Yet he was also loyal, resolute, and wondrously brave. The Serbian, Dusko Popov, was a rascal when it came to women and money. The D-Day agents, he writes, made up “one of the oddest military units ever assembled…a bisexual Peruvian playgirl, a tiny Polish fighter pilot, a mercurial French woman, a Serbian seducer, and a deeply eccentric Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming.” Macintyre does a fine job depicting this extraordinary cast and exposing the ambiguous world of espionage. Macintyre-a correspondent for the Times of London and author of Operation Mincemeat and Agent Zigzag-is an expert on World War II espionage, with an eye for colorful characters. A group from Britain’s MI5 called the Twenty Committee ran the operation and dubbed it Double Cross-a play on its own name, as XX is the Roman numeral for 20. How the Allies promoted the fiction of a Calais landing is the subject of Ben Macintyre’s new book, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies-specifically, how they turned five German spies into double agents who fed fabricated intelligence back to the fatherland. But their task in the 12 months preceding D-Day in June 1944 was to ensure the führer didn’t guess the truth: that they would land on the long sandy beaches of Normandy, 200 miles southwest of Calais.

Hitler was wrong, and the Allies knew it, thanks to their intercepts of German communiqués. “It is here that the enemy must and will attack,” he predicted in 1943. HITLER KNEW THE INVASION OF FRANCE was coming, and he knew where-the Pas de Calais region of France, with its deep-water ports and landing beaches that could be easily resupplied from England. MHQ Reviews: Double Cross, by Ben Macintyre Closeīy Ben Macintyre.

Double cross ben macintyre review