The Spies Who Never Were

The thrilling true story of the daring double agents who thwarted Hitler’s spy machine in Britain and turned the tide of World War II.

After the fall of France in the mid-1940s, Adolf Hitler faced a British Empire that refused to negotiate for peace. With total war looming, he ordered the Abwehr, Germany’s defense and intelligence organization, to carry out Operation Lena—a program to place information-gathering spies within Britain. Quickly, a network of secret agents spread within the United Kingdom and across the British Empire. A master of disguises, a professional safecracker, a scrubwoman, a diplomat’s daughter—they all reported news of the Allied defenses and strategies back to their German spymasters. One Yugoslav playboy codenamed “Tricycle” infiltrated the highest echelon of British society and is said to have been one of Ian Fleming’s models for James Bond. The stunning truth, though, was that every last one of these German spies had been captured and turned by the British. As double agents, they sent a canny mix of truth and misinformation back to Hitler, all carefully controlled by the Allies. As one British report put it: “By means of the double agent system, we actually ran and controlled the German espionage system in this country.” In The Spies Who Never Were, World War II veteran cryptographer Hervie Haufler reveals the real stories of these double agents and their deceptions. This “fascinating account” lays out both the worldwide machinations and the personal clashes that went into the greatest deception in the history of warfare (Booklist).

Author Biography

Hervie Haufler (1919–2016) was an author and World War II veteran. Born in Kentucky, he attended the University of Michigan, where he was editor of the Michigan Daily and a member of Phi Betta Kappa. His two books of World War II history, Codebreakers’ Victory (2003) and The Spies Who Never Were (2006), grew out of his wartime experiences as a cryptographer in one of the American units assigned to “Ultra,” the British program for intercepting and decoding Axis messages. Haufler researched public archives and interviewed other members of British and American codebreaking programs to write the books. A longtime employee of General Electric, he left the company in 1980 to found a communications consulting firm with his wife, Patricia. Haufler’s short stories and articles appeared in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and Travel & Leisure, among many other publications.