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Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies Paperback – May 14, 2013

by Ben Macintyre (Author)

4.4 4,830 ratings

Editors' pick Best History

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The “superb [and] intensely readable” (The Washington Post) untold story of one of the greatest deceptions of World War II and the extraordinary spies who achieved it—from the bestselling author of Prisoners of the Castle

“Not since Ian Fleming and John le Carré has a spy writer so captivated readers.”—The Hollywood Reporter

On June 6, 1944, 150,000 Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy and suffered an astonishingly low rate of casualties. A stunning military achievement, it was also a masterpiece of trickery. Operation Fortitude, which protected and enabled the invasion, and the Double Cross system, which specialized in turning German spies into double agents, tricked the Nazis into believing that the Allied attacks would come in Calais and Norway rather than Normandy. It was the most sophisticated and successful deception operation ever carried out, ensuring Allied victory at the most pivotal moment in the war.

This epic event has never before been told from the perspective of the key individuals in the Double Cross system, until now. These include its director (a brilliant, urbane intelligence officer), a colorful assortment of MI5 handlers (as well as their counterparts in Nazi intelligence), and the five spies who formed Double Cross’s nucleus: a dashing Serbian playboy, a Polish fighter-pilot, a bisexual Peruvian party girl, a deeply eccentric Spaniard, and a volatile Frenchwoman. Together they made up one of the oddest and most brilliant military units ever assembled.

With the same depth of research, eye for the absurd, and masterful storytelling that have made Ben Macintyre an international bestseller, Double Cross is a captivating narrative of the spies who wove a web so intricate it ensnared Hitler’s army and carried thousands of D-Day troops across the Channel in safety.

Print length

399 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Crown
Publication date

May 14, 2013
Dimensions

5.2 x 0.9 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

9780307888778
ISBN-13

978-0307888778
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From the Publisher

The untold story of one of the greatest deceptions of World War II


	Agent Sonya	Operation Mincemeat	Agent Zigzag	Rogue Heroes	The Spy and the Traitor	A Spy Among Friends
	Uncovers the true story behind the Cold War’s most intrepid female spy	Chronicles the extraordinary story of what happened after British officials planted a dead body behind enemy lines during WWII	Fall into this gripping tale of loyalty, love, and the thin and shifting line between fidelity and betrayal, based on recently declassified World War II files	The incredible untold story of World War II’s greatest secret fighting force—Britain’s Special Air Force	The thrilling tale of Oleg Gordievsky, a Russian double agent whose secret work helped hasten the end of the Cold War	The unbelievable true story of Kim Philby, the Cold War’s most infamous spy

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Gripping stories from the perspective of a remarkable ragtag group of spies who tricked the Nazis in an astounding D-Day deception. Puts other spy tales to shame.” —People

“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

About the Author

BEN MACINTYRE is a writer-at-large for The Times of London and the bestselling author of A Spy Among Friends, Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, and Agent Zigzag, among other books. Macintyre has also written and presented BBC documentaries of his work.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1. Raw Recruits

Dusko and Johnny were friends. Their friendship was founded on a shared appreciation of money, cars, parties, and women, in no particular order and preferably all at the same time. Their relationship, based almost entirely on frivolity, would have a profound impact on world history.

Dusan “Dusko” Popov and Johann “Johnny” Jebsen met in 1936 at the University of Freiburg in southern Germany. Popov, the son of a wealthy Serbian industrialist from Dubrovnik, was twenty-five. Jebsen, the heir to a large shipping company, was two years older. Both were spoiled, charming, and feckless. Popov drove a BMW; Jebsen, a supercharged Mercedes 540K convertible. This inseparable pair of international playboys roistered around Freiburg, behaving badly. Popov was a law student, while Jebsen was taking an economics degree, the better to manage the family firm. Neither did any studying at all. “We both had some intellectual pretensions,” wrote Popov, but “[we were] addicted to sports cars and sporting girls and had enough money to keep them both running.”

