Master of Deception

Reviews / Votes

A study of the adventurer's wartime capers ... filled with details you couldn't invent. 4/5 stars. * The Daily Telegraph * [Ogden] has researched his subject assiduously. A good part of the book consists of official documents, memoranda and reports written by Fleming himself. These will be of great interest and value to other researchers and historians ... This is a fascinating book. * Literary Review * A punctilious and notably well-researched account of Fleming's military career. * New Criterion * This book has some fascinating parts ... A good read. * Sorted Magazine * This is not a conventional biography, and a bit like Peter Fleming's extraordinarily fertile mind, it wends its way through an oblique and complex subject in a fascinating way ... We get real insights into the problems and challenges; this is an historian's book not a journalist's. * The Guards Magazine * Peter Fleming has been best remembered as an adventurous travel writer and brother of author Ian Fleming, making him an uncle of James Bond. In this readable account we are introduced properly to Peter Fleming, the wartime intelligence officer and master of the arts of deception against the Japanese Army in South East Asia. Alan Ogden's well researched biography reveals a little understood period in the life of an exceptional human being. * Professor Sir David Omand, former UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator * Alan Ogden's masterly study of Peter Fleming, a man as brilliant as a Second World War intelligence officer (and brother of the better-known Ian) as a Times journalist, is a book about military intelligence at its best during the Second World War.
Fleming's plans for 'stay behind' guerrilla units in Sussex and Kent (to fight the Wehrmacht on British soil, had the Nazis invaded Britain), his courageous (and highly explosive) acts of sabotage against the advancing German forces in Greece, as well as the intricate and intellectually refined strategies of deception and future 'Imperial Intelligence' that he developed to help win the war in the Far East, make this crisp study of the breadth and the depth of Fleming's skills a gripping introduction to the field. * Professor Anthony Glees, Director, Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies, The University of Buckingham * [T]his readable volume is very useful in bringing out the role of deception in South East Asia and, for the first time, the important part Fleming played in it. * Journal of Modern History *