somebody didn't look at the problem in a different way. In fact, very early on, in the beginning of 1933, a young Polish mathematician working for Polish military intelligence came up with an idea, the idea of how to apply a branch of mathematics known as permutation theory to solving the Enigma problem. In retrospect, from a mathematical point of view, that just seems totally obvious. Of course, everybody could see that. Everybody could see that. After Polish mathematician Marin Yuruski did it beforehand, it wasn't obvious to anybody. And he figured out what the wiring was by mathematical calculations. He reduced that five followed by 92 zeros to one. He knew the wiring. And then he and two even younger colleagues figured out how to, how to break down what the settings on the machine were. But when it came close to the time of the war, the Germans were switching the settings every day and Ryewski and his two colleagues couldn't keep up. And essentially what happened is they invited two British code breakers from Britain's own super secret code breaking agency to Warsaw and reveal the secret to them. The British still didn't believe that Ryuki did it by himself. They were sure that the polls must have gotten a stolen machine because nobody could do that. It's impossible. Right. But they took that information back to Britain to where their agency located at the beginning of the war, this estate in the British countryside called Bletchley Park. And they used that material to develop additional new ways to break into Enigma. And it was something that you had to do every day because the settings kept changing and, and then different branches of the German military used different settings and then even different fronts used different settings. So Bletchley park developed into essentially this hyper secret high tech startup whose business was breaking Enigma. And when you could read Enigma, you were reading what the Germans were saying to each other, whether it was their plans or their fuel situation or Colonel so and so is being transferred from this everything, Enigma. What it was like you were sitting in the German staff room, right.

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

And what was Alan Turing's contribution to breaking the Enigma?

[Gershom Gorenberg]

Well, Turing was one of. Turing was a brilliant Cambridge mathematician and he was part of the, he was signed up by the government Communications headquarters, that was the official name of the British agency just before the war to work on Enigma. Turing's work, I need to stress Turing was, on the one hand, Turing was an absolutely brilliant mathematician who made a huge contribution. And on the other hand, the picture you see in the film the Imitation Game, as if he did it all by himself and that he built the machine himself and all that, that's like cinematic fiction. Turing's work was first of all based on what the Poles had done before the war. And he was part of a team. His major contribution is he came up with the design for. He did not stand there with a screwdriver and a wrench putting it together himself. He came up with the design for a machine that ran through countless possible settings of the Enigma machine to see which one would have produced, would have turned a text that you expected to find into a message, into the gibberish that you had intercepted over the radio. In other words, you thought it's likely that this, that this message has the word Sandstorm in it. Right? Now what I have is GZQWX let's run the machine until we find a setting that will turn those letters into Sandstorm, or that would have turned Sandstorm into those letters. In order for that to work, first of all, a major improvement was made in the design by another brilliant Cambridge mathematician by the name of Gordon Welchman. And second of all, for it to work, what you had to depend on was that the Germans were going to regularly use the same phrases over and over again. Now, in basic, like code security101, if you were an intelligence officer, the rule would be don't repeat the same phrases over and over again. That gives the other side a way of breaking into your code. But Enigma is unbreakable, so it didn't matter. Right? So there was one German outpost in the Libyan desert in a really quiet spot where the commanding officer sent a message daily that said nothing to report. Okay, well, you've intercepted a message from that station and you run the machine to look for what setting could have turned nothing to report into those letters. Sometimes it could be Heil Hitler. It could be, you know, as I said, it could be Sandstorm, it could be a number of tanks. You counted on the fact that they were going to repeat phrases and it worked.

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

Right. So we start to get a sense of how the, the, the British and then the Americans got access to, to secret German messages. How did the Italians end up getting access to secret American code books and cipher table?

[Gershom Gorenberg]

I'm going to be careful not to give away the whole story all at once.

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

Sure.

