XPD combines three areas of Deighton’s expertise – World War Two history, spy fiction and the world of Hollywood movies.
It’s a long novel – 431 pages – and interesting and convoluted enough, but nowhere really gripping. Deighton takes the decision to explain what it’s ‘about’ in the first few pages, and shows us all the key meetings between the various protagonists, so there is little or no ‘mystery’ for the reader to unravel, no dastardly conspiracy for us to slowly uncover via hints and tips. Everything is out in the full light of day from the start, it’s simply a question of what’ll happen to the secret documents (see below) – which isn’t really enough to sustain interest over such a long text.
The plot
The head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service explains that at the end of World War Two Hitler ordered all the Nazi gold, art treasures and vast archives of documents to be hidden in salt mines in Thuringia. Almost immediately the advancing Americans found the mine and loaded all the loot into lorries to be sent to Frankfurt. Except some of the lorries never made it. Instead, a small group of American soldiers set up a bank in Switzerland soon after the war ended with a surprising amount of gold bars; one soldier – Colonel Pitman – stays on to run it, the others return to the States to pursue their post-war lives with a healthy amount of financial help and support.
The novel is set in 1979 and all the key players assume the incident is long forgotten so that now – 24 years later – alarm bells go off when a small-time American film producer places adverts in the trade mags saying he’s producing a movie about a group of Americans who steal Nazi gold, and that he’s willing to pay anyone who can send him documents shedding light on this interesting historical episode.
The unsecret secret
Why alarm bells? Again, there is no need for the reader to guess, because Deighton has the head of MI6 – Sir Sydney Ryden – tell a meeting of other security chiefs (and us) that it’s not the gold – it’s the documentation which was included in the stolen loot which matters, for it includes the so-called ‘Hitler Minutes‘, which are the detailed proposals Churchill sent direct to Hitler for a peace in May 1940.
These list the amazing concessions Britain was prepared to make to secure peace with the Nazis and include: creating a joint Anglo-German administration of Ireland, giving the German navy bases at Cork and Belfast as well as all Britain’s other bases from Gibraltar to Hong Kong, restoring to Germany all her pre-Great War colonies in Africa, persuading the French to co-operate, allowing the Nazi fleet free run of the North Sea and so on: almost complete capitulation (chapter 16). Further, SIS agent Boyd Stuart, who is assigned to the case, digs around in the archives and discovers that all the records indicate that Churchill flew to meet Hitler in person in June 1940 (chapter 35) – a stunning revelation.
The premise of the novel is that, if this information was made public, it would ruin Churchill’s reputation (and do big domestic damage to the Conservative party) but also ruin Britain’s reputation abroad, from black Africa (where the British Prime Minister is struggling to conduct tricky negotiations over Rhodesia) to the USA, which would rewrite its opinion of its brave ally.
So what’s at stake in the novel is never a mystery. We know it all. And, as we all know that these ‘secrets’ never came into the public domain back in 1979, there is no real tension about their revelation. Instead, the novel focuses on a small number of interested groups circling around the missing documents, and what ‘interest’ the novel possesses simply comes from wondering which of these various groups will achieve their ends, and which of the 20 or so named characters will be bumped off in the process.
The key motor of the narrative is a small group of Germans, operating on behalf of some ‘Trust’. They put into practice ‘Operation Siegfried’, a sting with two strands: they pull an elaborate international con trick to swindle the Swiss bank the Americans set up out of almost all its funds, thus placing them in a weak position; then they concoct this story about a film being produced about the incident and the adverts put in American papers by a ‘film producer’ inviting people to come forward who have any relevant documents – tempting the Americans to sell the (to them, largely worthless) papers in order to make good their losses.
