PROLOGUE

ON 24 SEPTEMBER 1942 A top-level secret meeting took place in London. Among those present were the Directors of Intelligence of the British Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force. The guardian of the Enigma secret and head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) was also present, along with the head of the Security Service’s B Division, who was responsible for counter-espionage in the United Kingdom. Sitting before them was an immaculately dressed colonel in his mid-forties. Known simply as the Controlling Officer, Johnny Bevan had been charged with masterminding a global deception policy with the aim of hoodwinking the Axis into wasting their resources and manpower by whatever means came his way. Like his predecessor in the post, the Controlling Officer had some inkling that the secret services had some special means of feeding information to the German intelligence service, the Abwehr.

However, where his predecessor had been kept in the dark about the true nature of this ‘special means’, Bevan was about to be told. Like the breaking of the Enigma code, it was one of the greatest secrets of the war. As he listened, first to the head of the SIS and then to Guy Liddell, the head of B Division, it became clear that the Allies had a major advantage over the Germans in this war. In addition to being able to read the secret codes of the Abwehr and other enemy organizations, the Security Service, MI5, firmly believed it controlled the only active German spy rings then operating in the United Kingdom. If Bevan wanted to dupe the German intelligence services, there was a pool of well-established double agents on hand to carry out his bidding.

How this had come about, and why Germany’s spies were now working for the British, was quite a story. As Bevan quietly took this information in, Liddell explained to him how everything had begun with an agent he called Snow.