Monopoly X: How Top-Secret World War II Operations Used the Game to Help Allied POWs Escape, Conceal Spies, and Send Secret Codes

In this thrilling account, game historian Orbanes (Tortured Cardboard) revisits a little-remembered episode of WWII when the Allies concealed POW escape kits inside Monopoly game sets distributed by the Red Cross. British military intelligence first came up with the scheme, employing Waddington Ltd., a maker of games and playing cards, to reconstruct Monopoly boxes to hold lockpicks, tiny saws and compasses, maps printed on silk, fake identification papers, and Reichsmarks. With cinematic flair, Orbanes narrates the clandestine meetings between spies that led to the false game sets’ development and later adoption by the U.S., along the way touching on many fascinating historical tangents. (It was because of American spymaster Allen Dulles’s regret at having once turned away Lenin from his door that he started giving audiences to all manner of visitors, including the French-German woman who would become his Red Cross plant.) The author also describes a daring escape utilizing the false game set undertaken by two Allied prisoners at Colditz Castle near the Baltic Sea. Throughout, Orbanes intriguingly surfaces other ways in which games, especially Monopoly, were used for Allied spycraft. (The Monopoly game board was the cypher used to decode a warning that Stalin had spies in the White House.) While some of the stylishly written scenes are clearly speculative, it’s all so gripping that readers won’t mind suspending a bit of disbelief. (July)