double agents

double agents are spies who secretly transfer their allegiance to an enemy secret service which uses them to confuse its foes. For example, in February 1942 an early SOE agent in the Netherlands, hunting for a lorry to remove supplies from a parachute drop, met a Dutchman who ran a small transport firm, whom he engaged. The Dutchman told the Abwehr, who supervised not only that parachute drop, but hundreds more, thus entrapping almost all of SOE's effort into the Netherlands for eighteen months (see Englandspiel). Similarly, a Welsh nationalist was recruited as a spy by the Abwehr before the war. When the war broke out in 1939 he went to his local police station; made his first radio report to Germany from Wandsworth gaol; and helped MI5 to capture every one of the agents the Abwehr sent to the UK, all through the war (see XX-committee). An early escape line (see MI9) in north-eastern France was shattered when one of its organizers, an English sergeant, on being arrested, gave away 50 of his colleagues to the Gestapo, with whom he worked until 1944.

A Frenchwoman who helped a Franco–Polish intelligence circuit in France in the winter of 1940–1 (interallié) was arrested and became a double agent overnight. She drove round Paris with one of her captors, an Abwehr sergeant, pointing out members of her circuit whom they passed in the street. See also triple agents.

M. R. D. Foot