Caleb Marr is a Canadian spymaster.
When we first meet him he has just returned to his home in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada after five incredibly long years serving in England and the Continent during the Second World War and was thinking, prematurely as it turns out, that his life of excitement and danger was now behind him. A call from William Stephenson, the now famous spymaster known during those years by the codename of Intrepid, would bring that hope to an end; more service would be needed from him in the immediate future as the Western world makes the transition from hot combat against the Axis into the Cold War with those behind the Iron Curtain.
In the first recorded adventure, that summons from Intrepid to the agent he knew as "Jesuit" will deal with a problem in Poland but it will have its roots in events at the start of WWII and we will spend most of our time in those years. In the second adventure, the attention reverts to the Cold War genesis period.
Caleb Marr, Kalev to his parents who had come to Canada from Poland fleeing the persecution there many years before, is a Major in the Commonwealth's military but when we take that sojourn back to his first days in WWII, he holds the far lower enlisted rank of Corporal. We watch as his knowledge of Poland and his expertise in languages will result in his being pulled into the intelligence world from which he will not leave.
We will read early in the first story how "he was trained and twice deployed in Nazi occupied France by the Special Operations Executive. If you haven't heard of it, they are a bunch of very secret, highly trained cut-throats whom Churchill ordered to 'Set Europe Ablaze!' And they did. 'M', whom I have mentioned to a couple of you, was his Commanding Officer, Major General Colin Gubbins. Caleb carried out covert operations in the Nazis' backyard with remarkable skill, serving there for more than a total of eighteen months. In between these deployments he worked .. generating secret agent training doctrine that is still employed without revision in STS-103, throughout the American OSS, and in Jedburgh training systems. .. He speaks and reads Russian and a couple of other languages like a native, and he has firsthand experience in both covert and conventional combat."
And from Marr's own words to his father about his war-time activities, "I spent most of the war in Nazi-occupied France, working with a resistance circuit in Lyon, as an agent of a very secret organization whose head reported to Churchill alone. I lived and traded in lies daily, not only to deceive the enemy to think one thing while we killed him by another, but just to stay alive. We were all hunted. All the time. And it wasn't just the Germans. The Russians were just as bad. Another agent and I found evidence that they massacred thousands of Poles in a forest near Smolensk. I secretly carried it back to England and briefed the Prime Minister on what we found. They should occupy the same dark cages as the Nazis."