Former British intelligence officer Annan offers an insider's view of the military espionage that helped the Allies win the war against Hitler. When working on the Joint Intelligence Staff at Whitehall from 1941 to 1945, Annan's job was to sift a torrent of documents, reports and intercepted messages, to monitor German troop movements and to predict Hitler's next move. Annan provides intimate details on preparation for D-Day, the Nazi invasion of Greece, the Allied bombing campaign and Stalin's disregard of confidential British warnings of an impending German invasion. At war's end, the author spent 18 months in Berlin on the governing British Control Commission. He vividly describes power struggles among the Allied forces occupying Germany, his work in guiding post-Nazi Germany toward multiparty democracy, his friendship with Konrad Adenauer and the Soviet Union's abortive campaign to amalgamate its puppet, the German Communist Party, with Germany's Social Democrats, a plot that, the Allies feared, might have led to a German-Soviet alliance.
"Changing Enemies is one of the last accounts we shall have by a witness to some of the high-level decision making during the war and its immediate aftermath. . . . Lord Annan's book valuably points to the contribution to German democracy that was distinctively British."
The New York Times