| Summary/Abstract |
By the outbreak of World War II, French intelligence services had accumulated encyclopedic knowledge of Germany’s military establishment. France, for example, had an embedded mole in secret German communication centers who supplied high-value intelligence for more than a decade and gave vital Enigma encryption secrets to the Allies, and it had another formidable agent who unmasked German spies and “turned” officers in Abwehr, Germany’s principal spy agency. German intelligence boasted of penetrating the Deuxieme Bureau, France’s most important intelligence service, and secret sessions of the Senate. In truth, neither France nor Germany could hardly conceal secrets from one another. France’s success in intelligence, however, has been obfuscated by the ignominious Fall of France in a few short weeks as well as France’s failure to anticipate the audacious German attack through the Ardennes. Arguably less a shortcoming of intelligence, this failure was more a question of France’s leadership and its colossal inaction against the German Western Offensive.
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