Double Cross

Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies (2012), a non-fiction book by British author Ben Macintyre, details the British response to Nazi spies sent by the German Abwehr intelligence service and efforts to turn those spies into double agents. The key endeavor chronicled in the book involves British efforts to trick the Germans into believing the 1944 D-Day Invasion would take place in Pas de Calais rather than Normandy Beach in a feat known as Operation Fortitude. For Double Cross, Mcintyre received nominations for the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime and the Goodreads Choice Award in History and Biography.

Starting in 1940 during World War II, the Abwehr German intelligence service began its espionage campaign against Great Britain. Sent by parachute, submarine, or via fake passports, German spies entered the British Isles hoping to extract information or sabotage British operations. A significant amount of paranoia began to infect Britain as the English believed the country was riddled with well-trained German spies who had infiltrated all levels of British society. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill referred to this paranoia as "spy-mania." In actuality, fewer than twenty-five German agents arrived in Britain between September 1940 and November 1940, the timeframe for this supposed mass infiltration. Furthermore, the spies who entered were poorly trained and often easy to spot. Many of them barely knew how to speak English. The question of why Germany's spies were so ill-equipped for espionage is one Macintyre grapples with throughout the book. One explanation is that Adolf Hitler devoted few resources to intelligence gathering. Egotistical and narcissistic in the extreme, Hitler trusted his own intuition far more than he did his intelligence operations.

Most of these spies were quickly picked up by British authorities. Rather than simply imprison or execute them, Britain employed many of them as double agents tasked primarily with spreading disinformation, an effort known as the Double Cross or XX system. John Masterman, the chairman of the Twenty Committee in charge of running Double Cross efforts, later said that by 1941, British intelligence service MI5 "actively ran and controlled the German espionage system [in the United Kingdom]." This boast is borne out by post-war records which show that only one German agent in the U.K. went unnoticed by British intelligence agencies, and he committed suicide before he could cause any damage.



Upon being caught, German spies were sent to the British interrogation center Camp 020 in Richmond, where Lieutenant Colonel Robin Stephens broke them primarily through a careful and vigorous picking apart of their life histories. If deemed suitable as a double agent, the German spy was sent to Scottish MI5 intelligence officer Thomas Argyll Robinson, or "TAR," for training. Some of MI5's earliest efforts were qualified failures. For example, Welsh double agent Arthur Owens, code name Snow, had in fact been playing British and German intelligence services against one another. Suspicious of Owens's fealties, Robinson sent double agent Walter Dicketts to meet with Owens's German handler Nikolaus Ritter under the pretense that Dicketts was a traitor to Britain in order to suss out where Owens's true loyalties lay. Owens proceeded to blow the cover of Dicketts who fortunately managed to convince Ritter he was more valuable to them alive than dead. While Owens's entire network of sources had to be shut down as a result, Robinson believed the experience offered extremely valuable information to the British about how the Abwehr service operated.

MI5 had far more success with Operation Fortitude. Under the leadership of British Army Colonel Noel Wild, the agency worked to deceive the Germans into believing the D-Day Invasion would arrive at Pas de Calais instead of Normandy. Rather than ask agents to submit fake intelligence reports about the precise time and place of the invasion, the British had them transmit minute pieces of information about various troop movements and insignia. By doing so, the British led the Germans to reconstruct the most strategically likely locale for the invasion, which according to the false intelligence would be Pas de Calais. In fact, the Germans were led to believe that the Normandy attack was the diversion, not the other way around.

One of the agents who played a significant role in Operation Fortitude was Lily Sergeyev. A Frenchwoman of Russian origin, Sergeyev was recruited by Abwehr after the fall of France. Upon her arrival in Spain with her beloved pet dog Frisson, Sergeyev immediately turned herself over to British authorities. While the British promised to ensure the safety of Frisson, the dog ended up stuck in quarantine in Spain after Sergeyev's arrival in Britain. When Sergeyev later learned that Frisson had died, she threatened to expose her identity to the Germans as revenge. Eventually, her handler Mary Sherer convinced her to maintain her secret identity, and Sergeyev, code name Treasure, became a very effective double agent, transmitting disinformation about the time and place of the D-Day Invasion. This is but one of many idiosyncratic stories the author shares in the book.



In its review of Double Cross, the New York Times calls Macintyre "the leading practitioner of oddball-powered history."