[Gershom Gorenberg]

But the Italians had a much smaller code breaking agency than the British did. Or then later the Americans did. The Americans, by the way, their expertise was in breaking Japanese messages. And essentially when the alliance was created between the British and the Americans, they were trading information. I will break Japanese, you break Germans. Okay? The Italians didn't have the, the funding and the staff to do the kind of work that the British were. Even if they had had the, the skills, they, they had some good code breakers, but they just didn't have the resources. However, Italian intelligence was good at breaking something else. It was good at breaking locks and safes. And in the years before the war, the head of what was known as Italy's Penetration Squad, I mean, what was known to the probably dozen people who knew that it existed? The Peace Squad. The head of that squad managed to, through slow and careful and deliberate work, enlist Italian employees of foreign embassies who would wait months for the situation in which somebody left a key lying around, and then they would press that key into wax and a copy could be made. And at an hour, when nobody was in the embassy, he could enter the embassy openly safe with another key that had been copied for him, remove documents swiftly, take them to a nearby photography studio, photographed them all, rushed them back to the safe and put them in exactly as they'd been before. He was the maitre d of a hotel called Rome. And for years he was stealing documents, including code books from the embassies of many, many countries. Now, obviously, when a country entered the war against Italy, they close their embassy. But if you had code material that you had stolen beforehand, that was still valuable. To make things even more complicated, many countries had two embassies in Rome. They had one embassy to the Italian government and one embassy to the Vatican. And when the war began, let's say the British Embassy to the government of Italy shut down. But the British Embassy to the Vatican, which had previously been located like the physical embassy, had been located outside of the Vatican because the Vatican is the size of a postage stamp. But now the rest of Rome was an enemy city. So they moved into the Vatican. Okay, so they're now in this little teeny country called the Vatican. And the peace squad continued to break into embassies that were in the Vatican and continued to steal material from there. New Year, new me. Cute, but how about New Year, new money? With Experian, you can actually take control of your finances. Check your FICO score, find ways to save and get matched with credit card offers giving you time to power through those New Year's goals. You know you're going to crush start the year off right. Download the Experian app based on FICO's Core 8 model. Offers an approval not guaranteed. Eligibility requirements and terms apply subject to credit check, which may impact your credit scores. Offers not available in all states. See experian.com for details. Experian.

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

Right. And to shift gears a little bit, you mentioned at the outset that you were surprised to learn just how advanced the Nazis, the Germans, came towards Palestine and extending the Final solution there. What were the steps that were taken in terms of the planning to bring the Final Solution to the Middle east and to Palestine? What kind of concrete steps did the Germans take in that direction?

[Gershom Gorenberg]

Well, in the beginning of the summer of 1942, it looked in Berlin as if General Erwin Rommel and the combined German Italian army that he led was about to conquer Egypt. It was. It appeared that in doing so, that it was going to destroy the British 8th army, which held Egypt, and that it would be able to keep moving. In fact, the plans in Berlin were that Rommel's army would continue all the way across the Middle east to take the Iraqi oil fields. And it was expected that another German army after the Germans assumed that they were going to conquer Stalingrad in southern Russia and that that army would continue south through Persia and meet up with Rommel's army in a pincer action and destroy the entire British Empire in the Middle east. And even by doing so would reach the Persian Gulf and that meant the Indian Ocean and therefore it could connect up, I see with, with Japan. That was the grand plan. As part of that plan, as part of that expected conquest of the Middle east, the SS appointed a Einsatz, created an Einsatz commando, essentially a mobile genocide unit for the Middle East. At the command of that unit was a SS officer who had previously been responsible for, for the production of the mobile gas chambers, the truck mounted gas chambers that had been used to murder at least a half a million Jews in Eastern Europe. And his assignment was to carry out what the SS called executive measures, which essentially meant mass murder, first against the Jews of Egypt and then as Rommel was expected to continue against the half a million or more Jews in Palestine and then the Jews of Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. And those preparations were in place. In fact, the SS officer Walter Ralph actually flew from Europe first to the port town of Tobruk in Libya and onward to El Alamein where Rommel's battle headquarters were to coordinate what, you know, the murderous work that they were going to do in the Middle East. But fortunately they were never able to carry out that plan because Rommel, because the British defeated Rommel at Elamein and prevented the German army from, from conquering the Middle East.

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

Right. So given the, the kind of profound threat that the, the Nazis and the German war machine presented to the Jews of Pales, what was their position in terms of which side of the conflict they aligned themselves with? In other words, were all the Jews in Palestine siding with the British and hoping for a British victory?

