The spies who never were : the true story of the Nazi spies who were actually Allied double agents /

In mid-1940, German chancellor Adolf Hitler ordered the Abwehr 0 (the German defense and security intelligence organization) to carry out Operation Lena. It was a network of spies sent to Britain during World War II to gather information about Allied defenses and strategy. But the spies were actually under British control--double agents that reported back to their German spymasters only what the British permitted them to report. These messages contained carefully selected true information of some value, but increasingly they also included misinformation calculated to deceive the Germans and lead them to self-damaging decisions. In all, 120 individuals became double agents, many for only short periods, others until the end of the war. The files abound with code names such as Balloon, Hamlet, Lipstick, and Puppet. Haufler was a WWII cryptographer who served in both English and American code-breaking operations. He offers a fascinating account of these masters of deception. --George Cohen Copyright 2005 Booklist

This compact survey of Allied double agents in WWII begins before the war, when British Intelligence "turned" Arthur George Owens, a Welsh engineer working for the Nazis. Owens's conversion inspired the formation of Britain's Twenty Committee (aka XX or Double Cross), which controlled the messages sent by double agents, as well as the country's systematic policy of using German intelligence agents for deception. As diverse as they were duplicitous, the double agents include Dusko Popov, a Yugoslav said to be the model for James Bond; Eddie Chapman, a British sociopath; Elvira Chaudoir, the daughter of a Peruvian diplomat; and Juan Pujol, a Spaniard nicknamed Garbo for his expertise at disguise. The author portrays these agents and others with a novelist's eye for character and suspense, revealing, for example, that Pujol's wife nearly blew his cover because she was tired of living in wartime England and that Popov might have prevented the attack on Pearl Harbor if not for a personal clash with J. Edgar Hoover. Haufler (Codebreakers' Victory) is a natural raconteur, and his stories may serve to spark new readers' interest in deeper study of WWII counterintelligence. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved