Baiting the trap with CHEESE: how we fooled the Germans in the second world war

Second world war deception operations are now widely known, particularly those which misled the Germans into thinking that the D-Day Normandy landings were merely a diversion. Great use was made of captured German agents in Britain who sent disinformation about invented army divisions and ships allocated to the supposedly ‘real’ landings still to come.

Much less well known, though of arguably equal consequence, was a similar deception operation in the Middle East, based on an MI6 agent known as CHEESE. He came to be regarded by the Germans as their most valuable source in the region, despite the fact that the disinformation he fed them helped prevent them capturing Cairo and the Suez Canal, lose them Tobruk, starve Rommel’s Afrika Korps of fuel, and kept vital German divisions in the south of France and the Balkans while the Allies established and expanded their Normandy foothold.

Sir Michael Howard, official historian of British strategic deception, described him as ‘the most successful channel at their [British] disposal’.