To the French, Albion’s expertise in perfidy will come as no surprise. But centuries of warfare have given them time to learn. With their experience only dating back to 1914, the Germans clearly found it difficult to grasp during the second world war that nowhere is the truth more expertly and instinctively spun than in the land of the gentleman.
While a schoolchild soon masters the lie simple, and the lie financial merely requires a degree of brazenness easily developed by proximity to other people’s money, the lie belligerent demands an instinct for dis-simulation that must be bred in the bone of its practitioners to be carried off convincingly.Thus, alongside the exquisite entertainment to be derived from Double Cross, Ben MacIntyre’s account of the wartime operation to feed false information to the enemy, there ought also to lurk some unease about the source of our alarming genius for deceit.
One clue may come from the name chosen for the umbrella group made up of different Intelligence services that ran the system.
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