DOUBLE CROSS• 157visitors’ names. In some cases they have been of really valuable service in
the sense of obtaining the contents of wastepaper baskets, which have
given us either valuable documents or material useful for breaking ciphers.
Most embassies, however, are careful to burn such material, and we cannot
hope that many of them will be as productively insouciant as the Spanish
during the war.
Mr. Dickson [then head of the agent-running section], moreover, has
pointed out that the difficulties of finding suitable agents and putting them
in work will grow immensely. During the war, many agents were willing
to carry out this kind of work out of patriotic conviction, but they are now
hesitating to continue after the war either on moral grounds or because
they are trying, quite naturally, to secure better paid and more permanent
work for the future. It must also be assumed that it will soon become easier
to find servants and that therefore the competition for a particular post will
be greater.DOUBLE AGENTS.No attempts were made by British Intelligence to
run double agents during World War I because of a disastrous inci-
dent shortly before the war. CaptainVernon Kellsuccessfully re-
cruited a convicted German spy,Armgaard Graves, but once he
was released from prison for the purpose of contacting his German
controllers, Graves had promptly decamped to New York and pub-
lishedThe Secrets of the German War Office, which included an em-
barrassing account of his encounters with Kell and the assertion that
his mission had been authorized personally by the foreign secretary,
Sir Edward Grey. Questions were raised in the House of Commons
in June 1913 and deflected by the Scottish secretary.
In May 1939 a French Deuxie`me Bureau officer visited London
and delivered a lecture to an audience ofSecret Intelligence Service
officers on the subject of ‘‘double-crossing agents.’’ This led four
months later toMI5accepting an offer fromsnowto contact the
enemy under MI5’s control, an operation that was to develop into the
double crosssystem.
DOUBLE CROSS.The informal term used to refer to the coordinated
exploitation of controlled enemy agents. These operations during
World War II were described byJohn MastermaninThe Double
Cross System in the War of 1939 to 1945(1972). Masterman revealed
the extent of MI5double agentoperations and the method of super-
vising them with individual case officers directed by a Double Cross