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Ben Macintyre, Book Review, Double Cross - The True Story Of The D-Day Spies, Normandy Landings, Second World War
Truth is often much much weirder than fiction
Ben Macintyre, who rather seems to have cornered the market in factual books about espionage in this country, both during the Second World War and then later, during the period of the Cold War, has here written a complex account of the part that not just spies, but those who were double agents, or even triple agents, turned, and turned again – or always firmly on the Allied side, but convincing Germany they were her spies.
At times, this engagingly written but dizzying book – I struggled to keep track of the agent, their British code name, their German code name, plus the fact that code-names sometimes got revamped and changed – read almost like a comedy, as the subterfuges dreamed up got wilder and wilder. In fact, the ‘game’ of course was deadly, and the double agents were dangerously playing not only with their own lives, but the lives of thousands of others.
Macintyre concentrates on a handful of agents, who were employed, so their German handlers thought, to provide information about Britain and her military plans. In fact, these agents – flamboyant, hedonistic, larger-than-life to a man and woman, were feeding their German handlers misinformation, and as the plans for the Allied offensive which became the Normandy landings progressed, a complex structure of legerdemain was taking place, in order to get the German Secret Service, and the military, to be looking in the wrong direction, convinced that the Allied attack would happen elsewhere.
To that end, one of the double agents created a completely fictitious cohort of spies, including a mythical group of disaffected Welsh Nazi sympathisers, and several of the non-existent spies were also ‘minders’ for still more spies. And to stretch the joke still further, it was the Abwehr (German Military Intelligence) which ended up paying for the Double Agents whom they thought were spying for Germany, to feed them this disinformation.
Not only was every active agent which the Abwehr thought they had planted in Britain in fact a double agent working FOR Britain, but the Allies even had planted ‘’Double Agent Pigeons’ in Occupied France, as homing pigeons were employed as couriers. (You have to read the book!) Massed dummy tanks at a location to confuse spyplanes about where landings would start from, in order to divert attention to a false destination, an actor impersonating Monty and seen in a neutral country, to disguise the fact that the real Monty was elsewhere, preparing invasion, and even a beloved small dog whose possibly planned smuggle into Britain, going astray, nearly jeopardised the whole effort
Approaching Omaha Beach. Wiki Commons
In amongst the brilliant games being played, to achieve deadly ends, win or lose, and amongst the self-congratulation about British intelligence, and the extraordinary personalities of the double agents and their handlers, there is much evidence of pettifogging accountancy bureaucracy, and even extraordinary meanness, showed by a book-keeping mentality, and what at times seemed like a real lack of appreciation showed by those within the British Civil Service who were responsible for meeting expenses claims, from those often profligate, overblown, histrionic, but remarkably brave double agents, who risked not only their own lives, but the lives of many others, within their hands. Had the war of 
‘misinformation’ not been the success it was, the already horrific loss of life on the D-Day landing would have been immeasurably higher, and Allied failure here would have led to a very different outcome, and no doubt prolonged the war.
Behind the derring-do, lies of course, the horror which that derring-do was designed to end.
Double Cross – The True Story Of The D-Day Spies Amazon UK
Double Cross – The True Story Of The D-Day Spies Amazon USA
Interesting!
Yes, he has a couple more on various other disinformation projects carried out by British Intelligence during the Second World War
Thank you.
I’ve just finished ‘A Spy Among Friends’ on your recommendation so I’m a bit spied out at the moment. I can only take so much of a bunch of silly little boys playing daft games – tragic that, as you point out, they had influence over the lives and deaths of so many. And probably still have sadly…
I see you didn’t post on Friday – have you gone down to two a week as you mentioned you might?
This lot included women too. Not to mention one of the doubles who was captured, had he spilled the beans, which everyone expected him to. If physically tortured, as he was, it would have completely blown the whole carefully crafted misinformation designed to turn the bulk of German military away from Normandy. So though they were certainly odd people with not always disinterested agendas, their contributions were crucial.
