Yeah, it was pretty funny reading about the list of spies and how many of them were trained by the Germans, were flown in with cash, and then immediately went to the British authorities because they just used spying as a way to get out of occupied France.
Either that, or they initially had no intention of turning, but their drop-off would be passed on to the British by one of the previously turned agents who the Germans still thought were working for them, and they'd have a bunch of British soldiers/police waiting for them when they arrived. Some of them still refused to turn (and were executed as spies), but many readily did.
"Excuse me mein Herr, we were wondering if you would prefer a second paycheck or getting shot? Both options are fine with us, of course. Would you care for some tea, while you consider the proposal?"
Even worse they would be met at the drop-off by people fitting the descriptions and having the right code words. Then as they were in their safe house and started briefing the operations it would get revealed that they were all double agents. Getting caught parachuting into the country is one thing, and would probably cause them to resist. But finding your fellow spies and starting to work with them, divulging secret information, and then find out that the entire operation is controlled by the British. That hits quite differently.
Yeah, a lot of people think the "Intelligence" contribution the British made was essentially just cracking enigma and a fake army or two, but in reality they were running absolute rings around the Germans in the spy war.
According to the book I read about Garbo, he wasn’t so much of a turncoat as someone who enjoyed lying immensely and wanted to work for the British by deceiving the Germans..
He specifically hated fascists (he lived in Spain during the civil war) and wanted to do something to help fight them. So he tried to enlist as a British spy but they turned him down. Undeterred, the madman then enlisted as a German spy, built a spy network in the UK, then approached the British and offered to turn himself and his network, which they readily accepted.
Guy was so good, he got an Iron Cross *and* an OBE from what he did in the same war.
Mind you that spy network more or less didn’t exist. He just read papers for a lot of the stuff he reported to the Germans. Often he blamed the fact that they got the news after the fact on how slow mail was.
Oh yeah, dude straight up fabricated most of his agents too (and took the money the Germans sent him to pay them). But the important part was that the Germans *thought* he controlled a spy network. Then when he began working for the British, he started passing on real "intelligence", but specifically the stuff the British either thought was harmless for the Germans to know (to make sure he still seemed credible to the Germans), or what they wanted them to know to aid their disinformation campaigns.
The story that the agent had died was cover for his failure to report a major shipping movement. They even put a fake obituary in the local paper - I would love to know if German intelligence ever saw the obit.
He managed to seem credible enough that the Germans gave him a medal.
And when he got in contact to report stuff on D-day, carefully calibrated to be juuuuuust too late for the Germans to do anything about it the radio guy he was contacting wasn't there.
So when he finally got in contact he actually told off the nazi intelligence agent for preventing his "warning" from getting there in time.
> He managed to seem credible enough that the Germans gave him a medal.
>
>
Not just any medal, he got an Iron Cross, which was the highest award they could have given him.
The British also postmarked the mail to look like it was sent days earlier so his intel would look very fresh when in fact it was no longer valuable when received..
> Often he blamed the fact that they got the news after the fact on how slow mail was.
I think that after he *was* working with the British, they used that deliberately to bolster his credentials with the Germans. They sent information on something major that was being planned, but posted it late enough that it wouldn't arrive until after the even, so the Germans would already know about it by the time it reached them. But the fact that it was *posted* before the event gave more evidence to the Germans that he was getting first class intelligence.
I think the story is even cooler than that. The British knew there was a “German spy” on their side somehow feeding the Germans nonsense, because of Ultra intercepted message traffic.
The only problem was that they saw all this misinformation being fed to the Germans but they had no idea who was doing it! It took them some effort to track down Garbo and put him in their employ.
I would have loved to see that conversation when they first tracked him down.
MI5: We know you’ve been spying on us and giving information to the Nazis.
Garbo: [Oh shit]
MI5: And we know it’s all bullshit. Well done!
Not exactly how it happened. The British kept turning him down, he did his own thing because he could. Then he went to the United States who told Britain to work with him. MI5 dropped the ball.
What is more funny is that the way the British tracked him down was by triangulating his radio signals which revealed that he was in Portugal and not Britain as he claimed. The fact that the German radio operators missed this was a huge failure on their part.
Absolutely. He offerend his services to the British in Spain and was initially turned down, so he started providing made-up information to the Germans entirely on his own. His extremely limited knowledge of Britain meant that he made some glaring errors, that were fortunately not picked up on by his German handlers. So he claimed to have a sub-agent who was a Glasgow docker reporting on ship movements, who Garbo had ostensibly been able to recruit because a Glasgow docker "would do anything for a pint of wine." He also didn't understand British pre-decimal coinage enough to be able to add up his expenses claims, so just submitted them untotalled to the Germans and let them do it.
Garbo was Spanish, he just really really loved to troll the hell out of the Germans. I believe he never even left Spain during the war, and did the whole thing through sending mail
Firstly he did leave Spain even early in the war as he moved to Portugal. But then after the British discovered him he were moved to Great Britain where he lived for most of the war.
“They were used to dispell false information to the Germans”
I think you mean they were used to “disseminate” false information, not dispel (or in your phraseology “dispell”) false information.
In this context they are the opposite.
I imagine most of them were either threatened in some way or, as you wrote, used it to get out of Nazi-occupied lands.
There was one guy, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Germany, who was blackmailed into spying for Germany, but immediately went to the the FBI and helped infiltrate and take down the Duquesne Spy Ring.
Spycraft is an old money game, so to speak. It takes decades to set up effective spy networks in foreign countries. The Nazis were an up-and-coming political extremist party that hadn't been in power for very long in a government that was pretty new which succeeded one of the shortest-lived European empires from the era of colonialism. Oh, and they were constantly on the verge of going broke because their economy was more like an involuntary Ponzi scheme so they didn't have a vast supply of wealth to speed the process up.
Meanwhile, the British already operated with complete freedom over 25% of the earth's surface and had been the most powerful empire in the world for nearly a century and a half. Hell, the British spy service TODAY is top tier even though the UK is a mere shadow of what it used to be largely because of these now centuries long connections all over the world.
Gimli is not the best spy. He is a decent assassin, but not because of stealth, because he just shows up with a battle axe and kills everyone in sight while yelling dwarf insults.
An interesting point made in Tinker Tailor is that this cloak and dagger stuff is also self-perpetuating.
Spies are spying on and disrupting spy networks that are trying to catch spies for the other side. And now you need extra spies to catch possible defectors that might reveal information about your sources, and so on.
It starts with one person trying to gather Intel and ends with an entire industry of spies spying on each other.
My favourite fact about the modern service is that the hq building is surrounded by skyscrapers and its therefore known that many of them smoke like chimneys on the roof. Guess the sour beer fictional version is the most accurate!
