>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C. >> Marie Arana: Thank you very much. I know your program says Kevin
Sullivan who should have been here to introduce Ben who is
a good friend of Ben's, but Kevin is a reporter for
the Washington Post; and so, he was called off to
the hurricane in Texas in quite perilous conditions is
covering that devastating flood for the paper and for our benefit. So, my name is Marie Arana,
and I am the literary director of this festival. It's a wonderful festival. I've been doing this for 17 years. How about you? I mean are you having a good time? [ Applause ] How many of you are
here for the first time? Oh, welcome. Welcome. And may you come back. How many of you are here
for the last five years? Wonderful. And for the last 17? A few hands. Wonderful. Well, thank you very much
for supporting the festival, and there is a better
way to support it and that is through your donations. This is a free and public event and
we can only do it if you support it. So I hope you will
consider doing that. Ben will have a Q and A after
his talk, and it's such a thrill to be standing here
introducing Ben Macintyre. Congratulations for having the good
judgment to come to this session because you are in
for a very big treat. He's a marvelous storyteller
whose book after book after book have engaged many
readers beyond his native England. I am certainly an ardent fan. It's really a great
pleasure to welcome him here and to have him cross the Atlantic
to come and be with us today. So, now to the books. The title of Ben Macintyre's
most recent book "Rogue Heroes" tells us a great
deal about the people and the events and themes that interest
him the most. He recognizes and honors genuine
heroism on the infrequent occasions when it occurs, but he also delights in rogues especially
rogues who becomes spies. He has a soft spot for the
awe, the unconventional, the shameless, and yes, larcenists. All the better when the
scandal turns out to be a hero. Well, a hero of sorts. So it is that Adam Worth,
the hero of the Napoleon of Crime not merely engineers epic
thefts on an international scale, he steals Gainesboro's
great portrait of Georgiana the alluring duchess
of Devonshire and hides it away for a full two decades maintaining
her as his private pinup girl. And so it is that Kim Philby,
the notorious double agent, emerges in Macintyre's superb
A Spy Among Friends as amoral but irresistibly charming. Loved by his closest friends even
as he betrays them and his country. And so it is that Agent Zigzag, the
petty criminal Eddie Chapman becomes in World War 2, a double
agent whose service to England plays a crucial part in
the struggle against Nazi Germany, yet who remains a rogue
and a scoundrel right up to the rather glorious end. And finally, so it is,
that in Rogue Heroes, a small band of British officers
and men refuses to play by the rules of warfare forming the special air
service parachuting behind enemy lines, unheard of at the
time, and doing damage far out of proportion to their numbers. All of these stories are true like
the stories in his other books yet all are told by Macintyre
with flair and suspense. That is, his friend David Cordwell, the great novelist John
LeClaire surely admits and perhaps even envies. It is your turn now to fall
under Ben Macintyre's spell. Ben. [ Applause ] >> Ben Macintyre: Hello everybody. Thank you very much for that. Very lovely introduction. I didn't always quite write
about people who are either mad or dangerous or crooked or in
some way kind of off center, but it does seem to be a kind of --
it's a habit I can't break actually. Rogue Heroes. Special forces like your own
Delta Force and Navy Seals and the SAS have a particular
hold on our public imagination. Of the military, they attract
more imagination, more admiration, more speculation, and more
downright fantasy than any part of the military establishment. This is largely because
they are mysterious. They cultivate all of these
groups, cultivate an air of secrecy, and that is sort of part of
the way they sell themselves. So when I was asked three
years ago whether I was willing to write the authorized
book about the SAS, it took me about eight
seconds to say yes because what it meant was
access to their secret archive, which I can't even tell
you where it is in fact. But and to describe it as an archive
is rather dignified what is actually really just a set of enormous
cardboard boxes stuffed with paper. And not just paper. The archives contain letters,
diaries, memos, postcards, but also parachutes, guns, uniforms,
because the SAS is so secret that towards the end of
the war when they were sort of gathering everything together, they simply just hid
it away in these boxes. And as an archive, it's irresistible because the SAS itself doesn't
really know what it's in. They did in fact digitize
the entire archive for me. It was about a million and a
half pages, 1.5 million pages. And some poor soldier who had signed
up to strangle people in Iraq had to spend about a year
digitizing this and he ended up absolutely
hating me. I approached the task
with some trepidation because I wondered whether the SAS
would try to control what I wrote. Whether they would try to
take the less creditable parts of the story out. I was assured that they
wanted a warts and all book, and that's what they got. There are more warts in
this story than I expected, and I think a great deal
more than they expected. But to their credit, they
never tried to take them out. And of course, the SAS is a
vital part of all of our history because all special
forces units which are now of course a completely accepted
element of all modern warfare. The idea that you have
small highly-trained units that will operate covertly
behind the lines both to gather intelligence and to
hit high value strategic targets. That is now an absolutely
accepted part of military thinking. It wasn't always that
way and it began with a very unlikely
group of people. I had come to the SAS -- I
mean I think we all have a sort of image of special forces. Of highly trained, very
efficient, very fit people carrying out the sort of jobs that most
of us would never want to do. The reality is both much more
-- certainly historically, the reality is much more complex
and much more interesting than that. The original SAS was highly
eccentric; deeply diverse. It was peopled by oddballs. Soldiers who wouldn't fit
into a conventional army. The original SAS was in many ways
a kind of ragtag private army. Some of the early SAS
were clever and tough, but others were extremely sensitive
of no more than average strength and fitness and yet courageous
in other very unexpected ways. Many were brutally
hardened by the experience of behind the lines warfare and
became more so as the war advanced. Some never recovered from the
experience of this kind of warfare, and some were borderline psychotic. This didn't turn out to be as
I had expected it to be a kind of traditional regimental history. Instead it sort of turned into a
kind of study of human behavior. How ordinary men behave in
extraordinary conditions of warfare. And I discovered many
things about the SAS which I had never known
before including the fact that it was very nearly
disbanded at birth and would really only
have survived -- would not have survived without
the personal intervention of Winston Churchill himself. Now the SAS was dreamed up by a young British
officer called David Sterling. Now Sterling came up with the idea
of the SAS, the Special Air Service, while he was convalescing
from a failed parachute jump in the North African desert in 1941. If I just quickly tell you
how that accident happened, it'll give you a little bit of the
flavor of what Sterling was like. He was bored to death
in North Africa. He had signed up for the
Commando's but wasn't seeing nearly as much action as he wanted; and
so, he stole a set of parachutes from a dock in Suez,
borrowed a plane that was completely inappropriate
for what he wanted to do, and then he and a couple of
friends simply tied the rip cords of the parachutes to the
chair legs inside the plane, opened the door, and jumped out. The problem was, as I said, that the
plane was the wrong sort of plane. And Sterling's own parachute snagged
on the tailfin and he plummeted to Earth at roughly four
times the recommended speed and did his [inaudible]. But while lying in
hospital in Cairo, he came up with a most simple
but very singular idea. He worked out that because
at that point of the war -- I should probably give you a little
strategic idea of where we were. Obviously, America was not yet
in the war, but the 8th Army, the British 8th Army was
sort of encamped at Cairo in the eastern part
of the western desert. And the Italian and German
armies were encamped in the west, and it was kind of a
moment of stasis really. Nobody was moving. And the Germans and the Italians
controlled all the airfields along the northern strip; the single road that runs along the
coast of North Africa. So Sterling worked out that if he
could parachute into the desert, and as it were this vastly
desert, and as it were creep up behind the enemy, they
could attack the airfields, blow up as many planes as they
possibly could in the shortest space of time, and then effectively
run away back into the desert. It sounds like a simple
idea, and indeed it was. But in many ways, it was completely
revolutionary because many of the middle ranking officers at that point had a very static
idea of how war was fought. This came from the first world war. The idea was that two large
armies will meet in a large space and fight it out until
one of them wins. What Sterling was recommending
was completely different and very revolutionary. Amazingly, he got permission
to start recruiting, and he set about doing this
in a very particular way. He was looking for people
who were unconventional. He was looking for people
who didn't really stick by the rules and he got them. One of his earliest recruits
was a man called Patty Mane. He was a northern Irishman
with an explosive temper and a serious drink problem
and a capacity for raw and frequently unconstrained
violence. He probably destroyed more planes than anybody else during
the Second World War, any fighter pilot on either side. But he blew them up all
entirely on the ground. Another key recruit was
a man called Jock Lewes, who was an Oxford educated
intellectual really with sort of matinee looks, but he
was also a very clever man, and he invented a particular
kind of bomb which is still called a
Lewes bomb, which was a kind of rustic handheld time bomb. I particularly love this
painting by Rex Whistler because it shows Lewes training
at Sandown Racecourse in Britain, which is one of the big
race courses in Britain. You can actually see the horses
sort of coming up behind him, and he's holding a [inaudible] gun
and it looks exactly as if he's about to start mowing down the
runners and riders in the 350. Another key recruit was
a man called Reg Seekings who was a foul-mouthed one-eyed
boxer from Cambridge who had a sort of gift for killing really. He was able to do so
without remorse. He described himself as
a rough tough so and so. Most people thought he was a
complete maniac but he was the sort of person that you actually wanted
on your side in a war like this. His closest friend was a
man called Johnny Cooper. Cooper was actually 17. He was too young to join the SAS. He lied about his age to get in. And this is the typical
photograph of Cooper. There are lots of photographs
in the SAS archive and lots of photographs in the book. One of the things the
SAS was very good at was taking photographs
of themselves. It's almost as if they
knew that they were going to become extremely famous
after the war; and so, they might as well capitalize on it. But every photo -- I mean,
Cooper was an extraordinary man. He fought through every single
one of the worst campaigns that took place that the SAS
fought during the Second World War, and he has a broad grin on his
face in every single photograph. And Sterling himself,
you see him here again, is a most unlikely candidate to lead what would become a
famously fit fighting force. He was tall, stooped,
he had a bad back. He had conjunctivitis. He had desert sores. He was very unfit. He drank too much. He smoked all the time. And yet, he had one very
particular talent which was that he had a real gift
for identifying the sort of characters that he wanted. And in a way, it was a little like
a sort of dirty dozen operation. Sterling went around
picking out people that he thought would fit the bill. He said, "I didn't
want psychopaths." He got a few psychopaths, but he wanted people
who were unconventional. Who were able to think
laterally but who could also be when necessary, completely ruthless. He began training them
at Kibrit in Egypt. They were trained in unarmed combat in long-term desert
survival techniques. And in particular, in parachuting. Now Sterling believed that a very
good way to train for parachuting is to jump out of the back of a
speeding truck at 40 miles an hour. This is actually not a good
way to train for parachuting because you're going
horizontally and not vertically. But it is a very, very
good way to break your legs which quite a number of
trainees in fact did. This was very tough training, and
indeed two died while training for the first operation which
was called Operation Squatter, and it took place in November 1941. It involved 55 parachuters. And the idea, as I say,
was pretty, pretty simple. They would parachute into the
desert, they would then sneak up behind the sort of aligned
airfield, grab as many planes as they could and then escape. It was an unmitigated catastrophe. These parachuters jumped into the
teeth of what was the worst gale -- worst storm in the
area for 30 years. Most of them landed
miles off target. Many became completely disorientated
and lost in the desert at night. Some were actually scraped
to death on the desert floor because in the high winds they
couldn't unclip their parachutes, and a couple were so badly wounded
by the fall that they simply had to be abandoned and died
of thirst in the desert. Of the 55 parachuters that went in
on Operation Squatter, 23 came back. They straggled back to a
rendezvous in the desert with the long-ranged
desert group, the LRDG. These were the desert reconnaissance
intelligence unit whose task it was to drive across the 500
mile Libyan desert and spy on the troops moving
along the coastal road. They were brilliant
desert navigators. They'd worked out incredible
techniques for getting across the desert, and they were
the ones who took the survivors of the first SAS operation
back out again. Now instead of this leading
to the immediate disbanding of this operation, and Sterling
actually interestingly never really reported on quite what
a disaster it had been. I read his report on
Operation Squatter, and it's a miracle of economy. He just says it didn't
go terribly well. We're getting on with the next one. But as a result of it, he hit
on a very simple idea which was that if the LRDG, if
these truck-born and jeep-born troops could get
into the desert and take them out, then they can bring them
in in the first place, and then that would obviously
obviate the need to jump out of planes with parachutes
in the middle of the night. And quite why this
glaringly obvious solution to a quite simple problem had not
occurred to anyone before is one of the great mysteries
of the SAS story. But it was a real turning
point for the SAS because it made them highly
mobile, and they began an alliance. The SAS and the LRDG to
carry out a whole series of lighting raids on airfields. They blew up hundreds of them and
then escaped back into the desert. And one of the things that I
learned in writing this book is that it requires a particular cast
of mind and sometimes that cast of mind has to be particularly
