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The Double-Cross System: The Incredible True Story of How Nazi Spies Were Turned into Double Agents

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J.C. Masterman's "The Double-Cross System: The Incredible True Story of How Nazi Spies Were Turned into Double Agents" should be required reading for all counterintelligence and other human intelligence (HUMINT) personnel. Even after a 20+ year career as a human intelligence professional myself, this is one of the few "spy" books that I have. I consider this book a counterintelligence "how to" text book. To get the full impact of this book, I suggest first reading Ladaslas Farago's "Game of the Foxes", based on the files of Nazi Germany's intelligence service. After reading the German side of the story, the full impact of J.C. Masterman's book and this amazing intelligence operation will hit you right between they eyes.

The Double-Cross System by J. C. Masterman was written right at the end of the European campaign of WWII while the author was still on active duty with the British Government. The text was initially an official memorandum of the Double-Cross (XX) System which was declassified and published around 1970. XX was apparently successful in identifying all German agents operating in Britain and either turning them into double agents serving British interests or eliminating them.

Masterman cites seven specific reasons for running the XX System:

1. To control the enemy system or as much as we could get our hands on
2. To catch fresh spies when they appear
3. To gain knowledge of the personalities and methodologies of the German Secret Service
4. To obtain information on the code and cypher work of the German services
5. To get information of enemy plans and intentions from the questions asked by them [questions assigned to German agents in Britain]
6. To influence enemy plans by the answers went to the enemy [in response to their questions]
7. To deceive the enemy about our own plans and intentions.

Achieving any of these goals would have more than justified the efforts of the XX System. Incredibly, all of them were achieved to a great extent.

One of the more famous operations, Operation MINCEMEAT, was the basis for the movie The Man Who Never Was. In this operation, a body dressed as a major in the Royal Marines was released by a British submarine so as to wash up on the coast of Spain in the knowledge that the neutral but fascist government would provide any information to the Germans. Chained to the body was a dispatch case containing apparently official letters indicating that the next allied move after North Africa would be an invasion of either Greece or Sardinia. This was deliberate disinformation intended to lead the Germans away from the actual plan of invading Sicily. The deception was entirely successful.

Masterman also provides details of several other successful deceptions associated with the Normandy Invasion and with leading the Germans to inaccurately target their V-1 and V-2 weapons.

The book is a good, concise summary of the XX System. For the reader interested in a broader and more detailed treatment of the subject, I'd also recommend Anthony Cave Brown's Bodyguard of Lies.

"The Double-Cross System" was written by John Cecil Masterman in 1945 at the request of the Director General of the Security Services as a history of MI5's section B1A, which dealt with double agents during World War II. It was published for confidential consumption in September 1945, in the same form you see here, but Masterman did not receive permission to make it public until 1971, when it was published under the title "The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939 to 1945". J.C. Masterman was a novelist and a university don who was recruited by MI5 during the war. He worked with double agents for 4 1/2 years. This was his report on the theory and practice of running double agents and how they contributed to Britain's war effort.

From the fall of France in mid-1940 until its liberation in 1944, Britain "actively ran and controlled the German espionage system" in its country. Everyone the Germans thought were working for them were actually working for the Brits. This was, in part, because France's occupation cut Britain off from the Continent and forced Germany to work with limited agents in Britain. This unique situation proved a great advantage for Britain and ultimately allowed B1A to supply Germany with misinformation about D-Day, leading Germany to believe that a larger offensive would come in Pas de Calais, thereby diverting 7 German offensive divisions away from Normandy. That was the coup de grace for the double-cross system, but most of its work was done in the previous 4 years.

Masterman begins by laying out the principles of running double agents and explaining the organization. As the needs of double agents presented formidable administration challenges, they required a specialized department, B1A. But MI5 did not do it alone. The Twenty Committee, of which Masterman was chairman, was formed with representatives from various agencies to decide what information could safely be allowed to pass to German hands and to maintain consistency. B1A was aided by some flaws in the German intelligence organization, Abwehr, which kept the double-agents afloat longer than they might have been. It seems that the Germans did suspect some of the agents but preferred to have disloyal agents than none at all.

