Agent Garbo

by Stephan Talty

  For the Cockade planners, the reviews were very different. Scathing, in fact. “The movements made were rather too obvious —it was evident [they] were bluffing,” said Gerd von Rundstedt, commander of German forces in the West. “The general make-up and number of agents’ reports give rise to the suspicions that the material was deliberately allowed to slip into the agents’ hands.” From his bunker at Zossen, the authoritative voice of Colonel Roenne rang out. “The multiplicity of the at-times utterly fantastic reports about allegedly imminent operations … ,” the aristocrat wrote Hitler directly, “reveals an intention to deceive and mislead.” Roenne was, as usual, the most clear-eyed analyst of the deception planners’ work.

  Hitler was so unimpressed by rumors of an invasion he removed twenty-seven of the thirty-six divisions guarding Western Europe and sent them to the front lines in Russia, Sicily and the Balkans between April and December 1943, the exact opposite of what the Allies wanted the Germans to do. Ironically, had the Allies actually invaded France on September 9, 1943, they would have found the beaches stripped of almost all their German troops. The final report on Starkey found that the garrisons and pillboxes at Calais had been “practically denuded.” The invasion would have been a cakewalk.

  The Allied commanders were just as unimpressed by Cockade as the enemy was. The generals who mattered, the ones whose wholehearted cooperation would be needed when the real D-Day came, were appalled. William Casey, the head of secret intelligence of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency, spent September 9 with General Jacob Devers, overall commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, as Cockade played out. “[He] watched and shook his head,” Casey remembered. “[He] had seen it, he didn’t like it and it had failed.” The old mistrust of deception flared up again. If, when the real D-Day came, the enemy was as undeceived as they had been with Cockade, the Allied armies would be chewed up on the beaches and in the coastal towns of Normandy. D-Day would be a bloodbath.

  We don’t know if Tommy Harris knew of the deaths at Le Portel and elsewhere. If he was unaware of the details, the case officer must have at least suspected that many people had died for Cockade. But the news was kept from Pujol; there was no operational need for him to know, and for all his toughness in dealing with Araceli, Pujol was an emotional and often tenderhearted man. “Violence is contrary to all my ideas,” Pujol said years later. “There are no dead men on my conscience.” There was no need to upset him and risk his sharpness for the work ahead.

  Cockade had been a disaster. Men and women had died in a hopelessly bungled cause. The totality that was essential to a great military illusion—men, rumors, physical deception, black propaganda, radio intercepts, all working together to create a seamless alternate reality, a vast army in the English Channel that the Germans could smell and hear—had never come close to being achieved. Cockade had been meant to instill fear, but it had only elicited contempt. The Allied deception planners sat in their offices in London and asked themselves: How did they know? How did the Germans figure out that Cockade was a fake? What crucial element from the play was missing? Was it the scenery, the writing or the overall theme?

  The Allied planners produced an in-depth report on German reactions to Starkey and stamped it “Most Secret.” The report makes for fascinating reading. The analysts came up with five theories as to why the enemy had ignored the operation: “i) not noticing, or failing to attach significance to, the preparations for Starkey until it was too late to do anything about them, ii) not being able to reinforce the Channel coast heavily owing to commitments elsewhere, iii) appreciating from the general intelligence background that the Allies were not in a position at the time to invade Western Europe, iv) appreciating that Starkey was not likely to be more than a second ‘Dieppe,’ and v) learning in advance the real nature of Starkey.”

  In other words, We have absolutely no idea why it didn’t work. The report was more than a spectacular example of ass-covering; it was a statement of philosophical despair. To those few men walking around London in the fall of 1944 who knew the truth about the operation, the mystery was the most terrifying thing of all. Cockade had failed and nobody had a clue why.

