IN THE W AR OF 1939 T 0 1945

225 Pages·2016·10.67 MB·English

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THE DOUBLE-CROSS SYSTEM
IN THE WAR OF 1939 T01945
by J. C. Masterman
with a Foreword by Norman Holmes Pearson
“By means of the double-cross system we
actively ran and controlled the German espi­
onage system in this country.’’
This extraordinary claim is made in this
British top secret intelligence report written
by an Oxford don at the end of World War II.
The Masterman Report, now made available
for the first time, with the permission of
Her Majesty’s Government, describes the
double-cross system and offers an account
of its workings which clearly substantiates
the claim.
The double-cross system was a remarkable
apparatus of deception whereby German
agents captured in Great Britain were in­
duced to serve the Allied cause by supplying
the German officers with information de­
vised and manipulated by British intelli­
gence. In the Masterman Report the theory
and practice of this device, which in the end
contributed substantially to the Allied mili­
tary success, is laid out in fascinating
detail. The author discloses the careful
process by which the captured spy was
brought into effective British service and
the necessity for total psychological em­
pathy between the British spymaster and
the Nazi agent. He describes the problem of
providing credible messages for return to
the enemy and, ultimately, the use of this
“traffic” in the actual conduct of strategic
deception. Here at last is the explanation of
how Hitler and the German army were fooled
into believing that the Allied D Day landings
would be made in the Pas de Calais rather
than in Normandy.
continued on back flap
This book was published by ANU Press between 1965–1991.
This republication is part of the digitisation project being carried
out by Scholarly Information Services/Library and ANU Press.
This project aims to make past scholarly works published
by The Australian National University available to
a global audience under its open-access policy.
THE DOUBLE-CROSS SYSTEM
in the War of 1939 to 1 945
THE DOUBLE-CROSS SYSTEM
IN THE WAR OF 1939 TO 1945
BY J. C. MASTERMAN
AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY PRESS • CANBERRA 1972
To the Earl of Swinton, P.C., G.B.E., C.H., M.C., D.L.,
amongst whose many services to Great Britain
the Chairmanship of Security Executive 1940-42
was not the least.
Copyright © 1972 by Yale University
Crown Copyright reserved. This book may not be
reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form
(except by reviewers for the public press)
without written permission from the publishers.
Library of Congress catalog card number: 71-189015
National Library of Australia Card No. and ISBN 0 7081 0459 2
Designed by Sally Sullivan
and set in Linotype Times Roman type.
Printed in Australia at The Griffin Press,
Adelaide, South Australia.
Published in Australia by
Australian National University Press,
Canberra.
CONTENTS
Foreword by Norman Holmes Pearson ix
Preface xvii
List of Abbreviations xxi
1 The Theory and Practice of Double Cross
2 Origins of the Double-Cross System 36
3 Autumn 1940 46
4 Organisation for Controlling the
Double-Cross System 60
5 The Agents’ Traffic in 1941 71
6 Experimental Plans in 1941 82
7 The Agents in 1 941 90
8 Developments in 1942 101
9 Work and History of the Agents in 1942 1 12
10 Activities in 1943 127
1 1 Deception to Cover the Normandy Landings and
the Invasion of France
145
12 Use of the System in the Last Year of the War 164
13 Conclusion 186
Appendix 1 : Double-Cross Agents in the
United Kingdom 190
Appendix 2: Tricycle’s American
Questionnaire 196
Index
199
FOREWORD
Sir John Masterman's account of the double-cross system
in British intelligence is an important historical document.
Masterman is a trained historian and is well aware that he
is describing a chapter of World War II which deserves
being known and remembered. Masterman is also a skilled
narrator. The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939 to
1945 is an engrossing book as well as a highly serious one.
There is no need to vouch for the authenticity of the
episodes and cases he describes of spies who worked ostensi­
bly for the Germans but, in fact, and unknown to the
Germans, were working for Great Britain. The official origin
of The Double-Cross System is sufficient affidavit. Never­
theless I can endorse their authenticity, having been aware
of many of the cases in connection with my own war work.
My particular counterespionage affiliation was with M.I.6.
