The Spy with 29 Names

by Jason Webster

  There was a long meeting in St James’s Street involving John Masterman, Tar Robertson, Guy Liddell and Harris. Harris put forward his act-now proposals, but Masterman and Liddell were more circumspect. Better, Masterman said, to carry on as if nothing had happened. Only if and when concrete evidence came through that either Tricycle or Garbo had been blown should they close those agents down. In the meantime, it was better to leave them alone. Liddell agreed. There was a strong chance that Tricycle might be blown by the Germans, but then again Jebsen may simply have been taken in for questioning about his irregular financial dealings.

  But, Harris countered, Bletchley had not been able to warn them that Artist was about to be arrested; the code-breakers might not give them any forewarning that he had told his interrogators what he knew either. Artist had informed the British that he thought all of Kühlenthal’s spies in Britain were double agents. Everything, the whole of double-cross, was at stake. They could not wait for Jebsen to break under torture and for the Germans to work things out for themselves; MI5 had to act now.

  Harris had overstepped the mark. He was Garbo’s case officer, but now he was making suggestions about the running of other double agents. Liddell told him as much.

  ‘Don’t endanger your position by poking your nose too much in other people’s affairs,’ he said.

  Carry on like that and he would be sacked.

  Harris could do nothing. This time his famed powers of persuasion were not enough. He was outnumbered and outranked. All they could do was continue as before, monitor the information from Bletchley for any sign that Jebsen might have talked, and then take things from there.

  MI5 would adopt a calm, steady British approach to the problem.

  But Harris was still concerned.

  What if the Germans started playing games with the Allies? If they extracted the truth from Jebsen, they might keep running Pujol as their agent in London, now aware that he was working for the British. Then they would simply take what he said and believe the opposite.

  The potential for damage to Overlord was immense. If Garbo was telling the Germans that the Pas-de-Calais was the main target for the invasion, the Wehrmacht would inevitably end up taking its best forces, including the feared SS Panzer divisions, away from the area to make them available for action in Normandy. The future of Europe and tens of thousands of lives hung in the balance, yet the deception plan on which the Allied assault depended was under threat.

  D-Day was imminent. Everything now lay with Johnny Jebsen. Would he be able to withstand the horrors that his torturers would inflict?

  22

  England, Northern France and Southern Germany, 5 June 1944

  MAVIS RARELY READ the full texts of the messages that she deciphered at Bletchley Park. A sentence, or half-sentence – that was enough to break into the coded text and then the rest would be passed on to the analysts. And she did not ask questions: it was not how things were done. But she saw enough to get some idea of what was going on – aspects of the war that ordinary civilians and even the majority of fighting men were unaware of.

  It was the first week in June and the weather had been nice over the weekend, although storms were predicted for the coming days. She was on a train, heading to London from the station that sat at the bottom of the hill from Bletchley Park.

  Dilly Knox, her beloved mentor, had died a year before, shortly after Mavis had married. Keith Batey was one of the code-breakers in Hut Six working on the German naval Enigma. She and Keith had tried to hide their relationship from the others at Bletchley for as long as possible, until some sharp-eyed colleague noticed that, mysteriously, the two always managed to coincide for mealtimes in the canteen. Dilly had joked that mathematicians were not much fun, but Mavis had gone ahead with the wedding anyway. She was Mavis Batey now, sharing a passion for crosswords and puzzles with her husband.

  There were plenty of people in the carriage that Monday, gazing out at the budding green countryside through the grimy windows: mothers, businessmen in suits, servicemen and women in uniforms of many shades, from many parts of the globe. The war was now in its fifth year and the world had changed – even here, rolling over the quiet fields. The Luftwaffe was not dropping quite so many bombs over English cities as it once had, but there were rumours of a new terrifying Nazi weapon to come. She worried about her parents; their house to the south-east of London was in the direct firing line of whatever it might eventually turn out to be.

  The Germans were no longer triumphant as they had been, however. In North Africa, on the Eastern Front, and now in Italy, they were slowly being pushed back.

  But there was more than enough fight left in Hitler’s forces. The call from Moscow for a Second Front – a real second front; what was happening in the Mediterranean did not count – was finally being heard. Britain was awash with US soldiers, shipped over the Atlantic to help fight the Nazis. A new attack was imminent, almost certainly in France. What no one except a very, very few could say, however, was where in France the attack would come, or more importantly, when. Certainly nothing was being given away on the radio or in the newspapers. But judging by the numbers of GIs around, and the endless manoeuvres and exercises, even the least observant would conclude that it could not be too far off. Some time over the summer, perhaps.

  Mavis did not get to read entire messages, but she did know things, important things. It was part of her work.

  As she looked around the carriage at her fellow passengers she realised, with a jolt, that she was almost certainly the only one there who knew the actual date of D-Day. This quiet corner of England was soon about to be drawn much closer to the actual fighting of the war; the battlefields would no longer be in distant lands but just across the sea on the beaches of France.

  And it was coming much sooner than anyone thought. Tomorrow, in fact.

