John Williams at the New York Times offers a Q & A with Ben Macintyre (seen in the above photo), the author of Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies.
"Double Cross” is Ben Macintyre’s third book about World War II espionage, following the acclaimed “Agent Zigzag” and “Operation Mincemeat.” When the MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence service, realized that it had turned all of Germany’s spies into double agents, it started the Double Cross operation. The German spies fed an ornate series of lies to Berlin, helping the Allies win at Normandy by drawing the attention of the Nazis to other possible points of attack. In a recent interview via e-mail, Mr. Macintyre discussed whether he would have made a good spy, Churchill’s knowledge of Double Cross, the possibility that German intelligence officers may have been sympathetic to the plan and more.
... Q. Do you think you would make a good spy?
A. I think I would have been a hopeless spy. I love telling stories, and am almost entirely unable to keep a secret. Novelists make good spies (and most of the great spy writers have been spies — Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, John Le Carré). But we nonfiction writers need to stay wedded to truth and reality, which I suspect makes us pretty useless as espionage material.
You can read the rest of the interview via th below link:
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