The Spy Game: Ben Macintyre Talks About \'Double Cross\'

By JOHN WILLIAMS

“Double Cross” is Ben Macintyre's third book about World War II espionage, following the acclaimed “Agent Zigzag” and “Operation Mincemeat.” When the MI5, Britain's intelligence service, realized that it had turned all of Germany's spies into double agents, it launched the Double Cross operation. The German spies fed an ornate series of lies to Berlin, helping the Allies win at Normandy by drawing the attention of the Nazis to other possible points of attack. In a recent interview via e-mail, Mr. Macintyre discussed whether he would have made a good spy, Churchill's knowledge of Double Cross, the possibility that German intelligence officers may have been sympathetic to the plan and more. Below are excerpts from the conversation.

How well known are these individual stories at this point in history? Was the main appeal of writing the book a synthesis of the available details?

The broad outlines of the Double Cross deception have been known since 1972, when Sir John Masterman, the former chairman of the double agent committee, controversially published his account of the operation in defiance of official secrecy. A few of the agents published “memoirs” after the war, of varying reliability. But the detailed stories of the individual spies have only emerged with MI5's release of its wartime files. The opportunity to pull together these different strands, and tell the story of Double Cross in full for the first time, was irresistible.

The Double Cross plan wasn't introduced to Churchill until fairly late in the game. Why?

Churchill was fascinated by the espionage game. Too fascinated, in the view of some intelligence officers, who feared that with his natural imaginative ebullience he might come up with his own extravagant additions to the Double Cross plan, and possibly wreck it. So he was not introduced to the system until it was already firmly in place, and even then he was told only the broad outlines: in part to give him cover, since he could then deny knowing about the various illegal and underhand aspects of it.

As you write, “a number of senior officers [in the Abwehr, Germany's intelligence agency,] were actively opposed to the Hitler regime.” And some historians “believe [German intelligence chief Alexis] von Roenne was deliberately sabotaging the German war effort from within.” How much do we know for certain about what the Abwehr did and didn't suspect? What are the chances that it was effectively (though not explicitly) working in concert with Double Cross agents?

We will probably never know the full extent of opposition to Hitler within the Abwehr - many anti-Nazi officers were killed in the aftermath of the July Plot, and those who survived carefully covered their tracks. What is certain is that within German intelligence a combination of inefficiency, corruption and, i n some instances, willful blindness to the truth, worked to the Allies' advantage. I am convinced that several senior German officers knew very well that they were being fed false information, and chose to say nothing - some did so out of anti-Nazi convictions, but others played along because it was simply not in their personal interests to make waves.

How do you think the Allied invasion of France would have played out without the existence of Double Cross?

“What if?” history is a tricky game, but there is no doubt that the senior planners of D-Day - including Eisenhower and [British General Bernard] Montgomery - believed that the Double Cross operation had played a pivotal role in the victory. It is, of course, impossible to quantify how many lives were saved, and how much of an advantage was achieved through the deception.

If just one of the agents were really still acting for Germany, it could have been disastrous for the Allies - even worse than ha ving no double agents working for them at all. Was it worth the risk?

It was a huge gamble, but the Allies had one great (and unprecedented) advantage that loaded the dice in their favor. Through the decoding of Abwehr wireless messages at Bletchley Park, the Double Cross team could tell exactly what the Germans thought of each agent. The spies themselves were quite unaware they were being monitored in this way; if one or more of them had been playing a triple game, the evidence would have appeared in the intercepts - or so MI5 believed. With hindsight, the risk was worth it, but only because it worked.

There are several funny stories in which spies bungled their entrance into the UK and were caught. Do you have a favorite example?

My favorite failed spy is one who managed to row ashore in a dinghy, loaded down with explosives and a bicycle, on the rugged east coast of Scotland. He somehow managed to make his way to a train station and asked for a ticket to London. On being told it was “10 and six,” he doled out 10 pounds and six shillings, rather than 10 shilling and sixpence - and was immediately arrested, on the grounds that anyone wandering around rural Scotland who did not understand how the money worked must be a spy. He spent the rest of the war in prison, betrayed by his ignorance of the duodecimal currency.

Juan Pujol García (Agent Garbo) made up dozens of people in the stories he told, with his work coming “to resemble a limitless, multicharacter, ever-expanding novel.” What was the most outlandish thing he put over?

The most bizarre element of Garbo's fictional network was the Brotherhood of the Aryan World Order, a group of sinister, anti-Semitic Welsh fascists. These people were, of course, entirely invented, but the German intelligence service remained convinced that Wales was filled with enthusiastic ultra-nationalist Nazis plotting to overthrow the government. Garbo knew this, and told them exactly what they wanted to hear, creating a team of fake Welsh spies to feed false information to Berlin.

At one point, you write that spies for Germany were subjected to “intense interrogation using every method to extract the truth short of physical violence.” You don't explicitly make comparisons to current debates about torture, but is that a significant detail to you?

Indeed it is. The British interrogators were as hard as nails, and uncompromising in their determination to extract the truth, but they established a concrete rule that no spy should ever be subjected to physical coercion. There was nothing soft-hearted about this: they believed that information extracted by violence was unreliable, since someone under torture may say whatever he or she thinks the interrogator wants to hear, simply to stop the pain.

Most of Double Cross' tactics would be easily foiled now using Google Earth, among many other technologies. Is subterfuge a lost art in our age of information saturation?

Some elements of Double Cross would be unthinkable in a digital age. On the other hand, digital evidence can also be falsified. How easy would it be, for example, to plant a network of fake spies on the Internet, to ensure that when the other side went hunting for confirmation they would find it? The technology of Google Earth might reveal that there was no real army assembling in Kent; but then doctoring the technology to give precisely that impression would hardly be beyond the wit of today's intelligence services. Technology changes, but the art of deception hardly changes at all.

Can you recommend a relatively obscure book about the spy game that you think more readers should know?

“The Man who Never Was,” by Ewen Montagu, remains the best book about wartime espionage written by an active participant - incomplete, and dry in parts, it nonetheless summons up the ingenuity and sheer eccentricity of those who played this strange and dangerous game.

Do you think you would make a good spy?

I think I would have been a hopeless spy. I love telling stories, and am almost entirely unable to keep a secret. Novelists make good spies (and most of the great spy-writers have been spies - Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, John Le Carré). But we nonfiction writers need to stay wedded to truth and reality, which I suspect makes us pretty useless as espionage material.

Are you done with World War II for now? And with espionage? What's next?

With “Double Cross,” I feel I have completed a journey of sorts, although I wouldn't rule out a return to the Second World War in future books. Espionage still seems to me the ideal backdrop for exploring questions of loyalty, betrayal, sacrifice and love. My next book will stay with spies, I expect, but shift historical focus.