Codeword Overlord

by Nigel West

  Two days later, GARBO had more to say in a letter about the sergeant, who had said:

  a lot of curious things about the basis of the composition of this U.S. Fourteenth Army; amongst them he said that in their ranks there were many convicts who were released from prisons in the United States to be enrolled in a foreign legion of the French or Spanish type. It can almost be said that there are brigades composed of gangsters and blood-thirsty men specially selected to fight against the Japanese, men who were not supposed to take prisoners but, instead, to administer a cruel justice at their own hands.

  Whatever else, this made the (entirely notional) Fourteenth Army a rather memorable component of FUSAG. On 31 August GARBO reported on a meeting supposedly held with the sergeant and attended by his Venezuelan deputy, code-named BENEDICT, whose ‘real name was Carlos’:

  Important! The following obtained at meeting between myself, Juan, and CASTOR yesterday. In reply to your questionnaire about airborne army and also explains the move of the Fourteenth U.S. Army from the east coast. CASTOR: He said that the original FUSAG plan for attacking the Pas de Calais has been definitely cancelled and the FUSAG forces are again being reorganized in the following way: The Fourteenth U.S. Army and the Ninth U.S. Army are now under the direct command of SHAEF, as SHAEF strategic reserve. This force will be at the disposal of SHAEF for Eisenhower to be able to reinforce the Allied armies in France if they want assistance in the advance which is now about to be driven to prevent the German Army from escaping to Germany. The Fourteenth U.S. Army is being replaced in FUSAG by the new airborne army which has now been given the name of the First Allied Airborne Army. With this arrangement a great part of FUSAG is now composed of airborne troops and will not be used for special operations; in fact FUSAG will become part of modern version of Combined Operations. For instance they will carry out large-scale airborne operations anywhere in France, Belgium, Holland or Germany to attack the enemy lines of communication. They will also be used to occupy any areas or countries which the Germans give up unexpectedly and this will avoid the necessity of having to make sudden dispersals of forces in the battle at the expense of carrying out their original plans. Following just arrived urgently from Juan. This morning I happened to be present at an interview between AMEROS and a war press correspondent of SHAEF at Ministry of Information. He told us in confidence that a large attack in France is imminent. He was recently at advance HQ of SHAEF in France where he learned about the following discussions. 21 Army Group demands that Patton’s advance should stop. They want him to make a feint attack towards the east, keeping back the weight of his forces to turn north to attack the German flank whilst the 21 Army Group, reinforced by FUSAG, makes a definite attack against the Pas de Calais, to occupy that zone. On the other hand Patton requests that all reinforcements and supplies are put at his disposal to attack into the centre of Germany, asking at the same time that the British Armies should make a deceptive attack against the Pas de Calais to maintain all the German forces there, leaving Patton’s troops with freedom of action. The correspondent said that it would therefore be absurd to speculate without knowing what personal decision Eisenhower will eventually take as to which of the two attacks is the feint attack and which is the one destined to make the advance.

  This message, in which Pujol characteristically referred to himself in the third person simply as ‘Juan’, signified the long-delayed termination of FORTITUDE SOUTH, and officially ended the threat of a second invasion that, based on the original plan, had never been intended to last much beyond D+14.

  On 2 September the precise details of the message were included in the FHW’s latest Lagebericht for that day:

  According to a report from a hitherto particularly trustworthy source the Ninth and Fourteenth American Armies have been parted from FUSAG and have come under the direct command of Eisenhower. (The strength of these two armies in Great Britain is at present to be taken as some eight infantry and two armoured divisions.) The object of this measure is said to be the creation of a large strategic reserve for Eisenhower in order to give him the opportunity of exploiting his successes in France by deploying new armies. The withdrawal of the American formations from the South-East of England which was already reported in the Short Appreciation for the West of 31 August is thus confirmed. We must therefore reckon with a considerable influx of forces into France and the setting up of new higher formation staffs, and in this connection we must count on the immediate shipment of further formations from the United States to complete the Ninth and Fourteenth Armies. FUSAG, which is still held ready in England, is thus composed after reorganisation of the strong Fourth English Army (some twenty divisions) and the First Allied Airborne Army (six airborne divisions). This source suggests widespread use of this airborne army against rear lines of communication, while it does not express an opinion on the probable employment or the significance of the Fourteenth (?Fourth) English Army. The double change in the direction of the American Army Group which has been observed since the thrust forward from the area south of Paris particularly on the part of the Third American Army is attributed by the agent mentioned above to differences of opinion in the command. Montgomery is said to have demanded only a deceptive attack towards the East by the Third American Amy so as to enable him to envelop the German flank from the South with the mass of the American formations, while Patton wanted to press forward directly towards Germany and demanded for this purpose all available reinforcements of the whole of the supply arrangements for himself. It is not yet clear in which direction the decisive effort will finally be made since particularly the employment of the mass of the First American Army is at present not clear. But it must be assumed that with the further successes of the Americans in an easterly direction Patton’s view has carried the day.

  GARBO made a further report on 14 September, based on a another conversation with his sergeant friend:

  The Fourteenth U.S. Army is remaining on the SHAEF reserve in southern embarkation areas pending further developments in the battle against Germany. CASTOR does not think there is any likelihood that this army will go overseas for the present time as all supply routes which have had to be monopolized by SOS are already working to capacity.

  This message conclusively marked the end of the FORTITUDE SOUTH campaign to support OVERLORD, although GARBO stayed in touch with his American sergeant and continued to deceive his handlers in Madrid until the end of the war, and even beyond. In retrospect, Hans Speidel described the profound impact of the ‘second wave’ threat:

  Hitler and the High Command expected another Allied landing on the Channel coast. This problem of a second landing was to have an important bearing on the first six weeks of the invasion. Marshal Rommel considered a second landing to be hardly likely for strategic, tactical and political reasons. But the regular doses of intelligence material that came to us from above during the next five weeks reported between thirty and fifty divisions still in the British Isles. Of course, these forces were to be taken into account; Rommel indicated the Somme–Seine coast as the sector where they might possibly be employed: but after the middle of June, Army Group B thought it unlikely that the Patton Army would land north of the Seine, and certainly not on the strongly fortified Channel coast, since the Allies had spread out over sufficient bridgeheads in the Orne–Vire and Cotentin areas and were about to link them up. The High Command still refused to let divisions of the 15th Army be transferred and gave no scope for operations. General Jodl later recognised this decision as a mistake. It was not until the second half of July that the High Command ordered the idle divisions of the 15th Army from the Channel coast to Normandy. But by that time it was already a question whether these troops would not have been better employed preparing a Seine line of defence, since the High Command was still against giving any freedom of manoeuvre to its forces in Normandy.3

  11

  STAY-BEHIND

  ‘I can’t imagine that the fortress of Europe will ever be overrun.I don’t beli
eve it. At any rate if they were to try it, it would be an extremely difficult job.’

  General Ludwig Crüwell, Trent Park 16 May 1943

  After the war, Rommel’s Chief of Staff, General Hans Speidel, wrote a memoir, We Defended Normandy, in which he explained how the OKW had declined to release any armoured divisions north of Paris, and refused to allow either his own Army Group B, or the Commander-in-Chief West, von Rundstedt, to exercise control over the panzers.1

  Rommel’s son, Manfred, recalled that his father had claimed, in part justification for the OKW’s intransigence on this issue that, in retrospect, it was highly likely that the panzers had been a deterrent, and that their withdrawal from the Pas-de-Calais would have triggered a second invasion. Whether Rommel really believed this, or was indulging in some post facto self-justification, it is clear that the Germans did begin planning for the creation of a stay-behind network in late 1943, to operate behind Allied lines after a beachhead had been established. The existence of such an organisation had been betrayed in November 1943 by Carl Eitel, a member of the Lisbon KO who made contact with OSS’s Robert Solborg offering details of three networks in the Brest–Cherbourg area. Born in Warsaw, and a former Czarist cavalry officer, Solborg had served as the US military attaché in Paris before the war and operated from the Lisbon embassy under military attaché cover. Having previously headed OSS’s Special Operations branch, Solborg was a shrewd professional and must have realised the significance of Eitel’s claim that the Abwehr had prepared a stay-behind network of experienced agents, among them PANCHO, BERTIN, LOTHAR, CHARLES and DESIRE. Certainly the existence of an entirely new, uncontrolled spy ring that was at liberty to undermine or even contradict a post-invasion Allied deception campaign was daunting.

