The Spy with 29 Names

by Jason Webster

  Hitler was thinking what the Allies wanted him to think. He had successfully fallen into the trap of assuming that Normandy (or Brittany) would itself be a diversion before a bigger assault at the narrowest stretch of the Channel – from Dover to Calais.

  It was enough for Harris to be given the permission he needed: he could go ahead with his plan. The SS tanks could set off for Normandy first before Garbo attempted to have them sent back.

  On 8 June, two days after the landings had begun, the news the Allies dreaded came through. German armoured reserves, including the 1st SS Panzer Division LAH, had been ordered to Normandy. ‘Case Three’ was a reality. RAF Typhoons, bombing the German columns as they travelled along French roads by day, could slow them down to some extent, but the Panthers and Tigers could move relatively easily by night. It was a question of hours, days at most, before these hardened Nazi troops would be attacking Allied soldiers on the ground.

  It was at this very moment, as Jochen Peiper and his men began to move out from their positions in Belgium, that Garbo sent Kühlenthal ‘the most important report of his career’.

  The message went out, as usual, from the radio set in Hendon. But just to be certain that the Germans would be listening, Garbo sent them a taster earlier in the evening.

  I have had an extremely agitated day today. But I have the satisfaction of being able to give you the most important reports of my work. As I have not got all the messages ready I hope you will be listening tonight.

  The last line was a clear reference to the German no-show of three nights before. This time there could be no excuses: for the Allies, this was a message that Kühlenthal absolutely must read.

  Garbo came back on air with his news a few hours later, at seven minutes past midnight. It was now 9 June.

  Everything – the outcome of the Second Front, the outcome of the war itself – depended on how the Germans reacted to what he had to say. The months of preparation, the lessons learned from the mistakes of Operation Cockade, and the painstaking and detailed work that had gone into creating Garbo – from the fear and anxiety of Pujol sweating over his false reports from Lisbon, to the great network of fictional sub-agents and collaborators dreamed up with Harris from a cramped office off Piccadilly – now focused on this one moment, this one message. And to be absolutely clear, so that there could be no doubt in the Germans’ minds about what he was trying to tell them, he broke almost every rule in the spy’s guidebook.

  He began slowly, almost low-key. But then Garbo was not only a master double agent, he was a master storyteller. Move in gently, and save the best for last.

  There was, he told Kühlenthal, an argument brewing between neutral embassies in London and the British government over lifting the ban on diplomatic communications that had been imposed in the run-up to D-Day. The information came from Garbo’s mistress, J(5), with whom he had spent the previous night. Why continue to prevent diplomats from reporting back to their respective governments now that the landings had actually taken place? went the argument. There was no need for any more security, any fear that the date and place for the invasion might inadvertently leak out now that operations had begun. But the word from the top came that the ban had to remain. The only logical conclusion was that there were more landings to come . . .

  Stepping things up a little, Garbo then reported the lunch he had had that day with a friend of Fred the Gibraltarian. Agent 4(3) was a pro-Franco member of the US Service of Supply based in London who had been recruited to the Garbo network in late 1943. Now, just a couple of days after D-Day, he passed on ‘an interesting bit of information’.

  He told me that FUSAG had not entered into the present operation.

  General Patton’s First US Army Group (FUSAG) was the large fictional unit which Garbo had helped conjure up in the enemy’s mind. The fact that this powerful force was still in south-east England now that the invasion had begun was suspicious.

  Charlie Haines had been transmitting for half an hour by this point, but the real meat of Garbo’s message was still to come.

  Racheting up the tension, Garbo then moved to the detailed information that his sub-agents had brought in from various points on the south-east coast. It was here that the Brothers in the Aryan World Order came into their own: Sub-agent 7(2), David, the founder of the movement, now based in Dover, known to the Germans as ‘Donny’; Sub-agent 7(4), Rags, the Indian poet and lover of group secretary Theresa Jardine, based in Brighton, known to the Germans as ‘Dick’; and Sub-agent 7(7), group treasurer based in the Harwich and Ipswich area. Garbo never named him, but Kühlenthal referred to him as ‘Dorrick’.

  These fanatical Nazis had passed on to Pedro, Garbo’s deputy, news about the various Allied divisions that were still stationed in their respective areas.

  Garbo began forwarding long lists from each of the sub-agents detailing these units.

  7(2) reports that the following divisions are to be found in his area without any indications that they are to embark for the moment: the 59th Division, the 43rd Division . . .

  7(4) reports that the following divisions are to be found in his area without indication of embarking at present: South Eastern Command, 1st Canadian Army . . .

  7(7) reports that the activity in his area has greatly increased, giving the following divisions stationed without indication of embarking for the moment: 28th US Division, 6th US Armored Division . . . He furthermore said that he had learned through a well-informed channel that there are more than a hundred tank transport barges capable of transporting about five hundred tanks.

  Garbo had now been transmitting for over an hour and a half. If he had been a real German spy he almost certainly would have been caught by this point, as by staying on air for so long he would easily have been picked up by the Radio Security Service as they homed in on unauthorised signals and their source. As it was, Kühlenthal did not suspect anything: the information that his Arabal network was providing him was first class.