  Would it be enough? Would these young men in uniform be up to the job? Before too long, some of the soldiers now sharing the carriage with her might be dead.

  The train heaved its way down to London. Once again, everything was about to change.

  Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was an early riser. Dawn had broken and the clear, hot weather of the previous few days was turning into a storm over northern France and the Channel. The commander of German Army Group B, with special responsibility for the coastal defences against an Allied attack, was confident that he would not be missed for a few days. Eisenhower would be insane to attempt a crossing in the face of so much wind and rain. The waves breaking on the beaches that morning were well over two metres high.

  Rommel had decided to take some leave and head back to Germany. It was his wife Lucie’s birthday the following day, and he also wanted to go to Berchtesgaden, in the Alps, where Hitler was staying at his mountain retreat. There were matters that he needed to discuss face to face with the Führer – a strengthening of the Atlantic Wall defences along the French coastline, and an appeal for two more Panzer divisions to help fight off the Allies when eventually they came.

  Not that any such move was imminent. The Luftwaffe meteorologist had predicted that the bad weather was to continue for the next few days at least, with winds in excess of force 6, thus preventing an Allied landing while the tides and moon cycle suited them. It would be another fortnight before the conditions would once again be favourable.

  Rommel was anything but complacent. He knew, like everyone, that an attack was coming. Only the day before he had urged for more reconnaissance flights over southern England to gather new information on the enemy’s intentions. But the storm meant any such action would now be impossible. The Allies had also imposed radio silence – as they had done previous to all their actions in North Africa, when Rommel had fought the British across the sands of Libya and Egypt. Yet there had been other instances of radio silence since March that year – attempts to throw the Germans off guard, no doubt.

  And so, at 6.00 in the morning, he set off from his headquarters at La Roche-Guyon, an eighteenth-century chate
au built into a cliff face overlooking the Seine. Accompanied by his aide and his driver, he began the long journey to his home in Herrlingen, a small village outside the southern German city of Ulm. It would take him most of the day.

  He was happy for others to lower their guard that blustery Monday morning. As he sped away in his open-top Horch car, his chief of staff told the German armies in France and Belgium that they might stand down in the light of the bad weather. They needed a break after so much time spent on alert, watching for signs of the Allies approaching from over the northern horizon.

  Officers and commanders of the German 7th Army, stationed in Normandy around the Cherbourg peninsula, decided to go ahead with some war-game exercises in Rennes the following day, 6 June. They did not consider themselves to be in the main firing line in any case. If Allied air operations were anything to go by, the target for the landings was almost certainly the Pas-de-Calais, where the bombing in preparation for an assault was heaviest.

  Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt agreed. On 5 June he wrote a report on the prospects of an Allied landing: ‘The main front between the Scheldt [River in Belgium] and Normandy is still the most probable place of attack.’

  Like Rommel, he foresaw no imminent danger. ‘As yet there is no immediate prospect of the invasion.’

  There is a cloying beauty about Berchtesgaden. Set near the Alpine Austro-German border, it is a place of wide green valleys banked by high mountain walls, sweeping pine forests of uniform perpendicular trees and spotless timber-framed houses with overbearing roofs and carved wooden eaves. According to legend, Frederick Barbarossa is buried inside the nearby peak of Untersberg, waiting to return, Arthur-like, to save the German peoples at their hour of need.

  Hitler adored it, and turned this corner of southern Germany into both a playground and a spiritual homeland for the Nazi elite. His own home, the Berghof, was a grand villa commanding impressive views over the surrounding landscape, while Goering, Himmler, Goebbels, Bormann and other dignitaries also had retreats built there to be close to the Führer.

  This was no mere holiday resort. Hitler spent a great deal of time at the Berghof, and as head of state and commander-in-chief, whenever he decided on an Alpine sojourn the machines of government and the military had to travel south with him. As the war raged on the Eastern Front, he was usually to be found at the Wolf’s Lair, his military headquarters in modern Poland. On 5 June, however, he was back where he felt happiest, deep in the southern German mountains, now filled with the delights of spring.

  The day had been devoted to dealing with a number of matters. Rome had fallen to the Allies just the day before, although the German 10th Army had managed to withdraw successfully, abandoning the Eternal City with little fighting. Meanwhile there was the matter of Portuguese tungsten imports to deal with, as well as a meeting with Albert Speer to discuss plans for creating smokescreens on bridges along the Rhine. Then he had a medical examination with his personal doctor: the Führer’s flatulence was causing him problems again and a stool examination was performed. He was in bad shape by this stage, both physically and psychologically.

  It was a starlit night, and after the matters of state had been attended to, Hitler listened to some music and chatted with Eva Braun and Goebbels about cinema late into the night, before taking a sleeping potion and going to bed.

  In the early hours of 6 June, having finally reached his home in Herrlingen and dined with his wife and son, Rommel was busy writing a memorandum to Hitler about the need to bolster the defences in France with more Panzer divisions.