This was the British agency responsible for intelligence
operations outside the United Kingdom; the “Military In­
telligence” of its name was an anachronism. B.I.a, which
handled the counterespionage operations Masterman de­
scribes, was a section of M.I.5, the British internal security
agency roughly equivalent to the American F.B.I. What
went on within the United Kingdom was, properly enough,
Great Britain’s affair. But those enemy spies who were un­
covered there and persuaded to work for the British from
then on, thus double-crossing their original masters, of course
had ultimate contacts outside of the country. Thus the co­
operation of M.I.6 and its opposite numbers in Allied
intelligence services was inevitably involved.
Viewed in retrospect, certain British contributions to the
ix
FOREWORD
X
art of intelligence operations seem outstanding. In the field
of interception the results were splendid and increasingly
dominant, as the many published accounts certify. The tech­
niques of intercepting messages sent by wireless were highly
developed. So was the science of direction-finding by which
the location of the transmitting instrument could be deter­
mined. By the constant monitoring of all wireless traffic of
any sort it was possible to check not only what the double
agent sent out, if he was his own wireless operator as he
usually was, but also messages sent to him. It was possible
too, by careful study, to evaluate the critical reception by
the enemy of what they received and exchanged amongst
themselves. This was the test of any plan of deception. Not
the least of course among the benefits was the simple fact
that the existence of new spies became known. In this way
both the skeleton and the nervous system of German espi­
onage within England could be outlined and controlled.
Another contribution was that of so-called overt intelli­
gence, by which scholarly sources, when studied by scholars,
revealed information which had long since been gathered
but already been covered by dust. Timetables for tides in­
volved in invasion landings, the location of bombing targets
within metropolitan areas, amounts of precipitation to pro­
vide against and rainy seasons to avoid: these not-at-all
trivial data emerged from the otherwise ignored pages of
books rather than from the impossibly delayed reports of
agents. American intelligence services learned much from
the British example of research and analysis carried on at
the universities. But the double-cross system was of course
not itself involved.
Certainly the most imaginatively appealing success of
British intelligence work was the operation of double agents,
and through them the practice of deception. The center of
this activity was in the B Division of M.I.5. At least it was
the center of what Masterman describes. For as he states,
this was an activity which involved many branches: M.I.5,
M.I.6, the Admiralty, the Air Force, the Home Office, and
the Foreign Office, among others.
FOREWORD xi
As in World War I, the British government partly by
necessity, partly by design, drew on the universities and the
professions for additional brains. Amateurs joined hands
with professionals in the intelligence establishment. Work
with double agents was a game made for one amateur—
J. C. Masterman—who was a university don and an enthusi­
astic cricketer. His mind was tuned to the pitch of the ball
in this sport whose hazards were so real and whose rewards
were so immense. This was the greatest test match of the
century. It is by no mere rhetorical flourish that Masterman
can refer to two masters of cricket when he remarks of two
masterly double agents, “If in the double-cross world Snow
was the W. G. Grace of the early period, then Garbo was
certainly the Bradman of the later years.” Skills were in­
volved in the double-cross game, and absolute coordination.
The British were masters and whatever Americans did sim­
ilarly in the European and Mediterranean theaters stemmed
from British direction and example.
The sense of example which The Double-Cross System
provides gives the book a particular merit. It is a manual of
operation. There has never been one like it. When Americans
midway in World War II were preparing for their own
external counterespionage system, its novices were given,
half desperately, Compton Mackenzie’s Water on the Brain
(1933). Manuals on either espionage or counterespionage
are after all rare. Graham Greene’s satiric Our Man in
Havana ( 1958) is perhaps as good as most. Edward Weis-
miller's novel The Serpent Sleeping (1962) is one of the few
accounts of the handling and psychology of a turned agent,
in this case after the invasion of France, when German
agents attempted to operate behind the American lines.
Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu’s The Man Who
Never Was ( 1953) is the most famous account of strategic
deception and the most detailed. Duff Cooper in his novel
Operation Heartbreak (1950) had told the story earlier,
but Montagu, as a member of Naval Intelligence, was a
chief begetter and the case officer of this completest of de­
ceptions. By means of false messages found on a body, itself