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

“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

“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

“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

“He threw a dinner party in Popov’s honor and invited Jebsen, Aloys Schreiber (the new head of counterintelligence), and their secretaries. It was a bizarre occasion. Two of the guests were German intelligence officers, and two others were secretly working for British intelligence; Jebsen was sleeping with Schreiber’s secretary, who was spying on her boss; the married von Karsthoff was having an affair with his secretary, Elizabeth Sahrbach, while ripping off the Abwehr. Popov was conducting at least six love affairs.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“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

“The Double Cross idea had always been based on lateral thinking without boundaries, a willingness to contemplate plans that others would dismiss as unworkable or, frankly, barmy.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“A vast, secret army set to work on Operation Fortitude, fabricating physical deception, including dummy landing craft and rubber tanks at key points, and technical deception in the form of great waves of radio traffic, a blizzard of electric noise mimicking great armies training and assembling where none existed. British diplomats dropped misleading hints at cocktail parties to be overheard by the eavesdroppers and channeled back to Germany. Conspicuously large orders were made for Michelin Map 51, a map of the Pas de Calais area.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“Instead of introducing keen new spies into Britain, the Germans would be helping to recruit, train, finance, and transport a stream of ready-made double agents, precooked and ready to serve.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“reality he worked for MI6, recruiting agents and potential double agents and, with his wife, Peggie, also an MI6 officer, organizing a rich range of skulduggery to confound German espionage in the Iberian peninsula.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“Walker prepared his flock, and in August more than a thousand homing pigeons, each carrying a list of questions deliberately framed to suggest a looming attack, were dropped in a flapping deluge on Calais and Brittany. “The mere fact of increasing the number of pigeons used has a certain deceptive value,” Robertson gleefully reported.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“The central plank of the deception was to be nailed down by planting false information through the double agents. Cockade was not quite the grand roll of the dice envisaged by Masterman, but it was the most ambitious gamble so far.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“In addition twelve real, and seven imaginary persons have been foisted upon the enemy as Double Cross spies.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies