Brief information about double agent system

Motto: It is essential to seek out enemy agents who have come to conduct
espionage against you and to bribe them to serve you. Give them instructions
and care for them. Thus doubled agents are recruited and used.
Sun Tzu The art of Warefare

Sibiu
2014

There is no example more relevant for Sun Tzus rule than the Double-Cross
Operation from the Second World War. Its success confirmed the Chinese
strategists way of thinking and the effects on the German Reich were, indeed,
disastrous. The Double Cross Operation was one of the base operations that lead to
Hitlers defeat.
Operation Double Cross began in the early forties when it became clear
Hitler was sending a network of spies to infiltrate Britain. The Fuhrers aim was to
sabotage military targets, uncover details of the war effort and, later, piece together
details of Allied plans for D-Day.
The Double Cross System or XX System was a World War II anti-espionage
and deception operation of the British military intelligence arm, MI5. Nazi agents
in Britain were captured or turned themselves in and were then used by the British
to broadcast mainly disinformation to their Nazi controllers. Its operations were
overseen by the Twenty Committee under the chairmanship of John Cecil
Masterman. The name of the committee comes from the number 20 in Roman
numerals: "XX".
Masterman was an accomplished cricketer and writer of crime fiction
enlisted by the British intelligence services.
Captured German spies, or those who simply gave themselves up when they
arrived in Britain, were handed over to Masterman and his colleagues. they were
frequently given the stark choice of becoming double agents or facing the firing
squad.
From that moment the moles were supplied with false information to send
back to the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service. Later Masterman
was to claim: By 1941 we effectively ran and controlled the German espionage
system in Britain.
At times it must have seemed that the operation was doomed to fail, largely
due to the unpredictable characters involved.
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 transmissions purporting to be from
one double agent were facilitated 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 ciphers
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.
The first agent to be recruited was the Welshman Arthur Owens who was
arrested upon the outbreak of war because he was known to have been in contact
with the German intelligence service. As the proprietor of a battery company he
had often visited the Kiel shipyards, and had reported his observations to SIS.
Unfortunately, as a mail intercept revealed, he was also in touch with the Abwehr,
and this led to his detection.
While in custody Owens volunteered the fact that he had been entrusted with
a wireless, and offered to make radio contact with the enemy under MI5's control.
This unpromising beginning was to lead to a tremendous cryptographic
breakthrough, because his hand ciphers were subsequently encrypted on the
Abwehr's Enigma circuits, and he was also able to supply advance warning of the
arrival in 1940 of several agents who were parachuted in Britain.
KISS was a Persian national who went to Germany in 1936 to study
electrical engineering. Recruited by the Abwehr in 1941, he was sent to Turkey,
where he made contact with the British agent BLACKGUARD and revealed he
had no intention of carrying out the Abwehr mission to report on Allied activity in

Persia. BLACKGUARD persuaded him to continue his journey but allow his codes
and transmitter to be passed to the allies. KISS complied, eventually arriving in the
Soviet-controlled part of Persia where he worked in an armaments factory.
Meanwhile, unknown to him, the British played back his transmitter to the
Germans, initially with low-grade material.
As the Germans asked specific questions about the situation in Persia and,
particularly, the Tehran conference, KISS was required to provide more and more
detail, which lead the British to reveal his existence (but not BLACKGUARD's) to
the Soviets. The deception of the Germans was continued to the end of the war and
beyond, as the link was watched for any signs of post-war Germany attempting to
re-establish contact with its supposed agent in Persia
'Summer' and 'Tate', were to become important double agents. Indeed, 'Tate'
was to continue his link with Hamburg from his arrival in September 1940 until the
very last day of the war.
The XX Committee, which came to be known as the 'twenty committee',
because of the roman numerals, gradually expanded its activities to run some four
dozen enemy agents, and eventually concluded that it had effectively taken control
of the Abwehr's entire organization in Britain. This was accomplished by skilful
handling, the careful cross-referencing of information from agents with intercepted
German wireless traffic which allowed MI5 an unprecedented insight into the
enemy's intentions, and the development of a sophisticated conduit for conveying
deception.
By 1944 MI5 was sufficiently confident of its double agents to be entrusted
with 'Fortitude', the principal deception campaign intended to persuade the enemy
that the widely expected Allied invasion of France would occur in the Pas-deCalais. A secondary objective was to convey the impression that the landings in
Normandy were merely a diversionary feint which could be safely ignored. The
task of supplying this information rested with 'Garbo', who was highly regarded by
the Abwehr, 'Brutus' a former Polish airforce officer who had been allowed to
escape from German captivity in France, and 'Bronx', the daughter of a Peruvian
diplomat who had travelled to Vichy for SIS.

'Fortitude' became a textbook example of how strategic deception should be

conducted, and captured documents demonstrated that the enemy was duped not
just about the date and place of the main Allied offensive, but even accepted that an
entirely fictional army, the First United States Army Group, had assembled in
south-east England in anticipation of crossing the Channel from Dover.
By the end of the war the deception had been so complete that both Tate and Garbo
had received German decorations in recognition of their espionage, and the entire
operation had been financed by funds provided by the Abwehr.
Altogether an unlucky thirteen German agents were executed in Britain
during the war, but more than three times that number had actively co-operated
with their MI5 handlers.
In conclusion, the rule of Sun Tzu is more than relevant in case of war and
the success of an operation is given both by the fight in the trenches and the secret
war behind the closed door. Operation XX is just an example of using double
agents during the history. Moreover, in some cases, it has been discovered that
some agents played even on three sides offering information to whom was paying
more.