[Gershom Gorenberg]

Well, at the beginning of the war, you have to remember that just before this, the British had issued their famous white paper which banned or almost completely banned Jewish immigration to Palestine. Just at the moment that many Jews were trying to escape Europe, relations between the British and the, and the Jewish leadership were at a low point. The vast majority of the Jewish community and its central leadership, its mainstream leadership recognized that my enemy's enemy is a greater enemy and that it would be necessary to fight on the side of the British to put off the conflict between the Jews in Palestine. And the British rulers until after the war because it was essential to defeat the Nazis first. At the very far right extreme of the Jewish community there was a tiny group known as Lehi in English, often called the Stern Gang, which was so extreme in its anti British feelings, so ideologically rigid, that at the beginning of the war they even tried to send an emissary to Vichy held Beirut to make contact with the Italians to offer their support against the British. That was, you know, it was a, it's, it's significant that they tried to do this just because it showed how extreme they were. But they were a, as I said, a very tiny group. The, the great majority of the, of the Jewish community in Palestine sided with the British. In fact, they were, if anything more eager to join the British army and fight than the British were to take them. Because there were concerns in the, in the British leadership. They're saying, okay, well, so we're gonna, you know, recruit these, these people and they're gonna fight with us and we're gonna train them to be soldiers and then the war will end and we'll have all these trained soldiers and then they'll turn against us. And so within the British establishment there was a real debate about, about how many Jews to recruit for Palestine and what kind of military role to, to allow them to have.

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

Right. And so who were the Jews who secretly worked with, for British intelligence during the war?

[Gershom Gorenberg]

Well, there were various, there were various things that, connections that were made. You know, there was one center in, in, in Palestine that interrogated axis POWs, for instance. And they used the skills of, of, of Jews who knew, you know, various European languages, especially German. There was a small commando unit created in the British army in North Africa which consisted entirely of German born Jews from Palestine who were taught how to act exactly like German soldiers. They were provided with uniforms from captured German soldiers. They were, they were provided with photographs of their, their blonde girlfriends who were actually English women soldiers, but were, you know, little German names written on them. They were, they and, and two anti Nazi German POWs taught them how to march and talk like German soldiers. And they were used for commando raids deep inside of, of enemy territory in Libya. And then one of the biggest pieces of cooperation was that there was a British agency known as the Special Operations Executive which was responsible for training partisans guerrillas in Nazi occupied areas. And when it looked like Palestine was about to be occupied by the Germans, they collaborated with, trained a Jewish militia unit known as the palma, the strike force that had just been established in Palestine. And they essentially Gave them partisan training. They taught them how to plant bombs, how to make time fuses, how to carry out ambushes, things like that. Again, this was very controversial within. Within the British command because there were generals who said, this is. This is too dangerous. You shouldn't be teaching them how to, you know, those are dangerous skills to be teaching them. When Rama was defeated in Egypt and the Germans began to retreat, this collaboration ended. It existed during the brief period when to everyone on both sides, it seemed almost inevitable that the Germans would conquer Palestine.

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

Right, Right. And your book is full of kind of larger than life characters. And one of them that you talk a lot about is Rommel himself. And from major movies about him, he often has, even American films often has a very. Is portrayed in a very positive light. And just how much of a Nazi was Rommel actually and was he part of the plot to kill Hitler in 1944?

[Gershom Gorenberg]

Well, he wasn't an official member of the party. Normally, most of the military, in general, military officers weren't made members of the party. But it's very clear from his own writings, from letters that he wrote, whatever, that he worshiped Hitler. He was Hitler's favorite general at the beginning of the war. Last year, before the war, and at the beginning of the war, Hitler actually put him in charge of a battalion that accompanied Hitler in his travels into. First into Czechoslovakia and then into Poland, his security battalion. So he was. He favored Hitler, favored Rommel. And at that point, it's clear that Rommel had, first of all, no problems with Hitler, that he had an extremely high opinion of Hitler. There's no sign that he questioned Hitler's ideology. He was with Hitler during the first days of the invasion of Poland, when everybody, you know, when within the highest ranks of the German army, it was clear that horrendous things were going to be done to the Polish civilian population. It's seems certain to me that he was aware of these plans. So the idea that he was unstained by Nazism seems unsupportable to me. In 1944, in July of 1944, when an attempted coup was carried out against Hitler, failed coup against Hitler, one of the conspirators under questioning by the Gestapo, said that Rommel was part of the plot. And the secret police came to Rommel's house and the regime had a problem because they had turned Rommel into a propaganda hero. So arresting him and putting him on trial would have been embarrassing to the regime. So they offered a. They made an offer to Rommel. If you commit suicide, then we'll declare that you, you know, died of injuries or natural causes and your wife will get her pension and you won't be shamed. If you refuse to commit suicide, then we'll have to put you on trial and execute you. So he committed suicide. And because that was in association with the coup, it created the impression that he'd always been doubtful of, of Hitler. Whether or not he was actually involved in the coup is a subject of debate among historians, among German historians. But even if he was, it seems like this was a very late case turning against Hitler when it was becoming obvious to military leaders within Germany that Germany was going to lose the war. They were basically looking for a way to get out of the war.