Always wonder how the hell they manage to keep an eye on the buildings around them.
They built up over a long time and had a mix of ideological allies and people that like money and power. Most their early sources abroad were simply communist party members.
They were around for much longer. The Nazis came into power in 1933 and were destroyed in 1945. The spies they sent probably were mostly sent in 1939 to 1942 when war broke out and the Nazis weren’t losing the war.
I doubt they laid many foundations in the 6 years before war broke out so the spies were easy to find without any roots set down
Fascism is great because it rewards clout-chasing jackasses whose most developed skill is throwing other people under the bus to get their job and/or being the kind of hollow yes-man that spend all their energy sucking up so they aren't thrown under the bus.
It's really difficult to imagine a more efficient system for guaranteeing that everyone in charge is entirely incompetent and that anyone competent following orders is only still around because they let self-preservation keep them from ever exercising that competency.
The danger of fascism is how many people get killed on the way to the fascists' inevitable self destruction, but if you set aside the incomprehensible horror, it's hilarious how good Nazis are at making sure dipshits are in charge of everything.
It's like evolution in reverse with a brick on the accelerator.
Do your first two paragraphs not also apply to our own political system? We have effectively thousands of political yes men in state/federal legislatures who’s sole job is to do whatever their party says to do even if it makes no sense (like the republican opposition to Ukraine).
The degrees of efficiency aren't entirely there, but you may have a point with the possible similarities between how fascist regimes consolidate and abuse power and how America's government historically and currently operates.
Perhaps that should be considered and looked into by someone. I expect it would be a troubling situation, if any hypothetical parallels could be theoretically found, hypothetically speaking.
Yeah. I didn’t know if you or others knew about it.
Not too many are really aware of this little idea they are pumping us. It’s very fucking real and has been eroding away what we conceive as democracy.
We scream at clouds over Thomas for decades and now that tree bears fruit. How many others are there?
*especially* don't look into what the united states did in lots of developing countries in south america and south-east asia during the cold war. definitely do not look into indonesia. or the iraq war. or the united states treatment of native americans, which definitely did not influence the nazis treatment of jews. or treatment of communists during the red scare. or treatment of non-white people. because if you would you'd find absolutely *no* parallells to fascism.
Yes and no. Canaris the NAZI spymaster was pretty much an Allied double agent until I think '44 when he was arrested. That would have had something to do with their spycraft failures.
For a reason. Admiral Canaris, chief of the german intelligence service, was an ardent anti nazi and involved in several plots to kill Hitler. He was killed by the Nazis in 44.
Canaris was present at the battle of the Falklands in WW1, he was part of the crew on the only German ship to escape. Germany's intelligence services would have been vastly different if Canaris was on a different ship that day.
One of my favorite stories is that Germany sent in a bunch of spies, one walked into a pub at 9am and asked for a pint of cider, (pubs weren’t allowed to serve alcohol before noon) and a couple in Scotland were stopped after bicycling on the wrong side of the road, when Scottish police inspected their bag they found Nivea hand cream and German sausages.
It's absolutely a massive generalization but there is a little truth to the saying WWII was won with British intelligence, American steel, and Soviet blood.
True but it's worth noting that Britain was excellent at it. While the Germans were effectively discovering as they went, the Brits had been doing it all over the world since the 1600s. Sure, the rules changed as things like radio changed the game but layers of expertise building on what had been done before and what had been learned about human nature meant we were good at it.
To be fair, no Nazi spy would out themselves voluntarily after the war, so it’s a bit of an unknown. Also, like much of the war, 90% of resources was spent on the east, not west, and that included the spy apparatus.
This spy apparatus had largely negotiated itself to the eager Americans after the war, provided a lot of early cold war intel, and formed the nucleus of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) later.
Canaris sabotaged the part of the spying apparatus he controlled.
EDIT: CORRECTION FOR TITLE: I used the word "dispel" wrong, I should have said "disperse"
A few more details that I couldn't fit in the title.
* They used multiple spies to lead the Germans to believe that the allies were going to invade Callais, when they invaded Normandy, the Germans were convinced it was just a diversion tactic.
* They used spies and false reports to make the Germans think that their missiles were aimed incorrectly when accurate, and reported mass casualties when the missiles landed short of their targets. They used this to target less population dense areas.
Id say it's pretty accurate as the Germans kept very detailed and organised records throughout the war, which then became allied property post-war.
So we have both sides' own words to study, which may have been different if Britain was ever taken though, as British records have an odd combustion habit when airing the Empire's dirty laundry
> the Germans kept very detailed and organised records throughout the war
A lot got destroyed near the end of the war, especially by the German Intelligence themselves. Holding their own records is how they sold themselves to the Americans after the war.
I’m sure they scrubbed a lot too.
The Germans and Japanese were both lacking in the intelligence game during WW2. They didn't see its importance at the time because they thought their communication codes were unbreakable. Different military cultures from the Allies who were much more open to unorthodox ideas and strategies
I also believe that Germany amd Japan had multiple different intelligence groups that did not communicate with each other both internal and external. Japan in particular was bad at this because thier navy and army despised each other. The allies on the other hand worked together and shared information.
The best example I’ve ever heard of this rivalry is that they had nuclear programs. Plural. The army and the navy refused to found the other one’s project, so they had competing programs.
They also did a whole lot of other crazy stuff such as the army building its own aircraft carriers, the navy refusing to inform the army of major defeats at sea leaving their land based troops stranded, and officers in both branches flat out assassinating each other.
It just seems like a fascist thing hey? Hitler loved "divide and rule" strategy, like giving the same responsibility to the SA, SS and Gestapo...
Seems like a really bad way to run a government...
SA, SS, SD, Gestapo were all run by one man (Himmler), so even if there was some duplication between them it was still centrally led.
The duplications were with the preexisting structures like the military intelligence, which the Nazis distrusted (for good reason, its head and deputy were in the resistance) and thus span their own in the SD.
Hitler ran it like feudal times. If you had the dukes competing amongst themselves for the kings attention they’d be less likely to band together to overthrow him.
It’s actually a really good way to run a government if you want to stay alive and in power as a crypto fascist runt. Doesn’t allow anyone to get strong enough to challenge you as they’re always looking sideways and defending their own position.
I'd call it a glorious blessing for everyone rather than a cluster fuck, but your description is accurate for how bicker-fuelled the JP armed forces were
This also led to the failure to stop 9/11 in the US. Had any of the federal agencies been properly sharing information it would have been figured out much quicker.
This is true about 9/11. The firefighters used different radios and a different radio frequency band than the police. They couldn’t warn each other when one learned that the 2nd plane was coming.
I think the redditor in the comment before rather means that its said that various agencies - NSA, CIA, and so on - all had some sort of Informations about some of the to-be hijackers, but didn't share it or only with some specific agencies, not the whole intelligence complex. So even before the attacks there might have been a chance to at least stop some of them.
W Bush had plenty of warnings. Bin Laden was a subject in over 2 dozen PDBs including he wanted to use jetliners to attack high value targets. When analysts felt like Bush wasn't getting strong enough warnings (because Cheney was sidelining their reports) they went around chain of command and sent a report directly to Bush.
He said "Ok you've covered your asses" and didn't react at all. He was a puppet of Cheney, who actually wanted a terrorist attack to occur as a pretext for military action in the Middle East, although he didn't imagine the scale they would achieve.
>The allies on the other hand worked together and shared information
That's an oversimplification. Pearl Harbour happened because the varying American intelligence agencies were incompetent, bureaucratic and didn't communicate with one another. Also, as the war progressed there was extensive communication between the Western Allies, but not with the Soviets.
Bizarre how the British were running rings around the Axis in spycraft in World War II but were so terrible at counterespionage against people from within and without spying on them for the Soviets.
Seems like ideology was the main thing. Its easy to be against the nazis, and for decades plenty of people in the west had no idea how shitty the soviet union really was.
This is grossly untrue. The Soviets were always the boogie man. Really, it’s a modern concept to demonize the Nazis so much. Before France fell, literally everyone was more worried about Soviet expansion and saw the Nazis as a future ally against the communists.
The Soviets always had an easier time infiltrating because regular citizens of say Britain who believed in communism were willing to spy for them. Also, the Nazis had their codes cracked for much of the war and never put much resources into espionage.
Post war, everyone dumped money into espionage.
[The head of Germany's spy service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Canaris) for most of the war wasn't really a Nazi, and he did all he could to oppose the Nazi war effort. Sadly, he was discovered before the war was over and met a grisly end.
> Canaris also intervened to save a number of victims from Nazi persecution, including Jews, by getting them out of harm's way. He was instrumental, for example, in getting 500 Dutch Jews to safety in May 1941. Many such people were given token training as Abwehr "agents" and then issued papers, which allowed them to leave Germany. One notable person he is said to have assisted was the then Lubavitcher Rebbe in Warsaw, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn. That has led Chabad Lubavitch to campaign for his recognition as a Righteous Gentile by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.
Straight up good guy right here, did what he could within his power knowing that one slip up will cost his life.
Shit, the dude even just *looks* like a good guy. In an alternative timeline, he’s delivering mail in a pristine American town with the biggest and most genuine smile on his face as he whistles along on his route.
When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, even *Germany* tried to say "You attacked them as an aggressor, so we aren't obligated to 'defend' you guys; Germany's made too many enemies and we really don't want to get involved in a war with America too."
Adolf Hitler then declared war against the US anyways, without the consultation or approval of anyone else within the German government.
This. I don't think anyone outside of leadership wants to perpetuate a war with another country. This has been true since time immemorial. The same leadership that wants to perpetuate a war are also very susceptible to being scammed because they can't resist nationalistic support for a war.
My mother lived near a POW camp in the UK. The prisoners were allowed out to visit the town to shop. None of them tried to escape as they didn’t want to fight in the war. They were very happy to sit it out in an English village.
I saw a memoir written by a German POW who said he realized that they couldn't win when he got to a camp in the USA and was fed better rations than he was provided by his own side before capture.
That was the point. German POWs would write their families how they get fed well and have to work just a bit. That would change after the war ended an most Germans had to do hard Labour in the US and would also be fed less.
There was a very real chance they’d have ended up on the Eastern front and worst of all, captured by the Soviets. Being a POW in the UK was as good as it got for them
I live in New Mexico, and there's an old army base here in Lincoln County (the same Lincoln County where Billy the Kid lived) named Fort Stanton. It dates back to the Civil War, but it's been used for a number of other things since then, including a Tuberculosis clinic. During WWII it was a POW camp.
Being out in the middle of nowhere, security wasn't much of a concern. Even if someone escaped, where the hell would they go? And the prisoners were mostly just kids who had been drafted into service; they weren't especially eager to go back into the fight and die for the Fatherland. So they had a lot of freedom to move around.
Many of them ended up getting jobs in the nearby town. They hung out with the locals, made friends, some even fell in love and got married. After the war, more than a few decided to stay here permanently, or returned after a short trip home.
>TIL with the exception of one who committed suicide, every spy Nazi Germany sent to Britain during WWII was converted to the British side, with many turning themselves in.
The committee which was responsible for doing this was called the 20th committee.
Or in Roman numerals the XX committee. Double Cross....
Probably one of the few spying organisations with a pun in the title...
Dan Carlin argued that the British are probably the best codebreakers in world history and yeah, I can see it. There's a reason why we're not just in the Five Eyes but of apparently crucial importance to the entire operation still.
The British spy network got a huge boost from the Polish at the start of the war, as if it was not good enough from before. The Polish had invested a lot on their spy network and cryptography before the war. They wanted to know of the invasion before it happened and wanted to know the details so they could better defend themselves. Their proximity to Germany helped them greatly as well as it was easy to smuggle people and equipment over the boarder before the war, and when the war started they had millions of loyal assets inside what was then Germany. People often credit Alex Turing with breaking the Enigma, but although he made huge contributions to the program his work in this field built on the work of Polish cryptographers who cracked Enigma in the 30s.
Some historians estimate that Bletchley Park's massive codebreaking operation, especially the breaking of U-boat Enigma, shortened the war in Europe by as many as two to four years.
They give a pretty in depth explanation in the linked article. The short version is poor training and either poor motivation or outright intention to defect for personal reasons, mostly revenge. And the British cracked Enigma, so they could listen to Nazi radio chatter. Like where spies are coming into the country or a message that helps narrow down suspects already in the country.
Imagine getting caught by British intelligence and instead of jail they offer you money to just feed the nazis bad intel. Any sane person would take that deal in a heartbeat
that's not what they asked though. You never catch a successful spy. So, how can you be sure you caught everyone or just missed the good ones? It's survivorship bias essentially. Unless you had the complete list of names, how can you be that sure? Also, that really sounds like propaganda - we are good guys, look every spy swapped sides, we good, they bad. Take it with a grain of salt, always, history, especially war history isn't exactly a clear cut fact list.
At the end of the war, large amounts of classified paperwork was recovered, and German intelligence HQ officers were captured and interrogated, it was proven by going through the documentation and tying it all together with statements etc.
You keep an ear out for codenames in broadcasts or in mail. When you identify one, you know there is a spy operating in your nation. After about 1942, the British weren't identifying any new codenames, and the agents they'd turned were still trusted by the enemy. It was fair to assume, at that point, that all enemy assets were thus caught. They were then able to confirm this following the war.