brutal. I mentioned at the beginning Patty
Mayne, the Irish Rugby player. There was one handwritten
document I found in the archive that is actually very chilling, and
it's a description by Patty Mayne of an assault that was made
on an airfield called Tamit. And it goes roughly like this. They got onto the air field. They noticed they planted their
bombs and they were sneaking off without having been
picked up by the sentries. When they spot in the corner of the
airfield a hut with a light coming from under the door,
and they realized a sort of party was taking place inside. Italian and German officers
were having a ball inside. And this is -- I'll just read to you very briefly Mayne's
description of what happened next. I kicked open the door and
stood there with my Colt 45. The others at my side with a
tommy gun and another automatic. The Germans just stared at us. We were a peculiar
and frightening sight. Bearded and with unkempt hair. For what seemed like an age,
we just stood there and looked at each other in complete silence. Then I said, "Good evening," and
at that, a young German arose and moved slowly backwards. I shot him. I turned and fired at
another some six feet away. The room by now was in pandemonium. Then they barricaded the doors. They rolled in hand grenades
and barricaded the doors. At least 30 people
were killed that night in what even Sterling was shocked by what he called a callous
execution in cold blood. Patty Mayne was really, in some
ways, a kind of trained killer. But alongside people like Mayne
were others; no less brave, but of a very different
kind of martial bent. One of my favorites in this story
is a man called Fraser McLuskey, who called himself
the parachute padre, and he was the first
chaplain of the SAS. So he took part in all of the toughest assignments
that they were on. He never carried a gun, and
he exuded an astonishing sort of moral force that had a
great impact on the regiment. Life expectancy in the early
SAS was extremely short because having planted these
bombs, they then had to escape, and as sun would come
up, any surviving planes from the airfields would
then go hunting for the SAS. And this appalling game of cat and mouse would take
place in the desert. This is the last known photograph
of Jock Lewes who was attacked with his convoy on
Christmas Eve 1941. He was hit by a [inaudible] shell
which blew his leg off and he bled to death very, very swiftly. And he is buried somewhere
in the western desert. No one has ever found his remains. The men of L detachment. They call themselves
L detachment SAS. Sterling used to joke that
the L stood for learner. L detachment were very
mindful of their own drama. They looked, dressed, and to a
considerable extent, acted the part of swashbuckling desert warriors. And they took their cue really
from the first World War, from Lawrence of Arabia and his
kind of very romantic take on war. Everyone wore beards like this. The cover of Rogue Heroes, I always
thought it shows six soldiers just about to go into battle, and I've
always thought it looks exactly like a rock band preparing
to go on stage. They knew exactly the
impact they were having because theirs was not
just a military effect. It was a moral effect. They were under strict orders
never to boast about their exploits but then they never really needed
to because others boasted for them. And the exploits of the SAS quickly
became the stuff of myth and legend. They inflicted huge
damage on axis air power. They sacked German and Italian
morale and they tied up thousands of enemy soldiers defending
the air fields who would otherwise have been
deployed on the frontline. In his diary, Rommel wrote
that the SAS had inflicted considerable havoc. He said Sterling's men
had caused more damage to us than any other unit. Now there were few people
who understood the importance of military drama better
than Winston Churchill, and you see him here
with his son Randolph, a figure who's been almost
completely lost to history but who plays a very important
part in the SAS story. Now Randolph was a
most unlikely soldier. He was extremely overweight, and
in fact, Sterling always joked that it was very hard to sort
of push him through the hole in the aircraft to get
him to actually parachute. But Sterling, Randolph
Churchill was a journalist, and like many journalists, he
had a pretty vivid imagination. And Sterling worked out that if
he could get Randolph involved in the SAS project, there
was a high probability that Randolph would
tell his father and that that would ensure the future of the
SAS because he was in real trouble. And so, he invited
Randolph to take part in one of the least successful operations. Not just of the North African
campaign, but of the entire war, and it was called Operation Bigamy. And the plan was very simple. Sterling decided that he would
convert a staff car to look like a German vehicle,
and you see it here. They called it the blitz buggy. And the idea was very simple. They would drive into occupied
Benghazi which was seething with Italian and German troops. They would then go down to the dock. They would then inflate
some inflatable clacks and padlock the shipping
that was moored in the dock. Then they would blow
it up with [inaudible] and sink all the ships there. So they would blow up