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

Right. And another character that you talk a little bit about is Haj Amin Al Husseini. Who was he and how important was he to people in the Middle east and to the German war effort?

[Gershom Gorenberg]

Husseini was a Palestinian nationalist and Islamic leader. He had been the Mufti, the top clerical figure in Palestine under the British. He had been involved in the anti British activities in Palestine and had gone into exile before the war. He was living in Baghdad and he was involved in a pro Nazi, short lived pro Nazi junta in Iraq. In 1941, when the British retook Iraq, he fled, eventually reaching Berlin. So on the one hand it's absolutely clear that Hajime was, was totally pro Axis and supportive of the Nazis. But a certain mythology grew up about the influence or stature that he had in the eyes of the Nazis, which is exaggerated. The Nazis basically treated him as a propaganda tool. He spoke on, on German Arabic radio aimed at the Middle East. He had a meeting with Hitler at one point in late 1941. And typical such meetings, Hitler did all the talking. And Hitler told Hosseini that when the British. Sorry, when, when Nazi Germany conquered the Middle east, part of their plans were to carry out murder against the Jews. That idea didn't come from Husseini. It wasn't something that Hosseini had to influence the Germans to do so. He essentially served the role during that period as a German propagandist. His influence, at least at that stage during the stage of the war when it seemed like Germany might conquer the Middle east. His actual influence should not be exaggerated as it sometimes has been.

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

Right. And speaking of Arab leaders, who is King Farouk and which side did he favor during the war?

[Gershom Gorenberg]

King Farouk was the King of Egypt. He had become king at the age of 16 in 1936, the first year and a half he was king. He was Actually, his place was taken by a regency council because he couldn't take on the response. He couldn't be crowned or take on the responsibilities of king until he reached the age of 18. And Farouk was incredibly inexperienced, was extremely spoiled and was not at all ready to take on the role of king. It was a constitutional monarchy. He had limited but important powers and his loyalties. Once the war started, the British were always suspicious of his loyalties, of which side he favored, whether he favored the Axis or the Allies. They had, it turns out, good reasons for those suspicions. For instance, Farouk apparently became aware of British plans to occupy persia, Iran in 1941, and through a intermediary conveyed that information to the Germans through the Egyptian Ambassador to Persia. Fortunately, the Germans didn't act on that and the British were in fact able to occupy Persia. And slightly later, In February of 1942, the British Ambassador in Egypt became so frustrated with Farouk's vacillating and unwillingness to support the Allies, even though Germany was trying to invade Germany and Italy were trying to invade Egypt, that the British ambassador masterminded a coup in which Farouk was forced to appoint a pro British Prime Minister. What the British got out of that was more stability in Egypt. But the effect of that was, was to delegitimize Farouk, to delegitimize the new Prime Minister who had previously been the most popular political figure in Egypt because now he was coming to power on the bayonets of the despised British imperialists. And there was a chain of events leading from that couple to another coup 10 years later when young military officers, including Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat took power in Egypt, forced Farouk to abdicate and became the rulers of Egypt.

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

It definitely comes through in the story how all sorts of actions that various governments ended up taking ultimately led to all sorts of unintended consequences. And how, you know, if things had been different at one stage, then it may have ended up quite differently at a later time.

