ANNA FEHRBACH

Anna Fehrbach is an agent with MI6 and the CIA.

She is, or was, also an agent with the OSS and with the secret SD (Sicherheitsdienst) of Nazi Germany, though not the way they ever expected.

Born in the early 20s, she was a tall, beautiful girl of 17 living with her family in Austria in 1938, attending a Convent school for girls and proving quite intelligent and not a little troublesome for the nuns. She had enjoyed a very happy childhood being of mixed Austrian and Irish heritage and able to speak both German, English, and Irish quite well. She had lots of plans for her future but like most teenagers, they changed with the moods. Then the Nazis moved in to "free" Austria and her world, like all of her countrymen, changed forever.

She was first noticed by an officer of the SS who saw in her bright, defiant even while scared eyes a beautiful sharp young woman who could be of use to the Fatherland. Since that organization did not employ females, he passed her name to an acquaintance in the SD and this man, meeting Anna, saw tremendous potential. He also saw great animosity but that was quickly taken care of by rounding up her parents and sister and putting them under 'protective' care. The choice was a simple one for her - work for the Nazis or see her family hurt and likely killed. She agreed.

But as cunning as her exploiters were, they had not reckoned correctly with a woman of incredible courage and determination and an IQ of 173. She despised her condition and her family's captors and when her training as an operative was over, and much of her previous innocense gone as well, she contacted her employers' enemies, MI6, and made them an offer. She would, with their guidance, continue to work for the SD but would be a double agent actually working for British Intelligence.

As time went by, her contacts grew to include the OSS and her work increased to help the Americans as well as the British. The only part of the three major powers of the Allies that she did not work with, the Russians, had a different attitude towards her. One of her missions from the Nazis would be to kill Josef Stalin and while she would not succeed in that, she would be put into a most interesting and precarious situation. The Russians wanted her dead because she worked for the Nazis and the American and British Intelligence people in the know could not let on her real status lest her original employers order her death.

So went the amazing career of Anna Fehrbach who would know many lovers during and after the War and would end the lives of a few of those and many others.

The eight volumes of Fehrbach's time in the cloak and dagger world were related to the author after he had tracked down a still amazing woman of 80+ years, now known as the Countess von Widerstand, living in comfort near Javea, Spain along the Costa Blanca. Having heard of her many years before he had searched whenever time permitted until at least he had located her and, learning she still lived, eventually convinced her to speak with him. It is through a series of long talks that her tale came out.

There is no escaping the power of the words that the author Christopher Nicole employs and it holds firmly true in the stories he relates about Anna Fehrbach. Since he took the device of having interviewed her to get the facts for the books, they come across as if they were a fictionalized biography. Granted, a very action-packed and often bloody biography. When you close one of the books, you almost feel the woman truly had existed. That is good writing.

These are very fast reads. He does not spend a great deal of time describing locations and settings, which fits perfectly the idea that he was recording the events for later transcribing and while the tales are in the third person, they still feel like someone was speaking.

The affairs and the situations that the character lives are fantastic but that was the point and if the reader can just suspend credulity a tad, not a hard thing to do with Mr. Nicole's pen, they make for a great series.