the mouth of Benghazi and prevent any other shipping
and supplies from coming in. It was a very simple idea. And here you see them about
to set off in the blitz buggy. Now a key figure who
had to be brought along for this was a man
called Fitzroy Maclean. Now Fitzroy was brought along
because Fitzroy could speak Italian, and the guard posts around
Benghazi were manned by Italians. Well, Fitzroy Maclean could speak
Italian but it was only a sort of Italian because he had
learned his Italian studying Renaissance art. And so, the Italian
he spoke was a kind of weird 15th century
[inaudible] Italian. And so, as they approached
the first Italian checkpoint, Fitzroy addressed this
astonished Italian in what must have sounded
like sort of Dante. [Inaudible] will open
yonder barrier so I and my companions may
enter therewith, and I think the Italian
was so astonished by this that he just threw up the
barrier and they drove in. And they drove down to the dock, and
they got to the dock and discovered that both the inflatable
kayaks had been punctured so neither could be used. So they called off the
operation, and there were four of them on this operation. And as they were sort of
marching out of the harbor, they realized that instead
of four, they had become six because two Italian soldiers
obviously thinking that some kind of weird military parade was
taking place in the middle of the night had joined
the back of the line. And so, I think this was the
only time in the war when Allied and Axis soldiers marched
together in perfect harmony. As they left, Fitzroy Maclean
he was obviously completely high on adrenaline by this point,
called out the Italian guard and dressed them down again
in this bizarre Italian. Saying what you've done here
is incredibly dangerous. There could be British saboteurs all
over the place and you're all fired. As I say, the operation
was a total failure. It had no impact whatever on
the war except that as planned, Randolph did indeed write it up in a
series of wonderfully vivid letters that he sent to his father. And that ensured the
future of the SAS. Churchill was very taken
by this kind of warfare. He loved swashbucklers. And very soon after this, he
was at a dinner party in Cairo on his way to see Sterling. When he met Sterling, and Sterling
chanted him with the stories of what they were up to
and the very next day, this is again from the archive,
Churchill's secretary sent a note to Sterling saying, "Tell
me what the SAS is about." Sterling replied with
a kind of blueprint for what special forces could be,
and it was really a paragraph. It said vastly expand
the size of the SAS and put me David Sterling
in charge of it. But what you see in this document
is really is a kind of blueprint for what all special forces
thereafter really became. It's rather a brilliant,
brilliant idea, and it worked. It ensured that the
SAS future was safe. I just very quickly want
to tell you, I mean the SAS by this point had developed
techniques of desert survival. That meant they could hang
out in the desert for long, long periods dug into these sort
of fortified desert encampments. But as I say, life
expectancy was very short. I just want to tell
you one quick story about a man called Jack Sillito who represents a particular
kind of bravery I think. Sillito was with his unit
trying to mind the [inaudible] in October 1941, '42 now, when
he was separated from his unit and realized that he was
completely on his own in the desert. And so, he could either surrender
to the Germans or he could try to walk back 130 miles
across the desert to try and rejoin the unit in the desert. He chose the latter course. He had no water. He had a little receptacle though. On the second day he began
to drink his own urine which became steadily
more concentrated as he trudged through the desert. On the third day, his feet
blistered and cracked. On the fourth day,
his tongue swelled up. On the fifth day he began to
hallucinate, and on the sixth day, he saw in the distance a little
convoy of jeeps; they were SAS, and he took off his shirt and set
fire to it in an effort to try and attract their attention. They drove away across the horizon
and disappeared, and he trudged on. He covered 130 miles and finally
got to the desert encampment, and there are a series of
extraordinary photographs of Sillito the next day
with his feet bandaged. Sterling believed that
a week after this, Sillito had completely
recovered from the experience which I think was not true actually. I think Sillito never
fully recovered from it. The second battle of L Alamein. You see General Montgomery
here who was the commander of the 8th Army was a
turning point for the army. Montgomery had initially
been very skeptical about Sterling's operations. He didn't like what
Sterling was up to. He said the boy Sterling is mad. Quite, quite mad but in war there
is always a place for mad people. They began to lose a lot of men
the SAS towards the end of the war, and the reason for this, again, I found in the archives
was actually due to a spy. The SAS was infiltrated by
a man called Theodore Skerch who was an Italian. He'd been recruited by
Italian military intelligence. He was a very committed fascist. And one of the reasons why
the SAS lost so many men was because in fact a lot of
their positions were betrayed by Theodore Skerch who was captured