[Gershom Gorenberg]

Well, yeah, I mean the, the dilemma that policymakers faced throughout this stage was that what you needed to do to win the war at this moment might not necessarily be what you needed to do in terms of your long term policy. So there's constantly these arguments going on. You know, I mean, essentially the same argument applied to the coup in Egypt as to, to, to training the Jews in Palestine. If we, if we carry out this coup, it's bad for the British Empire in the long run. But right now Rommel is at the gate, so maybe we better do it. You know, if we train Jews how to it, how to be resistance fighters. What if they turn those, those skills against British rule of Palestine? Well, yeah, that's a worry, but right now Rommel's about to conquer Palestine, so we need resistance fighters. I'm telling this in a light manner, but one of the things that comes through when you sit and you work your way through the original documents from historical events, when you're holding the papers in your hand from Churchill and from the generals in the Middle east and from lower level officers, is people were wrestling with huge questions on which the fate of the world depended. They did not know how it was going to turn out. We tend to look at the past through the lens of what we already know as if, as if everybody already knew the spoilers, as if they knew what the next paragraph of history was going to be. But they didn't. They didn't know what the effect. They had no more idea of what the next paragraph was than we do. They didn't know what the. They had to guess. And the stakes were enormous. And one of the things that I constantly try to present in War of Shadows is the uncertainty and the anxiety with which people worked to take you into the moment and understand how unclear that future looked, how uncertain it was that the Allies would win, how, how totally possible it was that the Axis would win or that the Axis would conquer the Middle East. Because only if you feel that tension, do you understand the weight that was resting on people and how uncertain they were about their decisions.

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

Right? Absolutely. Speaking of holding the documents in your hand, given that your whole book is about secrets and about secrets that many of the people that, that were involved never wanted to share, even years after the war, how did you do your research? How did you manage to locate enough information to fill in all the pieces of this very complex puzzle?

[Gershom Gorenberg]

Okay, that's a great question, because what happened is when the war ended, just before VE Day, Victory in Europe Day, a command was sent out to everybody in British Intelligence who had knowledge of breaking Enigma. And that order was, you must keep the secret for your, the rest of your life. You may never talk to anybody. When people ask you what you did in the war, you can't tell them. By the way, this was an incredible problem for people. All of your friends had been off fighting. You couldn't, you had actually contributed immensely to the victory, but you couldn't talk about it. You went out on a date, you couldn't tell the girl or the guy what you had done during the war. And that's, I mean, think about Britain in 1945. That's all anybody talked about was what they did during the war. But the reason for that order was that it was considered essential that the Germans felt that they had been completely defeated by force of arms on the battlefield, because they hadn't believed that after World War I, and that had led to the second attempt, World War II. So the psychological strategy of the British command was don't give them any excuses to think that they should try again. And in order to avoid that, everybody had to keep the secret. And of course, the papers were also kept completely secret. In the 70s, the essential fact that Enigma was broken came out. And there were some not too accurate books about how it had happened. But the idea of this, what was called ultra intelligence, the breaking of Enigma, it came out. Most of the British papers, actually all of the British papers remained secret. The first papers that began to get released were in the 90s, and then little pieces have been released since then. So my research involved looking at British intelligence papers that had been released 50, 60, 70 years after the war, at American intelligence papers, at captured German documents that were held in American archives, at Italian documents, in terms of what was going on here in, at papers that were preserved in Zionist archives, in Israeli archives afterwards. And even that wasn't complete because there were essential papers that were missing. And some of those I managed to locate in the homes of the children or grandchildren of, of people who had been involved. And that filled in more of the story. It was a process of putting together jigsaw puzzle pieces that had been scattered across half the globe. And I would sit with these different pieces of paper, you have a British document and an Italian document, a German document, and you try to see where did the British information end up being expressed in the Axis documents and where did the British manage to read the Axis documents and figure out what was going on there and what was the American role in all this? And out of that set of jumble of jigsaw puzzle pieces to create a accurate picture of the incredible intelligence battle that was so secret that not only did the soldiers fighting on the battlefield did not know, but for the most part, even their commanders did not know what was going on behind the scenes.

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

Wow. Really, really fascinating. To go back to a little while ago, you were talking about how the Italian intelligence service managed to, to break into US embassies in Rome and make off with secret code books. Were there any warnings among American intelligence circles, among American government circles, that the American embassies were a Soft target that they were in danger of being broken into and having their secret documents stolen.

