Uncovering the Untold Story of the D-Day Spies: Double Cross

Ann Heavener: As always, the product is great and the delivery speed exceeded my expectations!

United States on Nov 22, 2023

anonimaniac: The Brit double agents were a fascinating group of offbeat characters. It's amazing to read the extent to which the allues managed to break the enemy codes and weave huge deceptions. At the same time, it's heartbreaking to find how many Germans would have taken the opportunity to betray the nazis if they had been supported. And, how different would the world be if the allies hadn't been duped by Stalin etal?

United States on Oct 29, 2023

Amazon Customer: Thank you Ben Macintyre

Great place to start if you love spy films. Very well researched and informative.

Highly recommended!

United States on Oct 29, 2023

Jl Adcock: Crooks, conmen, eccentrics and a small dog are amongst the cast of characters that feature in Ben Macintyre's excellent book on the spies who worked on Double Cross. Marshalling a huge amount of material into this highly readable book, Macintyre shows how a disparate bunch of people who would have found it hard to use their talents in peace time came to work on one of the greatest pieces of deception of all time. At times, the overlapping plots of deceit and deception that were employed against the Germans can be confusing, but overall the book comes together well as we head towards the story of the D-Day landings in 1944. Double Cross ensured that the German army was deceived into thinking that the assault on Europe would happen not on the Normandy beaches, but in other locations, including the Mediterranean, Norway and the Pas de Calais. As a result, the Allies were able to land in Normandy and establish a bridgehead to ensure the invasion was successful.

The deceits and plots along the way are mind-boggling in scope and cleverness. As the book makes clear, such was the ingenuity of Double Cross that for a good chunk of the war British intelligence knew more about what...

United Kingdom on Jan 05, 2023

Joey Boden: Double Cross, by Ben Macintyre, is an unusual World War II story. It is the true and incredible story of how five Allied double agent spies working for the British Security Service, better known as MI5, fooled the Nazis into thinking the D-Day invasion, the biggest amphibious invasion of all time, would take place in a location that it would not take place. This deception, made by the Double Cross agents, the MI5 double agent section, was the most sophisticated and successful deception operation ever to take place. This book was very strong in the detail and interest departments, but weak in the department of being able to appeal to a large audience and was confusing at times. Despite this, I found Double Cross to be very good because of its interesting topic and extensive details.
This book was, overall, very well written because it was interesting. The abundant little facts and details draw in the reader. Ben Macintyre uses these facts to make the reader better understand who the spies were and how they were able to make D-Day a victory, despite the odds against them. The reader learns that these spies were not the typical James Bond or Mission Impossible type. They had basic...

United States on Apr 29, 2016

Lady Fancifull: Ben Macintyre, who rather seems to have cornered the market in factual books about espionage in this country, both during the Second World War and then later, during the period of the Cold War, has here written a complex account of the part that not just spies, but those who were double agents, or even triple agents, turned, and turned again - or always firmly on the Allied side, but convincing Germany they were her spies.

At times, this engagingly written but dizzying book - I struggled to keep track of the agent, their British code name, their German code name, plus the fact that code-names sometimes got revamped and changed - read almost like a comedy, as the subterfuges dreamed up got wilder and wilder. In fact, the `game' of course was deadly, and the double agents were dangerously playing not only with their own lives, but the lives of thousands of others.

Macintyre concentrates on a handful of agents, who were employed, so their German handlers thought, to provide information about Britain and her military plans. In fact, these agents - flamboyant, hedonistic, larger-than-life to a man and woman, were feeding their German handlers misinformation, and as the...

United Kingdom on Aug 02, 2014

cimic: Ben Macintyre has written what could prove to be the definitive account of the Double Cross system, operated by Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) during WW11, under which captured German spies were given a stark choice: collaborate with us against the Nazi regime or face execution or imprisonment. For most of those deemed suitable to be `turned' it was an offer they couldn't refuse.

B1A Section of the SIS comprised a small collection of able individualists from many different walks of life who became a cohesive group under the brilliant leadership of TAR Robertson (aka Tar). The section was tasked with identifying German agents sent to operate in Britain, capturing them, and where practicable using them as `double' agents to feed misinformation to their German spymasters in order to impede the German war effort in various ways.

Thanks to the work cryptographers at Bletchley Park the British had cracked the wireless codes used by the Abwehr and were able to monitor and decode their transmissions. Thus they were forewarned about every Abwehr agent despatched to Britain and were able to capture each and every one of them, without exception.
Following the...

United Kingdom on Jan 18, 2013

Dean: When you consider writing a review that runs counter to the "accepted wisdom" represented by an enormous body of editorial and reader acclaim, you ask yourself why do this? In the case of "Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies", the hype begins with many editorial reviews that are peppered with the following florid adjectives:amazing,gripping(4x),astounding,entertaining,winning,stupendous,nail-biting,breathless,riveting,scintillating,edge-of-the-seat,tense,incredible,spellbinding...all offered by none less than the publishing elite, such as WSJ,The Monitor,Washington Post,New Yorker,Boston Globe and others with equal pedigree. Then there are the readers with parallel enthusiasm. To wit 50 reviews...only 11 with fewer than 4 stars and the huge majority "over the top." And let's remember this is said to be the "true story" of D-Day trickery. I will admit I was an avid consumer of such enthusiasms being a student of WWII and the D-Day event near the top of crucial events during that perilous time.
But wait, as is told in a NYT news story published this week, there is strong evidence that what I would call the equivalent of "grade inflation" has with some stealth crept...

United States on Sep 01, 2012

S Riaz: Anyone who has read anything by Ben Macintyre before will know that they are in for a treat. He is a wonderful storyteller and, in this book, he is on territory he seems to understand brilliantly and relish. The Allied military planners were working on the the great assault on Nazi Occupied Europe - the D-Day invasion would decide the outcome of the war. In order to convince the Germans that the invasion was coming where it was not actually coming, and not coming in the place where it was actually coming, a huge amount of effort was expended. There were dummy planes, tanks and even dummy armies in place to fool the Germans. There were even pigeons masquerading as German carrier pigeons (lots more on pigeons in the book - they play a larger part than you might imagine!). There were impersonators to convince the Germans that military leaders were elsewhere. Counterfeit generals led non-existent armies. Radio operators created a barrage of fake signals. Finally, there were spies. The Allies had a harder task than it appears in hindsight, knowing that it succeeded, as the targer range for a cross-Channel invasion was small. There were only a handful of suitable spots for a massed...

United Kingdom on Apr 13, 2012

Brian R. Martin: At the Tehran conference in 1943, the Allies laid the plans for the invasion of Europe, codenamed Operation Overlord. It was a high-risk strategy, and to maximize the chance of its success it was essential that for as long as possible the Germans should be uncertain where the invasion would take place. To this end, Operation Bodyguard was created. It was an immense undertaking, involving the construction of false tanks and aircraft, sending masses of fake radio signals and even `creating' whole dummy armies, apparently directed at spurious targets on the continent. But within this activity, the most important element of deception was that provided by Operation Fortitude. This was specifically aimed at convincing the Germans that the invasion would take place at the Pas de Calais, rather than the actual site chosen, the Normandy coast. It was hoped that when the invasion started, the Germans would assume it was only a diversion and so would not move their strong tank forces away from the Calais area, thus giving the Allies time to establish themselves on shore.

The core of Fortitude was the Double Cross system, where enemy spies were `turned' and became double agents acting...

United Kingdom on Mar 31, 2012