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The Double Cross System or XX System, was a World War II anti-espionage and deception operation of the British military intelligence arm, MI5. It involved turning captured Nazi agents and using them to broadcast mainly erroneous information to the Nazi high command. It took its name from the Twenty Committee (under the chairmanship of John Cecil Masterman) which oversaw its operations and which was denoted by the Roman numerals for it, XX. Mushroom cloud from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki rising 18 km into the air. ...
Current MI5 headquarters in Thames House, London MI5—officially called the Security Service—is one of the British secret service agencies. ...
The Nazi party used a right-facing swastika as their symbol and the red and black colors were said to represent Blut und Boden (blood and soil). ...
The system of Roman numerals is a numeral system originating in ancient Rome, and was adapted from Etruscan numerals. ...
The policy of MI5 during the war was initially to use the system for counter-espionage . It was only later that its potential for deception purposes was realized. Agents from both the German intelligence services, the Abwehr and Sicherheitsdienst (SD), were apprehended. Many of the agents who reached British shores turned themselves in to the authorities. Still others were apprehended when they made elementary mistakes during their operations. The Abwehr and SD sent agents over by a number of means including parachute drops, submarine and travel via neutral countries. The main route was travel via neutral countries, with agents often impersonating refugees. The Abwehr was the common name for the German military foreign information and counterintelligence department, during both World War I and World War II. Abwehr is a German word, which is commonly translated to the English defence. The head of the Abwehr during World War II was Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. ...
SD Insignia Patch The Sicherheitsdienst (SD, Security Service) was the intelligence service of the SS. The organization was the first Nazi Party intelligence organization to be established and was considered a sister organization with the Gestapo. ...
It was not only in the United Kingdom that the system was operated. A number of agents connected with the system were run in Spain and Portugal. Some even had direct contact with the Germans in occupied Europe. One of the most famous of the agents who operated outside of the UK was Tricycle. There was even a case where an agent started running deception operations independently from Portugal using little more than guidebooks, maps and a very vivid imagination to convince his Abwehr handlers that he was spying in the UK. This agent, Garbo, created an entire network of phantom sub-agents and finally succeeded in convincing the British authorities that he could be useful. He and his phantom sub-agents were absorbed into the main double cross system and he became so respected by the Abwehr that they stopped landing agents in Britain after 1942. They thus became wholly dependent on the spurious information which was fed to them by Garbo's network and the other double cross agents. Tricycle was the codename of both Dusko Popov (Душко Попов), and the network with which he was involved. ...
Garbo was the British codename of Juan Pujol Garcia, (1912 – 1988), a Spaniard who was taken on by the Germans during World War II to spy on the British, after an initial overture to British intelligence had been rejected. ...
The Abwehr was the common name for the German military foreign information and counterintelligence department, during both World War I and World War II. Abwehr is a German word, which is commonly translated to the English defence. The head of the Abwehr during World War II was Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. ...
The main form of communication that agents used with their handlers was secret writing. Letters were intercepted by the postal censorship authorities and some agents were caught by this method. Later in the war wireless sets were provided by the Germans. Eventually the playing back of the transmitter of one double agent was made very easy and convenient by transferring the operation of the set to the main headquarters of MI5 itself! On the British side, a critical aid in the fight against the Abwehr and SD was the breaking of the German cyphers. Abwehr hand cyphers were cracked early in the war, and SD hand cyphers and Abwehr Enigma cyphers followed thereafter. The signals intelligence allowed an accurate assessment of whether the double agents were really trusted by the Germans and what effect their information had. In the history of cryptography, the Enigma was a portable cipher machine used to encrypt and decrypt secret messages. ...
SIGINT stands for SIGnals INTelligence, which is intelligence-gathering by interception of signals, whether by radio interception or other means. ...
A crucial aspect of the system was the need for genuine information to be sent along with the deception material. This need caused problems on a regular basis early in the war with those who controlled the release of information reluctant to provide even a small amount of relatively innocuous genuine material. Later in the war as the system became a more coherent whole genuine information was integrated into the deception system. For example, one of the agents sent genuine information about Operation Torch to the Germans. It was postmarked before the landing, but due to delays deliberately introduced by the British authorities the information did not reach the Germans until after the Allied troops were ashore. The information impressed the Germans as it appeared to date from before the attack, but it was militarily useless to them. Operation Torch (from November 8, 1942) was the Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa in World War II during the North African Campaign. ...