Popov had a round, open face, with hair brushed back from a high forehead. Opinion was divided on his looks: “He smiles freely showing all his teeth and in repose his face is not unpleasant, though certainly not handsome,” wrote one male contemporary. He had “a well-flattened, typically Slav nose, complexion sallow, broad shoulders, athletic carriage, but rather podgy, white and well-kept hands,” which he waved in wild gesticulation. Women frequently found him irresistible, with his easy manners, “loose, sensual mouth,” and green eyes behind heavy lids. He had what were then known as “bedroom eyes”; indeed, the bedroom was his main focus of interest. Popov was an unstoppable womanizer. Jebsen cut a rather different figure. He was slight and thin, with dark blond hair, high cheekbones, and a turned‑up nose. Where Popov was noisily gregarious, Jebsen was watchful. “His coldness, aloofness, could be forbidding, yet everyone was under his spell,” Popov wrote. “He had much warmth too, and his intelligence was reflected in his face, in the alertness of his steel-blue eyes. He spoke abruptly, in short phrases, hardly ever used an adjective and was, above all, ironic.” Jebsen walked with a limp and hinted that this was from an injury sustained in some wild escapade: in truth it was caused by the pain of varicose veins, to which he was a secret martyr. He loved to spin a story, to “deliberately stir up situations to see what would happen.” But he also liked to broker deals. When Popov was challenged to a sword duel over a girl, it was Jebsen, as his second, who quietly arranged a peaceful solution, to Popov’s relief, “not thinking my looks would be improved by a bright red cicatrix.”

Jebsen’s parents, both dead by the time he arrived in Freiburg, had been born in Denmark but adopted German citizenship when the shipping firm Jebsen & Jebsen moved to Hamburg. Jebsen was born in that city in 1917 but liked to joke that he was really Danish, his German citizenship being a “flag of convenience” for business purposes: “Some of my love of my country has to do with so much of it actually belonging to me.” A rich, rootless orphan, Jebsen had visited Britain as a teenager and returned a committed Anglophile: he affected English manners, spoke English in preference to German, and dressed, he thought, “like a young Anthony Eden, conservatively elegant.” Popov remarked: “He would no more go without an umbrella than without his trousers.”

Preoccupied as they were with having fun, the two student friends could not entirely ignore the menacing political changes taking place around them in the Germany of the 1930s. They made a point of teasing the “pro-Nazi student intelligentsia.” The mockery, however, had a metal strand to it. “Under that mask of a snob and cynic and under his playboy manners,” Jebsen was developing a deep distaste for Nazism. Popov found the posturing Nazi Brownshirts ridiculous and repulsive.

After graduation, Popov returned to Yugoslavia and set himself up in the import-export business, traveling widely. Jebsen headed to England, announcing that he intended to study at Oxford University and write books on philosophy. He did neither (though he would later claim to have done both). They would not meet again for three years, by which time the world was at war.

In early 1940, Popov was living in Dubrovnik, where he had opened his own law firm, and conducting affairs with at least four women, when he received a telegram from his old friend summoning him to Belgrade: “Need to meet you urgently.” Their reunion was joyful and spectacularly bibulous. They went on a bender through Belgrade’s nightspots, having enlisted “two girls from the chorus of one of the clubs.” At dawn, all four sat down to a breakfast of steak and champagne. Jebsen told Popov that in the intervening years, he had become acquainted with the great English writer P. G. Wodehouse. With his monocle and silk cravat, Jebsen now looked like an oddly Germanic version of Bertie Wooster. Popov studied his old friend. Jebsen wore the same expression of “sharp intelligence, cynicism and dark humour,” but he also seemed tense, as if there was something weighing on his mind. He chain-smoked and “ordered his whiskies double, neat, and frequently. In style, his clothes still rivalled Eden’s, but his blond hair was no longer so closely trimmed and he had a neglected moustache, reddened by tobacco.”

A few days later, the friends were alone at the bar of a Belgrade hotel, when Jebsen lowered his voice, looked around in a ludicrously conspiratorial manner, and confided that he had joined the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, “because it saved him from soldiering, of which he was very much afraid as he is a heavy sufferer from varicose veins.” Jebsen’s recruiter was a family friend, Colonel Hans Oster, deputy to Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of the Abwehr. He now had the formal but vague Abwehr title of “Forscher,” meaning researcher or talent scout, with the technical rank of private, attached to a four-hundred-strong special detachment of the Brandenburg Regiment. This unit was in reality “a wangle by Canaris to keep a number of young men out of the clutches of compulsory service.” Jebsen was a freelance spy on permanent leave from the army, with a personal assurance from Canaris that he would never wear a uniform, never undergo military training, and never be sent to war. He was free to spend his “time travelling throughout Europe on his private business and financial affairs, so long as he held himself available to help the Abwehr when called upon to do so.”

“Hitler is the undisputed master of Europe,” Jebsen declared. “In a few months’ time, he’ll probably finish off England, and then America and Russia will be glad to come to terms with him.” This was pure Nazi propaganda, but Jebsen’s expression, as usual, was glintingly ironic. “Would you dine with a friend of mine,” Jebsen asked suddenly, “a member of the German embassy?” The friend turned out to be one Major Müntzinger, a corpulent Bavarian and the most senior Abwehr officer in the Balkans. Over brandy and cigars, Müntzinger made his pitch to Popov, as subtle as a sledgehammer. “No country can resist the German army. In a couple of months, England will be invaded. To facilitate the German task and to make an eventual invasion less bloody, you could help.” Müntzinger shifted to flattery. Popov was well connected. His business was the ideal cover for traveling to Britain, where he must know many important and influential people. Why, did he not know the Duke of Kent himself? Popov nodded. (He did not admit that he had visited Britain only once in his life and had met the duke for a matter of minutes at Dubrovnik’s Argosy Yacht Club.) Müntzinger continued: “We have many agents in England, quite a number of them excellent. But your connections would open many doors. You could render us great service. And we could do the same for you. The Reich knows how to show its appreciation.” Jebsen drank his whiskey and said nothing. Müntzinger was somewhat vague about the kind of information Popov might gather: “General. Political.” And then, after a pause: “Military. Johnny will introduce you to the proper people when and if you accept.” Popov asked for time to think the offer over, and in the morning he accepted. Jebsen had recruited his first spy for German intelligence. He would never recruit another.

Popov, meanwhile, had begun to develop what he called “a little idea of my own.”

In 1941, the Interallié was the most important spy network in Nazi-occupied France. Indeed, as one British intelligence officer remarked, it was virtually the only one, “our sole source of information from France” in the early part of the war. The network consisted of scores of informers, agents, and subagents, but ultimately the Interallié was the creation of one spy, a man to whom conspiracy and subterfuge were second nature, who regarded espionage as a vocation. His French collaborators knew him as Armand Borni; he also used the code name “Walenty,” or Valentine. His real name was Roman Czerniawski, and in a very short time, through sheer energy, conviction, and a soaring sense of his own worth, he had become the most valuable British spy in France.

Czerniawski was a Polish patriot, but that phrase cannot do justice to his essential Polishness and the depths of his attachment to his motherland. He lived for Poland and was perfectly prepared (at times almost anxious) to die for it. “His loyalty is entirely to his own country, and every problem he sees is bound up with the destiny of the Polish people,” wrote one of his fellow spies. He loathed the Germans and Russians with equal intensity for carving up his country, and dreamed only of restoring the Polish nation. Every other loyalty, every other consideration, was secondary. He stood just five foot six inches tall, with a thin face and intense, close-set eyes. He smiled readily and spoke at machine-gun speed.

