Double Cross

In the early hours of June 6, 1944, some 150,000 Allied soldiers came ashore in Normandy, and the casualties were far lighter than anyone had dared hope. Behind that military success lay an elaborate lie. Operation Fortitude, working alongside the Double Cross system, which took captured German agents and turned them against their masters, convinced the Nazi high command that the real blow would fall at Calais or in Norway. It remains the most sophisticated and effective deception campaign ever mounted, and it helped decide the war at its most critical point. Ben Macintyre tells this story through the people who lived it, something that has not been done this way before. At the center is the officer who directed the system, a clever and polished intelligence professional, along with the MI5 case officers who handled the double agents and their opposite numbers in German intelligence, who were being steadily fooled. The heart of the operation was a group of five spies, and they were an unlikely crew: a dashing Serbian playboy, a Polish fighter pilot, a bisexual Peruvian party girl, a thoroughly eccentric Spaniard, and a volatile Frenchwoman. Together they formed what may have been one of the strangest and most gifted military units ever put together. Macintyre brings his thorough research, his eye for the absurd and his storytelling skill to the account. The result is a gripping narrative of how these spies spun a web so intricate that it trapped Hitler's army and helped carry thousands of troops safely across the Channel on D-Day.