The scale of the initial plan was impressive: 15,000 sorties to be flown by Allied fighters; 6,000 bomber sorties by medium and heavy bombers over the projected landing zones, in both night and day operations; thousands of British and Canadian troops to be massed in the embarkation and assembly areas on the English coast to fool the Germans into believing they were boarding ships for the invasion; two R-class battleships, enormous, 624-foot-long craft originally ordered for World War I and bristling with 13-inch-thick armor and powerful 15-inch guns to pound the concrete-reinforced batteries along the Pas de Calais coast; 12 destroyers to protect the battleships across the English Channel; and squadrons of seaborne commandos, royal marines and paratroopers to drop from the skies in case the invasion turned real. The planners hoped, in the best-case scenario, for fourteen days of intense aerial combat, an “Armageddon-of-the-Air,” where the Luftwaffe would be shot to pieces in a series of high-altitude dogfights.
An operation of this size and complexity would depend in no small part on double agents. On one of the Wednesday meetings of the XX Committee, the deception planners asked if Garbo could lead the operation. Cockade would be his chance to prove he was ready for the real D-Day. Could he do it? Tommy Harris agreed with the request and hurried back to Jermyn Street, where he and Pujol furiously began adding new subagents and repositioning existing ones, placing them where they would do the most good. Cockade would be the largest and most ambitious deception operation in the war up to that point, a test of everything Garbo and the entire intelligence community had learned over the previous two years.
As an agent working for the Allies, Pujol remained in a certain amount of physical danger as the war went on. The Germans were known to kidnap suspected double agents and bring the more valuable ones to Berlin for questioning and execution. Hitler’s intense dislike of spies was reflected in the Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) directive, issued by the German High Command at the end of 1942, which stated that two types of prisoners in the concentration camps—resisters and spies—had to wear coats with black letters—N over X over N—scrawled on the back. These unfortunates were to be executed without word of their fate being sent to their families. Even the way they were killed was cruel: when spies were brought to the guillotine, they were condemned to have their necks placed on the block facing up, so they could see the blade fall.
In case of a surprise German invasion of the island, MI5 had a plan for the double agents: they would be shipped to northern Wales and hidden from the Gestapo. In charge of the plan was Cyril Mills, one of the men who’d met Pujol when he first arrived in England. Since Mills was the son of Britain’s answer to P. T. Barnum, the plan was called Mr. Mills’s Circus. Appropriate code words were used for the Circus plan. “I have now completed arrangements for the accommodation of the animals, the young and their keepers, together with accommodation for Mr. Mills himself,” wrote one officer to headquarters in April 1941. The plan itself was hardly sentimental. “If there is any danger of the more dangerous cases falling into enemy hands,” wrote Tar Robertson, who was in charge of double agents, “they will be liquidated forcibly.” The British were themselves not above killing spies: Scruffy, a Belgian ship steward, real name Alphons Timmerman, showed up in Gibraltar and was processed through the Royal Victorian Patriotic School and caught—in part because he’d asked that his wages be sent to his mother. Two things gave him away: a line in an Ultra decrypt that mentioned him and the ingredients for making secret ink that were found in his luggage. Timmerman was sent to the dreaded Camp 020, where the interrogators broke him down and he confessed. Then he was executed. His death notice was published as part of a plot to see how the Abwehr would react.
There were others in far more danger as Cockade ginned up. If deception was a chess game, the pawns and the knights were living, breathing human beings who sometimes had to be sacrificed.
The people of France, the British agents of the Special Operations Executive who’d infiltrated Paris, the French partisans, even the Germans, were all waiting for the invasion in the spring and summer of 1943. The seaside town of Le Portel, near the large port of Boulogne in northern France, was typical of the occupation experience. Le Portel’s history goes back to the fourteenth century, and for many generations the lives of its inhabitants have been connected with the sea, but only rarely with war. The town’s fishermen went out in their wooden boats to fish for herring and mackerel in the Atlantic, suffering the tragedies inevitable to any working harbor. On October 14, 1881, for example, seventy-one of the town’s men launched their boats in the morning and never returned; they’d been swept away by a storm. Sea widows raised their children with the help of their neighbors. The town was close-knit and proud, considering their fishermen a cut above the ones in nearby Boulogne.
On May 25, 1940, the black and red Nazi banner had snapped in the wind of the belfry in Boulogne for the first time when Le Portel came under German occupation. Days later, the town sent fishing boats to Dunkirk, where the British Expeditionary Force was in danger of being wiped out. The fishermen of Le Portel plucked exhausted British soldiers out of the water and onto the chipped decks of their fishing smacks and headed for England; some boats ended up at the bottom of the Channel, their hulls pierced by the bullets of strafing Luftwaffe fighters. Back in Le Portel, the town’s clocks were changed to “l’heure allemande” (German time), two hours ahead of the normal time, and a curfew kept the fishermen and their wives inside after 7 p.m., on pain of imprisonment. Mines were laid on the beaches the Portelois had enjoyed for generations, bread and meat were rationed, and passes were required to travel anywhere outside the town limits. When tobacco ran out, the townspeople put dried grass in their cigarette papers and smoked it; clay took the place of soap. The Portelois were a tough breed. They persevered—and prayed for deliverance from the occupiers.
