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Author | Kenneth Martin Follett |
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Language | English |
Genre | Thriller Historical Fiction Spy fiction War story |
Set in | United Kingdom |
Publisher | Macdonald & Jane's |
Publication date | May 1978 |
Publication place | United Kingdom |
Pages | 339 pages |
ISBN | 978-0060748159 |
Eye of the Needle is a spy thriller novel written by Welsh author Ken Follett. [1] It was originally published in 1978 by the Penguin Group under the title Storm Island. This novel was Follett's first successful, best-selling effort as a novelist, and it earned him the 1979 Edgar Award for Best Novel from the Mystery Writers of America. [2] The revised title is an allusion to the "eye of a needle" aphorism.
The book was made into a motion picture of the same title in 1981, starring Donald Sutherland, with a screenplay adapted by Stanley Mann and directed by Richard Marquand.
In 1940, Henry Faber, a German spy nicknamed 'die Nadel' ('The Needle') due to his trademark weapon being a stiletto, is working at a London railway depot, collecting information on Allied troop movements. Faber is halfway through radioing this information to Berlin when his widowed landlady stumbles into his room hoping for intimacy. Faber fears that Mrs. Garden will eventually realise that he was using a transmitter and that he is a spy, so he kills her with his stiletto, then resumes his transmission.
David, a trainee RAF pilot, and his bride Lucy are on their honeymoon when they're involved in a car crash. David loses the use of both his legs. Unable to fly during the Battle of Britain, David grows embittered and he and Lucy retire to the isolated (fictitious) Storm Island off the east coast of Scotland. Lucy later gives birth to their son Jonathan ('Joe'), conceived just before the wedding, but their subsequent relationship remains celibate.
Four years later, MI5 has executed or recruited all German spies in Britain except Faber. A history professor formerly acquainted with Faber, Godliman, and a widowed ex-policeman, Bloggs, are employed by MI5 to catch him. They start with the interrupted broadcast and his codename Die Nadel. They connect the landlady's murder to Faber by him having used his 'needle' during the transmission. They then interview Faber's fellow tenants from 1940. One identifies Faber from a photo of him as a young army officer.
Faber is ordered by Berlin to investigate the First United States Army Group (FUSAG) military base. He takes photos and discovers it is a dummy and has merely been constructed to look real from the air. Several soldiers try to arrest him but he kills them with his stiletto. Realising that FUSAG being fake implies that the D-Day landings will be in Normandy rather than around Calais, Faber heads for Aberdeen, Scotland, where a U-boat will take him and his intelligence back to Germany.
Godliman and Bloggs realise what Faber is trying to achieve and chase him across Northern England and Scotland. Faber escapes many times but his repeated killings (intended to prevent people from recognizing his appearance) allow MI5 to track him to Aberdeen. Both Hitler and Churchill are informed that Faber has the critical information. German Field Marshalls Rommel and Von Rundstedt, both already convinced that Normandy is indeed the target, lobby Hitler for several reserve panzer divisions, but Hitler delays making a decision until he receives Faber's intelligence.
In Aberdeen, Faber steals a small trawler and sets out to meet the U-boat. Caught by a fierce storm, he is shipwrecked on Storm Island, collapsing near the isolated house where David, Lucy and Joe live. Lucy nurses him back to health. Stuck in a loveless marriage to the crippled David, she begins a physical relationship with Faber. David soon discovers both Lucy's infidelity and Faber's FUSAG photos. David confronts Faber, but after a struggle Faber kills David by rolling him off a cliff, and tells Lucy it was another accident. However, she discovers her husband's body and realises the truth.
Faber realises he may be caught before leaving the island and so tries to radio the information about FUSAG directly to Germany. Lucy stops him by short-circuiting the electricity in the cottage, injuring herself in the process. By the cold logic which has guided his actions throughout his career, Faber should kill Lucy, but he finds himself unable to do so, being deeply in love with her to the detriment of his mission and of simple self-preservation. Unable to send a radio message, Faber attempts to descend the cliff and swim to the waiting U-boat. Lucy throws a rock down at him, striking him and causing him to lose his balance and fall to his death. An RAF patrol plane then appears and drives the U-boat away. A fictitious radio message is sent with Faber's call code, convincing the Germans that the planned invasion is still targeting Calais and causing Hitler to deny Rommel and Rundstedt the reserve panzer divisions. Bloggs comforts the widowed Lucy, with the epilogue implying that they later married.
Operation Fortitude was an Allied counter-intelligence operation run during World War II. Its goal was to convince the German military that the planned D-Day landings were to occur at Calais and not Normandy. As a part of Fortitude the fictitious First United States Army Group (FUSAG) was created. FUSAG used fake tanks, aircraft, buildings and radio traffic to create an illusion of an army being formed to land at Calais. The controversial American General George S. Patton was given command of this 'army' which also influenced the German military. As Follet notes in the foreword to the novel, if the deception had been discovered the invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe would have become more difficult.
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In the film The Iron Lady there is a scene in which the retired Margaret Thatcher is shown reading Eye of the Needle.
