SECRET AGENTS IN WW2 CODE
B1A broke this rule routinely.Īs early as 1940, MI-5 was capturing German agents sent to Britain thanks to two advantages. First, the Government Code and Cypher School (GC& CS), the paper thin cover for British code breakers, had successfully broken the German Enigma codes allowing German spies’ arrival times and locations to be as predictable and reliable as British rail schedules. Second, the quality of spies sent were generally abysmal, as bands of poorly trained and reluctant spies, often from occupied or neutral countries, waded ashore or parachuted into muddy fields. Once captured these spies were given the choice between a blindfold and a pockmarked wall or being double agents. Very few chose the blindfold. The best of the Double Cross agents, however, were men and women who were recruited by the Nazis but were anti-Nazi. Four or five of them had a gift for their work. This was an interagency working group set up to coordinate the work of the growing number of double agents under British control while ostensibly working for the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service. B1A officers had a love of inside jokes, with the XX Committee being the earliest (XX was “20” in Roman numerals but also “Double Cross” committee.) This extended to agent codenames, which by practice are not supposed to be related to the agent’s identity. He and Sir John Masterman, an Oxford history professor and ultimately vice chancellor of Oxford, created in January of 1941 the Twenty (XX) Committee. Managing these agents was an equally eccentric assortment of case officers working for MI-6 (Secret Intelligence Service or “SIS”) and MI-5, the British intelligence agencies. MI-5’s official name is the Security Service, but unlike its sister organization MI-6, did not use an abbreviation of its title because SS had already been taken and had a justifiably repulsive connotation. Within MI-5, B Division was the counterespionage branch and within B Division was B1A, the section tasked with double agents.Ĭhief of B1A was Thomas Argyle “Tar” Robertson (1909-1994), a former Seaforth Highlander officer who joined MI-5 in 1933. Robertson was a charming, charismatic man who insisted on continuing to wear his regimental tartan trousers, which earned him the nickname “Passion Pants.” Despite the flippancy of his nickname he was deeply respected by BIA’s staff. The story of Operation FORTITUDE, the Allied effort to mislead the Germans into where the Jlandings would occur, is a fascinating and complex story. Some of the key people involved in FORTITUDE were an odd mix, or as Ben Macintyre describes them so well in Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies: “…a bisexual Peruvian playgirl, a tiny Polish fighter pilot, a mercurial Frenchwoman, a Serbian seducer, and a deeply eccentric Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming.” (p. Top Image: Dummy Sherman Tank 1944, photo courtesy of the US Army
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