Book Review: Double Cross
Jul. 7th, 2019 05:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerLike all of Ben Macintyre’s books, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies is a delightful trip. About midway through World War II, the British intelligence service realized that all the Nazi spies in Britain - all - were actually double agents working for the Allies, and therefore the British could feed the Germans misinformation more or less at will. They used this ability to trick the Germans about the location of the D-Day landing, which enabled the Allies to gain a strong foothold and spelled the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany.
As impressive as this feat of espionage is, I was even more fascinated by the mind-boggling obtuseness of the German intelligence service, the Abwehr. Macintyre doesn’t venture an explanation why the Abwehr was so gullible, but he does mention that many of the Abwehr members were blue-blooded aristocrats who despised the thuggish lower-middle class Nazis and thought the whole war was a bad idea in the first place, so I kind of got the impression that a lot of them completely half-assed their jobs because they just didn’t care.
Also - this thought also draws on Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor, which outlines some memorable KGB gaffes - possibly intelligence services in totalitarian regimes suffer from a sort of reality-warping effect: if you have to interpret everything according to the regime’s ideological framework, it may be easy to lose track of what’s plausible in the real world, if you will.
Hence the fact that the Abwehr was willing to believe that one of the Double Cross spies had recruited an entire cell of Welsh nationalist fascists (who in fact where wholly imaginary): it fit with their beliefs about how nationality worked.
Also: an impartial observer surely would have realized after D-Day that the Abwehr’s spies were actually British double agents, given the way that they kept insisting that more attacks were coming and yet somehow no one ever attacked the Pas de Calais. But no one is impartial when the price of failure is a bullet in the head: they continued to belief because they had to believe.
Alternatively - given that British intelligence during World War II employed Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt and I think two other Soviet moles, and never caught them - maybe intelligence agencies are just really extremely gullible all around. Maybe the only reason any of us believe in intelligence agencies at all is because we’ve basically been brainwashed by propaganda movies like James Bond et al.
As impressive as this feat of espionage is, I was even more fascinated by the mind-boggling obtuseness of the German intelligence service, the Abwehr. Macintyre doesn’t venture an explanation why the Abwehr was so gullible, but he does mention that many of the Abwehr members were blue-blooded aristocrats who despised the thuggish lower-middle class Nazis and thought the whole war was a bad idea in the first place, so I kind of got the impression that a lot of them completely half-assed their jobs because they just didn’t care.
Also - this thought also draws on Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor, which outlines some memorable KGB gaffes - possibly intelligence services in totalitarian regimes suffer from a sort of reality-warping effect: if you have to interpret everything according to the regime’s ideological framework, it may be easy to lose track of what’s plausible in the real world, if you will.
Hence the fact that the Abwehr was willing to believe that one of the Double Cross spies had recruited an entire cell of Welsh nationalist fascists (who in fact where wholly imaginary): it fit with their beliefs about how nationality worked.
Also: an impartial observer surely would have realized after D-Day that the Abwehr’s spies were actually British double agents, given the way that they kept insisting that more attacks were coming and yet somehow no one ever attacked the Pas de Calais. But no one is impartial when the price of failure is a bullet in the head: they continued to belief because they had to believe.
Alternatively - given that British intelligence during World War II employed Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt and I think two other Soviet moles, and never caught them - maybe intelligence agencies are just really extremely gullible all around. Maybe the only reason any of us believe in intelligence agencies at all is because we’ve basically been brainwashed by propaganda movies like James Bond et al.
