Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

From Barnes & Noble

The successful D-Day landing of 150,000 Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy encompasses tens of thousands of compelling stories, but none of them perhaps is more significant than the history of the MI5 plan called Double Cross. That brilliantly executed deceit convinced Hitler and German military leaders to mass their defenses hundreds of miles from the actual assault. In this new book, Ben Macintyre (Operation Mincemeat; Agent Zigzag) not only goes beyond earlier accounts; he renders this intricate, risky undertaking with compelling suspense and narrative skill. Now in trade paperback and NOOK Book.

Publishers Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

The Washington Post

From the Publisher

“It should be said loud and clear that Macintyre is a supremely gifted storyteller. He spins quite a yarn. His books are absurdly entertaining. I would kill for his keen wit. He takes us into a world of bounders, spivs, roués, and men (and women) on the make….Double Cross is a blast.” – Boston Globe

“Forget fiction when you are buying beach reading this summer. Ben Macintyre’s factual account is more gripping than what you will find anywhere else. It is a story unsurpassed in the long history of intelligence.” – Washington Times

“Macintyre at once exalts and subverts the myths of spycraft, and has a keen eye for absurdity” – New Yorker

“[A] complex, absorbing final installment in his trilogy about World War II espionage….Macintyre is a master storyteller.  Employing a wry wit and a keen eye for detail, he delivers an ultimately winning tale fraught with European intrigue and subtle wartime heroics.” – San Francisco Chronicle

“Superb….the story comes alive again in all its stupendous, unimaginable duplicity.…intensely readable” – Washington Post

“A wonderfully entertaining story of deception and trickery that is told with verve and wit….Macintyre’s early books about espionage in World War II have been bestsellers, and this will be no exception.” – Christian Science Monitor

“Macintyre revels in the surreal aspects of his story, writing with a breezy, almost tongue-in-cheek style. But the author is also adept at communicating the seriousness and the stakes of the underlying game….Nail-biting and chuckle-inducing reading.” – Columbus Dispatch

“Another captivating, improbably fresh story of World War II….Double Cross is ennobling, invigorating and, above all, entertaining. Macintyre's research is impressive, as is his ability to shape disparate facts into a breathless page-turner….Throw in nail-biting suspense and the occasional decadent Nazi (fickle mistress optional) and, with Macintyre in charge, you're virtually guaranteed a history book that reads like a spy novel.” – Richmond Times-Dispatch

“It is the riveting tales of these agents on which Ben Macintyre focuses, to full advantage, in Double Cross….Macintyre makes good use of the material. He knows how to let the high drama unfold on its own.” – Wall Street Journal

“London Times writer Macintyre (Agent Zigzag, Operation Mincemeat) concludes his WWII espionage trilogy with the tantalizing tale of an oddball, ‘Dirty Dozen’-like group of double agents who fool the Nazis into believing the Allied D-Day attack would come at Calais, not Normandy.” – New York Post, Required reading

“A tale of smarts, personal courage and — even knowing what happened on June 6, 1944 — suspense.  Where would we be if these troubled, eccentric and hang-it-all characters hadn't known how to lie, and lie well?” – Seattle Times

“As in his earlier best-sellers about WWII-era spycraft, Agent Zigzag and Operation Mincemeat, Macintyre writes with novelistic flair.” – Entertainment Weekly

“The story of D-Day – when 150,000 Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy – as it’s never been told before….this amazing story shows how double agents and spies tricked the German army and saved thousands of Allied lives.”
– New York Post

“Only with author Ben Macintyre’s scintillating account has this complex human drama, with all its tortuous twists and turns, finally received the cinematic treatment it deserves….This is edge-of-the seat stuff.” – WWII Magazine

“Macintyre does a fine job depicting this extraordinary cast and exposing the ambiguous world of espionage....compelling.” – MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History

