The Dennis Wheatley 'Museum' - Dennis Wheatley in World War II: a supplement

‘Bodyguard’ – leaking false information to the enemy

A table showing the detailed
arrangements of how false
information was to be relayed
to the enemy through
double agents

Note that DW’s former
employee ‘Agent Gelatine’
is one of those providing
false information

Click on the image to enlarge

While a huge variety of means were used to feed false information to the enemy, one of the most effective means was through the use of double agents.

As DW wrote, ‘James, Neil and I, as Planners, were not supposed to know anything about these secret intelligence activities. But, of course, we did,’ and he proceeded to list and give brief character sketches of the key agents, such as Garbo, Brutus, Tricycle, Tate and Treasure as well as some eight others, and while he did not mention the top secret ‘XX’ or ‘Twenty’ Committee’ chaired by MI5 and which selected the information to be given, DW quite possibly knew of its existence.

He certainly knew about the use of double agents, because he had given cover to one of Maxwell Knight’s most important agents, Agent Gelatine, in the run-up to the war.

A nice example of a table used to co-ordinate the dissemination of information by double agents is to be found in The National Archives, and it will be noted that both Garbo and Agent Gelatine figure in this table showing who was to relay what, and when.

In effect, a vast jigsaw was being created (but not too perfect a jigsaw, or the recipients would have been suspicious), dis-assembled and then fed at different times and through a variety of different means to the enemy, so that they could then re-assemble the jigsaw and cleverly determine exactly what the Allies wanted them to believe was going on.