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The Double Cross System or XX System, was a World War II expedient of the British military intelligence arm, MI5, which 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. Those who refused to collaborate were immediately executed.
Often the turned agents were given factual collateral with which to build up their reputations. One of the major players in the Double Cross System was Garbo, who built up a highly fictitious network of agents, and became respected by the Abwehr to the extent that they stopped landing agents in Britain after 1942, and became wholly dependent on the spurious information which was fed to them by Garbo's network.
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]."
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 arroused 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 the stage units aound the country with those that would land first nearest to the invasion point. German intellegence 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.
The Allies were willing to risk exposing the Double Cross network to achive 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.
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.
For deeper and further information on Double Cross and its significance, the reader is referred to Masterman's 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. This book is one of the most significant works in the field of literature dealing with intelligence fieldwork and although to a certain extent sanitised nevertheless remains a remarkably accurate depiction of events.
Double Cross agents
(partial list)
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