“With the same skill and suspense he displayed in Operation Mincemeat and Agent Zigzag….Macintyre effortlessly weaves the agents’ deliciously eccentric personalities with larger wartime events to shape a tale that reads like a top-notch spy thriller.” – Publishers Weekly (starred)

“Macintyre has written a tense, exciting real-life spy story that illuminates a largely obscure aspect of WWII.” – Booklist

“With his latest book, Double Cross, Ben Macintyre tells the astonishing true story of a bizarre group of misfit spies who played a critical role in the success of D-Day.  The stories in this book, many of which have never before been told, are nothing short of incredible.  Skillfully woven together, they form one of the most gripping narratives I have ever read.” – Candice Millard, author of The River of Doubt and Destiny of the Republic

“Ben Macintyre and I work in the same period, and I should be reading him because he is such a scrupulous and insightful writer – a master historian. But, with Double Cross and his other excellent works, I always wind up reading him for pleasure.  Double Cross may be his best yet, falling somewhere between top-class entertainment and pure addiction.” – Alan Furst, author of A Mission to Paris

"Ben Macintyre’s spellbinding account features an improbable cast of characters who pulled off a counter-intelligence feat that was breathtaking in its audacity. Their deceptions within deceptions—known as the Double Cross—were critical to the success of the D-Day invasion, and continued to mislead the Germans long after Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy. A truly bravura performance, as is Macintyre’s fast-paced tale." — Andrew Nagorski, author of Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power

"How on earth, in 1944, did we dupe Berlin that we would attack the coast of France in completely the wrong place?  It was a deception that saved tens of thousands of Allied lives.  In Double Cross, Ben Macintyre ingeniously explains exactly how it was done." – Frederick Forsyth
 
"Never before revealed facts about the workings of the Intelligence Service in the build up to D-Day in the Second World War.  Ben Macintyre's remarkable book is a gripping revelation." – Jack Higgins

“[Macintyre] has excelled himself with a cast of extraordinary characters and in his storytelling abilities....Double Cross is an utterly gripping story.” – Antony Beevor, The Telegraph

“Enthralling....Macintyre is a master at leading the reader down some very tortuous paths while ensuring they never lose their bearings. He’s terrific, too, at animating his characters with the most succinct of touches....gripping.” — London Evening Standard

Library Journal

The Barnes & Noble Review

Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies is Ben Macintyre's third expedition into the surreal fourth dimension of the Second World War, the counterfeit reality concocted by Britain's virtuosos of deceit, the Twenty Committee and MI5's Section B1A. The declassification of a large body of British wartime intelligence files and Macintyre's own evident appetite for chancers, oddballs, and high-spirited mischief makers has resulted in three brilliant works of diabolical intrigue, each one a miracle of plot and pacing. Five years ago, Agent Zigzag told the astounding story of Eddie Chapman, safecracker, womanizer, and jailbird who was recruited by the Germans from a Channel Islands lockup, trained as a spy, and dropped into an English celery field, whereupon he became a double agent for the British so effective in deceit that he was awarded the Iron Cross by the Germans. Three years later, in Operation Mincemeat, Macintyre set out the full story of the ghoulish ruse involving the supposed corpse of Major William "Bill" Martin, "the man who never was," whose briefcase of fraudulent top-secret documents convinced the German high command that Allied forces meant to invade Sardinia and the Balkans in the summer of 1943, masking the real target, Sicily.

Many familiar figures from the earlier works appear again in Double Cross, and Macintyre presents them with undiminished relish. Here again are Thomas Argyll "Tar" Robertson, handsome, amiable spinner and detector of lies — also called Passion Pants in appreciation of his tartan trousers; monocled Robin "Tin-eye" Stephens, "xenophobic, rude, manipulative, ruthless, and brilliant"; Ewen Montagu, the mastermind behind Operation Mincemeat; Johnny Bevan, "cricket-playing, workaholic, stockbroker of rare intelligence" said to have "the most highly polished shoes in the British army"; and John Masterman, Oxford don, detective novelist, and fanatical cricketer, who saw intelligence operations as an extension of the sport. Back again too is the Twenty, or XX, Committee, formed to direct the Double Cross system, with Masterman as home captain. That committee, "the first and only government body named with a Roman numeral pun," wove the tissue of lies, distorted facts, and harmless truths purveyed to the enemy by double agents whose day-to-day operations were handled by MI5's discreetly labeled Section B1A.