  Garbo was about to break another rule, however, as he moved into the final and most important section of his message. Spies were meant to pass on hard information, not speculate or give their opinions. But Garbo was no ordinary spy; he was, in the Germans’ eyes, a spymaster, the head of a valuable and widespread ring of agents running around enemy territory. He was on the ground and could give them a much-needed eyewitness view of how things looked from the other side. As such he was a man whose opinions, they had learned over time, had to be listened to and respected.

  And besides, experience had shown that trying to get the Germans to work things out for themselves was rarely successful. This time everything would be spelled out for them, in black and white.

  It was 0144 hours. Time to move in for the kill.

  Charlie Haines tapped out the most important part of his message.

  From the reports mentioned it is perfectly clear that the present attack is a large scale operation but diversionary in character for the purposes of establishing a strong bridgehead in order to draw the maximum of our reserves to the area of operation to retain them there so as to be able to strike the blow somewhere else with ensured success.

  Garbo knew that he was crossing a line here, so his next sentence was carefully chosen.

  I never like to give my opinion unless I have strong reasons to justify my assurances. Thus the fact that these concentrations which are in the east and south east of the island are now inactive means that they must be held in reserve to be employed in the other large-scale operations.

  So far so good: everything pointed to another Allied assault subsequent to Normandy. The question was, where?

  The constant aerial bombardment which the area of the Pas de Calais has suffered and the strategic disposition of these forces give reason to suspect an attack in that region of France which at the same time offers the shortest route for the final objective of their illusions, which is to say, Berlin.

  To underline his point, Garbo returned to another piece of informati
on he had gleaned the night before from his mistress.

  From J(5) I learned yesterday that there were 75 Divisions in this country before the present assault commenced. Supposing they should use a maximum of twenty to twenty-five Divisions they would be left with some fifty Divisions with which to attempt a second blow.

  The message was clear, nothing more could be said.

  The only thing was to make sure that the intelligence Kühlenthal was now receiving went straight to German High Command.

  Like a puppetmaster, gently pulling strings from faraway Hendon, Garbo urged his supposed spymaster in Madrid to act:

  I trust you will submit urgently all these reports and studies to our High Command since moments may be decisive in these times and before taking a false step through lack of knowledge of the necessary facts they should have in their possession all the present information which I transmit with my opinion which is based in the belief that the whole of the present attack is set as a trap for the enemy to make us move all our reserves in a hurried strategical disposition which we would later regret.

  It was done. It was ten past two in the morning. Charlie Haines and the rest of the Garbo team could finally go to bed.

  Would the message get through? Even assuming that Garbo’s words got passed up through German intelligence to reach High Command, would anyone be listening? Could the Panzer divisions now tearing down to Normandy be stopped?

  All Pujol and Harris could do was wait.

  28

  Madrid, Germany and the Pas-de-Calais, 9–10 June 1944

  GARBO’S MESSAGE HAD successfully been radioed across to the German intelligence station in Madrid – this time they had been listening . . . So far, so good. Everyone in Allied deception now waited on tenterhooks to see if his words would filter through the enemy’s secret service all the way to German High Command. Even if it made it that far, however, there was the question of whether it was enough to halt the enemy’s tank reserves.

  Having been received overnight, Garbo’s message had to be decoded into clear script at the other end before anyone could read it. It was long, and the process took some time. It would have been mid-morning on 9 June by the time that Kühlenthal finally read the last lines, and the warning that the Normandy landings were a trap.

  He wasted no time, quickly writing a report based on Garbo’s text – using whole phrases verbatim. This was then encoded once again and sent via Enigma machine to the German secret service HQ in Berlin.

  Kühlenthal had performed his part; his link in the chain had held firm. This fact alone, however, was little short of remarkable. Only a short time earlier his own mentor, Admiral Canaris, had been deposed by Himmler and the Abwehr had effectively been closed down. Long suspicious of the diminutive spymaster and his true loyalty to the Nazi regime, Himmler had built up a dossier of mistakes and treacherous behaviour by members of the Abwehr, using it to get rid of its chief. Canaris was given an insignificant desk job, and the SD – Himmler’s parallel Nazi intelligence agency – took over the running of the Abwehr stations and machinery.

  It was a personal blow to Kühlenthal: the man who had mentored and safeguarded his position was now removed from power. Kühlenthal was working directly for the very people who would persecute him over his Jewish blood.

  Somehow he had managed to survive – not because of any lack of zeal on the part of the Nazi ideologues. The extermination of Jews was accelerating at this stage in the war, unaffected by the military reverses of the Wehrmacht on the battlefields. His certificate of ‘Aryanisation’ was a legal fig leaf. He was still vulnerable – now more than ever. The number of secret service staff at the German Embassy in Madrid was reduced to only a hundred and twenty-nine. Of these, forty-two were forced out into offices dotted around the city, losing the diplomatic protection that the embassy afforded them. Kühlenthal survived because he was allowed to, because of his worth to the whole German intelligence and military system.