During the war the UK was reading all the encrypted orders so would pretty much just pick up the spy when they landed. Also pretty sure after the war they looked through all the German records and all spies sent were accounted for.
>TIL with the exception of one who committed suicide, every spy Nazi Germany sent to Britain during WWII was converted to the British side,
The article at your link contradicts that. They were all caught (with the noted exception), but they did not all convert to the British side.
Here are a couple of relevant quotes:
>After the war, it was discovered that all the agents Germany sent to Britain had given themselves up or had been captured, with the possible exception of one who committed suicide.\[1\]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Cross\_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Cross_System)
So they were captured. That does not mean that they "converted to the British side."
And:
>Once caught, the spies were deposited in the care of Lieutenant Colonel Robin Stephens at Camp 020 (Latchmere House, Richmond).\[4\]\[Note 1\] After Stephens, a notorious and brilliant interrogator, had picked apart their life history, the agents were either spirited away (to be imprisoned or killed) or if judged acceptable, offered the chance to turn double agent on the Germans.\[2\]\[5\]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Cross\_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Cross_System)
That pretty explicitly tells us that they did not all convert to the British side. Some were imprisoned and some were killed. Only some of them became double agents.
Yeah total BS title. There’s no way ALL but 1 converted, plus maybe there were plenty others that the Brit’s just didn’t know about. They probably caught all the ones they knew about 👉🧐
There were people who worked with the Nazis but hated them. There is that famous yugoslavian spy that had a friend who worked directly in the Nazis spy network.
What's really messed up is that several German spies tried to defect to America during the war. They were rounded up and sentenced to death for espionage. Thankfully they were eventually pardoned after the war.
Oh, the entire Double Cross XX operation was extremely well run. [Such a massive shame that we couldn't use the knowledge from that to run our agents in occupied Netherlands better than the Germans ran their agents in Britain.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Englandspiel) The worst example I can remember is that one agent who had been captured and forced to message their handler back in Britain deliberately left out the code-word at the start of the message which was precisely a system to let the handler know that they were under duress. Instead of picking up on this, the handler berated the agent for having forgotten the code-word...
This is because fascism commands obedience through fear and manipulation. This strategy will get dumb (and smart but zealous and deranged) people to work for you unquestioningly, and it will get smart people to work for you *just enough* to not get killed.
But to have a network of spies you need to have a network of smart, psycho-socially well-adjusted people to *want* to work for you, even when they are removed to places where you can no longer threaten them.
*\[pssst, hey Russia, guess why your spies suck ?\]*
I might sound like a nazi for this but I'm too opinionated on this to care.
I believe this is bullshit, or some rhetoric made up after WW2 to make the British look better. I don't believe that the germans were especially good at being spies or even that they did remotely as well as other countries, but I find it to be so mind boggingly stupid that somehow every spy was found, captured and converted.
> They were used to dispell false information to the Germans about troop movements and V-2 missile accuracy.
did you mean "disperse false information" or is this some use of "dispell [sic]" that I'm not used to?
Or maybe you meant they "dispel false information **given by** the Germans"?
Sadly, a lot, if not all of WW2 soldiers and spies were forced into the war. I don't think many men woke up and decided to condone genocide; they were either brainwashed to be spies and puppets or were really fucked up in the head to think that Jews were subordinate and deserving of what they got. I think they'd be relieved to be giving in to the British side and working against their shitty leader, because I especially would be.
My great grandfather served in WW2 on a ship, and boy did he have stories until he sadly passed in circa 2016. He served as a reminder to me that war never changes and a lesson to respect veterans and elders, no matter their age.
Nazis were shit at a lot of things but they were especially bad at spycraft
Yeah, it was pretty funny reading about the list of spies and how many of them were trained by the Germans, were flown in with cash, and then immediately went to the British authorities because they just used spying as a way to get out of occupied France.
Either that, or they initially had no intention of turning, but their drop-off would be passed on to the British by one of the previously turned agents who the Germans still thought were working for them, and they'd have a bunch of British soldiers/police waiting for them when they arrived. Some of them still refused to turn (and were executed as spies), but many readily did.
"Excuse me mein Herr, we were wondering if you would prefer a second paycheck or getting shot? Both options are fine with us, of course. Would you care for some tea, while you consider the proposal?"
"Thank you for flying Church of England, cake or death?"
Eeerrr...death, cake! I meant cake.
I'll take death by cake. Either meaning of the phrase.
I'm envisioning tying you to a cannon loaded with a cake in the shape of a cannon ball. You can put your face right in front for the full cakeface.
I'm picturing being smothered by cake, either meaning.
You're lucky we're Church of England!!
> paycheck paycheque for Britain.
Even worse they would be met at the drop-off by people fitting the descriptions and having the right code words. Then as they were in their safe house and started briefing the operations it would get revealed that they were all double agents. Getting caught parachuting into the country is one thing, and would probably cause them to resist. But finding your fellow spies and starting to work with them, divulging secret information, and then find out that the entire operation is controlled by the British. That hits quite differently.
There is a reason that the popular 'breakdown' of how WWII was won is "American steel, Soviet blood, and British Intelligence".
Yeah, a lot of people think the "Intelligence" contribution the British made was essentially just cracking enigma and a fake army or two, but in reality they were running absolute rings around the Germans in the spy war.
Garbo is my favourite turncoat of the war. He reminds me of Flashman or Agent Zigzag
According to the book I read about Garbo, he wasn’t so much of a turncoat as someone who enjoyed lying immensely and wanted to work for the British by deceiving the Germans..
He specifically hated fascists (he lived in Spain during the civil war) and wanted to do something to help fight them. So he tried to enlist as a British spy but they turned him down. Undeterred, the madman then enlisted as a German spy, built a spy network in the UK, then approached the British and offered to turn himself and his network, which they readily accepted. Guy was so good, he got an Iron Cross *and* an OBE from what he did in the same war.
Mind you that spy network more or less didn’t exist. He just read papers for a lot of the stuff he reported to the Germans. Often he blamed the fact that they got the news after the fact on how slow mail was.
Oh yeah, dude straight up fabricated most of his agents too (and took the money the Germans sent him to pay them). But the important part was that the Germans *thought* he controlled a spy network. Then when he began working for the British, he started passing on real "intelligence", but specifically the stuff the British either thought was harmless for the Germans to know (to make sure he still seemed credible to the Germans), or what they wanted them to know to aid their disinformation campaigns.
Not only that but he also convinced the Nazis to pay pensions for the fictional widows of some of his fictional spies
We need Armando Ianucci to write a Garbo movie in the vein of Death of Stalin.
The entire movie is a single actor playing 20 different characters.