  15. The Interloper

  ON DECEMBER 20, 1943, in a sparsely wooded forest in East Prussia, in a crude wooden hut-like building that had been thrown up using local timber, Adolf Hitler was contemplating the second front. The staff officers gathered with him were tired and anxious, even though the scrublands of East Prussia were far from Berlin, which was being continuously pummeled by the RAF and American heavy bombers. The bad news that flowed in constantly from the East and Stalingrad made the mood at Hitler’s headquarters only more depressing. Winter and the rough seas of the English Channel had allowed the German divisions in France to rest, to lay mines and to build more concrete gun emplacements, but now that spring was coming, the Allies’ focus would be on plans for a continental invasion. Hitler had summed up the stakes in his Directive No. 51 over a month before:

  The danger in the east remains, but a greater one looms in the west: the Anglo-Saxon landing! … In the east, the vast extent of the territory makes it possible for us to lose ground, even on a large scale, without a fatal blow being dealt to the nervous system of Germany. It is different in the west! Should the enemy succeed in breaching our defenses on a wide front here, the immediate consequences would be unpredictable.

  Actually, they were very predictable: if the Allies secured a beachhead in France, they could drive inexorably toward the Ruhr, the industrial heartland of Germany, destroying its munitions and tank factories and crippling its ability to wage war as Allied forces headed for Berlin. It would be, as Churchill said, not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning.

  As the meeting in the Prussian woods progressed, Hitler’s staff clustered around an enormous map of Europe. Finally, the Führer announced that the invasion would come in the spring. The men nodded. Disagreeing with the Führer was not allowed, and besides, he was fantastically knowledgeable about the anti-invasion fortifications known as the Atlantic Wall. Hitler knew “the location of the defenses better than any single officer” in the German army. Now the Führer, too, studied the map. “It would be good,” he said, “if we could know from the start: Where is a diversion and where the real main attack?”

  To judge from that map, which described the European theater as it stood in December 1943, one would think that the Allies could choose from a handful of targets where a second front could be launched. But when one factored in the needs of the invading force, many of those candidates melted away. The Netherlands had deep ports and lay closer to the Ruhr than France, but its coast was beyond the range of the RAF’s fighters; Allied tanks couldn’t negotiate its sand dunes, and the Germans could open the dikes and flood the lowlands at any sign of invasion. Denmark was ruled out because it was too far from Allied supply lines and the factories along the Rhine. In the end, there were only two real potential targets: Normandy and the Pas de Calais.

  The Pas de Calais had clear advantages: it offered the shortest distance to English shores, just twenty-one miles from the port at Dover. Once taken, it would offer a direct line to Germany’s heartland: southeastern England is closer to Düsseldorf than Düsseldorf is to Berlin. But in its rightness lay a snare: the Germans had placed their best divisions and their heaviest gun emplacements there. The Atlantic Wall at Calais, bolstered by 16-inch guns stripped from German warships, was deemed impregnable. Attackers would arrive by sea and find thousands of tracers pouring down from the cliffs and panzer divisions rolling up to blast the Sherman tanks back into the water. And the ports at Dover and Folkestone, across from Calais, were too small to allow for the massive outflow of everything from potatoes to mortar shells that would be needed immediately after the first regiments took the coastline.

  In the end, the Allies settled on Normandy, 160 miles southwest of Pas de Calais. The beaches there were less heavily guarded. Normandy lay within ran
ge of the P-47 Thunderbolts and P-38 Lightnings that would keep the Luftwaffe off the incoming battalions. There was only one panzer division, the 21st, guarding the region, while Calais had five. Decent draws led away from the beaches, and a workable set of roads existed farther inland. But surprise was the first and clearest advantage of choosing Normandy. For the invasion to work as planned, the secret had to be kept.

  To deceive Hitler, the D-Day planners couldn’t depend on the occult battiness of Himmler or on Hitler’s own “inner voice,” which had caused him to take tremendous risks in the invasions of Poland and Holland. The upper reaches of the Third Reich were still awash in mysticism and denial: when Hitler read a lengthy report on food shortages in Russia, he wrote across the top: “This cannot be.” But this monomania applied far more to offensive operations than to defensive ones. For Hitler, his ego was not so much bound up in the prediction of where the Allies would land as it had been in whether he could take Poland against the advice of his generals. The essential decisions didn’t depend on his daring or courage; they were, in effect, technical questions. When it came to addressing the second front, he was far more apt to look at the available evidence dispassionately, to seek counsel and change his mind based on actual intelligence reports, than he had been when debating the German invasion of France.

  This was both a blessing and a curse for MI5 and double agents like Garbo. It meant that Hitler was providing an opening for their information to get through and influence him, so long as it could be convincing. But it also made the German process of deciding from where the invasion was coming more democratic and objective, which meant that the real invasion point was going to be harder to hide.