  Meanwhile, in Normandy, British gliders carrying paratroopers of the 6th Airborne Division circled over bridges crossing the Caen canal and River Orne in preparation for landing.

  As the first shots of D-Day were being fired, Hitler was falling deep into a drug-induced sleep.

  23

  London, 1 May–5 June 1944

  PEOPLE WHO WORKED with him commonly regarded Harris as one of the most talented officers involved in double-cross. Ewen Montagu dedicated his book Beyond Top Secret U to the memory of his colleague, describing him as ‘the greatest deceptioneer of us all’. Today, a sense of his genius comes across from the movements and messages of Garbo around D-Day.

  It was clear to those involved that Garbo’s greatest importance as a double agent and purveyor of false notions to the Germans would come once the Allied troops had actually landed on the beaches of Normandy and established a bridgehead. Getting ashore would be hard in itself, but their vulnerability would continue for several days thereafter. There was every chance that if the Germans hit back hard, using their best troops and Panzer reserves, thousands of British, US and Canadian soldiers would be pushed back into the sea, and the much-needed Second Front would die with them. Keeping those crack German troops away from Normandy, therefore, was of paramount importance, and Garbo was to play the most vital part in attempting to hold them at bay.

  Harris knew, thanks to the Bletchley decrypts, that Garbo was held in high regard by his Abwehr masters in Madrid. Only a few weeks before, as part of his supposed work for the Ministry of Information in London, Garbo had ‘signed’ the Official Secrets Act, meaning that he was now in a position to receive information unavailable to ordinary civilians – and of course pass the contents over to the enemy.

  Much had been achieved with the set-up for Fortitude. Enigma traffic showed that the Germans thought there were a total of eighty-nine divisions in Britain on 1 June, while in actual fact there were only forty-seven – the fictional troops that largely made up Patton’s FUSAG in south-east England were very real for the enemy. But the plan’s success rested on the misinformation that Garbo would be sending once the Normandy campaign had actually begun, so it was vital to cement his reputation in all German eyes – not just the intelligence gatherers in Madrid, but all echelons of the secret service as well as the military commanders. They were the ones whose decisions the Allies needed to influence.

  The question was, how? How could they turn Garbo from being simply a respected master of a spy-ring based in Britain to someone whose reports and analyses from inside enemy territory would be read and trusted by all concerned?

  The answer came to Harris one fine May morning as he sat in the garden at his new home in Earl’s Court. D-Day was a month away. The only way the Allies could ensure that Garbo would be listened to by everyone once the invasion had begun, Harris realised, was to give him an incredible scoop as a spy. While every effort had been made to conceal the actual date of the attack from the Germans, Garbo would go on air some time before the first soldiers hit the Normandy beaches and warn them that the assault was on. It would be a spectacular coup, and raise him so highly in the Germans’ esteem that they would subsequently hang on his every word.

  Needless to say, it was a controversial idea. Warn the Germans that we’re coming? Some baulked at it. But unlike many US commanders, General Eisenhower was in favour of deception: he had seen how useful it could be while campaigning in the Mediterranean the year before. In the end he gave Harris’s plan the go-ahead. Yes, get Garbo on the air to tell the enemy the attack was under way, but only so late in the day that it could not have any real effect on their defences. The first landing crafts of the assault, carrying men of the US 4th Infantry Division, were due to hit Utah beach, at the western end of the invasion front, at 0630 on 6 June. Garbo’s message could go out no sooner than three-and-a-half hours beforehand, at 0300.

  Harris and Pujol were satisfied, but there was a problem: the German radio transmitter in Madrid went off air just before midnight. How could they engineer it so that Kühlenthal was listening at the other end in the middle of the night without alerting him that it was something to do with D-Day?

  The Germans themselves provided the answer. On 22 May Kühlenthal told Garbo that he was particularly interested in the movements of Allied troops in Scotland, whose manoeuvres Garbo’s sub-agents had reported a few days earlier. This had been part of the Fortitude North dec
eption plan, aimed at making the Germans believe that an attack of some sort was imminent against Norway. Any developments, Kühlenthal insisted, should be radioed through to him as soon as possible.

  Harris and Pujol therefore set up the following story. The only remaining sub-agent in Scotland at that point was Agent 3(3), the communist Greek sailor who thought he was helping the Soviets. He got word to Garbo that the Clyde fleet was about to set sail at any moment and that he would phone through with a code word once this occurred. Garbo therefore told the Germans on 5 June that they should be listening at the agreed emergency night-call hour of 0300 in case he had urgent news to pass on.

  Everything was set: without having an inkling of what was really in store, the Germans were due to be on air at the appointed time to receive news – not about the Clyde, but about the beginning of Operation Overlord and the invasion of France.

  There are two accounts of the Garbo team’s activities on the night before D-Day. Years later, Pujol himself described how he, Harris and Charlie Haines had been stuck all night in their little office, having forgotten to bring sandwiches or even a flask of tea to keep them going, as Harris popped back and forth from the Cabinet War Rooms bringing news of developments on the ground.