The Double-Cross System — J.C. Masterman | Folio Society 2007 | WWII Espionage | Introduced by M.R.D. Foot | In Slipcase Description

The book the British government did not want published.

During the Second World War, British intelligence achieved something close to miraculous: it captured every single German agent sent to Britain, and then turned a good number of them, running them back against Berlin as double agents. For years the Germans believed they had a functioning spy network in Britain. What they actually had was a carefully managed fiction written by the very people they were spying on — a fiction that culminated in convincing Hitler the D-Day landings were a diversion and the real invasion was still coming at Calais.

The operation was run by the Twenty Committee, so named because twenty in Roman numerals is XX, which is to say a double cross. Somebody in wartime intelligence had a sense of humour.

The man who chaired it wrote this book. Sir John Masterman was an Oxford don before the war and returned to Oxford after it, but in between he ran the double-cross system, and in 1945 he wrote this account as a classified internal report — a cold, precise, extraordinarily clear-eyed assessment of how it had all been done and what had been learned. It was meant for official eyes only.

It stayed secret for twenty-seven years. Masterman fought to have it released, was refused repeatedly, and eventually forced the issue by arranging publication through Yale University Press in 1972, which put the whole thing beyond the reach of the British establishment. It caused a considerable fuss at the time. It is now regarded as one of the foundational documents of intelligence history, and everything written about wartime deception since has drawn on it.

This is the Folio Society edition of 2007, with an introduction by M.R.D. Foot — the official historian of the SOE, and about as authoritative a guide to this territory as exists — and the original foreword by Norman Holmes Pearson of the OSS. Quarter-bound in navy cloth with gilt lettering to the spine, over photographic boards showing four of the agents themselves in gilt-ringed roundels against a naval scene. Black and white photographic plates and facsimile documents throughout. In the matching navy slipcase.

The faces on the cover are worth a moment. These were real people, running enormous risks, most of them living double lives in a country that had every reason to hang them if the arrangement had ever come apart.

Condition. Good. There is white flecking and a scatter of small white specks along the navy cloth at the front joint and spine edge — paint spatter of some sort, clearly visible in our photographs and the reason this is priced where it is. The gilt lettering is bright and unrubbed, the photographic boards are clean and unfaded, and the corners are sharp. Internally clean, tight and apparently unread, with the plates crisp. The slipcase is sound with light edge wear.

A superb piece of history at a price that reflects a mark on the cloth rather than anything wrong with the book.

One of a kind — when it's gone, it's gone.

Free UK delivery. Hand-wrapped in stiff card and packing paper.