Helen Fry Audiobooks

MI9 and the secret war: Britain's escape lines, spy networks and hidden listeners

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.4/5 average

218 listener ratings

Who is Helen Fry?

Very little of Britain’s secret war has escaped the attention of Dr Helen Fry. Born in 1967, she is an English historian, biographer and broadcaster who has built a career on the wartime intelligence world, and she has written or edited a great many books on it, several of which opened up files that had been quietly ignored for decades.

Two strands run through the work. One is espionage proper: the listening operation at Trent Park, where captured German generals were bugged over brandy, the interrogators of the London Cage, and the women whose intelligence careers had been written out of the official accounts.

The other is personal in origin. Fry has documented the ten thousand German and Austrian Jewish refugees who fought for Britain against the country that had expelled them, a subject she returned to repeatedly and which gives even her most technical books a strong moral undertow. She appears regularly on television documentaries as a result.

Helen Fry in audiobooks

MI9 is the Fry title we would send you to first: thirteen hours on the branch of British intelligence devoted to escape and evasion, the department that got downed airmen and escaped prisoners out of occupied Europe along secret lines run largely by civilians who had everything to lose.

Helen Lloyd reads it, and reads it well, keeping the many code names, safe houses and operations distinct in a story with a very large cast. It has drawn a solid body of listener ratings and holds them steadily.

It is a good gateway into her wider work, and into a corner of the Second World War that spy fiction has never quite matched for nerve. Everything of hers we carry is collected below.