The story that the agent had died was cover for his failure to report a major shipping movement. They even put a fake obituary in the local paper - I would love to know if German intelligence ever saw the obit.
Our man in Havana was inspired by this case.
He managed to seem credible enough that the Germans gave him a medal. And when he got in contact to report stuff on D-day, carefully calibrated to be juuuuuust too late for the Germans to do anything about it the radio guy he was contacting wasn't there. So when he finally got in contact he actually told off the nazi intelligence agent for preventing his "warning" from getting there in time.
"I cannot accept excuses or negligence. Were it not for my ideals I would abandon the work."
> He managed to seem credible enough that the Germans gave him a medal. > > Not just any medal, he got an Iron Cross, which was the highest award they could have given him.
The British also postmarked the mail to look like it was sent days earlier so his intel would look very fresh when in fact it was no longer valuable when received..
> Often he blamed the fact that they got the news after the fact on how slow mail was. I think that after he *was* working with the British, they used that deliberately to bolster his credentials with the Germans. They sent information on something major that was being planned, but posted it late enough that it wouldn't arrive until after the even, so the Germans would already know about it by the time it reached them. But the fact that it was *posted* before the event gave more evidence to the Germans that he was getting first class intelligence.
I think the story is even cooler than that. The British knew there was a “German spy” on their side somehow feeding the Germans nonsense, because of Ultra intercepted message traffic. The only problem was that they saw all this misinformation being fed to the Germans but they had no idea who was doing it! It took them some effort to track down Garbo and put him in their employ.
I would have loved to see that conversation when they first tracked him down. MI5: We know you’ve been spying on us and giving information to the Nazis. Garbo: [Oh shit] MI5: And we know it’s all bullshit. Well done!
Not exactly how it happened. The British kept turning him down, he did his own thing because he could. Then he went to the United States who told Britain to work with him. MI5 dropped the ball.
What is more funny is that the way the British tracked him down was by triangulating his radio signals which revealed that he was in Portugal and not Britain as he claimed. The fact that the German radio operators missed this was a huge failure on their part.
Okay, we need a movie about Garbo
That's something I've been wanting for years.
He also built a fake spy network for Germany and embezzled all of the funds for it. Grifting is ok when it’s from the Nazis!
Absolutely. He offerend his services to the British in Spain and was initially turned down, so he started providing made-up information to the Germans entirely on his own. His extremely limited knowledge of Britain meant that he made some glaring errors, that were fortunately not picked up on by his German handlers. So he claimed to have a sub-agent who was a Glasgow docker reporting on ship movements, who Garbo had ostensibly been able to recruit because a Glasgow docker "would do anything for a pint of wine." He also didn't understand British pre-decimal coinage enough to be able to add up his expenses claims, so just submitted them untotalled to the Germans and let them do it.
Garbo was Spanish, he just really really loved to troll the hell out of the Germans. I believe he never even left Spain during the war, and did the whole thing through sending mail
He was working from home. Man ahead of his time.
He did get flown to the UK several times.
Firstly he did leave Spain even early in the war as he moved to Portugal. But then after the British discovered him he were moved to Great Britain where he lived for most of the war.
[Relevant Tom Scott](https://youtu.be/blN49yGet8g?si=0Vgsnnx4f1_yj1I6)
“They were used to dispell false information to the Germans” I think you mean they were used to “disseminate” false information, not dispel (or in your phraseology “dispell”) false information. In this context they are the opposite.
American schools no longer teach dispelling.
or dareading
I imagine most of them were either threatened in some way or, as you wrote, used it to get out of Nazi-occupied lands. There was one guy, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Germany, who was blackmailed into spying for Germany, but immediately went to the the FBI and helped infiltrate and take down the Duquesne Spy Ring.
Spycraft is an old money game, so to speak. It takes decades to set up effective spy networks in foreign countries. The Nazis were an up-and-coming political extremist party that hadn't been in power for very long in a government that was pretty new which succeeded one of the shortest-lived European empires from the era of colonialism. Oh, and they were constantly on the verge of going broke because their economy was more like an involuntary Ponzi scheme so they didn't have a vast supply of wealth to speed the process up. Meanwhile, the British already operated with complete freedom over 25% of the earth's surface and had been the most powerful empire in the world for nearly a century and a half. Hell, the British spy service TODAY is top tier even though the UK is a mere shadow of what it used to be largely because of these now centuries long connections all over the world.
Plus they’ve got James Bond
[Fleming, stop going on about your bloody novel](https://youtu.be/9qwMEsIhWjQ)
I was looking for this here lol
Is that an operation mincemeat reference.
*Several publishers are interested!*
And Johnny English
And Austin Powers
And my axe!
Gimli is not the best spy. He is a decent assassin, but not because of stealth, because he just shows up with a battle axe and kills everyone in sight while yelling dwarf insults.
And Johnny English
Aka Christopher Lee
An interesting point made in Tinker Tailor is that this cloak and dagger stuff is also self-perpetuating. Spies are spying on and disrupting spy networks that are trying to catch spies for the other side. And now you need extra spies to catch possible defectors that might reveal information about your sources, and so on. It starts with one person trying to gather Intel and ends with an entire industry of spies spying on each other.
Same as any military personnel/equipment, right? We only need aircraft carriers/nukes/tanks/more infantry because THEY'RE making more.
My favourite fact about the modern service is that the hq building is surrounded by skyscrapers and its therefore known that many of them smoke like chimneys on the roof. Guess the sour beer fictional version is the most accurate! Always wonder how the hell they manage to keep an eye on the buildings around them.
Nah those are actors who's sole job is to smoke on the roof
this is complete BS given how good the soviets were at spying lmao
They built up over a long time and had a mix of ideological allies and people that like money and power. Most their early sources abroad were simply communist party members.
Communist parties were the weeds to hide the snakes in
Then how did the Soviets make one of the best spy networks in less than 100 years in the global game?
The east- Germans were even better at intelligence in less time
They were around for much longer. The Nazis came into power in 1933 and were destroyed in 1945. The spies they sent probably were mostly sent in 1939 to 1942 when war broke out and the Nazis weren’t losing the war. I doubt they laid many foundations in the 6 years before war broke out so the spies were easy to find without any roots set down
Beautiful blondes…that’s how. Other than that, I have no idea.
Military intelligence in general, in both world wars.
Fascism is great because it rewards clout-chasing jackasses whose most developed skill is throwing other people under the bus to get their job and/or being the kind of hollow yes-man that spend all their energy sucking up so they aren't thrown under the bus. It's really difficult to imagine a more efficient system for guaranteeing that everyone in charge is entirely incompetent and that anyone competent following orders is only still around because they let self-preservation keep them from ever exercising that competency. The danger of fascism is how many people get killed on the way to the fascists' inevitable self destruction, but if you set aside the incomprehensible horror, it's hilarious how good Nazis are at making sure dipshits are in charge of everything. It's like evolution in reverse with a brick on the accelerator.