The son of a well-to-do Warsaw financier, Czerniawski had trained as a fighter pilot before the war, but a serious crash had left him partially sighted and deskbound. The German invasion of Poland in September 1939 found Captain Czerniawski at air force headquarters in Warsaw, a specialist in military intelligence and the author of a well-received treatise on counterintelligence. Czerniawski was a professional, “a man who lives and thinks spying,” as one colleague put it. He regarded the spy trade as an honorable calling “based on the highest ideals of human endeavour.” As the Polish army crumbled beneath the German onslaught, Czerniawski escaped to Romania and then, using forged documents, made his way to France, where Polish forces were regrouping. When France fell in 1940, his division was disbanded, but rather than join his compatriots in Britain to continue the fight from there, Czerniawski went underground. He persuaded a young French widow, Renée Borni, to lend him her late husband’s identity. As German troops began their occupation, a peasant whose papers identified him as Armand Borni wobbled along beside them on a borrowed bicycle, taking mental notes and already congratulating himself. “Every signpost, every sign on a truck, every distinguishing mark of any sort, meant far more to me than to anybody else.” Here were the seeds of what he would grandly refer to as his “vision.” While the Polish government-in-exile in London fought one kind of war, he would mount another. He imagined “small cells of resistance, multiplying with great speed, joining together and forming one screen of eyes.”

Czerniawski made his way to the unoccupied south of France, where he made contact with the Polish secret service and obtained formal approval for his plan to establish a network in the occupied zone. A few nights later, he was dining alone at La Frégate, a restaurant in Toulouse, when a young woman asked if she might occupy the empty seat at his table. “She was small, in her thirties. Her pale, thin face, with thin lips, was animated by very vivid eyes.” Mathilde Carré simultaneously sized up her diminutive and accidental dining companion: “Thin and muscular, with a long narrow face, rather large nose and green eyes which must originally have been clear and attractive but were now flecked with contusions as the result of a flying accident.” Czerniawski introduced himself “in an appalling French accent.” They fell into conversation. After dinner he walked her home.

Mathilde Carré was highly intelligent, overwrought, and, at the moment she met Czerniawski, teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown. The child of bourgeois Parisian parents, she had studied at the Sorbonne, worked briefly in an insurance company, trained as a teacher, and then married a childhood friend before swiftly discovering she could not stand him. The war was the excuse she needed to leave her husband. With the French army in retreat, she found work in a dressing station, treating the wounded. There she met a lieutenant in the French Foreign Legion and made love to him “under the eyes of an enormous crucifix” in the bishop’s cell of a seminary at Cazères sur Garonne. He was gone in the morning, and she was pregnant. She decided to keep the baby and then miscarried. One night, she stood on a high bridge, about to kill herself, but then changed her mind: “Instead of throwing myself into the Garonne, I would fling myself into the war. If I really intended to commit suicide, it would be more intelligent to commit a useful suicide.” To celebrate this decision, she had taken herself out to dinner at La Frégate.

Czerniawski’s abundant self-assurance made Mathilde feel instantly secure. “Every time he spoke of the war his eyes flashed. He would not accept that Poland had been defeated. He radiated a kind of confidence and the enthusiasm of youth, an intelligence and willpower which would alternately give place to the airs of a spoilt, affectionate child.” They met again the next night, and the next. “A great bond of friendship was swiftly forged.” Both would later deny they had ever been lovers with such vehemence that the denials were almost certainly untrue.

Three weeks after their first meeting, Czerniawski confessed that he was a spy and asked Mathilde to help him realize his “vision” of a multicelled intelligence network. She said he could count on her; together they would “do great things.” The theatricality of the moment was compounded by Czerniawski’s announcement that he had already selected a code name for his new accomplice: she would be “La Chatte,” the She-Cat, because “you walk so quietly, in your soft shoes, like a cat.” She raised the slim fingers of one hand in a claw: “And I can scratch as well if I wish.” Perhaps it was a warning.

Roman Czerniawski and Mathilde Carré formed a most effective spy partnership. In Paris, they rented a room in Montmartre and set about constructing an entire espionage network. “It will be inter-Allied,” Czerniawski announced. “The boss will be a Pole, the agents mostly French, and all working for the Allies.” The Interallié network was born.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0307888770
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown; NO-VALUE edition (May 14, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 399 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780307888778
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307888778
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.9 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #117,614 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #90 in European Politics Books
- #164 in Political Intelligence
- #893 in World War II History (Books)

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Ben Macintyre

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Ben Macintyre is a writer-at-large for The Times of London and the bestselling author of A Spy Among Friends, Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and Rogue Heroes, among other books. Macintyre has also written and presented BBC documentaries of his work.

