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

Jan 26, 2026

Gershom Gorenberg, journalist and author specializing in Middle East history, discusses his book about WWII espionage in North Africa. He traces Enigma and Bletchley Park breakthroughs. He recounts stolen codebooks, Axis plans for the region, Jewish intelligence contributions, and how chance, human error, and politics shaped wartime outcomes.

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INSIGHT

Turing's Role Was Teamwork And Engineering

Alan Turing designed machines to test many Enigma settings quickly, but he worked as part of a team and built on Polish work.
Success depended on predictable German phrase use and team contributions like Gordon Welchman's improvements.

ANECDOTE

Italian Espionage By Copying Keys

An Italian penetration squad copied embassy keys and photographed stolen documents over months, quietly stealing codebooks.
They exploited Vatican embassy moves to continue thefts even after war breakouts, yielding valuable prewar material.

INSIGHT

Nazi Plans Included Genocidal Contingency

German plans in 1942 envisioned Rommel seizing Middle Eastern oil and linking with a southern Russian advance to sever British control.
The SS prepared mobile genocide units to carry out mass murder of Jews across the region if conquest succeeded.

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As World War II raged in North Africa, General Erwin Rommel was guided by an uncanny sense of his enemies' plans and weaknesses. In the summer of 1942, he led his Axis army swiftly and terrifyingly toward 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. Brilliant 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 Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East (Public Affairs, 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 spanned the Middle East. Years in the making, this book is a feat of historical research and storytelling, and a rethinking of the popular narrative of the war. It portrays the conflict not as an inevitable clash of heroes and villains but a spiraling series of failures, accidents, and desperate triumphs that decided the fate of the Middle East and quite possibly the outcome of the war.

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.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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