Central to Double Cross is the story of Operation Fortitude, the long, ever-mutating deception that shrouded the Allied invasion of Europe, diverting German attention away from Normandy toward Norway and Pas de Calais. The many-faceted undertaking included the fabrication of phantom expeditionary forces, a British-led one in Scotland and another in southeast England under the supposed command of George Patton — an ideal commission: The unlovely, loudmouthed general was out of favor with Eisenhower but was held in high esteem by Hitler. Dummy tank landing craft and fighter planes were constructed — though the former tended to fly aloft in high winds and the latter to be eaten by cows. Among other theatrical devices, trucks roamed the countryside broadcasting the sound of mighty legions mustering, and a counterfeit Lord Mountbatten popped up in Gibraltar. But the linchpin of the entire scheme was the coordinated group of double agents who fed a stream of artfully tailored misinformation to the German high command and to Hitler himself.

With his characteristic attention to the rigors of British decorum, Macintyre points out that, while the country's history abounded in spies, double agents were considered not quite the thing: "Such creatures were classed as 'agents doubles' — in French, as if to underline that this was typically duplicitous Continental behavior." Six adepts in duplicity — none British, as it happens, and three, at least, of the most dubious virtue — are the leading actors in this book.

There is Serbian high liver and playboy Dusan "Dusko" Popov — Tricycle to the British, Ivan to the Germans. Among his accomplishments was Operation Midas, a dazzling exercise in financial legerdemain that resulted in the Germans paying to be spied upon and, in fact, making Double Cross "self financing" to the tune of £4.5 million. Less successful was Popov's attempt to set up a network of double agents in the U.S., a venture confounded by a ham-fisted, obstructionist FBI, nearly exposing the whole system.

Popov was aided, tacitly at first, then outright, by his Danish-German university chum and fellow carouser Johnny Jebsen, an Anglophile who "would no more go without an umbrella than without his trousers." Jebsen was the Abwehr officer who ran Popov for the Germans and was eventually recruited by the British, gaining the code name Artist. The success of the entire enterprise hung finally on his resolve and courage.

Also at work was the Polish patriot Roman Czerniawski — Brutus to the British, Hubert to the Germans — "fickle, irritating, and meddlesome" — whose loyalty lay with Poland, and only out of expediency with the Allies. Two women were also key in the grand deception. Elvira de la Fuente Chadoir (known variously as Bronx and Dorette), daughter of a Peruvian diplomat and guano tycoon, was a prodigious gambler, an extravagant thrower of wild parties, and a woman who, according to the police, favored "the companionship of women who may not be careful of their virginity." The other, Lily Sergeyev, was the daughter of a tsarist official who had emigrated to Paris with his family after the Revolution. Alternately dubbed Treasure and Solange, she considered herself French and was devoted to her dog, Babs. Chillingly, MI5's highhandedness where Babs was concerned jeopardized the entire invasion.

Finally, we have the arch bamboozler and most famous double agent of all, the Spaniard Juan Pujol García — the British Garbo and German Arabel. Preternaturally fecund in imagination and a prodigy of determination, he eventually ran some twenty-six fictitious sub-agents to feed the Germans a welter of misinformation and redirection. Many of Pujol's activities are covered by Macintyre, but their intricacies, extent, and consequences were so great that they merit an entire book — and here to fill the bill is Stephen Talty's Agent Garbo: The Brilliant Eccentric Secret Agent Who Tricked Hitler and Saved D-Day. It gives a much fuller picture of this particular agent than the one presented Macintyre and is also corrective, especially in the crucial role played by Pujol's wife, Araceli.