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Joey Boden

Great book for World War II enthusiasts

Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2016

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Double Cross, by Ben Macintyre, is an unusual World War II story. It is the true and incredible story of how five Allied double agent spies working for the British Security Service, better known as MI5, fooled the Nazis into thinking the D-Day invasion, the biggest amphibious invasion of all time, would take place in a location that it would not take place. This deception, made by the Double Cross agents, the MI5 double agent section, was the most sophisticated and successful deception operation ever to take place. This book was very strong in the detail and interest departments, but weak in the department of being able to appeal to a large audience and was confusing at times. Despite this, I found Double Cross to be very good because of its interesting topic and extensive details.
This book was, overall, very well written because it was interesting. The abundant little facts and details draw in the reader. Ben Macintyre uses these facts to make the reader better understand who the spies were and how they were able to make D-Day a victory, despite the odds against them. The reader learns that these spies were not the typical James Bond or Mission Impossible type. They had basic intelligence receiving and transmitting training, very different motivations for participating in the war, and they came from all over the world. “For the D-Day spies were, without question, one of the oddest military units ever assembled. They included a bisexual Peruvian playgirl, a tiny Polish fighter pilot, a mercurial Frenchwoman, a Serbian seducer, and a deeply eccentric Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming” (5). They did not know martial arts and were not licensed to kill. Their roles were to plant lies into Hitler and the rest of Nazi Germany’s brains to make them the most unprepared for the D-Day invasion. Ben Macintyre does a very good job of making this story interesting and unique.
Though Double Cross was a very good book, it has a couple problems. The first of which is not too much of a problem and is quite obvious. This book is intended to be interesting to a select audience, which is okay if the reader is part of this group. The story is very interesting, but not exciting, meaning the author expects that the reader is interested in espionage stories and World War II stories, and the details chosen show that. They make the book interesting to people who like the topic. The book would seem very boring to a reader not interested in World War II history. If this type of reader were to read, Double Cross, I can predict that they will think this book drags on forever. It would also be more confusing to any reader not interested in the topic. These assumptions of the author and the book are reasonable because the book would not have been as good without it. People like me, who love World War II stories, would not find the book as interesting.
The second minor problem is that Double Cross gets a little confusing at times. It was clear that this book was going to be a bit confusing because of the complexity of the story, which is okay because it is a true story and is told how it happened. Ben Macintyre, did however, do a very good job of making the story as clear as possible. The story follows five Allied Forces spies which causes confusion at the beginning. It was easy to mix up their names and code names at the start of the book, but was no longer a problem by the middle of the book. The story also has a few important things to remember and can cause confusion if the reader forgets them. The story is also confusing to the reader because it is partially what the story is about. The spies had to confuse and deceive the Germans. Readers who are not interested in the topic will find the book to be more confusing than readers who like it. This is because non interested readers will be more prone to forget key elements and will cause the book to not make sense. Readers who like the book will be able to deal with the confusing bits and find that everything makes sense by the end.
To conclude on Double Cross, it was very detailed, had an engaging topic, and will only appeal to those with an interest in the Second World War. Double Cross, in my opinion, was a fascinating book. I loved the extensive detail about this historical series of events. It feels like Ben Macintyre picked apart everything that happened and explained it. It shows how much work he must have put into writing this book to make it the best and most historically accurate as possible. I expected to learn about how the Allies were able to make the Normandy invasion a very possible success before it even happened. My expectation were very much met in this book and I am happy to have read it because of the historical significance of it. I however, would like to reiterate that anyone who does not find interest in espionage and World War II should stay away from this book.

