Roman Czerniawski

Roman Garby-Czerniawski (6 February 1910 – 26 April 1985 in London) was a Polish Air Force Captain and Allied double agent during World War II, using the codename Brutus.

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Life

Czerniawski graduated in the late 1930s from the Wyższa Szkoła Wojenna (WSWoj), a military academy at Warsaw. As a former officer of the Polish Air Force, he volunteered to create an allied espionage network in France in 1940. This network was code-named Interallie. Among the other members of the network was Mathilde Carré.

On November 17, 1941, the Abwehr group of Hugo Bleicher arrested Carré because of the lack of proper operational security within the organisation. Many other members of the Interallie and Carré revealed most of the members of the network. Czerniawski and others were imprisoned.

After having been offered safety by the Germans, he was sent as an agent to England. However, he immediately made himself known to the British authorities. He was de-briefed by the British (MI6) and Polish authorities about the security lapses of his organization in France. He was then employed as a double agent by MI5 using the covername Brutus under their Double Cross System. as such he played a major part in the allied deception prior to the D-Day landings in Normandy in 1944 as one of the primary agents conducting false information as part of Fortitude South, the deception plan that the Allies would invade Europe in the Pas de Calais area across the English Channel from South-East England.

After the war he stayed in the UK and wrote The Big Network published in 1961.

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