In this project, I find that I deviate somewhat from the conclusions to which Marshall who did not have access to archival material and Marnham came, and I shall take pains to explain why I think some of their conclusions β but not the major one concerning deception and betrayal of the Prosper circuit β may be flawed. Early next year I shall provide a deep analysis of War Cabinet records from the first half of , in order to clarify some of the bizarre decisions and activities that took place to support Allied deception exercises in Northern France as a prelude to the OVERLORD landings of Cookridge, in Inside SOE.
The claims made in these statements include some troublesome contradictions. On the other hand, E. Obviously one of these assertions must be wrong β maybe both. They are worth analyzing in more detail. Cookridge, on the other hand, quotes the trial transcript of the Permanent Military Tribunal at Reuilly Barracks from June Yet the Gestapo was playing a similarly speculative game.
Theirs was a far less dangerous enterprise, however: they were on home turf if not native soil. Whatever the details were, this was a poor way to run a railroad, let alone a penetrative intelligence organization, as the conflicting expostulations of Buckmaster, given above, affirm.
Here was an officer out of his depth. We think of a double agent as a man who, though supposed to be an agent of Power A by that power, is in fact working in the interests and under the direction of Power B. But in fact the agent, especially if he has started work before the war, is often trying to do work for both A and B, and to draw emoluments from both. The authorised double-agent who pays in good faith too dearly is not, therefore, a traitor, though of course such a double-agent may always turn real traitor, and the dividing line might be hard to draw.
Peddlers, fabricators, and others who do not perform a service for an intelligence organization, but only for themselves, are not agents at all, and therefore are not DAs. Such misrepresentations cause an enormous amount of confusion with the reading public. Thus the closest analogy to the strategy of the special agents is what Kim Philby set out to do: infiltrate an ideological foe under subterfuge.
