Double Cross - The True Story of the D-Day Spies (Ben Macintyre, 2012)

The Wall Street Journal has three sections spread across the Friday and Saturday editions that generally have some interesting reviews, articles, etc. - I save these for PJ, who often catches up on the stack when we are car-tripping on one of our little vacations.  On last year's trip to Laguna Beach and Santa Monica, she noticed reviews on two books about WWII spying.  Since we both are fans of pretty much any movie involving Nazis and spies (particularly 1940s vintage), she ended up getting both books for me as Christmas gifts.

So this was the first one I had a chance to read - had pretty high expectations, and they were exceeded.

I really think, or at least hope, that they do a new movie version based on the "real" story - so many more facts have been declassified in comparison to information available when those charming movies were made - and the "real" story is just phenomenal.

This author focuses on five double agents and their British handlers.  These five were about as unlikely as possible - described on the dust jacket as "a dashing Serbian playboy, a Polish fighter pilot, a bi-sexual Peruvian party girl, a deeply eccentric Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming, and a volatile Frenchwoman [with an] obsessive love for her pet dog . . ."  Yeah, that was the core team.

I wasn't aware that every single spy based in England and working for Germany had, by some point in the middle of the war years, either been killed, imprisoned, or turned toward working for England as a double agent.  German spy-handlers being duped sometimes had their own reasons for not pushing too hard to find out what was going on - money, prestige, anti-Hitler animus, etc.  But all in all, it just seemed that the Brits were better at this game (assisted in part by code-breaking skill).

Among the challenges in running all of these double agents:  providing information to Germany from each that was good enough to give them credibility with their German handlers, yet not so good that it constituted actionable intelligence.  Amazing how often the mails or other communications channels were just a bit too slow - such that the double agent could send true, actionable intelligence that arrived just a tad late - but the Germans didn't seem to note this pattern or find it suspicious.  All this activity built up to a grand deception for D-Day, when it was critical that German forces be concentrated near Calais (rather than Normandy).  A flood of misinformation was provided, and the German forces in fact were deployed just about exactly as would be expected if the double-cross agents reports were believed.  The British were able to intercept messages indicating that pretty much direct quotes from double-cross agents were getting all the way to Hitler himself.

How much did it help?  I have to believe it was quite significant.  Even if plenty of other factors were involved, and even if the author might be prone to overstate their role.

At any rate, it makes a sensational story.