The Twenty Committee
When World War II broke out, Masterman was drafted to become the chairman of the Twenty Committee, which was a group of British intelligence officials, including wartime amateurs, who held the key to the Double Cross System, which turned German spies into double agents working for the British. Its name was a pun based on the Roman numeral XX and its double-cross purpose.
Strictly speaking, the Committee was responsible for providing information for the agents to be transmitted to the Abwehr and other German intelligence agencies, deceiving them of Allied intentions and war plans. It was Section B1(a) of MI5, established by Lt. Col. T.A. Robertson, who had the task of finding, turning and handling the agents themselves.
Although Masterman ran the system, he credited MI5 with originating the idea. It is widely assumed that the writer Ian Fleming, himself involved in wartime intelligence, adapted Masterman's name for the (female) character of Jill Masterson in his James Bond novel Goldfinger (1959).
Read more about this topic: John Cecil Masterman
Famous quotes containing the words twenty and/or committee:
“The first day that we landed upon that fatal shore
The planters they came round us full twenty score or more,
They rank’d us up like horses, and sold us out of hand
Then yok’d us unto ploughs, my boys, to plow Van
Dieman’s Land.”
—Unknown. Van Dieman’s Land (l. 9–12)
“The absence on the panel of anyone who could become pregnant accidentally or discover her salary was five thousand dollars a year less than that of her male counterpart meant there was a hole in the consciousness of the committee that empathy, however welcome, could not entirely fill.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1953)