Burn After Reading

by Ladislas Farago

  The oldest son of a professor, the brigadier was a product of British public schools and Sandhurst. Except for a brief spell when he commanded a battalion of Fusilliers, his career was confined entirely to intelligence. He had spent time in Germany, France, Italy and Spain, learning the habits and languages of those countries. His first overt intelligence assignment was in Berlin on the eve of the war. By 1943 his reputation as the British Army’s outstanding expert on Germany was established.

  The coming of Strong to Eisenhower’s side was a dramatic illustration of the importance Ike attributed, and the part he assigned, to intelligence. Eisenhower was what one might call the thinking man’s soldier. He felt really safe only when he was satisfied that the best possible intelligence was available to him, procured and prepared for his eyes by the best possible chief of intelligence.

  On the eve of the invasion of North Africa, in the fall of 1942, it became necessary to establish surreptitious contact with pro-Allied French generals in Algeria and Morocco. Eisenhower toyed with the idea of personally going on that secret mission. “Since manifestly I could not go myself,” he wrote, “I chose, from many volunteers, my deputy, General Mark W. Clark, to make the journey.” Clark and his fellow “agents” sneaked to the rendezvous by submarine and experienced some of the perils of espionage. They were forced into hiding to escape detection by Vichy security forces whose suspicion had been aroused. This was the celebrated clandestine journey on which Clark lost his pants but gained invaluable information.

  Later Eisenhower sponsored other such secret missions, one by Brigadier Strong and General Walter Bedell Smith, his own chief of staff, to negotiate the surrender of Italy with General Castellano at clandestine meetings in Lisbon in August, 1943; another by General Maxwell D. Taylor, who operated as his seeing-eye in Rome when the city was still held by the Germans.

  Ike fully appreciated not only the importance, but also the thrills of such clandestine operations. In Crusade in Europe, he described them with the starry-eyed enthusiasm of an Eric Ambler fan. “Then began,” he wrote, “a series of negotiations, secret communications, clandestine journeys by secret agents, and frequent meetings in hidden places that, if encountered in the fictional world, would have been scorned as incredible melodrama. Plots of various kinds were hatched only to be abandoned because of changing circumstances.” He was especially impressed with Taylor’s conspiratorial skill and daring in enemy-held Rome, “where his personal adventures and those of his companion added another adventurous chapter to the whole thrilling story.” Ike added: “The risks he ran were greater than I asked any other agent or emissary to undertake during the war—he carried weighty responsibilities and discharged them with unerring judgment, and every minute was in imminent danger of discovery and death.”

  In England, between January and the end of May, 1944, Brigadier (later Major-General) Strong was responsible for a complex intelligence enterprise in preparation for D-Day. It consisted of three interrelated but essentially different manipulations. One was the collection of intelligence. The other was a negative effort to conceal the impending venture. The third was the development of elaborate deception measures to mislead the enemy as to the real Allied intentions, strength, and the direction of the attack.

  This game of grand illusions began in January, 1944, as soon as Eisenhower arrived in England and assumed command of Overlord. At that time a nebulous smokescreen was put up, behind which the Germans were allowed to suspect feverish preparations for an imminent invasion of Western Europe. During those days and weeks, Ike’s own movements were furtive and clandestine. The mystery was concocted to keep the Germans confused and to compel them to spread their forces all along an extensive front.

  In March, a single, brand-new B-29 super-bomber was flown to Bovingdon Airfield in England. Its arrival was leaked to the Spanish Military Attaché in London, from whose reports to Madrid the Germans were known to be getting considerable intelligence. In actual fact, the B-29s were intended for the Pacific, but the impression was created that they would be used against Germany. The deception resulted in much reshuffling of Germany’s air defenses and in considerable wasteful exercise, when concentration on realistic defense measures was imperative.