[Gershom Gorenberg]

Both for the British and the Americans there had been warnings before the war that the embassies were insufficiently protected on the British side in MI6, MI6 being the foreign intelligence service of the British, an MI6 officer had visited the Rome and Berlin embassies in 1937 and written reports saying these places can easily be broken into. He gave a chilling description of all the flaws in security and what must be done about it. And none of his recommendations were implemented. You had these incredible codes that had been designed, but it was easy to steal them and nothing was done about it. On the American side. An American ambassador to Harris had warned before the war that his experience showed that the embassy was extremely easy to penetrate. And then at the beginning of the war there were meetings of top espionage people on the American side who again warned that physically American secrets weren't being kept securely enough. And it's clear from another report that was done two years later that very few of their recommendations were carried out. And so you have this bizarre irony. There's people who are working to create incredible methods of encryption. A message is sent by radio between two points on a battlefield and it should be impossible to figure out. And yet those methods are being virtually left on the desktops for somebody to steal. And when you see that it's not just history because that's a problem that we're facing to this day, right? You know, you're, you know, the company tells all of its people that they have to design 14 letter passwords with exclamation marks and numbers and capital letters and the, and change them every six months. And it's great and it will protect, you know, the encryption and everything. And then people write, you know, who can remember a password like that? And they write it down on a piece of paper and leave it on desktop or somebody says that that kind of password nobody will remember. So they use a password that's the name of the country, company followed by 1, 2, 3. And then Russian hackers can break into that computer and use it to break into other computers, which has just happened. So lest we be too easy in our criticism of these people who did not protect their fantastic technology, that is the ongoing problem is that the flaw in all of these great machines is that they are used by human beings. The technology gets better and better. The human beings are the same human beings. And some other human being will look at that method and say, here's the weak point, here's where it can be broken into. And that's what happened during World War II. That's what allowed the Axis access, entry into the most important secret of the Allies. That's what brought them to the brink of conquering the Middle East. And those problems of human beings making mistakes that allow others to get access to, to secrets that could have world shaking implications that continues into our day. The technology has changed vastly in the last 80 years. The human factor in the equation has not changed much at all.

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

Right, right. One thing that seems to come up a lot when people are talking about breaking secret codes and trying to decipher enemy messages is the extent to which even if the messages, the codes are able to be broken and the messages are able to be deciphered, you know, to what extent do those, that kind of secret messages actually have impact on the outcome of a particular conflict? In other words, there seems to be a lot of possible factors that could prevent political leaders or military leaders from seriously taking into consideration the information that's gleaned from the secret codes.

[Gershom Gorenberg]

Well, let me give you the fantastic example of this which demonstrates two examples which demonstrate the problems. One is, this was an amazing experience. I was in the British National Archives and there's a logbook of messages being sent between British and American code breakers for the first week of December 1941. And the British code breakers send a message to their counterparts in Washington saying the Japanese Embassy has received instructions to destroy its cipher machines, its code methods. Have you been seeing messages like this? That's something that an embassy does right before its country goes to war. That's like a red flag saying Japan is about to go to war with Britain, which it did on the same day that it went to war with the United States. It was obvious from the messages that there were Japanese messages, diplomatic messages that were being broken, that Japan was about to go to war. But those messages did not say where Japan was going to attack. So that was the first part of the problem. The second part of the problem is the American military did take heat in Washington. The military commanders took heed of this situation and sent out warnings to American bases in the Pacific, the Philippines, Hawaii, Panama Canal, saying that you should be on alert. The General and the Admiral in Hawaii did not believe that the Japanese would dare attack Hawaii and did not go on the full alert that they were supposed to. So you had two problems. One was the information was incomplete. And the second was it did not break the preconceptions of the people receiving the information. In other cases, people did believe the Intelligence information, but simply didn't have the resources to make use of it. Before the Germans attacked Crete in 1941, the British literally had the complete plan for the attack, but they simply didn't have enough forces available to prevent the German conquest of Crete. So the ideal situation is you have enough information to make sense of it, to separate it from all the noise around it and to see what the enemy's plans really are. The commanders are open minded enough to act on it and they have the military resources to make use of that information. When those conditions come together, intelligence can lead to incredible results. That's what happened at El Alamein where the British defeated Rommel's forces. That's what happened, by the way, in Llamain was the turning point of the war in the west against Germany and Italy. That is the turning point. Churchill called it the end of the beginning of the war. The equivalent battle in the Pacific was the Battle of Midway, which was a few months after Pearl Harbor. By that time America had broken the Japanese Naval Corps code. They knew that Japan was going to attack this tiny island in the middle of the Pacific to use as a taking off point to proceed further west, further east, against the United States. And an American fleet sailed to Midway and took the Japanese completely by surprise. So again, in that situation you had the information, you had commanders who were willing to believe it and you had the wherewithal to make use of the information. And from the Japanese defeat at Midway, the Japanese were in retreat for the rest of the war. When everything comes together, intelligence can make all the difference, but you need the other factors as well.

