Every day this week a mystery contributor – no, not Harriet The Spy – will be taking us on a shadowy journey, through the greatest spies and codebreakers of World War 2 and the Double-Cross system. In part one, we hear the story of SNOW...
The Double Cross System is all over the news at the moment. MI5 and MI6 'turned' the Nazi secret agents sent to Britain during the Second World War and played them back against the Germans in one of the most successful intelligence operations of all time. Double Cross played a critical role in helping the allies win the World War and it also plays a critical role in the success of Biteback's books on Britain's spies! The story of Double Cross involved four main steps, each of which is charted in unrivalled detail by a Biteback book.
The original idea to set up the Double Cross system stemmed from the failed secret agent Arthur Owens, an untrustworthy, philandering, womaniser and the unlikely hero of fascinating book SNOW: The Double Life of a World War II Spy, by Nigel West and Madoc Roberts.
Owens was a businessman and inventor who travelled to Germany before the war and dabbled in espionage for both MI6 and the German secret service, the Abwehr. MI6 dropped him because he wasn't getting enough intelligence. The Abwehr regarded Owens as a potentially valuable spy. But MI5 was already onto him. He was arrested and persuaded to become the first of the great double agents, codenamed Snow. As a result, Snow gives a far more detailed and exciting description of how the Double Cross System was set up.
MI5 was able to pick up every German agent sent to the UK and soon had a large collection of double agents feeding false intelligence back to the Germans. But there was one big problem. Although the Germans appeared very happy with the phoney intelligence they were receiving, the Double Cross agent runners didn't know whether the Germans believed it.
The Bletchley Park codebreakers had cracked a number of the German Enigma ciphers but not the unbelievably complex Enigma cipher used by the Abwehr officers controlling the agents sent to Britain. Did the Germans know their spies had been captured? Did they believe the false intelligence they were being sent? Nobody in MI5 or MI6 could tell for sure one way or the other...
Come back tomorrow (IF YOU DARE) to hear the story of Dilly and the German Secret Service Engima Cipher...
N.B. SNOW is currently on offer at a special price of £9.99!