LONDON, Nov. 28 (UPI) -- Newly released documents from World War II disclose that Britain encouraged a pair of double agents codenamed "Mutt" and "Jeff" to bomb targets within the U.K. to fool Nazi Germany while protecting their own cover.
The security documents, released Thursday by the Public Records Office in London, show that a pair of German spies, Norwegians Helge Moee and Tor Glad, washed up on a Scottish beach in a rubber dingy in April 1941 and immediately surrendered to British police.
But rather than jailing them, Britain's MI5 intelligence agency talked them into changing sides and becoming double agents, to be used to send back false information to Adolf Hitler's Germany, including fake plans for a British invasion of Norway.
The two were given the code names "Mutt" and "Jeff," after a U.S. comic strip popular at the time, and were put to work convincing Berlin they were helping the German war effort -- but that meant pulling off acts of sabotage on U.K. soil.
According to the documents, "it should be recognized that friends as well as enemies must be completely deceived," and British intelligence handed Mutt and Jeff maps and enough explosives to blow up a power station and a grocery.
"If was obvious," said one of the declassified papers, "that if the case were to be kept going, a faked act of sabotage would have to be committed, and the decision was therefore reluctantly made to attempt an explosion in a food store."
Mutt and Jeff also were dispatched to bomb a power station in Bury St. Edmunds, England -- but in both cases, the documents said, humans were kept out of the way, and the agents were careful that their explosives did not cause serious damage.
To complete the ruse, the Norwegian spies were provided with files purportedly showing targets that Britain planned to bomb on its invasion of the Scandinavian country.
Many of the people used by British intelligence were "a bizarre lot," said Oliver Hoare, a spokesman for the Public Records Office.
"If you look at the files," he told the British Broadcasting Corp., "the people MI5 were investigating are colorful characters."
