The Traitor of Arnhem

November 1, 2024
Award-winning journalist Verkaik provides a chronicle of a little-known story that goes beyond that of the notorious spy Christiaan Lindeman (aka King Kong), "Satan Face," and the multitude of personalities associated with "Agent Josephine" in their betrayal of Allied Forces at Arnhem, a pivotal combined airborne and ground assault battle of 1944's Operation Market Garden. Through meticulous research, journalistic passion, and a touch of serendipity, Verkaik uncovers an 80-year-old cold case rife with disloyalties and tales of double and triple-crossing spies who often endangered all parties involved. Ultimately, a series of betrayals thwarted the American and British quest to seize the bridges at Arnhem and doomed the Allied dream of reaching Berlin before the Russians. The war would not end, as hoped, before Christmas. Verkaik's thorough research and skillful integration of numerous first-person accounts make this book a compelling read. However, his most significant achievement here lies in his unraveling of the intricate web of responsibility for the Allied failure, which allowed the weakened Germans to recover and prolong the conflict for several more months.

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Starred review from January 1, 2025
Unnerving findings about one of the great failed Allied operations of WWII. On Sept. 17, 1944, Operation Market Garden landed a massive Allied force by parachute and glider behind German lines in Holland, and a British division launched an offensive from Belgium to link up. Success would entail outflanking German defenses, crossing the Rhine, and ending the war in 1944. It failed--resistance was far greater than expected. Historians fault poor terrain, bad weather, and faulty intelligence, but British journalist Verkaik, author ofThe Traitor of Colditz, is not the first to claim that traitors betrayed the effort. One candidate was Christiaan Lindemans, a legendary Dutch resistance fighter. Frequently arrested, resistance fighters often emerged from their interrogation as double agents, and Verkaik provides evidence supporting ongoing suspicions that Lindemans was among them. Turning to Britain, Verkaik writes that 24 hours before the operation, Nazi commanders received a warning from "a shadowy source deep in the heart of the British state, known...as Agent Josephine." Although aware of "Josephine," British intelligence never discovered her, possibly because a traitor led the search. That was Anthony Blunt, one of a crew of British communists who kept the USSR informed of Allied operations. With victory guaranteed, Stalin was more interested in slowing the Allies' advance on Berlin than defeating Hitler. Market Garden's failure (as well as December's German Ardennes offensive) accomplished this, leaving the Red Army dominant in Eastern Europe and powerful communist parties in the west. Verkaik often overwhelms the reader with findings from archives, interviews, memoirs, letters, declassified MI5 and MI6 files, and postwar analyses that support, deny, or obfuscate the case for betrayal. He believes that Blunt was Josephine. His evidence is circumstantial, but there is plenty of it. A disturbing reevaluation of an iconic World War II battle, not definitely proven but well argued.

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Starred review from December 9, 2024
Historian Verkaik (The Traitor of Colditz) uncovers a startling new dimension to a well-known story of betrayal in this riveting account. Operation Market Garden, the September 1944 British-led invasion of the Netherlands by Allied paratroopers, was famously a failure—one usually chalked up to the revelation of the plan to the Nazis by Dutch partisan Christiaan Lindemans. While researching Lindemans, Verkaik stumbled upon allegations by his Nazi handler that Lindemans had been working for the Soviets. The Soviets, Verkaik theorizes, had sought to pass information about the invasion to the Nazis in order to halt the Allies’ western advance, giving the Soviets time to reach Berlin first. Discovering that the intelligence Lindemans gave to the Nazis wasn’t their earliest warning about the invasion, Verkaik turns his focus to MI5 and the Soviet spy ring within its ranks. He homes in on spy Anthony Blunt, whose reputation after the war Verkaik alleges was whitewashed as a noble communist merely helping an Allied nation, when in reality, according to Verkaik, Blunt betrayed Operation Market Garden to the Nazis at the Soviets’ behest, leading to thousands of British deaths. Verkaik offers fine-grained accountings of both Blunt’s and Lindemans’s actions that make his thesis add up—including Blunt’s ironic role as leader of the high-stakes hunt for a mole whom Verkaik posits was Blunt himself. It’s an explosive and paradigm-shifting account.