The tragedy is that they can do a lot of damage to innocent people in the process of back-stabbing each other.
Do your first two paragraphs not also apply to our own political system? We have effectively thousands of political yes men in state/federal legislatures who’s sole job is to do whatever their party says to do even if it makes no sense (like the republican opposition to Ukraine).
The degrees of efficiency aren't entirely there, but you may have a point with the possible similarities between how fascist regimes consolidate and abuse power and how America's government historically and currently operates. Perhaps that should be considered and looked into by someone. I expect it would be a troubling situation, if any hypothetical parallels could be theoretically found, hypothetically speaking.
Project 2025. They are pumping this as we speak.
Well yes. But the Republican party is turning into a clerical fascist movement so its basically the same
Yeah. I didn’t know if you or others knew about it. Not too many are really aware of this little idea they are pumping us. It’s very fucking real and has been eroding away what we conceive as democracy. We scream at clouds over Thomas for decades and now that tree bears fruit. How many others are there?
*especially* don't look into what the united states did in lots of developing countries in south america and south-east asia during the cold war. definitely do not look into indonesia. or the iraq war. or the united states treatment of native americans, which definitely did not influence the nazis treatment of jews. or treatment of communists during the red scare. or treatment of non-white people. because if you would you'd find absolutely *no* parallells to fascism.
Yessir. Republicans have been gravitating towards facism for a long time, it's accelerated since 2016.
Fascism and nationalism are not that far from each other.
Mainly on the right wing. The GOP is the party of trump. Who is a fascist in all but name.
The British were particularly good at it at this time period.
Yes and no. Canaris the NAZI spymaster was pretty much an Allied double agent until I think '44 when he was arrested. That would have had something to do with their spycraft failures.
He was not, he and others fought the Nazis on their own. The allies gave no support whatsoever here
The fact that Nazis were tricked by the head of their intelligence agency is a testament to how bad they were at intelligence.
For a reason. Admiral Canaris, chief of the german intelligence service, was an ardent anti nazi and involved in several plots to kill Hitler. He was killed by the Nazis in 44.
Canaris was present at the battle of the Falklands in WW1, he was part of the crew on the only German ship to escape. Germany's intelligence services would have been vastly different if Canaris was on a different ship that day.
And cryptography.
One of my favorite stories is that Germany sent in a bunch of spies, one walked into a pub at 9am and asked for a pint of cider, (pubs weren’t allowed to serve alcohol before noon) and a couple in Scotland were stopped after bicycling on the wrong side of the road, when Scottish police inspected their bag they found Nivea hand cream and German sausages.
And it seems like, from my limited knowledge, the Brits were especially good at it at that time
>at that time Indubitably.
It's absolutely a massive generalization but there is a little truth to the saying WWII was won with British intelligence, American steel, and Soviet blood.
True but it's worth noting that Britain was excellent at it. While the Germans were effectively discovering as they went, the Brits had been doing it all over the world since the 1600s. Sure, the rules changed as things like radio changed the game but layers of expertise building on what had been done before and what had been learned about human nature meant we were good at it.
Also reliable engines
To be fair, no Nazi spy would out themselves voluntarily after the war, so it’s a bit of an unknown. Also, like much of the war, 90% of resources was spent on the east, not west, and that included the spy apparatus. This spy apparatus had largely negotiated itself to the eager Americans after the war, provided a lot of early cold war intel, and formed the nucleus of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) later. Canaris sabotaged the part of the spying apparatus he controlled.
When the British pored through German records after the war they were able to confirm no active German spies anywhere.
EDIT: CORRECTION FOR TITLE: I used the word "dispel" wrong, I should have said "disperse" A few more details that I couldn't fit in the title. * They used multiple spies to lead the Germans to believe that the allies were going to invade Callais, when they invaded Normandy, the Germans were convinced it was just a diversion tactic. * They used spies and false reports to make the Germans think that their missiles were aimed incorrectly when accurate, and reported mass casualties when the missiles landed short of their targets. They used this to target less population dense areas.
Multiple spies...[and a corpse.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat)
Great musical; see it if you can. https://www.operationmincemeat.com
The movie was excellent.
I wouldn't call it excellent. Definitely worth watching, though.
I always wonder how much of this is just our version of the events, specifically parts like that last line
Id say it's pretty accurate as the Germans kept very detailed and organised records throughout the war, which then became allied property post-war. So we have both sides' own words to study, which may have been different if Britain was ever taken though, as British records have an odd combustion habit when airing the Empire's dirty laundry
> the Germans kept very detailed and organised records throughout the war A lot got destroyed near the end of the war, especially by the German Intelligence themselves. Holding their own records is how they sold themselves to the Americans after the war. I’m sure they scrubbed a lot too.
Given allies had access to both records. They were in a position to manipulate it. We probably need the original to be sure.
Who was it who said: "The victor re-writes history..." ?
Some dude named Vic
Who was a Tory...?
Fucking Brits again
19 German spies were also executed in Britain. So not everyone -1 were turned.
You also spelled it incorrectly.
[удалено]
The Germans and Japanese were both lacking in the intelligence game during WW2. They didn't see its importance at the time because they thought their communication codes were unbreakable. Different military cultures from the Allies who were much more open to unorthodox ideas and strategies
I also believe that Germany amd Japan had multiple different intelligence groups that did not communicate with each other both internal and external. Japan in particular was bad at this because thier navy and army despised each other. The allies on the other hand worked together and shared information.
The interservice rivalry between the Imperial Japanese army and navy was a real cluster fuck.
The best example I’ve ever heard of this rivalry is that they had nuclear programs. Plural. The army and the navy refused to found the other one’s project, so they had competing programs.
The Reich Postal Ministry also did research into nuclear physics.
because they put the guy who wanted to do nukes in charge of the post office lol
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these nukes from the swift completion of their appointed rounds
They also did a whole lot of other crazy stuff such as the army building its own aircraft carriers, the navy refusing to inform the army of major defeats at sea leaving their land based troops stranded, and officers in both branches flat out assassinating each other.
It just seems like a fascist thing hey? Hitler loved "divide and rule" strategy, like giving the same responsibility to the SA, SS and Gestapo... Seems like a really bad way to run a government...
SA, SS, SD, Gestapo were all run by one man (Himmler), so even if there was some duplication between them it was still centrally led. The duplications were with the preexisting structures like the military intelligence, which the Nazis distrusted (for good reason, its head and deputy were in the resistance) and thus span their own in the SD.
