IN THE WAR OF 1939 T 0 1945 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 1 0 1 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 X FOREWORD 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.