Book of the week: Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies by Ben Macintyre

If you’re looking for an August beach read, “forget fiction” and read this account of how the British misled the Germans about D-Day.

(Crown, $26)

“It is a story unsurpassed in the long history of intelligence,” said Joseph C. Goulden in The Washington Times. At the height of World War II, scores of poorly trained German spies were sent into Great Britain on a mission to scare up details about Allied strategy. British intelligence quickly captured all of them and offered many a choice: turn double or be executed. Those who agreed to start feeding false information to their German handlers were soon reinforced by “walk-in” double agents, who gave British intelligence a disinformation network stretching across Europe and beyond. Managed by the Twenty Committee, so named because the Roman numeral XX forms a double cross, these daring, often eccentric operatives routinely misled the Germans, notably about the details of D-Day. If you’re looking for an August beach read, “forget fiction.” Ben Macintyre’s factual account of the Double Cross operation is “more gripping than what you will find anywhere else.”

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