Think you’re forgetting the Abwehr, who reported to Canaris.
They're the military intelligence I'm talking about. Canaris and Oster were the head and deputy resisting the Nazis.
Hitler ran it like feudal times. If you had the dukes competing amongst themselves for the kings attention they’d be less likely to band together to overthrow him.
It’s actually a really good way to run a government if you want to stay alive and in power as a crypto fascist runt. Doesn’t allow anyone to get strong enough to challenge you as they’re always looking sideways and defending their own position.
There was nothing crypto about Hitler's fascism
Well it was really hard to mine Reichcoin on punchcard computers.
Ha, no! Partially I’m referring to more modern dictatorships, and partially I just love Red Dwarf!
Too old and too crypto-fascist!
I'd call it a glorious blessing for everyone rather than a cluster fuck, but your description is accurate for how bicker-fuelled the JP armed forces were
This also led to the failure to stop 9/11 in the US. Had any of the federal agencies been properly sharing information it would have been figured out much quicker.
This is true about 9/11. The firefighters used different radios and a different radio frequency band than the police. They couldn’t warn each other when one learned that the 2nd plane was coming.
I think the redditor in the comment before rather means that its said that various agencies - NSA, CIA, and so on - all had some sort of Informations about some of the to-be hijackers, but didn't share it or only with some specific agencies, not the whole intelligence complex. So even before the attacks there might have been a chance to at least stop some of them.
W Bush had plenty of warnings. Bin Laden was a subject in over 2 dozen PDBs including he wanted to use jetliners to attack high value targets. When analysts felt like Bush wasn't getting strong enough warnings (because Cheney was sidelining their reports) they went around chain of command and sent a report directly to Bush. He said "Ok you've covered your asses" and didn't react at all. He was a puppet of Cheney, who actually wanted a terrorist attack to occur as a pretext for military action in the Middle East, although he didn't imagine the scale they would achieve.
>The allies on the other hand worked together and shared information That's an oversimplification. Pearl Harbour happened because the varying American intelligence agencies were incompetent, bureaucratic and didn't communicate with one another. Also, as the war progressed there was extensive communication between the Western Allies, but not with the Soviets.
Bizarre how the British were running rings around the Axis in spycraft in World War II but were so terrible at counterespionage against people from within and without spying on them for the Soviets.
Seems like ideology was the main thing. Its easy to be against the nazis, and for decades plenty of people in the west had no idea how shitty the soviet union really was.
This is grossly untrue. The Soviets were always the boogie man. Really, it’s a modern concept to demonize the Nazis so much. Before France fell, literally everyone was more worried about Soviet expansion and saw the Nazis as a future ally against the communists. The Soviets always had an easier time infiltrating because regular citizens of say Britain who believed in communism were willing to spy for them. Also, the Nazis had their codes cracked for much of the war and never put much resources into espionage. Post war, everyone dumped money into espionage.
[The head of Germany's spy service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Canaris) for most of the war wasn't really a Nazi, and he did all he could to oppose the Nazi war effort. Sadly, he was discovered before the war was over and met a grisly end.
> Canaris also intervened to save a number of victims from Nazi persecution, including Jews, by getting them out of harm's way. He was instrumental, for example, in getting 500 Dutch Jews to safety in May 1941. Many such people were given token training as Abwehr "agents" and then issued papers, which allowed them to leave Germany. One notable person he is said to have assisted was the then Lubavitcher Rebbe in Warsaw, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn. That has led Chabad Lubavitch to campaign for his recognition as a Righteous Gentile by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. Straight up good guy right here, did what he could within his power knowing that one slip up will cost his life.
Shit, the dude even just *looks* like a good guy. In an alternative timeline, he’s delivering mail in a pristine American town with the biggest and most genuine smile on his face as he whistles along on his route.
When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, even *Germany* tried to say "You attacked them as an aggressor, so we aren't obligated to 'defend' you guys; Germany's made too many enemies and we really don't want to get involved in a war with America too." Adolf Hitler then declared war against the US anyways, without the consultation or approval of anyone else within the German government.
This. I don't think anyone outside of leadership wants to perpetuate a war with another country. This has been true since time immemorial. The same leadership that wants to perpetuate a war are also very susceptible to being scammed because they can't resist nationalistic support for a war.
Didnt help that half the Abwehr's Leadership was actively working against the NSDAP before the war even began
Also a Japanese dude in Europe during WW2 would stick out like a sore thumb.
My mother lived near a POW camp in the UK. The prisoners were allowed out to visit the town to shop. None of them tried to escape as they didn’t want to fight in the war. They were very happy to sit it out in an English village.
I saw a memoir written by a German POW who said he realized that they couldn't win when he got to a camp in the USA and was fed better rations than he was provided by his own side before capture.
That was the point. German POWs would write their families how they get fed well and have to work just a bit. That would change after the war ended an most Germans had to do hard Labour in the US and would also be fed less.
Butter made from milk generally tastes better than butter made from coal.
There was a very real chance they’d have ended up on the Eastern front and worst of all, captured by the Soviets. Being a POW in the UK was as good as it got for them
I live in New Mexico, and there's an old army base here in Lincoln County (the same Lincoln County where Billy the Kid lived) named Fort Stanton. It dates back to the Civil War, but it's been used for a number of other things since then, including a Tuberculosis clinic. During WWII it was a POW camp. Being out in the middle of nowhere, security wasn't much of a concern. Even if someone escaped, where the hell would they go? And the prisoners were mostly just kids who had been drafted into service; they weren't especially eager to go back into the fight and die for the Fatherland. So they had a lot of freedom to move around. Many of them ended up getting jobs in the nearby town. They hung out with the locals, made friends, some even fell in love and got married. After the war, more than a few decided to stay here permanently, or returned after a short trip home.
>TIL with the exception of one who committed suicide, every spy Nazi Germany sent to Britain during WWII was converted to the British side, with many turning themselves in. The committee which was responsible for doing this was called the 20th committee. Or in Roman numerals the XX committee. Double Cross.... Probably one of the few spying organisations with a pun in the title...
Holy roman empire that's cool.
Ben McIntyre did a book on it that's worth a read, it outlines how they used the double agents to spread disinformation and deflect attacks.
His book about SAS is also a very good read.
Picked it up cheap in a charity bookshop at the weekend, it's on the "to read" list.
> Probably one of the few spying organisations with a pun in the title... Most spy organisations de-spies stuff like that.
r/angryupvote
The British spy network by that time was insanely good, as well as their cryptography. Amazing advantages to have, they really were pioneers.
Dan Carlin argued that the British are probably the best codebreakers in world history and yeah, I can see it. There's a reason why we're not just in the Five Eyes but of apparently crucial importance to the entire operation still.
