Double Cross: The True Story of The D-Day Spies - Hardcover

Macintyre, Ben

3.97

12,409 ratings by Goodreads

9781408819906: Double Cross: The True Story of The D-Day Spies

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1408819902 ISBN 13: 9781408819906

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012

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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.

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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

(Max Hastings, Sunday Times)

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 (Antony Beevor, Daily Telegraph)

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 (Mail on Sunday)

Enjoyable and engrossing ... For all its splendidly weird ploys and feints, Macintyre's book culminates in a stirring account of old-fashioned courage (Boyd Tonkin, Independent)

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 (Oliver Moody, The Times)

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 (Evening Standard)

Exquisite entertainment (Andro Linklater, Spectator)

***** Crammed with anecdotes that will leave you laughing in disbelief ... an astonishing story of Britain's fake Nazi spies

(Metro)

Highly entertaining ... Macintyre is a first-class narrative historian and Double Cross is as pacy as a thriller and better written than most (Sunday Telegraph)

***** Fascinating (Daily Express)

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