He and Sir John Masterman, an Oxford history professor and ultimately vice chancellor of Oxford, created in January of 1941 the Twenty (XX) Committee. Managing these agents was an equally eccentric assortment of case officers working for MI-6 (Secret Intelligence Service or “SIS”) and MI-5, the British intelligence agencies. MI-5’s official name is the Security Service, but unlike its sister organization MI-6, did not use an abbreviation of its title because SS had already been taken and had a justifiably repulsive connotation. Within MI-5, B Division was the counterespionage branch and within B Division was B1A, the section tasked with double agents.Ĭhief of B1A was Thomas Argyle “Tar” Robertson (1909-1994), a former Seaforth Highlander officer who joined MI-5 in 1933. Robertson was a charming, charismatic man who insisted on continuing to wear his regimental tartan trousers, which earned him the nickname “Passion Pants.” Despite the flippancy of his nickname he was deeply respected by BIA’s staff. The story of Operation FORTITUDE, the Allied effort to mislead the Germans into where the Jlandings would occur, is a fascinating and complex story. Some of the key people involved in FORTITUDE were an odd mix, or as Ben Macintyre describes them so well in Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies: “…a bisexual Peruvian playgirl, a tiny Polish fighter pilot, a mercurial Frenchwoman, a Serbian seducer, and a deeply eccentric Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming.” (p.
Top Image: Dummy Sherman Tank 1944, photo courtesy of the US Army
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