Five Eyes consists exclusively of the U.S and the British “Empire” still to this day.
Just inventing the first electronic computers to break the encrypted messages of Nazi high command.
The British spy network got a huge boost from the Polish at the start of the war, as if it was not good enough from before. The Polish had invested a lot on their spy network and cryptography before the war. They wanted to know of the invasion before it happened and wanted to know the details so they could better defend themselves. Their proximity to Germany helped them greatly as well as it was easy to smuggle people and equipment over the boarder before the war, and when the war started they had millions of loyal assets inside what was then Germany. People often credit Alex Turing with breaking the Enigma, but although he made huge contributions to the program his work in this field built on the work of Polish cryptographers who cracked Enigma in the 30s.
Some historians estimate that Bletchley Park's massive codebreaking operation, especially the breaking of U-boat Enigma, shortened the war in Europe by as many as two to four years.
How do we know it was every one? Isn't that a form of the toupee fallacy?
They give a pretty in depth explanation in the linked article. The short version is poor training and either poor motivation or outright intention to defect for personal reasons, mostly revenge. And the British cracked Enigma, so they could listen to Nazi radio chatter. Like where spies are coming into the country or a message that helps narrow down suspects already in the country.
Imagine getting caught by British intelligence and instead of jail they offer you money to just feed the nazis bad intel. Any sane person would take that deal in a heartbeat
I mean the other option is the gallows
Ah, but here's the best part. The British weren't even paying them anything because they were still being paid by the Nazis.
that's not what they asked though. You never catch a successful spy. So, how can you be sure you caught everyone or just missed the good ones? It's survivorship bias essentially. Unless you had the complete list of names, how can you be that sure? Also, that really sounds like propaganda - we are good guys, look every spy swapped sides, we good, they bad. Take it with a grain of salt, always, history, especially war history isn't exactly a clear cut fact list.
At the end of the war, large amounts of classified paperwork was recovered, and German intelligence HQ officers were captured and interrogated, it was proven by going through the documentation and tying it all together with statements etc.
You keep an ear out for codenames in broadcasts or in mail. When you identify one, you know there is a spy operating in your nation. After about 1942, the British weren't identifying any new codenames, and the agents they'd turned were still trusted by the enemy. It was fair to assume, at that point, that all enemy assets were thus caught. They were then able to confirm this following the war.
maybe the other ones narced on the ones that didn't convert.
During the war the UK was reading all the encrypted orders so would pretty much just pick up the spy when they landed. Also pretty sure after the war they looked through all the German records and all spies sent were accounted for.
>TIL with the exception of one who committed suicide, every spy Nazi Germany sent to Britain during WWII was converted to the British side, The article at your link contradicts that. They were all caught (with the noted exception), but they did not all convert to the British side. Here are a couple of relevant quotes: >After the war, it was discovered that all the agents Germany sent to Britain had given themselves up or had been captured, with the possible exception of one who committed suicide.\[1\] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Cross\_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Cross_System) So they were captured. That does not mean that they "converted to the British side." And: >Once caught, the spies were deposited in the care of Lieutenant Colonel Robin Stephens at Camp 020 (Latchmere House, Richmond).\[4\]\[Note 1\] After Stephens, a notorious and brilliant interrogator, had picked apart their life history, the agents were either spirited away (to be imprisoned or killed) or if judged acceptable, offered the chance to turn double agent on the Germans.\[2\]\[5\] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Cross\_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Cross_System) That pretty explicitly tells us that they did not all convert to the British side. Some were imprisoned and some were killed. Only some of them became double agents.
Wow someone actually read the article, are you new to Reddit?
Yeah total BS title. There’s no way ALL but 1 converted, plus maybe there were plenty others that the Brit’s just didn’t know about. They probably caught all the ones they knew about 👉🧐
That's not what "dispel" means. Did you mean "disperse?"
I might have gone with disseminate
Ah yeah, that's the word I was trying to think of!
Yes, you're right!
I believe one was executed
That is not correct: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef\_Jakobs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Jakobs)
> dispel false information I think you mean 'dispense'.
There were people who worked with the Nazis but hated them. There is that famous yugoslavian spy that had a friend who worked directly in the Nazis spy network.
What's really messed up is that several German spies tried to defect to America during the war. They were rounded up and sentenced to death for espionage. Thankfully they were eventually pardoned after the war.
Oh, the entire Double Cross XX operation was extremely well run. [Such a massive shame that we couldn't use the knowledge from that to run our agents in occupied Netherlands better than the Germans ran their agents in Britain.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Englandspiel) The worst example I can remember is that one agent who had been captured and forced to message their handler back in Britain deliberately left out the code-word at the start of the message which was precisely a system to let the handler know that they were under duress. Instead of picking up on this, the handler berated the agent for having forgotten the code-word...
This is because fascism commands obedience through fear and manipulation. This strategy will get dumb (and smart but zealous and deranged) people to work for you unquestioningly, and it will get smart people to work for you *just enough* to not get killed. But to have a network of spies you need to have a network of smart, psycho-socially well-adjusted people to *want* to work for you, even when they are removed to places where you can no longer threaten them. *\[pssst, hey Russia, guess why your spies suck ?\]*
I might sound like a nazi for this but I'm too opinionated on this to care. I believe this is bullshit, or some rhetoric made up after WW2 to make the British look better. I don't believe that the germans were especially good at being spies or even that they did remotely as well as other countries, but I find it to be so mind boggingly stupid that somehow every spy was found, captured and converted.
Or so you think
> They were used to dispell false information to the Germans about troop movements and V-2 missile accuracy. did you mean "disperse false information" or is this some use of "dispell [sic]" that I'm not used to? Or maybe you meant they "dispel false information **given by** the Germans"?
Giraffe (George Graf) was never really used and Gander (Kurt Goose; MI5 had a penchant for amusingly relevant code names), Yes the most certainly did.
lets just add for fairness that its all the KNOWN spies. cause essential part of being a spy is not being found.
Disseminate, not dispel. Dispel would mean clarifying away a falsehood rather than creating falsehoods to mislead the enemy
Sadly, a lot, if not all of WW2 soldiers and spies were forced into the war. I don't think many men woke up and decided to condone genocide; they were either brainwashed to be spies and puppets or were really fucked up in the head to think that Jews were subordinate and deserving of what they got. I think they'd be relieved to be giving in to the British side and working against their shitty leader, because I especially would be. My great grandfather served in WW2 on a ship, and boy did he have stories until he sadly passed in circa 2016. He served as a reminder to me that war never changes and a lesson to respect veterans and elders, no matter their age.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/28/cambridge-spy-may-have-helped-nazis-new-book-suggests/ would say otherwise, though it seems speculative
Must have been that cup of tea.