Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel, Nazi Agent - Hardcover

"It takes a spy to catch a spy...Hal Vaughan, a former newsman and CIA operative, has finally done what the legions of Coco Chanel's other biographers resolutely failed to do: uncover the French fashion queen's secret past as a Nazi agent...Vaughan, who writes with welcome economy and flair, deserves a lot of credit for finally unravelling the strands of Chanel's deeply deceptive personality." (Financial Times)

"His research is valuable, adding crucial pieces to the jigsaw puzzle of Chanel's war" (Justine Picardie Mail on Sunday)

"It's a fascinating story" (Daisy Goodwin Sunday Times)

"Not for the first time, the ghosts of the holocaust are returning to haunt the industry. Sleeping with the Enemy reveals that Coco Chanel, the 'high priestess of couture' had a long affair with a German Nazi agent and collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War...if the truth about Chanel had been revealed at the time, her reputation would have been utterly destroyed" (Aoife Drew Irish Independent)

"Sleeping with the Enemy claims that not only was the designer the lover of a German officer, Hans Gunther von Dincklage, but they were spies who went on missions to Madrid and Berlin" (Christine Kearney Evening Herald Dublin)

Coco Chanel, high priestess of couture, created the look of the chic modern woman: her simple and elegant designs freed women from their corsets and inspired them to crop their hair. By the 1920s, Chanel employed more than two thousand people in her workrooms, and had amassed a personal fortune. But at the start of the Second World War, Chanel closed down her couture house and went to live quietly at the Ritz, moving to Switzerland after the war. For more than half a century, Chanel's life from 1941 to 1954 has been shrouded in rumour. Neither Chanel nor her biographers have told the full story, until now.

In this explosive narrative Hal Vaughan pieces together Chanel's hidden years, from the Nazi occupation of Paris to the aftermath of the Liberation. He uncovers the truth of Chanel's anti-Semitism and long-whispered collaboration with Hitler's officials. In particular, Chanel's long relationship with 'Spatz', Baron von Dincklage, previously described as a tennis-playing playboy and German diplomat, and finally exposed here as a Nazi master spy and agent who ran an intelligence ring in the Mediterranean and reported directly to Joseph Goebbels.

Sleeping with the Enemy tells in detail how Chanel became a German intelligence operative, Abwehr agent F-7124; how she was enlisted in spy missions, and why she evaded arrest in France after the war. It reveals the role played by Winston Churchill in her escape from retribution; and how, after a nine-year exile in Switzerland with Dincklage, and despite French investigations into her espionage activities, Coco was able to return to Paris and triumphantly reinvent herself - and rebuild the House of Chanel.

As Hal Vaughan shows, far from being a heroine of France, Chanel was in fact one of its most surprising traitors.