By early 1941, Masterman was able to opine, with some degree of accuracy, that as a consequence of Double Cross's efficacy, "We [MI5] actively ran and controlled the German espionage system in this country [United Kingdom]." Spy and secret agent redirect here; for alternate use, see Spy (disambiguation) and Secret agent (disambiguation). ...
The British put their double agent network to work in support of Operation Fortitude, a plan to deceive the Germans as to where the invasion of France would take place. Allowing one of the double agents to claim to have stolen documents describing the closely guarded invasion plans might have aroused suspicion. Instead, agents were allowed to report observing insignia on soldiers' uniforms and unit markings on vehicles. The observations in the south-central areas largely gave accurate information about the units located there. Reports from the east and north were fabricated to match the large, but fictional, Operation Quicksilver forces. Reports from southwest England indicated no troop sighting, when in reality many units were housed there. Any military planner would know that to mount a massive invasion of Europe from England, the Allies had little choice but to stage the units around the country with those that would land first nearest to the invasion point. German intelligence used the agent reports to construct an order of battle for the allied forces that placed the center of gravity of the invasion force opposite Pas de Calais, the point on the French coast closest to England and therefore a likely invasion site. The deception was so effective that the Germans kept 18 reserve division near Calais even after the invasion had begun at Normandy, lest it prove to be a diversion from the "real" invasion at Calais. Operation Fortitude was the collective codename for a number of the deception operations used by the Allied forces during World War II prior to and following the Normandy landings. ...
Battle of Normandy Conflict World War II, Western Front Date June 6, 1944 – August 25, 1944 Place Normandy, France Result Allied victory The Battle of Normandy was fought in 1944 between the German forces occupying Western Europe and the invading American, British, and Canadian forces. ...
In World War II, Operation Quicksilver (Allies, 1944) was a sub-plan of Operation Fortitude, the 1944 deception plan. ...
An order of battle (often abbreviated as ORBAT or OOB) is an organizational tool used by military intelligence to list and analyze enemy military units. ...
Pas-de-Calais is a département in northern France named after the strait which it borders. ...
The Allies were willing to risk exposing the Double Cross network to achieve the needed surprise for the Normandy invasion. However early battle reports of insignia on Allied units that the German armies encountered only confirmed the information the double agents had sent. Some of the double agents were informed in radio messages from Germany after the invasion that they had been awarded the Iron Cross. The Iron Cross (German: Eisernes Kreuz) is a military decoration of Germany which was established by King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia and first awarded on 10 March 1813. ...
When the German V-2 rocket became operational in September, 1944, the German asked their still credible spy network in Britain to send reports of exactly where and when each rocket landed. The British took advantage of this opportunity to feed the Germans false impact reports, concocted to move the V-2 aim point to a less populated region outside London. This saved many lives, but was a difficult moral choice since the British were in effect deciding which of their citizens would be bombed. German test launch. ...
Double Cross agents
(partial list) Roman Czerniawski (b. ...
Garbo was the British codename of Juan Pujol Garcia, (1912 – 1988), a Spaniard who was taken on by the Germans during World War II to spy on the British, after an initial overture to British intelligence had been rejected. ...
Mutt and Jeff were spies who worked for Britain and MI5 and were members of the Double Cross System. ...
Arthur George Owens (died 1976) was a Welsh electrical engineer who acted as a double agent during World War II. He was working for MI5 while appearing to the Abwehr (the German intelligence agency) to be one of their agents. ...
Tricycle was the codename of both Dusko Popov (Душко Попов), and the network with which he was involved. ...
Zig-Zag was the codename of Eddie Chapman, a criminal imprisoned in Jersey for safe_breaking in Glasgow. ...
References - The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939-1945. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1972. [pb] New York: Avon Books, 1972. New York: Ballantine, 1982, J. C. Masterman. ISBN 0345297431
- British Intelligence in the Second World War, Volume 4, Security and Counter-Intelligence, London, HMSO, 1990, F. H. Hinsley and C. A. G. Simpkins. ISBN 0116309520
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