Quotes from Ben Macintyre

Far from being an anticlimax, Garbo's carefully timed non-warning had achieved its purpose. He had passed over what must be seen, in German eyes, as the most important intelligence tip-off of the war, and they had missed it. Like the Madrid radio operator, the Germans had been caught napping.

April 1929 saw the publication of Daughter of Earth by the radical American writer Agnes Smedley.

There was a village saying, much repeated: "God said behave, but He didn't say how.

John Cecil Masterman:

Many of Philby's colleagues in MI6 would cling to that presumption of innocence as an article of faith. To accept otherwise would be to admit that they had all been fooled; it would make the intelligence and diplomatic services look entirely idiotic.

privately he considered him a prime specimen of the doomed ruling-class elite. "His intellectual equipment was unimpressive," Philby later wrote, "his knowledge of the world, and views about it, were just what one would expect from a fairly cloistered son of the upper levels of the British establishment.

Eddie Chapman, the wartime crook and double agent known as Agent ZIGZAG, considered himself a patriotic hero (which he was), but he was also greedy, opportunistic, and fickle, hence his code name.

If the Germans invaded and there was a danger the double agents might fall into enemy hands, "they will be liquidated forcibly." Robertson was becoming fond of his brood of double agents. But he would not hesitate to kill them if he had to.

Despite the misgivings of some at FHW, and Kühlenthal's blustering excuses for the gaps and contradictions in the story, the lie had by now firmly embedded itself in German strategic thinking and was beginning to metastasize, spreading out through the veins of Axis intelligence. Important and exciting information, whether true or false, develops its own momentum. So far from being questioned, the expected attacks in Greece and Sardinia were fast becoming accepted wisdom.

While Bevan controlled the business of deception from within the Cabinet War Rooms, the fortified underground bunker beneath Whitehall, his counterpart in the Mediterranean was Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Wrangel Clarke, the chief of "A" Force, the deception unit based in Cairo. Clarke was another master of strategic deception, but of a very different stamp. Unmarried, nocturnal, and allergic to children, he was possessed of "an ingenious imagination7 and a photographic memory.

took Lily Sergeyev to see Gone with the Wind in the West End. Lily's kidneys ached, and she was running a temperature. She had convinced herself, once again, that she was

If the deception before D-Day was composed of subtle hints and nudges, the second phase was spoon-fed to the Germans with a spade.

While Bevan and Clarke began weaving together the strands of Operation Barclay, Montagu and Cholmondeley went hunting for a dead body. In his initial plan, Cholmondeley had assumed one could simply pop into a military hospital and pick a bargain cadaver off the shelf for ten pounds. The reality was rather different.

admired goodness, but was not outraged by wickedness

Major Felix Cowgill was the model of the old-style intelligence officer: a former officer in the Indian police, he was rigid, combative, paranoid, and quite dim. Trevor-Roper dismissed him as a "purblind, disastrous megalomaniac," and Philby, privately, was equally scathing. "As an intelligence officer, he was inhibited by lack of imagination, inattention to detail and sheer ignorance of the world.

agents abroad. Within MI6, Section V played

From time to time there have to be individuals who deliberately take on the burden of guilt because they see the situation clearer than those who have the power.

This is the intelligence technique known as "coat trailing," dangling a potential recruit before the opposition in the hope that, if recruited, he or she can then be put to work as a double agent.

To retain German confidence, Agent Skoot would need to feed his handlers some true but harmless information—known in spy jargon as chicken feed, filling and substantial but lacking in real nourishment.

In a craven and hierarchical organization, the only thing more dangerous than revealing your own ignorance is to draw attention to the stupidity of the boss.

The deception had succeeded beyond every expectation, and Montagu was jubilant: "We fooled those of the Spaniards5 who assisted the Germans, we fooled the German Intelligence Service both in Spain and in Berlin, we fooled the German Operational Staff and Supreme Command, we fooled Keitel, and, finally, we fooled Hitler himself, and kept him fooled right up to the end of July.

He may simply have quit in a fit of pique.

In launching Operation RYAN, Andropov broke the first rule of intelligence: never ask for confirmation of something you already believe. Hitler had been certain that the D-Day invasion force would land at Calais, so that is what his spies (with help from Allied double agents) told him, ensuring the success of the Normandy landings.

Montagu and Cholmondeley took turns lying in the back and trying to sleep, as if that were possible when being driven at high speed by a myopic Grand Prix driver with no headlights. This was the closest either came to death in action during the war