The bulk of the book follows the agents and operations of B1A year by year, from 1939 through 1945. It begins with their first big agent, "Snow" (all agents are referred to by their code names), a German electrical engineer living in England who began work for Britain before the war. There are details of the work of many agents, including the remarkable "Garbo", a Spaniard of great initiative who was awarded the M.B.E. from Britain and the Iron Cross from Germany. The roles of the double-cross system were security, counterespionage, and strategic deception, which it fulfilled admirably. Masterman's prose is informative but very dry. It was written as a report, and it is fluid and interesting by that standard, but spare by the standards of a book.

This 1972 book explains how the British Secret Service actively ran and controlled Germany's spies during WW II. All German agents who were sent to Great Britain were captured; they either worked for the British Secret Service or were executed. This activity involved the cooperation of many branches of government (p.viii). This cooperation was the one essential condition for success. The examples given by this book could be a manual of operations. Page xii gives the purposes of the Twenty Committee. Other books were written before, but this is the best document on the system. This book was published to offset the bad publicity suffered in the fifties and sixties (p.xvi).

Page 49 says the German spies dropped by parachute were "an easy prey", and could not make radio contact "because of defects in the instruments themselves". I think this implies the British had a mole in the Abwehr who cleverly sabotaged their radios.

One of the reasons for this system was "to get evidence of enemy plans and intentions from the questions asked by them" (p.58). Chapter 5 gives many examples, such as the American Questionnaire which asked detailed questions about Hawaii and Pearl Harbor in August 1941 (p.80). Page 85 tells of Plan Midas, a successful money laundering operation where Nazi money paid for British counter-espionage! Chapter 8 notes that sending information back to Germany via double agents meant that the enemy would not send in other agents (p.108).

Deception was best assured by preventing dangerous information from being passed on, not by passing misinformation (p.110). They passed on facts which lead the enemy to deduce false intentions. Page 116 tells of the German agent who stayed in Lisbon and created stories of his visits to England. "Since he always reported what the the Germans expected to hear, and since many of his guesses were startlingly near to the truth, he was more and more readily believed." In April 1942 agent TRICYCLE was to report on American research into the atomic bomb (p.176). 1942 marked a change: Germany now sought information on British offensives, not defenses. In 1943 the policy of the XX Committee was to reduce the forces on the Russian front. Page 138 tells of METEOR, the German triple agent. By 1944 the sole interest was the grand deception for the Normandy invasion. To make the date of attack appear later, to indicate the wrong location of the attack, and to suggest the attack was just a feint. The reports on the V-1 flying bomb were used to make them fall short of the target (p.179).

Why did the Germans fail and the British succeed? He says it was the personal integrity of the British. German blunders were due to Abwehr officials profiting from their agent, and could not honestly judge the agent's work. Another is the fact that espionage in wartime is difficult and usually unprofitable; counterespionage is comparatively easy and yields satisfactory results (pp.187-190). Since espionage and counterespionage deal with different sides of the same problems, they should be as united as possible. At least activities should be on records accessible to each other. (This book necessarily lacks all mention of British spying in Germany.)

This book is one of two books that are simply indispensable for understanding the "nuts and bolts" of counterintelligence. Along with Spy Wars by T. H. Bagley Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, it is a classic intelligence literature. Read in concert and fully digested, these two volumes amount to a complete course on the basics of counterintelligence.

The book was in great shape, delivery time was reasonable and the content if the book is one of the best I have ever read!!!

This was written soon after the war (initially as a secret document) and is a candid assessment of the double-cross program's successes and failures; fortunately for the Allies, the former greatly outnumbered the latter. The author explains which operations worked, which did not, and why. He also explains how they could have exploited the system for further gains had they been more confident of their effectiveness in deceiving the Germans, but he also explains why they were cautious and why it was reasonable to be cautious given the circumstances. Details of individual cases are often fascinating, including meetings with German handlers in neutral nations and dealing with uncooperative agents. My only complaint was that the acronym glossary did not cover a lot of the acronyms used in the book.

The Author was one of the few who ran the double cross system in MI5 using captured spies they ran back false intel on the planned invasion of France. Making the German's think that Normandy was a ploy to weaken the fortifications at Calais. The Best agent was codenamed GARBO whom the German's still believed in at the end of the war. They fooled them with false bomb damage reports from the V1&2 Rockets causing them to aim the Rockets short therefore missing London. A Great book on the Secret War.