The town’s citizens knew just how difficult an Allied invasion would be. Some of them had been shanghaied off the streets and forced to pour concrete for blockhouses and level the ground for new roads that the panzers would roll down when D-Day came. They’d watched at nearby Cap d’Alprech and Fort de Couppes as two enormous gun batteries were built to blast any ships that dared approach across the Channel. The locals had done what little they could to resist—allowing the wagons filled with concrete to accidentally tip over every so often, slowing the work and driving their German overseers wild with frustration.
In that summer of 1943, as Operation Cockade got under way, Le Portel and the rest of France were tense, expectant. Rumors of liberation regularly swept through the partisan ranks and unsettled the populations of the small towns. The planners of Cockade knew this. They understood how much they were risking in raising the hopes of the occupied territories: “The effects of these operations will be to heighten to flash-point expectations of relief before the winter,” read a confidential Allied report on Cockade, “and then at the very onset of the winter to disappoint” them. But the operation was the first step in retaking Europe, and it was pointed directly at Le Portel.
By August 2, 1943, Garbo was working full-time on Cockade. His No. 7 “went” to southern Wales on a reconnaissance mission and stumbled on regiments where there shouldn’t have been regiments. He also “heard” rumors of something called Exercise Jantzen. He could only conclude that something big was being planned against the coast of Brittany. Agent No. 1, who happened to be in the area on vacation, came across the same mysterious regiments training for what was rumored to be an invasion. To keep the Germans keyed on a possible invasion of Norway, Garbo reported that he’d heard of the Russians advancing toward the fjords and took the extraordinary precaution of traveling himself to Scotland to “confer” with No. 3 and see for himself what was going on. Pujol stayed in London, of course, but Garbo gave a detailed report of his trip. When he reached Glasgow, he reported some worrying things: commandos rappelling up and down the local cliffs; new camps rising next to existing airfields, obviously meant to house airborne troops who
were rumored to be on their way; a noticeable increase in RAF insignia seen on soldiers in town; new cranes appearing, presumably to prepare for the arrival of sizable shipments of supplies.
Back in London, Garbo said he found No. 1 waiting anxiously for him. All signs pointed to an imminent invasion of southern France. No. 1 alerted the Germans directly by secret-ink letter sent from Winchester: “All the northern part of Southampton Common has been taken over by the military and has been surrounded with barbed wire. There are sentries everywhere. Among the trees I saw tents camouflaged dark green and I think that there are many vehicles for I saw some maneuvering on the road and possibly guns, as I caught a glimpse of one which was being repaired by some soldiers. I heard soldiers being drilled.”
When No. 1’s letter reached the Germans, the Abwehr was startled to find that it had been “striped”—British censors had swept the letter with five brushes wired together, each dipped in a different developer to unmask different inks. Fortunately, the particular chemicals didn’t reveal the invisible writing (intentionally, of course, since it was MI5 who had done the striping). But it was worrying: the British censors in Winchester were clearly on alert, searching for spies near the Cockade ports. Then the British government took the extraordinary step of censoring all letters bound for the Iberian Peninsula, Sweden and Switzerland, places “where the enemy was known to be operating cover addresses.” Every letter going to suspect locations was striped. It was an enormous undertaking: in the first week alone, the censors tested 22,000 pieces of mail. But it was the kind of thing the British would implement on the eve of D-Day, so it had to be done for Cockade. The Abwehr warned Garbo by wireless about the crackdown and ordered that no subagent’s letters were to be sent from the towns where the invasion forces were gathering.
Garbo recruited a new imaginary agent to bulk up his Cockade reporting: she was an employee of the Ministry of War, the nerve center for any invasion plans. Having established his reputation as a ladies’ man early on in Lisbon, he now gleefully “bedded” this plain-faced secretary, too dowdy and timid to attract many male advances. “This makes her all the more accessible to mine,” Garbo crowed to Federico. “Already she is delightfully indiscreet.” The Germans must have chortled at this stereotype in action: the Mediterranean playboy irresistible to frigid English women. Garbo’s new admirer, however, was costing him a fortune: “You must let me know whether I have carte blanche with regard to expenses incurred in her company, for it is natural that whenever I take her out I have to invite her to dinner and drinks and give her presents. I am certain that with this girl I can obtain information … She doesn’t care two hoots about my being married and rests in the hope that I can get divorced.”
As the fake invasion, now scheduled for September 8, drew nearer, Garbo grew worried. “It appears that the situation has become worse,” he wrote Federico. Agent 4 (a) scouted the port at Dover and “reported” back: “Large scale preparations for attack are coming to a head. Assault barges concentrating Dover and Folkestone. There is talk of large aerial attack and bombardments over the Channel intended to destroy your defenses and at the same time to facilitate large concentrations of barges and small boats there.” That was the bait for the Luftwaffe, intended to lure them out to open skies where the RAF would send their planes burning into the English Channel. Garbo’s bulletins continued: “Agent 1b in Portsmouth reported : Many invasion barges have arrived by road. Also in anticipation of heavy raids the AA and National Fire Service had been reinforced, being moved from other places. There are numerous corvettes and destroyers in the harbor.” And another: “About 70 assault craft for transporting troops are in Hamble river. Convoys of Canadian troops and armored vehicles are continually arriving. Predominant insignia dark blue square.”
