Ben Macintyre is back. Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies is the last instalment in his trilogy about British espionage in World War Two, following the hugely successful Agent Zig-Zag and Operation Mincemeat.
In Double Cross, Macintrye tells of how a cabal of eccentric double agents hoodwinked the Nazis into believing that the allied invasion of Europe would come through Norway or the Pays de Calais. Or that is the narrative he presents in his uniquely compelling and humorous style. Here is what reviewers have made of it so far.
Sir Max Hastings was ecstatic, but not uncritical, in the Sunday Times (£):
‘I quibble with this book’s subtitle The True Story of the D-Day Spies. When addressing characters with avowed multiple loyalties, not least to themselves, and heavily dependent on their own testimony for evidence about their behaviour, we can never be confident of truth… I have seldom enjoyed a spy story more than this one, and fiction will make dreary reading hereafter.’
On the other hand, historian Simon Winder subverted Macintyre’s analysis by arguing that the double agents’ preposterous intelligence endangered the invasion.
‘But even the most cursory reader of Macintyre’s account has to be chilled by the stupidity of it all. A counter-argument could be made that the agents themselves were the greatest threat to D-Day. With total air, naval and code-breaking superiority by the summer of 1944, the allies had effectively sealed Britain off. Left to their own devices, the Germans had no idea what was going on and were obliged to spread ever thinner forces across dozens of possible invasion locations from Norway to the Pyrenees.
The only substantial German source therefore was a handful of weirdos in St James’s, prone to tiresome cricket analogies and themselves harbouring a Soviet agent. The Germans came extremely close to realising that the agents were fakes – the Abwehr had been shut down earlier in the year, its functions taken over by the ferocious Reich Main Security Office and its disloyal and corrupt officials arrested, tortured and killed. The greatest danger to D-Day (aside from bad weather) now became the loopy telegrams and invisible ink letters sent as part of “Operation Fortitude”. If even one of the agents were to be blown (and one was teetering on the verge of giving herself away out of irritation that the British had accidentally killed her dog), then it would become clear that the one place they were not talking about was the real landing site, ie Normandy. It is a tribute to Macintyre’s skill that the reader is haggard with anxiety as D-Day approaches – as, at any moment, one of these people could betray the great Anglo-American crusade. But I am not sure that this is the effect he wishes to achieve.’
Double Cross: the True Story of the D-Day Spies by Ben Macintyre is published by Bloomsbury
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