The Bollywood movie Fanaa is loosely based on the book, moved to a contemporary Indian location. The role of the German spy Faber being taken by a Kashmiri separatist militant seeking to gain a nuclear weapon, while the role of Lucy is given to a Kashmiri girl who loves the militant yet ends up killing him.
Another Bollywood movie Right Yaaa Wrong is also loosely based on the book.
On 5 November 2019 BBC News listed Eye of the Needle on its list of the 100 most inspiring novels. [3]
The Double-Cross System or XX System was a World War II counter-espionage and deception operation of the British Security Service (MI5). Nazi agents in Britain – real and false – were captured, turned themselves in or simply announced themselves, and were then used by the British to broadcast mainly disinformation to their Nazi controllers. Its operations were overseen by the Twenty Committee under the chairmanship of John Cecil Masterman; the name of the committee comes from the number 20 in Roman numerals: "XX".
Juan Pujol García, also known as Joan Pujol i García, was a Spanish spy who acted as a double agent loyal to Great Britain against Nazi Germany during World War II, when he relocated to Britain to carry out fictitious spying activities for the Germans. He was given the codename Garbo by the British; their German counterparts codenamed him Alaric and referred to his non-existent spy network as "Arabal".
Operation Fortitude was a military deception operation by the Allied nations as part of Operation Bodyguard, an overall deception strategy during the buildup to the 1944 Normandy landings. Fortitude was divided into two subplans, North and South, and had the aim of misleading the German High Command as to the location of the invasion.
Kenneth Martin Follett, is a Welsh author of thrillers and historical novels who has sold more than 160 million copies of his works.
Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt was a German Generalfeldmarschall in the Heer (Army) of Nazi Germany during World War II. Born into a Prussian family with a long military tradition, von Rundstedt entered the Prussian Army in 1892. During World War I, he served mainly as a staff officer. In the interwar period, he continued his military career, reaching the rank of Colonel General before retiring in 1938.
Operation Bodyguard was the code name for a World War II deception strategy employed by the Allied states before the 1944 invasion of northwest Europe. Bodyguard set out an overall stratagem for misleading the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht as to the time and place of the invasion. Planning for Bodyguard was started in 1943 by the London Controlling Section, a department of the war cabinet. They produced a draft strategy, referred to as Plan Jael, which was presented to leaders at the Tehran Conference in late November and, despite scepticism due to the failure of earlier deception strategy, approved on 6 December 1943.
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Eye of the Needle is a 1981 British spy film directed by Richard Marquand, and starring Donald Sutherland and Kate Nelligan. Written by Stanley Mann, it is based on the 1978 novel of the same title by Ken Follett.
First United States Army Group was a fictitious Allied Army Group in World War II prior to D-Day, part of Operation Quicksilver, created to deceive the Germans about where the Allies would land in France. To attract Axis attention, prominent US general George S. Patton was placed in command of the fabricated formation.
The 80th Infantry (Reserve) Division was an infantry division of the British Army formed at the beginning of 1943, during the Second World War. For the twenty months that the division existed, it was a training formation. It was made responsible for providing final tactical and field training to soldiers who had already passed their initial training. After five additional weeks of training, the soldiers would be posted to fighting formations overseas. Notably, the division was used as a source of reinforcements for the 21st Army Group, which was fighting in Normandy. After all available troops left the United Kingdom for France, the division was disbanded.
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The Key to Rebecca is a novel by the British author Ken Follett. Published in 1980 by Pan Books (ISBN 0792715381), it was a best-seller that achieved popularity in the United Kingdom and worldwide. The code mentioned in the title is an intended throwback from Follett to Daphne du Maurier's famed suspense novel Rebecca.
Johannes Eppler (1914–1999), also known as Hans Eppler, John Eppler, and Hussein Gaafer, was a World War II Abwehr spy, a German who had been raised in Egypt by his Egyptian stepfather. One of Rommel's spies during the North African campaign in World War II, Operation Salaam led by László Almásy spirited Eppler and Hans-Gerd Sandstede into Cairo although they were both arrested soon after arrival in July 1942. Eppler is the subject of MI5 file KV 2/1467.
Dušan "Duško" Popov was a Serbian, a double agent who served as part of the MI6 and Abwehr during World War II. He passed off disinformation to Germany as part of the British Double-Cross System while occasionally using cover as the Yugoslav government-in-exile in London diplomat.
Ops (B) was an Allied military deception planning department, based in the United Kingdom, during the Second World War. It was set up under Colonel Jervis-Read in April 1943 as a department of Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC), an operational planning department with a focus on western Europe. That year, Allied high command had decided that the main Allied thrust would be in southern Europe, and Ops (B) was tasked with tying down German forces on the west coast in general, and drawing out the Luftwaffe in particular.
Faber is the Latin word for "smith". Like a few other Latin occupational names, it was adopted as a surname in the Low Countries and Germany. It is also common in England, perhaps due to Norman French influence. Notable people with the surname include:
A Column of Fire is a 2017 novel by British author Ken Follett, first published on 12 September 2017. It is the third book in the Kingsbridge Series, and serves as a sequel to 1989's The Pillars of the Earth and 2007's World Without End.
The reveal kickstarts the BBC's year-long celebration of literature.