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Muhammad Nizam Bin Mohtar

A well written book. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2023

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A well written book. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

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anonimaniac

Macintyre never disappoints

Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2023

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The Brit double agents were a fascinating group of offbeat characters. It's amazing to read the extent to which the allues managed to break the enemy codes and weave huge deceptions. At the same time, it's heartbreaking to find how many Germans would have taken the opportunity to betray the nazis if they had been supported. And, how different would the world be if the allies hadn't been duped by Stalin etal?

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Bobby D.

How a chicken farmer won the Iron Cross

Reviewed in the United States on August 29, 2012

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This is Ben Macintyre's last book in what is stated to be his trilogy of WWII non-fiction British spy books (the other two being Operation Mincemeat and Agent ZigZag). Having read them all I would have to say this is his most ambitious and epic in scope although the other books are both well worth your attention. What we have here is the story of how Britain's MI5 controlled every single German spy in England with emphasis on the five most important double agents in operation "Fortitude". In fact MI5 controlled more spies than were actually alive as they created whole fictional networks of German spies. All of this lead to the greatest deception of WWII and perhaps changed history but no doubt saved countless lives during the D-Day landings on Normandy.
The rhythm of Macintyre's narrative takes some getting use too as he presents five individual spies and their stories and it takes a while to introduce them , their backgrounds, and both German and British handlers.. But take it in stride because as you become familiar with each individual and their back stories I promise you that the suspense builds and your interest in each individual case and fate increases. The last chapter is a great epilogue that brings each significant character's (spies, MI5 handlers, and Germans) post war lives to light.
Just one example: One of the spies, who before the war was a chicken hating Spanish chicken farmer living outside Barcelona, won the Iron Cross from the Germans... AFTER D-Day so total was his act of deception.
If I have a complaint about the book... it would be that there is material here for several books (and several movies). But no doubt about it this is a history that is a very entertaining well researched true life story. And a tribute to those who participated in the deception, lies, immorality, friendships, ideology, loyalty, love and survival that ultimately resulted in the success of Operation Fortitude. Your understanding of the D-Day landings will never be complete without learning of a Serbian playboy, a Polish fighter pilot, a bi-sexual Peruvian party girl, a Frenchwoman who cared more for her dog than the mission's success, and of course that chicken farmer who ended up winning the Iron Cross.

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Tribalat

Passionnant

Reviewed in France on August 18, 2019

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Récit passionnant d'une histoire mal connue.
Des agents doubles servant le Royaume-Uni et payés par l'Abwehr au profil improbable !

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Sid

Double fun

Reviewed in India on March 1, 2017

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I don't know how I missed it so far ! It's one of the best description of the double agent system i have read so far. Has both the allure of historical event as well as the high tempo excitement of a fiction thriller!Truly a classic

Peter Stait

gripping

Reviewed in Germany on June 10, 2014

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One of the few books I've read at a sitting. It reads like a thriller, and if there is a defect it is that one can't quite believe it could be true. But whether or not it has been 'improved' it is still well worth the time and cost.

Carlos Vivanco Pastore

Really fascinating

Reviewed in Spain on May 21, 2014

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I never thought that a story like this (totally unknown before) could actually catch my attention from the very first page to the last. A real eye opener to what actually happened during the days prior to D-Day.

Brian R. Martin

The shadowy world of espionage and counter espionage

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 31, 2012

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At the Tehran conference in 1943, the Allies laid the plans for the invasion of Europe, codenamed Operation Overlord. It was a high-risk strategy, and to maximize the chance of its success it was essential that for as long as possible the Germans should be uncertain where the invasion would take place. To this end, Operation Bodyguard was created. It was an immense undertaking, involving the construction of false tanks and aircraft, sending masses of fake radio signals and even `creating' whole dummy armies, apparently directed at spurious targets on the continent. But within this activity, the most important element of deception was that provided by Operation Fortitude. This was specifically aimed at convincing the Germans that the invasion would take place at the Pas de Calais, rather than the actual site chosen, the Normandy coast. It was hoped that when the invasion started, the Germans would assume it was only a diversion and so would not move their strong tank forces away from the Calais area, thus giving the Allies time to establish themselves on shore.