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

Right? And it also seemed that sometimes for historians or, or others after the fact, trying to interpret to what extent was a military outcome based on a particular, you know, a particular code that was broken. There seems to be some difficulties there. I'm thinking, for example, when you talk about Operation Mincemeat, where the British tried to fool the Germans in terms of where the Allied landing would be at the end, towards the end of World War II, it seems like there's still questions about to what extent did they really fool the Nazis but with their operation? And to what extent did the Nazis simply respond the way that they would have responded anyway without the whole operation? You know what I mean?

[Gershom Gorenberg]

History is not a scientific lab. There is no control group. You can't run the war twice, once with this information and once without it. You have no way of knowing what would have happened if one factor had changed. And the what ifs are always a little bit silly. Because if one factor had changed, what other factors would have changed? You can't follow out all of the consequences of a single small change in the story of the fight against the Nazis in the Middle East. One crucial factor appears to have been that a particular telegram, or actually radiogram that was supposed to tell somebody to change his code got lost on a desk in Washington for a week. And in that week, crucial messages were sent. What could. I mean, talk about the twitch of the butterfly's wings. What could be more accidental than that? And that seems to have had a huge effect on. On the outcome of the battles in the war. Can I tell you what would have happened if the message would been sent on time? Of course I can. If it had been sent on time, everything else would have changed. So what we can do as historians is to tell you what happened. We can't tell you what would have happened if.

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

Well, fair enough. Very, very, very, very wise words. Is there a particular lesson you take from the complex story in your book?

[Gershom Gorenberg]

Well, I take a few lessons. I think one of the lessons, first of all, as I said, the espionage story, the technological espionage story, shows how much the weak point is human beings. Another lesson is how things that we seeing, results that we think are obvious, were not obvious at all at the time and could have easily gone the other way. Going back to that one radiogram that was delayed for a week. What would have happened if it had been sent on time? There's so much chance and so many tiny decisions that are involved in what look to us like inevitable results. And then I'll say one more thing. All of the stories that I've told about what happened in this battle for the Middle east During World War II, there are previous versions of those stories. There are accounts that came out right after the war that didn't have any access to secret information. There are accounts that came out 30 years later when some documents were released. There were stories that were told that became. That were repeated, that became so solid that they were fact. And yet underneath that, there were more stories that would only be revealed when other information came out. There are secrets beneath secrets, beneath secrets. There are stories that will. The history of events that have already happened will keep changing as we reveal more of what actually happened. And inside of those forgotten stories are forgotten people who were incredible heroes. At one point in my research, there were very few interviews I could do for this research because it was 70 years after the event. But at one point in the research, I went to interview the Israeli poet Chaim Ghori. Who was then 91 years old, and in the summer of 1942, he'd been 19, and he had watched convoys of Australian soldiers going to El Alamein to fight. And because of their fighting there, Palestine was not conquered by the Nazis. And he said to me, even if how how could I thank them? I don't even know their names. And what he didn't know was besides those soldiers that he saw, there were other people who he didn't saw, whose existence he never knew of, who broke codes and revealed Nazi secrets. And he couldn't possibly think of thanking them. Those were the forgotten heroes. And so I dedicated my book to the memory of forgotten heroes.

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

That's a wonderful place to leave this fascinating story for now. Thank you so much, Gershom, for taking your time to share your thoughts with us today.

[Gershom Gorenberg]

Thank you very much.

[Schneider Zalman Neufeld]

That concludes our program. Thanks for listening and have a great day.