at the end of the war and tried, and was actually the only British
soldier to be tried and executed for treason in the
course of the war. With the end of the
war in the desert, the focus redeployed to Europe. The SAS was deeply involved in
retaking Italy and in the fight for occupied France,
but they were no longer under the command of David Sterling. Sterling was captured in the very
last operation, last SAS operation of the desert war and spent the
rest of the war trying and failing to escape from various
prisoners of war camp. The unit now came under
the command of Patty Mayne, and the war entered a very different
kind of phase because Hitler by this point passed something
called the Commando Order. Now the Commando Order
was a direct response to what the SAS had been doing and what it did was
it effectively called for all captured SAS personnel to be executed immediately
and without trial. Dozens, scores of SAS soldiers
were simply murdered by the SS. And in the final phase of the
war, the SAS was vastly expanded. It played a vital role in D Day,
parachuting behind the lines, and really trying to prevent
the [inaudible] divisions from the south moving north to
reinforce the Normandy bridge head. SAS troops were among the first to enter Bergen-Belsen
Concentration Camp. A scene of unbelievable
horror greeted them there. And there was an extraordinary
moment. You may remember I mentioned
Reg Seekings the one-eyed boxer at the beginning. Well, Reg Seekings decided to take
the law into his own hands and began to beat up an SS officer. He was stopped by his
commanding officer who said, "No, we must arrest these people. They must all be put on trial,"
and it's a very interesting moment because the SAS could simply
have executed every single one of those SS soldiers,
but instead they decided that they should be put on trial. And it's a little spark of humanity in what was otherwise an
unbelievably brutal war. So that photograph you just
saw there was the [inaudible] under arrest who was
then tried and executed. The SAS idea expanded
hugely after the war. It spread to France, to Belgium,
to Australia, to New Zealand, and most importantly
to this country. US Delta Forces was directly
modeled on the SAS idea, and the ideas that
Sterling came up with back in 1941 are still really
the principles on which special forces
operate today, and they are as important
today as they've ever been. Arguably more important
than they've ever been. Interestingly, the other day
the US defense secretary said of special forces operating in
Syria, we want Isis never to know who is coming through
the window next, and that's a very similar
description to the way that Sterling approached this war. To finish, many things came
to me while writing this, but one of the things,
perhaps above all, the war -- we have an idea of
the Second World War that is written often
in black and white. That there are heroes and villains. There are good people
and bad people. There was a right side to be
on and a wrong side to be on. I've become increasingly
convinced writing about this area that actually all is really
painted in shades of gray. Good people do bad things by
mistake or not by mistake. I mean Patty Mayne was not a
bad man but he was a killer. And there are heroes
on the other side too. I wrestled with hero because
I wasn't sure that I -- I mean some of these men
were incredibly heroic but war itself is not heroic. War itself is incredibly
nasty, and nobody really comes out of this story glorified. But yet it raises the question
that I hope all good history raises which is, what would you do? And there's one final story that
I will tell you about which is about a man called
Sutton who parachuted into occupied France right
at the end of the war. He was just a young man. He was a signaler, and he landed
with three other companions. The other three were all executed. They were all captured immediately and the other three
were killed immediately. But he survived, and he
told this incredible story after the war of personal survival. How he had been captured,
he'd escaped, he'd fought off troops
with a [inaudible] gun. You know, it was an amazing story. The problem with this story is
that I don't think it was true. The truth is that actually Sutton --
and this became clear at the trials after the war of the
people who had captured him. It is pretty clear
that Sutton cooperated. That he agreed to work
with the Germans to -- it's not quite clear
how much he did, but he may even have
given the locations of parachute landing drops. Now when I read this account, I was
horrified, and I thought, "Well, I should really condemn this man." But actually I couldn't bring
myself to do that because I'm not at all sure that I wouldn't
have done the same thing in that circumstance. If given the choice between
being shot on sight and buried in a shallow grave, I would not
also have tried to save my skin by feeding perhaps disinformation
but certainly try to hold onto time. So I don't know that I wouldn't
have done the same thing, but I do know that I would probably
not have volunteered to parachute into occupied France
in the first place. So I guess my question, and I'll end with this thought is,
what would you do? Thank you very much indeed. [ Applause ] Thank you. [ Applause ] Now we certainly have some