Anyway as to Friday’s non post. – I thought I’d away with it! It was more to do with review than reading exhaustion. I was mulling and struggling a little with my review of this one and meanwhile had finished three other books so the review stack was looking almost as frightening as the TBR pile. But it may well happen soon as I have some doorstops on the TBR -. 3. Or maybe even 4 around the 500-800 mark. So it could easily be 1 a week at some point!
I know what you mean – I’m finidng it almost impossible to keep on top of reviews at the moment – they’re queuing up while I’m struggling to find anything for the blog. I don’t think I’ll be able to keep up a 5 day week much longer, even with the short story section and the TBR thing – it’s all too time-consuming, I fear. I think partly it’s our own faults though – our reviews have got incredibly long…better, I think, both of us (she said modestly), but it does mean I can’t bang one out in half-an-hour the way I used to for Amazon. I toy with doing a copied blurb and short review for the less literary books and keeping my verbosity for major classics, but I can’t bring myself to do it…yet.
This is so true – rightly or wrongly, you end up setting certain standards for yourself, and whether anyone else thinks those are good or sensible or silly waffly standards sort of becomes beside the point, so the dashed off review – even for something which I’m unenamoured of, has me frowning and thinking ‘could do better’ and giving myself a hard time for.
In fact – thinking back to that 1 star review for the dangerous aromatherapy text – I was crafting that one for many days! And the specifics of that publication never made the blog at all.
However, why is it I ask myself, that reviews even of toothbrushes threaten to become 3 volume novels. I once, many moons ago, wrote a 1 star review of something which I was enormously pleased with, which described all that was wrong with it in 2 lines. Probably the author, if she saw it, would not have agreed – it was another of those hyped to the skies ones, written by one of the metropolitan set, and reviewed by all the chums.
You do realise, that if WE wrote books, they would be those house-bricks we try to say we are loath to read?
Ah well.
Haha! Yes! And then can you imagine the length of the reviews we’d feel obliged to do of each other’s? You really have to pity poor Jilanne though, don’t you?
It took me the best part of a week to do my Hemingway review – apart from anything else my opinion of it kept changing the more I thought about it. It went up a star in the process, but in the end I had to ditch the whole thing and start again, I’d got into such a fankle. I’m still not too bad at keeping non-booky reviews short – primarily because I can’t be bothered doing them at all really. Must get those coffee pod reviews done… *sighs*
Though of course that Hemingway one was superlative, so we’ll worth the fankle (what a great word!)
Oh…thank you, that’s most kind! 😀 Haha! Yes, as I was typing it I began to wonder if it was a Scottish dialect word – sometimes I don’t know till I see the look of incomprehension on people’s faces…
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I’m pretty sure fankle is Scottish dialect – no-one bar my mother uses it, so it was nice to see. Another great one is “footer” (sp?) As in something fiddly, awkward. Such expressive words!
Yes, it was that proud Scotswoman FictionFan who used it, to my delight. I’d never heard it before
Another Scot! Together Fictionfan and I can supply you with lots of new words to try on your friends. Today the weather here (Oban) has been drizzly and damp – or dreich, as I’d say ordinarily to people up here. Is it just me, or are a lot of these words onomatapeaic (sp?) Actually, I’ve just remembered, Ben Macintyre has a holiday home not far from here – a friend lives next door and says he and his wife Kate Muir have a wonderful DVD collection and are very generous with it! DVDs? It’s their books I’d be looking at!!
Of course all these wonderful words sound much better with a Scottish accent (though I do think I might be able to get away with ‘fankle)’. It’s been more than dreich here today, and yesterday we even had a deluge of hailstones, rain as if liberally poured down in nails and some rather splendid thunder and lightening. I loved it, though I got home having managed drowned rat impersonation rather well. Looking at the sky, which is magnificently dark and lowering, I suspect it might happen again anythime soon. Where’s my boat……….