Why either the British (who knew the agents’ frailties) or the race-obsessed Germans (who knew that none of them had ethnic or ideological ties to the Axis cause) believed anything any of them reported is beyond mysterious. There was the Spaniard Juan Pujol Garcia, a failed chicken farmer (rather like SS head Heinrich Himmler) Serbian womanizer Dusko Popov Elvira de la Fuente Chaudoir, a bisexual Peruvian party girl Polish patriot Roman Czerniawski and a Frenchwoman of Russian descent, Lily Sergeyev, so devoted to Babs, her terrier-poodle cross, that she almost gave herself up to the Nazis out of rage after the British accidentally killed her dog. In an account redolent with ironies, Macintyre concentrates on five of the agents. The committee launched a plan in 1944 to use those double agents-along with others who had always been on the Allied side-to mislead the Germans as to the place and timing of the invasion of France, and thus thin the defensive forces arrayed against those storming the beaches. By 1942, a British counter-intelligence group, the punningly named Twenty Committee (its name in Roman numerals-XX-forming a double cross), was in control of every German spy in the United Kingdom. By the end of Double Cross he actually manages to make readers worry that the June 6, 1944, Normandy landings might fail. Though he’s not a novelist, Macintyre is one of the best spy-story writers around, someone who can weave a suspenseful narrative out of facts already on the public record.
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