Out of it comes a story, hitherto buried in Secret Service files, of a tragic friendship between two rich playboys who were friends at the University of Freiburg before the War. The inventiveness was breathtaking and only possible in an age when amateurism was celebrated and eccentricity allowed to flourish. The activity of these double agents was just one facet of the vast secret army assembled in June 1944 and known as Operation Fortitude.Īlong with rubber tanks and dummy landing craft, it encompassed faked maps, pigeon flights, blizzards of meaningless radio traffic, codes written in invisible ink and even doubles of Field Marshal Montgomery. In a rare moment of introspection, Lily confided: ‘I have destroyed my own work’. Tar Robertson, furious to be held to ransom by a dog, dismissed her, threatening prison. Lily, taking her revenge, threatened to crash the whole agent network by transmitting a single code. Weeks passed in a cold, lonely London flat until news came that Babs was dead. Lily only grudgingly agreed to travel after a sworn promise that Babs would follow.
This fell foul of England’s quarantine laws. Her defection to the British was on condition that she could take her terrier-poodle Babs back to England. His only failure was with Lily Sergeyev, a melodramatic Frenchwoman who was recruited by German Intelligence in 1941 and sent to Madrid to make contact with an Abwehr agent.Ĭodenamed Agent Treasure, she was to prove anything but. The Intelligence war against Germany was comprehensively won by the Allies – partly because the Head of German Military Intelligence, Admiral Canaris, became increasingly disillusioned with Hitler.īy contrast, The Twenty Committee was run by a handsome, amiable, fast-living Scotsman, Tar Robertson, a superb organiser who felt a natural affinity with many of his highly-strung double agents. But such was their personality that they relished the game of double-cross. They knew they lived dangerously: enemy double agents whose cover was blown expected (unless they became triple-agents) to be tortured and killed. Elvira was there to ‘coat-trail’ and hopefully get herself recruited as a German agent.Īll these people were born dissemblers. Rejected by the Free French, she was recruited by the British, who sent her to Cannes to join ‘the small class of unscrupulous millionaires’ living it up while the war raged. Then there was the bisexual Peruvian heiress Elvira Chaudoir, who gambled to relieve her boredom.
Canine crusader: Babs, Lily's beloved dog, was a critical if unlikely player in the D-Day storyĪnother agent, Roman Czerniawski, was an ex-fighter pilot, a passionate and haughty Polish patriot who would die a thousand deaths to see his motherland restored.
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