  What saved him was Arabal – Garbo.

  No one was about to remove an intelligence chief with an entire network of agents working for him from inside enemy territory. Take Kühlenthal away, the trusted link and case officer, and the whole enterprise might unravel. Kühlenthal might be quarter-Jewish, but he was useful. With much of his intelligence system dismantled, the Arabal traffic was practically all he had left.

  And now he had just been handed a message from his top man in London that might change the course of the war. He had to get it to the right people as quickly as possible.

  The intelligence men in Berlin were the next link in the chain. With all the recent changes since the SD takeover of the Abwehr, the operation was not running as smoothly as it might. It posed a danger at this critical moment – not only for the Germans, but for the Allies, who were relying on the flow of communications within German intelligence in order to feed misinformation.

  With Canaris gone, the man in charge of foreign intelligence was Walter Schellenberg, a thirty-four-year-old Nazi and Himmler protégé. Bright, hard-working and ambitious, Schellenberg had masterminded the Venlo Incident that had so out-foxed MI6 at the start of the war. He kept a list of over 2,000 people who were to be immediately arrested after an invasion of Britain, had a desk in his office with machine guns built into it that could be fired at the press of a button, and was rumoured to have been the lover in Paris of the fashion designer Coco Chanel.

  Busy with his reorganisation of the German secret services after Canaris’s fall, commonly working twenty-hour days, he had removed many Abwehr men from their foreign postings and replaced them with SD members – true believers. The Abwehr itself ceased officially to exist on 1 June, just days before D-Day. Kühlenthal, however, was still in his post. And when his message reporting Garbo’s text came through, Schellenberg’s organisation quickly and unquestioningly passed it on to the relevant bodies within the Wehrmacht.

  Miraculously, the next step had been successfully completed.

  The first intelligence man within the armed forces to read Garbo’s message was Colonel von Rönne, the head of Fremde Heere West (FHW).

  Owing to the intensive Allied bombing of Berlin, much of the military command structure had moved to the town of Zossen, just to the south of the capital. It was here that Schellenberg and von Rönne both had offices in the headquarters of the German High Command.

  Von Rönne was not a Nazi. In fact he was a member of the movement now plotting to remove Hitler from power. But he came from an aristocratic German family and was loyal to the German military. Not only that, he was quick and extremely competent – some of his colleagues regarded him as something of a genius when it came to military and intelligence matters. More importantly, Hitler himself – unaware of von Rönne’s political sympathies – trusted his judgement.

  Tall, slim and with round spectacles perched on his large hooked nose, von Rönne now pored over the report from Madrid. The FHW’s job was to evaluate the Allies’ strength in the west, basing their conclusions on all sources of evidence available: intercepted military communications, interrogations with POWs, photographs from spy planes, and reports from spies working behind enemy lines.

  Garbo’s message fell clearly into the last category: because of the difficulty of flying over Britain at the time, information from agents in the field had now become the main source of information for the FHW’s assessments. In general, owing to the bad name that the Abwehr had earned itself over the previous years, there was suspicion in German military circles about spies’ reports. They had shown themselves too often to be unreliable. But this particular agent in London had proved his worth – his earlier material had been good and von Rönne had come across his reports before.

  The latest message came complete with eyewitness sightings of Allied divisions based in south-east England from three different sub-agents. The London spymaster’s conclusions were therefore backed up by evidence. He was surely right – Normandy was a trap into which they must not fall. Besides, it made be
tter military sense to invade the Pas-de-Calais, the closest point to the British coast.

  Von Rönne’s immediate response was to call the two generals closest to Hitler at that time: the head of German High Command, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel; and his chief of operations Colonel-General Alfred Jodl. Both were in Berchtesgaden with Hitler, and both agreed with von Rönne’s assessment of this new, highly valuable report from the London-based spy. They had to act quickly before it was too late.

  Subsequently, and with the clearance of High Command, von Rönne issued an initial warning from FHW to all commands in the west:

  In all probability major landing by enemy on the Belgian coast is to be expected on June 10. Withdrawal of our forces from 15th Army sector [Pas-de-Calais and Belgium] untenable.

  The second line was a clear reference to Hitler’s order the previous day that the Panzer reserves could be sent into Normandy. From that moment the Führer’s best troops of the 1st SS Panzer Division LAH had begun to move from Belgium westwards towards the invasion area. And they were making steady progress. If this armoured force was allowed to carry on much further it would be difficult to haul them back to Calais in time for the expected second prong of the Allied invasion. Added to the other formations that had been released for Normandy by Hitler’s order, a total of 50,000 soldiers with around 500 tanks were falling into the trap that the Allies had so carefully laid, and which the Germans’ spy network in London was now warning them about, just in time.

  Garbo’s message had already worked its way close to the top of the German military hierarchy, unhindered and virtually unchanged from the original words first shaped by Harris and Pujol, encrypted and then transmitted by radio by Charlie Haines in the middle of the night from a modest, rather drab north London house.