Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.These are boom times for spies — at least the fictional kind. Black Doves, The Day of the Jackal and Slow Horses are all runaway hits on TV while cold war spymaster George Smiley made a recent return in Karla’s Choice, a terrific new thriller written by John le Carré’s son Nick Harkaway.Far from jumping on the bandwagon, podcast series The Spy Who has proved ahead of the curve, already being nine seasons deep. Hosted by actors Indira Varma and Raza Jaffrey, it tells the stories of history’s most significant spies, from Klaus Fuchs, who sold American secrets to the Soviets, and Willie Carlin, MI5’s top spy inside Sinn Féin, to the poisoned MI6 informant Sergei Skripal.Now there is a seasonal special, hosted solo by Jaffrey, telling the story of James Bond creator Ian Fleming, a wartime mission in Norway and the Trafalgar Square Christmas tree. It opens in 1940 with Norway’s King Haakon VII, on the run from the Nazis, hiding out in a cabin in a forest in the country’s frozen north and being persuaded to flee the country on a navy cruiser bound for Scotland. Fast-forward two and a half years to the North Sea where a group of sailors and spies are heading to Nazi-occupied Norway on a reconnaissance mission. Their plan is to sabotage a pyrite mine that is being used to make German ammunition.All this is told via a surprisingly fluid combination of narration and dramatised reconstructions, the latter giving voice to the story’s major players. In normal circumstances I tend to recoil from dramatised segments, with their often overzealous acting, but in The Spy Who it is the hosts who do the voices. The result is a show that makes you feel as if you’re being read a particularly action-packed bedtime story, albeit one with immersive sound design — headphones are a must for this series — and an elegantly understated score.So what do those furtive excursions to Norway have to do with Fleming and a Christmas tree? Londoners may already know that the Trafalgar Square tree, among the biggest in the city, is annually gifted by Norwegians as a thank you for Britain’s support during the war. What they may not know is that the first of those trees had been cut down by agents during their mission to thwart Nazi ammunition production. They had in fact brought back two pine trees from the forests outside Oslo, one of which was given to the homesick King Haakon, then living in exile near Windsor. It was Fleming — at the time a Naval Intelligence officer and who took the agents out on the town upon their return — who suggested the other one go up in Trafalgar Square. And lo, a Christmas tradition was born.On Wondery from December 19, wondery.com