  Eitel, who had been born in Alsace, used the alias Conrad Eberle and had been recruited by the Abwehr in 1934 while working as a wine steward on the SS Bremen. This episode in his career had brought him to the attention of the FBI when he was named in June 1938 as a co-conspirator in the Karl Schlüter espionage investigation. At the time, Eitel had switched to the Europa and had narrowly escaped arrest, but Johanna Hoffman, Otto Voss, Günther Rumrich and Erich Glasser had been caught and convicted.2 As part of his meal ticket offered to OSS, Eitel claimed to have a detailed knowledge of ten active spies and said that in 1939 he had been sent to Genoa to recruit seamen on the American Export line ships SS Washington and Manhattan. This tip would lead the FBI to three suspects, Johann Kassner, Fred Ehrich and Karl Elwert, and demonstrate their informant’s bona fides.

  OSS code-named Eitel SPEARHEAD but he lost contact with his Lisbon handler, Colonel Solborg, alias Charlie Grey, when he was posted to Saint-Jean-de-Luz to organise stay-behind networks along France’s north-east coast. This assignment was interrupted by his arrest in Nancy in September 1944 by the Free French, who handed him over to the US Third Army CIC at Chalons-sur-Marne. There he was run as a CIC source until he was passed to MI5’s Camp 020 in October 1944. Somewhat belatedly, and under intensive interrogation, Eitel was matched to an ISOS personality, code-named CARLOS, an analysis that showed he had lied constantly about the extent of his lengthy service for the Abwehr. He remained at Ham until July 1945, when he was delivered to CSDIC at Diest.3

  When Eitel had first approached the Americans to talk about German stay-behind plans in France, he had exposed the Portuguese consul in Dakar as an Abwehr spy and, more worryingly, given a description of a Russian woman who had declared to her German handler in Lisbon that she had been ‘doubled’ by the British. When this news reached London, the obvious candidate was TREASURE, then a contributor to the FORTITUDE SOUTH deception. According to Eitel, who knew neither her name nor code name, she had been flown to London from Lisbon by the British in April 1944 and on her return had confessed and given a full report to the Germans. A check on TREASURE’s movements showed that she fitted the description exactly, and the date coincided with her most recent visit to Lisbon, where she had arrived on 3 March and departed for London nineteen days later. Furthermore, Eitel had named her Abwehr handler as Erich Bücking, a known I-M personality, who would be mentioned by Walter Schellenberg as a well-known recruiter of agents in the Lisbon docks. According to MI5’s file on Bücking, alias Becker, pre-war he had been the master of a merchant vessel, had lived in Marseilles and had undertaken Abwehr missions to Romania and Turkey. He had:

  first come to notice in the Hague in 1941. In September 1942 he was moved to North Africa where he seems to have been attached to the KIA. (German Armistice Commission in French Morocco). In October he attended a conference in Paris on North African affairs and shortly afterwards went to the KIA headquarters in Wiesbaden. In December 1942 he was posted to Paris. He was transferred to Portugal the following July.

  Despite the shadow of doubt cast by Eitel, TREASURE would continue to transmit to the Abwehr until December 1944 and was approved for participation in FORTITUDE, reporting on her radio that there were not many troops to be seen in south-west England, thereby supporting the fiction of a concentration of Allied forces in the south-east. When pressed further, Eitel recalled more about his meeting on 22 April 1944 with Bücking, who had been drinking whisky in his chief’s apartment in Lisbon, and told him about:

  his recent meeting with a Russian woman in Lisbon, whom he had known before the war. She was working for the British Intelligence service now, and he had met her in the street by chance. She had told him that her British chief in England, whom she named, had sent her to contact a certain person in Lisbon; she had given him the name and address. Through her he had learned a considerable amount about the British Secret Service. She was a dark, good-looking girl but he was afraid he could not mention any names … She had left Lisbon with the undertaking to keep in touch by mail. Eitel did not dare to question him more closely and Buecking went on to tell his agent that he would never make good in the Abwehr unless he got a really worthwhile contact like this woman.

  Confirmation of some of Eitel’s claims was supplied by ISOS on the Lisbon channel referring to an Abwehr stay-behind asset in Cherbourg who was code-named PANCHO and used the alias John Eikens, and one of the spies he named turned out to be a Portuguese dockyard clerk, Juan Frutos, who had been active since 1935. In May 1944 Frutos was supplied with two additional transmitters and directed to report on, ‘the arrival of ships or commandos, the number of soldiers, who disembarked, their arms and the units to which they belonged, and the number of tanks and artillery that were landed’.

  After D-Day Frutos sent ten messages before he closed down on 20 June and hid his radios in his attic. He was arrested on 8 July and, having confessed, was passed to a joint MI5/OSS Special Counter-Intelligence Unit (104 SCI) consisting of Christopher Harmer, Niall MacDermot and John Oakes, who enlisted him as DRAGOMAN and supervised his resumption of wireless contact with the Abwehr on 25 July. By the end of the war, he would exchange some 200 messages, apparently without raising any suspicions.

  The following month Frutos arranged a rendezvous with another stay-behind agent, Alfred Gabas, a French naval officer and radio operator who had also been operating in Cherbourg, and Jean Senouque, a marine radio operator code-named CHARLES, active in Granville. Gabas, code-named DESIRE, was arrested and Senouque agreed to co-operate.4 Under interrogation Senouque, later code-named SKULL, identified his German controller as an I-M officer, Friedrich Kaulen.

  Senouque was transferred to Camp 020 via Newhaven at the end of August and provided a detailed account of the Abwehr’s stay-behind organisation for the invasion area, whose practice transmissions over several months had appeared in his ISOS traffic.5 Senouque confessed that he had been preparing for his mission since November 1943, and had been instructed to remain silent for eight days after his district had been occupied by the Allies. Consequently, he had only sent a single operational message to his controller, which was his observation of parachutists, a signal he had delayed by four days. As Senouque had been tasked to provide information of a tactical natur
e, he was not required to participate in any Allied deception schemes.

  During his interrogation, which resulted in a thirty-page statement, Senouque identified several other stay-behind agents whom he had encountered, including his German controller George Speich, and described his training at the Abwehr Gruppe II sabotage school at the Château Maulny, near Le Mans. After two weeks in British custody at Camp 020, Senouque was flown from RAF Northolt to Cherbourg, where he began operating as SKULL on behalf of the 21st Army Group.

  While DRAGOMAN and his mistress were allowed to remain in Cherbourg under the SCI’s close supervision, Gabas was shipped from Arromanches to Shoreham in August 1944 and transferred to Camp 020 for interrogation. There he confessed his own role and implicated many other members of his group, Abwehr training personnel, cover addresses and peripheral figures, thereby offering countless further opportunities for the recruitment of yet more double agents and, more importantly, neutralising the very considerable threat of uncontrolled Abwehr sources. Although Gabas appeared co-operative while in 020’s custody, and detailed all his activities since his recruitment at the end of 1942 when he was working on the Paris Metro, MI5 decided he was himself too dangerous to run as a double agent.

  MI5’s reason for distrusting Gabas was the testimony of his fellow agents, who asserted that Gabas had operated as a German spy in England in 1940 and had also worked for the Abwehr in the Le Bourget area against the resistance, an operation that allegedly had led to plenty of arrests, and eight or ten executions. Furthermore, Gabas had tried to conceal details of his very first Abwehr mission, to Oran, which had ended in his temporary imprisonment in Spain. Accordingly, after a lengthy investigation, MI5 judged Gabas to be unsuitable for further exploitation and he was detained until he was sent back to Paris in November 1944.