The Double-Cross System: The Incredible True Story of How Nazi Spies Were Turned into Double Agents

The. Print size is small but easily readable. List of abbreviations at beginning of book very helpful and quickly accessed when needed. I enjoy the way writer presents information.Pictures and illustrations throughout the book are helpful and the illustrations are carefully indexed as well.

There can be no better book on British Intelligence in the Second World War. John Masterman's work with the XX, or Double-Cross, committee, certainly provides one hell of a good read! Indeed, it was so good that the Intelligence community placed it under the severe British Official Act, and forbade Masterman to publish his saga However, Masterman, wo had run some 120 double agents, was not to be outdone. He had his book published in the USA in 1972! Masterman was sure that the Double-Cross system had survived the war intact, with no security breaches. e. Indeed on page 188 he wrote, "we do know that German straight agents [unturned] gained less than nothing for their masters." Yet, some twenty years later, in 1992, I received information from a valued friend that the Double-Cross system had in fact been double-crossed. There was a German "triple agent," an enemy cuckoo in the midst of the XX Committee's nest of spies. Tom Smith, who was the senior librarian at the Sellers Public Library in Upper Darby, PA, , brought me the story. He told me that an American officer had gone into the lavatory of a British hotel in southern England, during the tense period before the D-Day landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944. Amazingly, as he was to use the toilet paper, he found a sheet of paper rolled up in the roll. It was a rebus puzzle that,, when translated into English, read: "invasion, June 6" In a panic, he ran out of the bathroom and hurried back to his base to tell his colonel. Immediately, a dragnet was thrown out to catch the German spy for whom the message was intended. Either the spy never came, or he realized something was wrong and escaped. We will never know what may have happened if the message had got through to the Abwehr, German Intelligence. Perhaps nothing would have happened, for even when Adolph Hitler received news that the invasion was in progress, he dismissed it as a feint to cover the later, real landing at the Pas-de-Calais. Get this book and read it, for a real sense of what it was like when England was defended only by the courage and wits of the men and women who loved her! Cheers, Professor John F Murphy John is a member of the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies and the LePage Center for Global History, both at Villanova University in Villanova, PA< and The T E Lawrence Society in the United Kingdom.

J.C. Masterman's "The Double-Cross System: The Incredible True Story of How Nazi Spies Were Turned into Double Agents" should be required reading for all counterintelligence and other human intelligence (HUMINT) personnel. Even after a 20+ year career as a human intelligence professional myself, this is one of the few "spy" books that I have. I consider this book a counterintelligence "how to" text book. To get the full impact of this book, I suggest first reading Ladaslas Farago's "Game of the Foxes", based on the files of Nazi Germany's intelligence service. After reading the German side of the story, the full impact of J.C. Masterman's book and this amazing intelligence operation will hit you right between they eyes.

This book is one of two books that are simply indispensable for understanding the "nuts and bolts" of counterintelligence. Along with Spy Wars by T. H. Bagley  Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games , it is a classic intelligence literature. Read in concert and fully digested, these two volumes amount to a complete course on the basics of counterintelligence.

This is the classic description of how to run a counter-espionage program. Actually written as an end-of-war report between July and September 1945, it is brutally honest and exceptionally insightful. This is a must have for anyone interested in intelligence work.

I heard this author on the radio and he was fascinating, but this book is incredibly repetitive and boring. This work was originally a military report and it sounds like it. No one would ever confuse military writing with literature.

The book was in great shape, delivery time was reasonable and the content if the book is one of the best I have ever read!!!

This book is an historic must for understanding how things operated in WWII and in the intelligence community in general