But the Americans, in the shape of Chuck Stein, prove more reluctant than the Germans expected. And what are the Germans’ motivations, anyway? A mad idea to restore the Third Reich? Do surviving Nazis need the money? In fact, Deighton shows us a meeting of the Trust where the leaders say they actually want to destroy the documents in order to protect the successful, stable Democratic West Germany; no-one in their right mind wants to go back to the Nazi era (chapter 23). So their motives are surprisingly innocent. Why, then, go about it in such a cloak-and-dagger manner?
But there is also a suspicion that one or more of the leaders of this ‘Trust’ may be Soviet agents, using the Trust’s resources to get hold of the docs, which will immediately be smuggled to the East and publicised with the devastating repercussions for Britain outlined above…
Cast
MI6
- Boyd Stuart is the nearest thing to a ‘hero’, a 38-year-old SIS field operative, he is married to the head of SIS’s daughter – a bad decision for all concerned, since she’s left him and wants a divorce. He is tasked with flying to LA and finding out more about this ‘film producer’, Max Breslow. Here he dines with the producer and the lead American character Charles ‘Chuck’ Stein and watches fascinated while Chuck produces a sample of the documents – detailed medical records of the Führer showing just how much medication he was on by the end of the war. But behind this affability is violence: an assistant sent out from the Washington embassy is killed in an engineered car crash. Back in London he meets some computer hackers who’ve penetrated a German bank and stumbled across details of the Nazi loot, and who are brutally murdered and dismembered. Boyd begins to wonder whether his own side are bumping off witnesses and asks to be removed from the operation. Permission refused…
- Sir Sydney Ryden, the aloof, standoffish head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), deliberately vague and non-committal in his briefings to Boyd, who often sets off rather puzzled as to his instructions. In chapter 24 we see him having his regular lunch with the head of German intelligence in Britain, where he gives a bit much away about the two hackers. Later we learn this German is a double agent working for the KGB, who tipped off his bosses, who instructed Kleiber (see below) to murder them. Only right at the very end do we discover that Ryden himself played a key role in the Hitler-Churchill negotiations…
The American soldiers
- Chuck Stein, enormous fat Yank living in Los Angeles who played a key role in guiding the little platoon which stole the gold and documents, given, like all the war veterans, to reliving entire scenes from those chaotic days in May 1945. He is probably the second male lead, travelling to Geneva to hear from Colonel Pitman about trouble at the bank, and then returning with a faked passport to take the Colonel to safety. Alas, as Colonel Pitman is driving them to the airport Pitman has a fatal heart attack and their speeding Jaguar crashes, killing Pitman, and giving Chuck bad concussion. Despite which he hitches a lift to the airport and makes it onto a flight back to LA, only to be abducted at the airport by Parker, the Russian agent, and held hostage while they extract the whereabouts of the Hitler Minutes from him…
- Billy Stein, Chuck’s all-American Californian son, a dim playboy who he sends on a mission to London to meet the two computer hackers who’d left a message for Chuck that his name is on the list of people involved with the loot which they hacked from a big German bank. But when Billy arrives the hackers are dead and dismembered, and Boyd Stuart barges into his hotel room with a gun and holds him incommunicado in a ‘safe house’ in north London, hoping to find out where the documents are, or bringing pressure to bear on his father to reveal their whereabouts.
- Colonel Pitman, the most senior of the gold stealing US soldiers, who now lives in a fine mansion in Geneva and runs the Swiss bank the robbers set up with their swag. He calls Chuck Stein to visit him to explain how thoroughly they’ve been stung in a complex international scam: almost all the bank’s credit was tied up in a pharmaceuticals deal with Yugoslavia which went badly wrong, the intermediary disappeared, the consignment was empty, they’re left with worthless letters of credit. The Brits and CIA leak the information that the Minutes are at Pitman’s house which leads (Russian-spy-working-for-the-Germans) Willi Kleiber to organise a military assault on the Geneva mansion. The raid never goes ahead but it would have found the house empty, anyway, as Chuck Stein, on a second visit, realising things are hotting up, arrives a few hours before the planned attack, persuades the Colonel to meet him at a safe tea rooms in town, where he has the minutes, a stash of money and fake passports. Pitman is driving them both to the airport, at top speed, when he has a fatal heart attack and is killed in the resulting high-speed crash.
The Germans
- Willi Kleiber, ex-Nazi whose been called in by the ‘Trust’ to flush out the documents. The Trust itself (we see a meeting of the old ex-Nazis in chapter 23) and Max Breslow in particular (see below) are unhappy with Kleiber’s methods, which are violent. When an American producer, Lustig, seemed to find out about the plan, his body turned up in a car boot; when an assistant from the British embassy in Washington is sent out to LA to help Boyd Scott, his car goes up in a fireball; when the Trust learns that two English hackers have penetrated the account with details of the Nazi loot, money and contacts, the two hackers turn up very dead with their heads and hands chopped off. All this is Kleiber’s work. But Kleiber is in fact a Soviet agent, run by Ed Parker (see below). The Brits and CIA leak the information that the Hitler Minutes are at Colonel Pitman’s house in Geneva which leads Willi to organise a military assault on the mansion, planning to hold Pitman hostage till he hands over the Minutes, revelling in assembling a team of heavies and thugs with machine guns to carry out the assault (it’s just like the good old days). However, in the early evening of the planned attack, Kleiber is inveigled into meeting a rich client and slipped a mickey finn by people who turn out to be CIA agents, who have been taping his meetings with Parker and therefore know he is a Russian spy. He wakes up in a safe house in Carolina to discover the CIA know everything about him and Parker, and have enough evidence to send him to prison for 100 years; therefore, would he like to become a double agent?
- Max Breslow, ex-Nazi and now small-time Hollywood producer, more at home with TV movies, but finds himself called upon by the Brotherhood of ex-Nazis to pretend to be staging a movie based closely on the actual events of the gold heist, in order to flush any Yanks with information or documents out of the woodwork. Against his better judgement he is thrown into partnership with the brutal Willi Kleiber, climaxing in the set-up in Geneva where he is shown the small army Kleiber has assembled, pops out for lunch, and returns to find them all being rounded up by the Swiss police who have been tipped off about them (by the Brits or the Yanks). He evades arrest and flies back to Los Angeles only to find himself, in a bizarre scene, pursued through the sets of Hitler’s Reichs Chancellory which have been created for the film, by a concussed and crazed Chuck Stein with an antique WWII pistol.
- Franz Wever, ex-Nazi, captured by the English and a POW in East Anglia he never went back but settled and became an impoverished farmer. Boyd Stuart goes to interview him and Wever’s memories of being called in Hitler’s presence and being given the instructions about taking the gold to the salt mine are probably the most vivid part of the novel (chapter 13). As Stuart’s car trundles down the track from his farm, the farm abruptly explodes. Stuart goes back to find Wever dead, and a wall safe exposed from which he extracts a small sample of the Nazi documents. Stuart realises that, had he left even five minutes later, he also would have been killed. Who is trying to kill him?
The Russians
- Yuriy Grechko, top KGB man in America.
- Edward Parker, a Russian sleeper, based in America for 12 years, outwardly a respectable businessman, in fact Russia’s leading spymaster and Kleiber, the ex-Nazi killer, is one of his agents.
- General Stanislav Shumuk, very senior in the KGB. Arranges to meet Boyd on neutral territory in Denmark and reveals all about Grechko, Parker and Kleiber to him, on condition he murders Kleiber for him. Which Boyd agrees to do.
The CIA
Chapter 30 introduces us to various officials in the CIA, with some Frederick Forsyth-esque explanations of the duties and powers of the various sections and departments etc. The point is that they’ve detected that Parker is a senior KGB agent and want to entrap Kleiber. They’re not that interested in the gold or the documents and so make a gentleman’s agreement with Sir Ryden that both intelligence services will carry out their respective projects without stepping on each others’ toes.
- Melvin Kalkhoven, tall, thin, age 35 (p.271) is the main figure, who bugs the safe house where Parker and Kleiber meet then leads the team which drugs and abducts Kleiber on the eve of the latter’s planned assault on Colonel Pitman’s Geneva mansion, and flies him back to the States where he is made an offer he can’t refuse ie to become a double agent.
Thoughts
The fundamental problem is I didn’t much care: I didn’t care whether this supposedly earth-shattering secret was revealed, and therefore didn’t care which of the competing groups (MI6, Germans, Russians, Americans) got their hands on it.
The most compelling sections were the reminiscences of the war by the various veterans, Wever’s encounter with Hitler being the standout, but also the various battlefield memories of Stein, Pitman and others of their comrades, flashbacks to the intense situation in the war’s dying days which are used to explain how the robbers came together and carried out the heist.
As for the plot, it just got more and more byzantine and around page 350 I wondered if it was deliberately meant to be turning into a kind of Ealing comedy, deliberately comic in its top-heaviness. But in the final 30 pages there are some last-minute plot twists, further revelations about the Hitler-Churchill meetings, and it ends on an unpleasantly cynical note which quashes any comic feelings.
Quite apart from the lack of ‘grip’ or ‘thrill’, I found an unevenness of tone a problem: not with the prose which is solid and serviceable enough, though I did notice repetition of some phrases as if it hadn’t been completely proof-read. I mean the ‘moral tone’. Some scenes are played for macabre laughs, some are deadpan, some contain blank factual content about Nazi bureaucracy, like an encyclopedia fascistica, and then some parts or cruel and cynical, like the ending. This unevenness of tone is there in the early Ipcress novels but concealed, or is part of, the cool, humorous detached style of those early books. In Deighton’s later, less cool and elliptical, more factual novels, it comes over as simply a moral vacillation, an attitude that’s neither full-blown cynical, nor warm and humane, but an uneven gallimaufry of both, with other fragmented attitudes in between.
Details
It’s a cliché of the thriller genre that the protagonist is made to feel old, tired and jaded by his experiences:
- Suddenly he felt tired and rather old. (p.314)
- ‘I sometimes think I’m getting too old for this sort of work. Do you ever have that feeling?’ ‘Almost every day,’ said Boyd Stuart. (p.367)
XPD
XPD stands for Expedient Demise i.e. murder by the security services. Boyd grumbles about the SIS and worries whether his own side might be setting him up. But at the very end of the novel, having ascertained the full story from Kleiber, certain that the Hitler Minutes are safe with SIS, and at the last minute demanding the only photographic evidence of the Hitler-Churchill meeting which it turns out Kleiber had all along, Boyd then prepares to inject Kleiber with poison to eliminate him.
Having seen him flirting with his girlfriend and arguing with his ex-wife, Deighton has gone out of his way to make Boyd an attractive and very human protagonist. It is a deliberate slap in the face, then, to learn right at the end that he is willing to murder under orders.
Computer hacking
Deighton was an early understander of the power of computers, after all the Billion Dollar Brain at the centre of that novel is a super-computer, programmed to carry out a massive war plan and that was 50 years ago, in 1966.
This novel features the first reference I know to computer hackers. In chapter 23 two young men in London hack into a big German bank where they stumble across the details of the Nazi gold/Operation Siegfried and, as Chuck Stein’s name is prominent, they contact him in distant Los Angeles. As Chuck is out they leave a message on his answerphone, which the SIS themselves are tapping, and so which leads Boyd to the hackers’ shabby flat near King’s Cross. They explain that they call themselves COMPIR, computer pirates, and do it for fun. It is their bad luck that the head of SIS refers to them in his conversation with the London head of West Germany’s spy agency, who is a double agent, passes it onto the KGB, who pass it on to Willi Kleiber, who proceeds to murder them gruesomely.
The hackers hacked.
Books & Boots 