Garbo’s fake subagents were pointing the Germans toward the port of Southampton in southeastern England. It was the likeliest jumping-off point for the invasion on Pas de Calais. Then they cut off communication: they’d dropped the strongest hints they could, and now it was time to let the Germans draw their own conclusions. All mail from the agents stopped, and Garbo reported that the British were hunting for his men. Finally the authorities expelled all foreigners from the area—in actuality, not just in a Garbo message. Something big was obviously coming.
Operations like Cockade were incredibly complex, equivalent to stage-managing an epic action film, with thousands of soldiers from different armies, stationed from Glasgow to Dakar, and involving the planting of rumors as far away as Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo. Bombers flew raid after raid over Calais to soften up the defenses. Landing craft were built and delivered to the embarkation ports. Fake tank carriers, known as Bigbobs, and dummy troop carriers, known as Wetbobs, were placed in the waters of British ports. Forty thousand tents were erected in assembly areas in Portsmouth, Dover and other port cities, to give the Luftwaffe’s reconnaissance planes the impression that soldiers were going to be pouring in shortly. Notices were slapped on the walls of the London Underground telling commuters that visits to southern England were now illegal. Furious hotel owners—it was the height of the summer holiday season—were actually forced to call their guests and cancel all reservations. Guards on key roads stopped anyone carrying cameras or telescopes. Mobile telephone-eavesdropping units prowled the streets of Canterbury and Brighton, listening in to ordinary conversations. If you told your Aunt Nelly about the handsome Canadian sergeant you’d met at the pub the night before, you might hear a knock on your door minutes later.
The public was allowed, intentionally, to see certain things: landing craft pulling into Richborough and Rye harbors, for instance. Fifty new wireless stations were quickly erected, and the amount of traffic the German monitors picked up in southern England spiked (it was coded gibberish, meant to look like doubly encrypted, opaque messages). Gliders disappeared from airfields in the north and reappeared on ones in the south. It was all timed and plotted to sync up with the reports coming from Garbo and the other agents.
Luftwaffe planes went back to Germany or occupied France with their belly cameras full of crisp photos showing crowded ports and new camps bulging with decoy tents. The skies over the Pas de Calais erupted in machine-gun fire as Luftwaffe fighters fought duels with the RAF; British pilots shot down 45 enemy aircraft while losing 23 themselves. In the nine days before the operation kicked off, the RAF flew 6,115 sorties, their fighters and bombers diving through antiaircraft fire, to give the impression that Calais was being readied for the Big One. German and British gunboats dueled in the choppy English Channel, shooting torpedoes and raking each other with machine-gun fire.
The media was roped in with leaks engineered by the black-propaganda agents. Soon the BBC was broadcasting reports like this one: “The liberation of the occupied countries has begun … We are obviously not going to reveal where the blow will fall.” The news traveled all over the world. The French Committee of National Liberation told its members that the first step in their liberation “may come any day now.” The United Press crowed that “zero hour for the assault on Western Europe is approaching.” Even the Archbishop of Canterbury was drafted into the effort. During one of his sermons, he asked believers to pray for the soldiers and sailors who would soon be fighting and dying to liberate Europe.
The dream of Cockade—if all went well, a real invasion and a quick strike into France—was exactly what Pujol wanted. “I had the power to advance the date of the end of the war,” he said. He hoped not only to save Allied lives, but those of German soldiers as well. Pujol was finally at the center of the fight for the ideals he’d believed in since childhood. “There are three kinds of people,” he wrote later, “those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what happened.” Pujol now counted himself firmly in the first category.
The stage for Cockade was set. But would the audience come?
13. An Intimate Deception
AS HE CLOCKED MIND-NUMBING hours in the office alongside Tommy H
arris, working out the almost infinite complexities of his portion of Operation Cockade, Pujol ran into an unexpected and troubling problem. After two years in England, Araceli was showing signs of mutiny.
Many of the men in MI5 had domestic difficulties. Tommy Harris and his wife, Hilda, had legendary, knock-down drag-out fights after drinking bouts. Guy Liddell’s wife, Calypso, had run off to America with his four children; Liddell learned of their destination only when he glanced at a publicity photo heralding the Queen Mary’s docking in New York and noticed his offspring waving from the deck. Dudley Clarke of A Force, the undisputed genius of Allied deception, was a lifelong bachelor who’d once fallen in love with a Russian aristocrat named Nina and agreed to take part in a currency-smuggling operation the “distinctive Slav beauty” had devised; it nearly cost him his freedom, and did cost him a large chunk of his money. But even in this less-than-traditional crowd, Araceli was a special case. Pujol knew that, when roused, she could be as volatile as nitroglycerin.
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