D-Day, 6 June 1944, the turning point of the Second World War, was a victory of arms. But it was also a triumph for a different kind of operation: one of deceit, aimed at convincing the Nazis that Calais and Norway, not Normandy, were the targets of the 150,000-strong invasion force.
The deception involved every branch of Allied wartime intelligence - the Bletchley Park code-breakers, MI5, MI6, SOE, Scientific Intelligence, the FBI and the French Resistance. But at its heart was the 'Double Cross System', a team of double agents controlled by the secret Twenty Committee, so named because twenty in Roman numerals forms a double cross.
The key D-Day spies were just five in number, and one of the oddest military units ever assembled: a bisexual Peruvian playgirl, a tiny Polish fighter pilot, a Serbian seducer, a wildly imaginative Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming, and a hysterical Frenchwoman whose obsessive love for her pet dog very nearly wrecked the entire deception. Their enterprise was saved from catastrophe by a shadowy sixth spy whose heroic sacrifice is here revealed for the first time. Under the direction of an eccentric but brilliant intelligence officer in tartan trousers, working from a smoky lair in St James's, these spies would weave a web of deception so intricate that it ensnared Hitler's army and helped to carry thousands of troops across the Channel in safety.
These double agents were, variously, brave, treacherous, fickle, greedy and inspired. They were not conventional warriors, but their masterpiece of deceit saved countless lives. Their codenames were Bronx, Brutus, Treasure, Tricycle and Garbo. This is their story.
About the Author :
Ben Macintyre is a columnist and Associate Editor on The Times. He has worked as the newspaper's correspondent in New York, Paris and Washington. He is the author of eight previous books including Agent Zigzag, shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Galaxy British Book Award for Biography of the Year 2008, and the no. 1 bestseller Operation Mincemeat. He lives in London with his wife and three children.
Review :
Macintyre pulls together countless strands better than anybody hitherto, with an enthusiasm that prompts the reader to leap from page to page ... I have seldom enjoyed a spy story more than this one, and fiction will make dreary reading hereafter
Ben Macintyre has excelled himself ... an utterly gripping story. One can finish the book with the strangely proud sensation that in the Second World War perfidious Albion played the Great Game remarkably well
If you thought Antony Beevor's D-Day couldn't be bettered: [here is] the amazing story of the madcap spy network that bamboozled the Germans in the build-up to invasion
Enjoyable and engrossing ... For all its splendidly weird ploys and feints, Macintyre's book culminates in a stirring account of old-fashioned courage
Immensely satisfying ... Times columnist Macintyre has done his homework thoroughly and sketches out the characters of the double agents and their spymasters with sympathy and not a little humour ... in its own way it is as true a portrait of the war as Beevor's epic
Enthralling ... Macintyre is a master at leading the reader down some very tortuous paths while ensuring they never lose their bearings ... a book so gripping that I even found myself reading it in lifts
Exquisite entertainment
***** Crammed with anecdotes that will leave you laughing in disbelief ... an astonishing story of Britain's fake Nazi spies
Highly entertaining ... Macintyre is a first-class narrative historian and Double Cross is as pacy as a thriller and better written than most
***** Fascinating
A meticulous, thrilling account of the double bluff that paved the way for D-Day ... unfettered in the pages of history that read like the best adventure fiction, he becomes positively exuberant ... utterly gripping
**** Grippingly enjoyable
**** No one does cloak-and-gun history better; Macintyre mixes a professor's research with a journalist's eye for a good story and a forensic scientist's ability to spot the absurdities of war
Entertaining
