Australian Penthouse

British author, historian and The Times columnist Ben Macintyre reveals the true (declassified) story of Allied double agents crucial to winning World War II

How did you discover this fantastic story?
These stories would be impossible to tell without the release of the archives by MI5 [British domestic intelligence]. There’s been an incredible sea change in British secrecy in the past 10 years and they have now released pretty much all the wartime material. It’s the most wonderfully rich stuff because it’s written by people who never expected it to be released. So it’s honest in a way that most government files are not.

With such a wealth of available declassified information, how many fascinating stories did you have to leave out of your book?
Quite a lot, to be honest. This stuff is so rich that any single one of these double agents could have made a book on their own, and perhaps that’s a way of approaching it in the future, but I loved the way they combined together. But there’s a stunning amount of detail and these files keep on being released. They haven’t released all the wartime stuff yet, so there’s more to come.

Was the Abwehr [German intelligence] amateurish compared with MI5?
In some ways, they were amateurish. In some ways, you could argue they were almost too professional. I mean, the amateurs were really on the British side; kind of strange, oddball agents who had never been trained and were just using their instincts. On the German side, it was much more rigid and much more unimaginative.

When presented with the misinformation, they just swallowed it. That was partly to do with the way that the German system was structured: it was a very rigid, very straightforward system that couldn’t deal with deception on this massive scale. That said, the Germans were quite capable of attempting their own deception operations, and did so fairly often.

The various double agents in MI5 seemed one beer shy of a six pack… That’s putting it mildly. Some of them were borderline nuts, to be absolutely honest. Many of these people would not have found employment in any other role in any other circumstance. They were gamblers, misfits and crooks, in some cases, and that’s the kind of characters that are attracted to this strange, complicated world.

They are not normal people, but this is not a normal aspect of war we’re talking about. In a way, it was the inspiration of Churchill’s spies and spymasters to employ people who were not of conventional stamp, because that’s how you get into the mind of the enemy. In a way, his genius was to choose these extraordinary oddballs and misfits: bisexual Peruvian playgirls and gamblers, and so on.

How was MI5 able to trust these oddball double agents during the war?
MI5 had one huge advantage, which the agents themselves were completely unaware of: they could track whether the agents were still trusted in Berlin via the Bletchley Park Enigma files. Without that, it would have been virtually impossible to do and I strongly doubt they would have taken such a huge gamble if they hadn’t been able to check because the stakes were impossibly high. If they got it wrong and they were rumbled, the Germans would have realised that instead of Calais being a decoy D-Day target, the real attack was coming at Normandy, and the effect of that could have been absolutely disastrous.

There are a lot of quotes about agent attractiveness in the book. Why was attractiveness so important to these people?
These are stories about psychology and personality, much more than they are about guns, wars, battles and military manoeuvres, so the interpersonal relationships between people are what define this particular world. It’s all about trust and loyalty and whether you get on or like someone, or whether you don’t. So that element of attractiveness is absolutely critical, because you’ve got to be able to seduce the other side, whether it’s by wireless or letter or in person. It is a game of sorts, of seduction and flirtation, and, therefore, attractiveness is vital.

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