Double Cross Quotes

“For the D-Day spies were, without question, one of the oddest military units ever assembled. They included a bisexual Peruvian playgirl, a tiny Polish fighter pilot, a mercurial Frenchwoman, a Serbian seducer, and a deeply eccentric Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“Like all truly selfish people, Kliemann believed the minutiae of his life must be fascinating to all.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“Of all the strands in Operation Fortitude, none was quite so bizarre, so wholly unlikely, as the great pigeon double cross, the first and only avian deception scheme ever attempted.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“As the Battle of Normandy raged, the Germans held fast to the illusion, so carefully planted and now so meticulously sustained, that a great American army under Patton was preparing to pounce and the German forces in the Pas de Calais must remain in place to repel it.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“As the real army plowed through the waves toward Normandy, two more fake convoys were scientifically simulated heading for the Seine and Boulogne by dropping from planes a blizzard of tinfoil, code-named “Window,” which would show up on German radar as two huge flotillas approaching the French coast.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“Out of a hundred birds of the same stock perhaps one will be that bird all breeders hope for—a bird of highly individual character, courageous and resourceful. Much depends on the individual bird and especially its character and intelligence.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“And he began recruiting sluggish British carrier pigeons to be sent on this secret mission to infiltrate the German pigeon service and destroy it from within. Soon there was a force of 350 double-agent pigeons at his disposal, disguised as German pigeons, ready to do their bit.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“When informed that a clerk at the Portuguese embassy was spying for both the Germans and the Italians, he wrote: “Why don’t you shoot him?”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“William Gerbers” was a German-Swiss businessman living in Liverpool who had been conjured into being by Garbo before he even arrived in Britain.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“The Double Cross system was now not only self-financing but profitable, to Masterman’s delight: “The actual cash supplied by the Germans to maintain their and our system between 1940 and 1945 was something in the region of £85,000”—the equivalent of more than £4.5 million today.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“If this is Upper Silesia, one wonders what must Lower Silesia be like,”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“Major Müntzinger’s boast that Germany had “many agents in England” was entirely correct. But so far from being “excellent,” most of them were hopeless, many were actively disloyal, and a number were already working against Germany as double agents.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“Allied casualty rates averaged 6,674 a day for the seventy-seven days of the Normandy campaign. Those numbers would have been far higher, had it not been for a small and most peculiar band of men and women fighting a secret battle.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“In war, no variable is more important, and less easy to control, than the element of surprise.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“The relationship between cricket (that most English of sports) and spying (at which the British have always excelled) is deep-rooted and unique. Something about the game attracts the sort of mind also drawn to the secret worlds of intelligence and counter-intelligence – a complex test of brain and brawn, a game of honour interwoven with trickery, played with ruthless good manners and dependent on minute gradations of physics and psychology, with tea breaks.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“Anthony Blunt: His Lives (London, 2001), p. 273. 24 That’s what Tiggers: Ibid. 25 He was a very nice: Andrew, Defence of”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“plausible deniability.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“In wartime, the truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“took Lily Sergeyev to see Gone with the Wind in the West End. Lily’s kidneys ached, and she was running a temperature. She had convinced herself, once again, that she was”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“If the deception before D-Day was composed of subtle hints and nudges, the second phase was spoon-fed to the Germans with a spade.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“Far from being an anticlimax, Garbo’s carefully timed non-warning had achieved its purpose. He had passed over what must be seen, in German eyes, as the most important intelligence tip-off of the war, and they had missed it. Like the Madrid radio operator, the Germans had been caught napping.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“Everything was totally normal and the countryside was gorgeous, and in a few days’ time one would be going into an absolute charnel house.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“If Baron von Roenne was the best way of planting an idea in Hitler’s head, then Baron Oshima was the most reliable way of finding out if it had taken root there.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“A professional soldier with formidable powers of recall, after each cozy and informal chat with the Führer, Oshima compiled a detailed update on Hitler’s military thinking and planning, which was encrypted and sent by wireless, with German approval, to the Japanese Foreign Office. These reports were read with avid interest in Tokyo—and Washington and London.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“If he has confessed, one would have expected that some of the Abwehr officials closely connected to Artist and Tricycle would have ceased to carry out their normal functions”—like breathing.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“Unfortunate,” “rather worrying,” “most critical”: these were delicate British euphemisms for what one officer described as “near-panic.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“MI5 had once worried Churchill might go “off the deep end” if he knew too much about espionage matters. It can only be imagined how far off the deep end he would have plunged had he learned not only that the Double Cross system was in danger of unraveling but that the invasion itself was in jeopardy.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“Most Secret Sources showed that Garbo’s reports, five or six a day, were being relayed to Berlin, promptly and almost verbatim, along with his analysis of their meaning. The hoax was being injected straight into the central nervous system of the Third Reich.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“Imitation docks and an oil storage complex were constructed by set builders from Shepperton Studios following plans drawn up by the architect Basil Spence. King George VI’s tour of this impressive and entirely unusable installation was duly reported in the press for the Germans to read.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies