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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

Axis Ambitions In The Middle East

Mussolini aimed to recreate a Roman-style empire by conquering Egypt, Sudan, and the Middle East through rapid expansion from Libya and Ethiopia.
Hitler sent Rommel to rescue Italian failures, turning a regional front into a German plan to sweep across the Middle East.

INSIGHT

Why Enigma Seemed Unbreakable

Enigma used rotating wired rotors so repeated keystrokes produced different letters, creating astronomical keyspace.
Germans believed the machine was mathematically unbreakable because of the enormous number of permutations.

INSIGHT

Polish Breakthrough Enabled Bletchley Park

Polish mathematicians applied permutation theory to reconstruct Enigma wiring and reduce the problem to solvable parts.
Poland shared its breakthroughs with Britain, forming the basis for Bletchley Park's later work.

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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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