  In May, only weeks before D-Day, deception went into high gear. It was designed to exploit to the fullest Germany’s major deficiency—the lack of a general reserve of troops. According to the estimate of the Allies’ Joint Intelligence Committee, Hitler had a total of three hundred and thirty-six combat divisions, but only fifty-eight of them had been identified in France and the Low Countries. Almost two hundred of them were on the Eastern Front, locked in desperate battle with the Red Army. The rest were thinly spread from the Arctic Ocean to Italy, reflecting the plight into which Hitler had maneuvered himself when he bit off far more than he could digest.

  In order to bolster their defenses in France, the Germans would have had to withdraw forces from elsewhere, and the Allied command resorted to deception to prevent this. Misleading information, supported by shadowy moves, was put out to convince the Germans that Ike intended to strike at Norway, where they had only twelve divisions. Strong was gratified when his agents in Norway reported the arrival of another German division there, when, if the Germans had known the truth, it was sorely needed in France.

  On May 20, Commander Butcher recorded in his diary: “When we invade west of the Seine, we hope the Germans will believe that this is merely a minor operation and that they may expect the major thrust in Pas de Calais, thus keeping the Nazis from shifting troops from the latter place to the coast between the Seine and Cherbourg.” During those days, Field Marshal Sir Bernard L. Montgomery was seen in the most unlikely and indiscreet places, indicating by his presence certain activities discernible to the trained intelligence analyst. This Montgomery was merely an actor resembling the real Field Marshal; the genuine article was preoccupied in places whose significance had to be quietly concealed from the enemy.

  Elaborate efforts were thus made to permit the enemy to ascertain exactly what we wanted him to learn. The efforts to conceal from him the truth were even more elaborate.

  The unprecedented magnitude of the impending operation, the ramifications of the preparations, and the very vastness of the Allied forces made it impossible to conceal everything from the enemy. A substantial portion of information had to be known to military attachés and other privileged persons in London known to be friendly to the Germans. Some preparations could not be concealed from the frantic reconnaissance efforts of the Luftwaffe. Many confidential communications had to be put on the air, and although they were encoded or enciphered, there was reason to believe that the Luftwaffe’s so-called Forschungsamt,” a central cryptographic agency, was reading many of them.

  Yet so efficient was the screening operation that the Germans had little hard intelligence in the end. They knew D-Day was coming, but they had little precise information from which to gauge our intentions, our timetable, our strength and the direction of our attack. While security was never taken for granted, today we know that it proved well nigh ironclad. In fact, aside from a harmless, bibulous indiscretion that threatened to reveal the date of D-Day, there was but a single major “leak” through which, it was feared, the Germans could acquire the sort of intelligence they so desperately and urgently needed.

  In March, 1944, a package containing highly classified documents concerning Overloard was discovered in Chicago. Sent by the War Department’s Ordinance Division through the mail, it was addressed to a private residence in a section of the city that was densely populated by people of German origin or descent. The package was improperly wrapped and the documents fell out. At least ten persons read them in the Chicago Post Office. It was then forwarded, not to the obviously improper address on the wrapper, but to the Army’s 6th Service Command in Chicago. There, four more unauthorized persons had a chance to peruse the documents before agents of G-2 and the Counter Intelligence Corps got them.

  Gener
al Clayton Bissell, new head of G-2 in Washington, entered the case personally, and directed the investigation. It developed that in the Ordnance Division, back in Washington, the package had been addressed by an American soldier of German extraction. The explanation he offered was anything but satisfactory. He claimed that his sister had been seriously ill in Chicago and he must have been preoccupied with her when he erred by addressing the package to her street address.

  Was the soldier a spy? Was this clumsy handling of a sensitive package part of a greater espionage plot? The case was never solved to everybody’s satisfaction. The persons who read the documents were placed under surveillance, as were the soldier and his family. Nothing derogatory was discovered about them. They were warned not to divulge anything they had read, but their discretion could not be guaranteed. Nevertheless, it appears that nothing ever leaked from them to the Germans—but for six weeks no one in the Allied High Command drew an easy breath.

  An outstanding feat of D-Day screening was the concealment from the Germans of any knowledge of a couple of artificial ports. Called “Mulberries” and “Gooseberries,” these were monstrous quays which were to be floated across the Channel and sunk in position to make improvised landing places for supply ships. This heavy flow of supplies would make it possible to concentrate the invasion on a single major landing. Special efforts were made to ascertain whether or not the Germans had any inkling of the piers. A week before the invasion, Strong was satisfied that the Germans still expected several landings, the first one to be diversionary. From this he deduced that they knew nothing of the Berries. When, only ten days later, the piers were in place, with merchantmen disgorging their supplies, the Germans simply refused to believe they were real and thought that the reconnaissance planes of the Luftwaffe had photographed some elaborate camouflage.

  In the meantime, Intelligence was working feverishly, collecting information. The magnitude of the task cannot be adequately expressed. German units down to single platoons and squads had to be identified. Airports of the Luftwaffe had to be located and the Luftwaffe’s strength established in number and quality of its planes, supplies and personnel. Detailed blueprints of the vaunted Westwall—the system of German fortifications all along the coast—had to be obtained. Specific information was needed about the coastal batteries, including some new ones, big naval guns removed from major warships and emplaced at strategic points. Rail traffic had to be monitored.

  Intelligence had to find out about the condition of the landing beaches, minefields both on and off shore, and the intricate system of underwater obstacles. Those underwater obstacles represented a special problem that had to be solved at all costs. Among them Intelligence had identified gatelike structures of steel angles, called “Element O”; another, named “Tetrahedra,” was a pyramid of steel angles about four feet, six inches each. Commonest were steel stakes consisting of I-beams or rails. If the ships were to get through to the beaches, these obstacles had to be destroyed, and they required hand-placed demolitions.

  In the end, Strong and his special force succeeded in procuring virtually all the data needed, including samples of the mines and obstacles, enabling special demolition teams to practice on them in preparation for the real thing.

  The nerve center of this fantastic activity was the War Room at Widewing, Eisenhower’s invasion headquarters. There, all the pertinent data was spelled out and marked on huge maps. One map showed the beaches, also indicating the depth of water in which the troops were to wade ashore. Another map showed the location of gun emplacements, hedgehog defenses, barbed wire installations and minefields. Still another displayed all enemy airfields within striking distance of the invasion fleet.

  Down on paper was the German Order of Battle, identifying all the commanding officers from Field Marshals von Runstedt and Rommel down to regimental leaders; and listing every unit with their combat characteristics. According to this Order of Battle, there were fifty-eight German divisions in the invasion area. Intelligence also identified some two hundred thousand dissident Russian troops deployed in France, former war prisoners recruited for this special force. The Luftwaffe was believed to have two thousand two hundred and fifty planes.

  Where did all of this information come from?

  The vast bulk of the data emerged from the routine sources of conventional Intelligence—from aerial reconnaissance and the painstaking study of aerial photographs; from monitoring the enemy’s communications and intercepting his documents; and the other usual means of Intelligence collection. From time to time, special patrols were put ashore to bring back detailed information on certain obscure targets. Resident agents sent back additional information on specific installations, on last-minute changes in the Order of Battle and on certain objectives whose assessment required specialized knowledge.

  It was a spectacular job, but it was performed with a minimum of melodrama and bravado. Whatever part the romantic variety of story-book espionage played in this intelligence effort, it was infinitesimal and insignificant compared with the routine, almost humdrum, teamwork of conventional Intelligence.

  There was one area of friction and controversy that was sufficiently serious to cast a shadow over the operation. It was the role Frenchmen (or, for that matter, Frenchwomen) were to be permitted to play in this crucial effort aimed at their liberation.

