Double Cross

Ben Macintyre, “Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies”,  Crown Publishers, 2012, 358 pp

I read this book at the same time as “Agent Garbo” and most of the facts are the same in both. If you only choose to read one of the two I recommend this book as it covers a broader area and other double agents as well as Garbo (see that review previous to this one).

The successful D-Day invasion on 6 June 1944 by the 150,000-strong force owes its’ success to a number of double-agents the Nazis thought worked for them, but in fact worked for the allies.  It is just amazing, at least to me, that every single Nazi agent in Britain worked for the allies and that the entire British spy system ultimately was paid for by Nazi funds channeled to their “agents”.  This book documents how those agents, mostly working from 58 St. James Street, London, convinced the Nazis that the expected attack would target Calais and Norway.  Panzer divisions should not mobilize to reinforce the Normandy areas, any attack there would just be a diversion. 

The key D-Day spies were just five in number, and their enterprise was saved from catastrophe by a shadowy sixth spy, Johnny Jebsen, known as Artist.  The others codenames were Bronx, Brutus, Treasure, Tricycle and, most important of all, Garbo.

I have toured the Normandy invasion sites twice in the past twenty years.  While reading this book (along with another book: “Agent Garbo”) it was impressed on me that the key element to the invasion success was the failure of the Nazis to reinforce the coast with the 15^th army located in the Calais sector.  The guides I had on my tours of the area never mentioned this fact and only emphasized the coastline defenses Rommel had installed as the key to German efforts at defeating any attack. 

Pg. 4:  Robertson and the small team of intelligence officers under his command specialized in turning German spies into double agents.  This was the “Double Cross” system, coordinated by the intensely secret Twenty Committee, so named because the number twenty in Roman numerals, XX, forms a double cross.  In June 1943, Robertson reached the startling conclusion that every single German agent in Britain was actually under his control.  This meant that Robertson’s team of double agents could now begin feeding the Germans a gigantic, war-changing lie. 

Pg. 5:  The D-Day deception plot involved every branch of the secret war machine: scientists laid false trails, engineers built dummy tanks, radio operators put up a barrage of fake signals, and counterfeit generals led nonexistent armies toward targets that were never in danger.  While the overall, global deception campaign was code-named “Bodyguard,” the plan specifically covering the cross-Channel invasion, the pivotal element in the deception, was named “Fortitude,” the quality most essential to its success.  Operation Fortitude, the ruse to bottle up German troops in the Pas de Calais and keep them there, depended on Robertson’s spies and a web of deception so intricate and strong that it would snare Hitler’s armies and help to carry thousands of soldiers across the Channel in safety.

Pg. 35: The task of intercepting enemy spies was made immeasurably simpler after cryptanalysts cracked the Abwehr wireless code and began reading Germany’s most closely held secrets.  The breaking of the Enigma (Ultra), the German cipher machine, was the most important intelligence triumph of this, or any other war.

Pg. 36:  Of the twenty-five German spies sent to Britain between September 3 and November 12, 1940, all but one was caught (the lone evader shot himself); five were executed; fifteen were imprisoned; and four became double agents. 

Pg. 74:  Anthony Blunt was a Soviet spy recruited by the Soviets in 1937.  In 1941, Guy Liddell, the head of B Section of the British spy system took on Blunt as his personal assistant. Blunt would continue to feed secrets to Moscow for the balance of the war.  This leakage of information to Moscow represented the single gravest threat to the Double Cross operation.  If Soviet intelligence was penetrated by the Germans, then the information he was passing to Moscow would end up in Berlin.  Blunt would hand the Soviets a staggering total of 1,771 documents. And not for an instant did the Double Cross team suspect the double agent in their midst.

Pg. 93:  Popov (Tricycle) was sent to the U.S. by his Nazi handlers.  Hoover held him at arm’s length and prevented him from conducting any active espionage.  Popov, in response, went on a spending binge of epic proportions and his scale of expense seemed aimed at embarrassing Hoover.  Within a short time he had acquired an apartment on Park Avenue, a summer house in fashionable Locust Valley on Long Island, a red Buick convertible, and another girl friend, the French film star Simone Simon.  Among the accoutrements he considered necessary were a butler, a Chinese manservant, and a team of gardeners; he had his apartment refurbished by an interior designer and spent twelve thousand dollars on furniture, and antiques.  He drank and danced at the Stork Club, skied in Sun Valley, and motored south for a sunny vacation in Florida.  When the Germans failed to send more money, he demanded a loan from the FBI in order to pay his tailor, shirt maker, florist, and staff.  Popov treated the FBI as his private bank. 

Pg. 177:  Operation Fortitude had several interlinked aims: it sought to convince the Germans that the attack on Normandy was merely diversionary a ploy to draw off German forces before the main thrust of the invasion in the Pas de Calais; at the same time it sought to lure the Germans into preparing for an attack on Norway, along with another landing in the area of Bordeaux.  Crucially, the threat to the Pas de Calais would be maintained for as long as possible after the Normandy landings, to ensure that the Germans did not send a large body of troops south to repel the real invasion.  There were simply not enough soldiers in Britain to do what the planners wanted the Germans to believe they were about to do, so they invented them.  An entire ghost army dubbed the First United States Army Group, or FUSAG, was supposedly stationed directly across the Channel from the Pas de Calais and would be led by General Patton.

Pg. 179: The paranoid Soviets convinced themselves that they were also victims of a doublecross operation because the information the Cambridge Five (Blunt, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and John Cairncross) were sending was so high-grade it must be deliberate disinformation; and since the information from the five tallied perfectly, this was further proof that they were in league.

Pg. 245:  Johnny Jebsen (Artist), a member of the Abwehr, was a one-man production line of secrets.  His reports contained an extraordinary wealth of detail about flying bombs, economic conditions in Germany, intelligence reports, and even an account of opinions expressed by Hitler and Himmler and Kaltenbrunner. His information was gleaned from no less than thirty-nine subsources and informants, ranging from Abwehr secretaries to Canaris himself.  Jebsen, although suspected of being a double agent and a crook, was kidnapped by the Nazis because they were afraid he could derail the 20 July, 1944 plan to assassinate Hitler.  Jebsen knew enough to completely derail the doublecross operation.  Yet, even though interrogated by the Gestapo, he apparently said nothing.  The last anyone ever heard of him was from another prisoner who saw a very bloody Jebsen returned to his cell and exclaiming to his guards that they could at least provide him with a clean shirt.

Pg. 307:  American cryptanalyst had broken the Japanese wireless code in 1940.  Therefore the Allies were able to read the enemy’s sensitive diplomatic cables as soon as they were sent.  The Japanese ambassador to Germany, Oshima, supplied the most interesting reading of all.  His commentaries were like having a bug in Hitler’s headquarters.  He furnished copious information on U-boats, mobile forces, military production, technological developments, the effects of Allied bombing, and the state of the German economy.  In November 1943, he was taken of a four-day tour of German fortifications on the Channel coast of France.  His resulting twenty-page report described the location, strength, and weaponry of every German division, the dimensions of antitank ditches, and the layout of machine-gun emplacements. 

Pg. 311:  The Normandy invasion force comprised seven thousand warships and landing craft, eleven thousand planes, and nearly 160,000 men.  One British airborne division would try to secure the eastern flank, while American forces would land to the west by parachute and glider; shortly after dawn, six Allied infantry divisions—three American, two British, and one Canadian—would storm onto five selected Normandy beaches.  By the end of the first day of the invasion, the Allies had suffered at least 10,000 casualties and 2,500 dead. But 156,000 men had landed in France from the sea and 23,000 from the air securing a bridgehead in France.

Alarmingly, on June 9^th the mighty First Panzer Division, 25,000 strong, was ordered to head south from the Pas de Calais to join the counterattack against the Allied bridgehead.  But then came Garbo’s explicit warning that the Normandy invasion was a ruse specifically designed to draw off troops from the Calais before the main assault.  The order to the First Panzers was countermanded.   If doublecross had failed, then the invasion would have failed, and D-Day would have ended in a massacre of Allied troops.  Eisenhower had said “Just keep the Fifteenth Army out of my hair for the first two days,” he got more than 15 days.  A month after D-Day, no fewer than twenty-two German divisions were still held back in the Fifteenth Army sector.  Hitler had “reposed an almost mystic confidence in Garbo,” MI5 later concluded.  Far from realizing they had been fooled, the Germans assumed that Allied plans had changed.  On August 30, Garbo reported that the planned attack on the Pas de Calais had been canceled, and the Germans believed him, as they had believed him from the start.