The thrilling true story of Agent A12, the first enemy of the Nazis.
CRACKING THE NAZI CODE
The Untold Story of Agent A12 and the Solving of the Holocaust Code
by Jason Bell
Pegasus Books, May 2024
(via Vertical Ink)
The thrilling true story of Agent A12, the first enemy of the Nazis In public life, Dr. Winthrop Picard Bell was a Harvard philosophy professor and wealthy businessman. As MI6 Secret Agent A12, he evaded gunfire and shook pursuers to break open the emerging Nazi conspiracy in electrifying 1919 Berlin. His reports, the first warning of the Nazi plot for WWII, went directly to the man known as C, the mysterious founder of MI6, and to prime ministers. But a powerful fascist politician quietly worked to suppress his alerts. Nevertheless, his intelligence sabotaged the Nazis in ways only now revealed. Bell became a spy once again in the face of WWII. In 1939, he was the first to crack Hitler’s deadliest secret code: the Holocaust. At that time the Führer was a popular politician who said he wanted peace. Could anyone believe Bell’s shocking warning? Fighting an epic intelligence war from Ukraine, Russia, and Poland to France, Germany, Canada and Washington, D.C., A12 was the real-life 007, waging a single-handed fight against madmen bent on destroying the world. Without Bell’s astounding courage, the Nazis might just have won the war.
CRACKING THE NAZI CODE, informed by recently declassified documents, is the first book to illuminate the astounding exploits of Winthrop Bell, Agent A12.
Jason Bell, Ph.D. is a professor of philosophy at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. He has served as Fulbright Professor in Germany (at Göttingen, Winthrop Bell’s alma mater), and has taught at universities in Belgium, the United States, and Canada. He was the first scholar granted exclusive access to Winthrop Pickard Bell’s classified espionage papers.
Joni Ackerman’s decision to raise children came with a steep cost. Twenty-five years ago, she was a pioneering filmmaker, one of the few women to break into the all-male club of Hollywood feature film directors. But she and her husband Paul had always wanted a family, and his ascending career at a premier television network provided a safety net. They have recently transplanted to Brooklyn, so that Paul can launch a major East Coast production studio, when a scandal rocks the film industry and forces Joni to revisit a secret from long ago involving a powerful man who abused women, including the friend of her youth, Val.
Fifteen year old Natalie has had a horror of blood and meat since the day her bother, Flynn now 17, raped her at age 9. Yet sheand her family (mother, Viv, former trophy wife, now hapless housewife; father, Ray, former accountant, now handyman; andgrandmother, Eleanor) are trapped on an enormous factory farm in a world where climate change has left plant cropsdevastatingly rare, and the Corporation ensures meat is virtually all there is to eat. With grains grown exclusively for raisingcattle, pigs and chicken for slaughter, and greens a black-market luxury, Natalie is emaciated, bitter and angry. She is desperateto escape, but electric fences and the draconian punishments of the Corporation stand in her way.