  Inside France, the army of resistance stood ready, but the role it was to play was still obscure. This was due mainly to Roosevelt’s enduring annoyance with France (whose collapse in 1940 left him with a bitter taste) and his irrational hostility to de Gaulle, in whom he saw an egomaniacal troublemaker. Roosevelt refused to believe that de Gaulle had any influence over men and events inside occupied France or, indeed, that any real forces of resistance existed at all. His attitude was certainly not founded in fact. The evidence was available to the President from Donovan’s O.S.S., whose special teams, individual agents and weapon instructors were plotting inside France in close co-operation with the French underground. From 1943 on, the O.S.S. was in London in force to support French resistance, and in January, 1944, it developed a quasi-autonomous organization called Special Forces Headquarters (S.F.H.Q.), created specifically for clandestine operations in connection with the invasion. In that first month of S.F.H.Q., the Americans dropped ninety-six containers of supplies for the French underground, and this surreptitious support increased rapidly both in quality and quantity until S.F.H.Q. was dropping five thousand containers in a single month.

  If the President had not wanted to take Donovan’s word, he could have gained all the evidence he needed from an objective and scholarly source, Commander Tracy D. Kittredge, USNR. A distinguished educator in civilian life, Kittredge was serving at U.S. Naval Headquarters in London as liaison officer to de Gaulle and the French forces of resistance. Kittredge had a most difficult and thankless task, for he had to wage his own war within the war. He had to buck Roosevelt’s prejudices as well as a rather widespread and stubborn tendency within his own command to take French patriotism with a grain of salt.

  As late as April 17, 1944, this attitude was reflected in an entry in Butcher’s diary. “The French railwaymen will not be likely to help us,” he wrote. “All of which makes me wonder if we are hoping too much for French resistance.” At the same time, the Germans also distrusted those same French railwaymen, on exactly opposite grounds. They decided to train their own workers to run the railways after the invasion, convinced that those Frenchmen would do them more harm than good. Events proved the Germans right. During a three-week period, those underrated French railwaymen’s sabotage destroyed more rolling stock than the Allied air forces succeeded in putting out of action in four months.

  The British had an ambivalent attitude toward this clandestine force. On the highest political echelon, Churchill sought to humor Roosevelt by following his hands-off policy. At the same time, the Foreign Office under Anthony Eden maintained intimate relations with the Free French, humoring de Gaulle in turn.

>   Liaison was even closer between the French underground and the Special Operations Executive. The S.O.E. supplied many of the weapons and explosives the underground needed. Like O.S.S., it provided liaison personnel and weapons instructors. It also worked out plans for joint operations, mainly in espionage and sabotage. In the course of their French operations (between March 15, 1941, when the first mission was carried out, and the end of the campaign in 1944), the French section of S.O.E. trained and dropped three hundred and sixty-six agents, organized fifty resistance groups and carried out some four thousand supply missions.

  In preparation for the invasion, French resistance was organized in two major groups. One, called the “Grande Armée,” operated somewhat loosely, under local leadership, executing haphazard, minor missions. Its major raison d’être was to form the reservoir from which the French Forces of the Interior, France’s underground army, could be organized at the strategic moment. The “Petite Armée” was organized for direct action when needed, to carry out specific espionage missions and sabotage pinpointed installations. Members of the “Petite Armée” were chosen with extreme care. It was maintained as a more or less dormant force, its Sunday punch preserved for the invasion itself.

  Unlike Roosevelt and some of his own colleagues, Eisenhower expected major contributions from the French. However, there was grave discrepancy between this noble expectation and the aid even he was prepared to give the French. On February 1, 1944, after considerable squabbling, the scattered underground groups were united in the French Forces of the Interior. In March, General Joseph-Pierre Koenig, one of de Gaulle’s top-ranking and most gallant lieutenants, was named to command the FFI.

  But not until April did the Allies agree to a plan for the utilization of the FFI in the invasion, and even then only on a humiliatingly limited scale. In the combat zone, members of the FFI were expected to supply only intelligence. Sabotage was to be conducted by them only in the rear areas. A number of plans were drafted, a “Plan Green” providing for the “complete paralyzing” of the railways; a “Plan Blue” for the sabotage of public utilities; another plan for sabotaging fuel and ammunition dumps; still another for guerrilla harassment of the movement of enemy troops and material.