time for some questions. What time did we wind up? We haven't got very long I'm afraid. But please do ask any
questions about this or any other subject
that I can help with. Yes, sir? >> Thank you very much. I love all of your work. >> Ben Macintyre: Thank you. >> Two questions. One about Rogue Heroes. Just that you brought that so alive. Did they actually, and I'll
state those questions quickly, did they actually think that
they were going to be as accepted by the archaically minded
British military as they were? And you did a great job of that too. And on Operation Mincemeat, did
you have access to the same kind of archival materials for the book
was essentially [inaudible] war secret undertaking? >> Ben Macintyre: Thank you. The answer to the first question
is no, they did not expect to be accepted and Sterling
was in constant battle with the higher brass who he
referred to sort of the mid-levels of British military bureaucracy as
layer upon layer of fossilized shit. It was a phrase he used repeatedly
and sometimes in writing. So they knew exactly what
he was talking about. So no, they didn't expect to survive and it was rather amazing
that they did. And they did so really by a
certain amount of subterfuge too. I mean Sterling essentially
got away with it, and he wasn't the only private man
running a sort of semi-private army. On Operation Mincemeat which
is the deception operation that preceded the Sicilian
invasion which was a bizarre and rather wonderful story
of using a dead body to try to ferry effectively lies
to the German high command. Yes, I was incredibly lucky with
that one because M15 happened to release their archives. It was an M15 operation. M15 is the equivalent of the FBI. I mean they are the internal
security organization but they were running
the operation for reasons that are quite complicated. M16 never releases its files. M16 God bless them does
otherwise I'd be out of a job. So they do me proud. Thank you. Yes, sir? >> You said that Sterling spent the
rest of the war trying to escape. What happened to him after the war? >> Ben Macintyre: Well,
his after war story -- like a lot of these soldiers, he's actually rather a
sad one in lots of ways. I mean, many of these men
were people who thrived in war but really suffered in peace, and
Sterling never really found a point to his life after the war. It had been so exciting. He had been so young. He'd achieved so much that really
the SAS was disbanded after the war and then reformed again a
year later, but by that point, Sterling was long out of the army. And many of them lived very
sad after lives actually. They never quite adjusted
to peace time conditions. And Patty Mayne was another one. I mean, he died incredibly young. He took to the drink and actually
drove his car into a lamppost. I've never been sure whether he
did that intentionally or not. So Sterling's afterlife, which
is often true in fact of people who have seen vivid
action of this sort, was never quite the same again. Yes, ma'am? >> Sir, you mentioned the cardboard
boxes full of the archival materials that you worked with, and you
probably worked with tons and tons of other material afterwards. How much background research do
you feel yourself having to do, and when did you finally say
okay enough, I've got to work? >> Ben Macintyre: That's
a lovely question. The answer is I never
quite get to the moment where I think I've done enough. But the deadline, I can sort of
hear it crunching up behind me, and I realized I'd better stop. I got huge help from the SAS. They were wonderfully
cooperative about all of this. I thought they would be tricky. I through there might be
elements of this story that they would want to take out. The only thing they wanted to
take out was a graphic description of the death of one soldier and
they wanted to take that out because it was going
to upset the family, and I completely understood that. I got a lot of help from them. In fact, this book could
not have been written without the active
participation of the SAS. They really -- they made it happen. Whether they will allow me to
do a sequel I strongly doubt because after 1945, we end
up in even murkier territory. I probably only got time
for one more questions. Sir? >> Mr. Macintyre, how important do
you believe the special relationship between the United States and Great
Britain is for world security today? >> Ben Macintyre: Wow. That's a question I'll give you
a lot more than two minutes on. It's still absolutely vital. It is still the strongest and most
important of the relationships. Particularly in an era of when
signals intelligence which was so important during the Second World
War and is now obviously digital and to do with mobiles and so on, is
actually vital, and the relationship between GCHQ which is
our equivalent in Britain of the signals intelligence
[inaudible] absolutely vital. So I would argue it's probably never
been more special or more important. And that is true of
intelligence generally. I mean, we imagine, don't we,
somehow that war has moved on, but actually human intelligence and signals intelligence are
absolutely the core of all of our freedoms and have
been for a very long time. Ladies and gentlemen,
thank you very much indeed. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress. Visit us at Loc.gov.