Though Pujol had fought with the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War and spent the last part of it hiding from the Republicans, he hated fascists and wanted, he said, "to start a personal war with Hitler" with his imagination as his weapon. Aiming to become a double agent for the British, Pujol convinced the Germans to enlist him as a spy through a series of ingenious subterfuges and by adopting the persona of a hot-blooded, easily offended, endlessly verbose worshipper of the Führer. From the very start he met German questions about his veracity with withering outrage, high-strung pique, and bombastic paeans to Hitler, a pose that worked wonders then and later. Ordered to Britain by his German handlers, Pujol found it impossible to get there, instead reporting from Portugal as though he were roaming the British Isles, a hoax aided by his wife. As Agent Arabel, Pujol produced reams of waffle on morale, innovations in weaponry and defense, the movement of troops, and much else — baffling MI6, which was intercepting his messages, with such discoveries as Glaswegians who "will do anything for a liter of wine."

Meanwhile, in a tortuous tale, Pujol was taken up by the British secret service and moved to London with his family, at which point three years of brilliant deception commenced, the details of which almost defy belief. Connected as he was with his fantastic network of sub-agents, Pujol, as Arabel, became one of the Germans' and, indeed, Hitler's, most trusted sources and was awarded the Iron Cross.

Both Talty's and Macintyre's works are awash in secret ink and steeped in chicanery; both are electric with suspense, even though we know the general outcome. But how much of D-Day's success was the result of the Double Cross system? A great deal: Field Marshal Rommel, for one, believed that the Germans' "decisive mistake" — perhaps in the whole war — was leaving troops in Pas de Calais instead of deploying them to Normandy. Well then, how risky was the Double Cross operation? Macintyre asserts that "if the Double Cross deception had backfired,?if the great defensive net of lies had unraveled and the Germans had been ready and waiting in Normandy, reinforced and alert, then the invasion would have failed, and D-Day would have ended in a massacre of Allied troops."

It takes nothing away from the resourcefulness, daring, and courage of the agents who risked their lives and those of family members living in German- controlled territory, to note that the success of the Double Cross system depended on critical advantages held by the British over the enemy. Macintyre covers them all with telling, sometimes amusing detail. German intelligence had been tardy in setting up a spy network in Britain, with the result that all the operatives they did manage to land were immediately captured (and executed or imprisoned) or turned, becoming double agents and conduits for disinformation. In addition, the incentives for an Abwehr officer turning a blind eye to possible duplicity in one of his agents were great: Those who ran the spies were skimming gratifyingly large sums of money from the operation; but more to the point, a deadly rivalry existed between the somewhat dozy Abwehr and the SD, the intelligence agency of the SS, which was not in the least dozy. An Abwehr officer who exposed an agent he had been running as working for the Allies could expect to be sent to the Eastern Front — if not something more immediately fatal.

Furthermore, as the war progressed, which is to say, deteriorated for the Germans, increasing numbers of German officers simply wanted it over, especially if it could be ended in a separate peace with Britain and the United States, with the hope of forming a future united front against the Soviet Union. It is not certain in the case of Operation Fortitude — or indeed in Operation Mincemeat — how much silent acquiescence on the part of some key Germans was in play. In one terrible instance of irony, one of the agents — whose identity I leave you to discover — was seized, imprisoned, tortured, and done away with because he presented a threat to the success of the July 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler, a project he would have been happy to further.

But the crucial advantage held by the British was that they had cracked the Enigma Code, with the result that the Germans themselves were briefing the British as to whether or not they were swallowing the lies fed to them, as well as alerting B1A about operatives suspected of treachery. It is doubtful that double agents would have been given such an important role in Allied strategy without what amounted to a cheat sheet. You might say, pace John Masterman, that the game played by the Twenty Committee was not quite cricket. On the other hand, the Double Cross System wasn't a game; it was war.

Katherine A. Powers reviews books widely and has been a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle.

Reviewer: Katherine A. Powers