The core of Fortitude was the Double Cross system, where enemy spies were `turned' and became double agents acting for Britain. This is the subject of Ben Macintyre's book. It was a system developed by an eccentric, but brilliant, MI5 officer, `Tar' Robinson. By mid 1943, he realized that every German agent in Britain was actually being controlled by MI5 and so he could start feeding misinformation to the German handlers of the turned spies. In practice, the nucleus of Double Cross was just five agents. They were a very exotic bunch: a rich serial-seducing playboy Yugoslav (codename Tricycle), a Polish patriot fighter pilot (Brutus), a bisexual Peruvian playgirl (Bronx), an hysterical Frenchwoman (Treasure), and the most successful of them all, a Spaniard (Garbo) with a wild fertile imagination that proved extremely useful in constructing information to feed the Germans. In addition, there was another key player, a German citizen and friend of Tricycle called Johnny Jebsen. He spent most of his time in Portugal working for the German military secret service, the Abwehr, and did not openly work for the British until late in the war. Their handlers and MI5 officers were almost as strange. For example, Tar's team included John Masterman, whose life revolved around cricket and who referred to agents `making a good innings' and being ready to be `put in to bat'.

Feedback via the decrypts from Blechley Park showed that the deception was working, but tension mounted as D-Day approached, and events occurred that could have destroyed the whole operation. One was the activity of a freelance spy operating from Portugal who had been feeding bogus information to the Germans by purporting to be located in Britain. At one point, by chance, he was close to naming the actual D-Day landing place. Another was the unstable character of Treasure, who was besotted with her dog, and who blamed the British for its death. She seriously considered betraying the double cross operation to the Germans. Even more serious was the arrest of Jebsen in Portugal by the Abwehr and his removal to Berlin. This was done by a group that was part of the plot to kill Hitler, but was worried that if Jebsen defected it would be used as the pretext for Himmler to replace the Abwehr with his own SD security organization, and they themselves would be arrested. Ironically, Jebsen would have been only too willing to help them, but he was quickly transferred to the SD. Despite being tortured, he never revealed any secrets and Fortitude remained intact right up to D-Day and beyond.

Espionage and counter espionage are strange shadowy worlds, full of uncertainty, and where things are frequently not as they appear. For example, could one ever be sure that a double agent was not really a triple agent, working for the Germans? The agents were also difficult characters to control, motivated as they were by mixtures of patriotism, and baser reasons such as simple greed. This was particularly true of Jebsen, who ran lucrative and risky currency scams on the side. This often resulted in difficult relationships between the agents and their handlers. Amid this deadly serious game there was also sometimes humour, such as the utterly mad proposals by Flight Lieutenant Walker to set up an operation using squadrons of pigeons to destroy `incoming enemy pigeons', and later to run a `double cross' system for pigeons, whereby they would be infiltrated into German pigeon lofts! Needless to say there is no evidence that these schemes contributed anything to the war effort.

After the war, agents and MI5 officers went their own varied ways. Most settled quietly: Brutus in London; Garbo in South America, running a bookshop; Bronx in France to run a gift shop; Treasure in Michigan having eventually married an American serviceman. Tricycle continued his flamboyant lifestyle, marrying two 18 yr. olds. Jebsen was presumed killed in the final chaotic days of the collapse of Germany. Tar retired to look after a sheep farm; Masterman became Provost of an Oxford college, wrote detective novels and continued his life-long devotion to cricket. Walker of course spent the rest of his days breeding pigeons.

This is a superb book. Ben Macintyre's convincingly takes us into the topsy-turvy world of espionage and counter espionage. The narrative could have been disjoint, because it is essentially the stories of five double agents who never met, but he links them seamlessly via their roles in the ongoing operation, and gives a real feeling for the characters of the extraordinary players involved in the Double Cross operation and the crucial times in which they worked. It is also well researched and amply documented by references. I strongly recommend it.

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