  The information about D-Day went out to the fewest possible Allied officers. Those let in on the plan were called “Bigot,” and when they spoke to each other they used green scrambler telephones. When ten Bigot officers went unaccounted for during a preinvasion mishap, a feverish search was mounted until every body was recovered. The radio operators who sent the traffic relating to D-Day were told not to talk in pubs or even in the latrines.

  Few gave the invasion plan much chance of success. Amphibious landings in support of an invasion had a bloody reputation earned over many centuries. Kublai Khan’s attacks on Japan in 1274 and 1281 failed because of storms and bad ship design; the Spanish Armada’s attempt to land an army on British shores in 1588 was wrecked by storms and a ferocious naval battle; the huge British invasion force at Cartagena in 1741 was defeated by a much smaller Spanish contingent; and Gallipoli in 1915 and 1916 had become a byword for disaster. True, the British had managed three successful landings in World War II—North Africa, Sicily and Salerno—but all three had been against unfortified positions. When the Allies attacked the heavily defended coast at Dieppe in August 1942, the invasion had failed at the cost of thousands of lives.

  Casualty rates were predicted to be 90 percent. The Allies hoped, in the best-case scenario, to land five divisions in France during the first twenty-four hours; the Germans had fifty infantry and eleven armored divisions waiting for them. When Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, laid out the details of the attack, code-named Overlord, he ended his presentation this way: “Well, there it is ; it won’t work, but you must bloody well make it.” General Sir Hastings Ismay wrote to a field marshal: “A lot of people who ought to know better are taking it for granted that Overlord is going to be a bloodbath on the scale of the Somme and Passchendaele.” In early 1944, Churchill wrote, “I see the tides running red with their blood, I have my doubts … I have my doubts.”

  While the Allies worried over the very concept of a cross-Channel invasion and Hitler contemplated his maps, wondering where it might fall, a secret battle was being waged in London as to how D-Day could be disguised from the Germans. The basement of Whitehall was filled with people writing and rewriting the “story” that would be told to Berlin. The plan would eventually be code-named Bodyguard, after Churchill’s famous declaration: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” But in late 1943, the composition wasn’t going well.

  In the offices of the London Controlling Section underneath Whitehall, Controller of Deception Johnny Bevan and his staff—including the portly, clubbable writer Dennis Wheatley, the man who’d been there in the bad old days with his file-burning chief Lumby—worked over the master deception plan in the winter of 1943. Bevan’s staff looked at each aspect of the proposed operation from every angle, trying to decipher how it would play out in the minds of the Germans, how it could be fitted into the mosaic of the overall deception, and the best way to execute it.

  The staff wrote paper after paper, subsection after subsection, with titles such as “Factors against the possibility of disguising the purpose of the expedition” and “Possible means by which the truth about our intentions may become known to the enemy.” Bevan read the papers and sent them back covered with comments, demanding more and more detail, more realism. He was furious if his officers assumed something would go well. There were interlocking cogs in the machinery—if one scheme failed in Turkey, another in Norway could go haywire—and Bevan wanted every possible disaster accounted for. Perhaps Starkey still haunted him. Perhaps the American soldiers he saw sauntering in the streets of Whitehall, their lives in his hands, had unsettled this nervous but kind man. Whatever the reason, with each draft the Bodyguard plan grew longer and darker.

  Gradually, Dennis Wheatley came to realize that “it had become a hopelessly depressing document … virtually informing the Chiefs that the chances were ten to one against the cover plan … succeeding.” The novelist read his superior the riot act and finally convinced Bevan the plan had to be changed. The staff whittled it down from twenty pages to three. The chiefs of staff accepted it “without a murmur.”

  Churchill, one of the driving forces behind the scheme, was excited. “The plan has to be just close enough to the truth to seem credible to Herr Hitler, but will mislead him completely.” Bodyguard would earn the Allies “a thin extra edge that could mean the difference between a glorious triumph and a bloody debacle … If we pull this off, it will be the greatest hoax in history!” By December 1943, the plan was up and running. The great departure from Operation Cockade was a simple one. This time, there was an invasion coming. They just had to disguise two facts about it: where and when.

  Reduced to its essentials, Bodyguard laid out what the Allies wanted the Germans to believe before D-Day—that there would be a fake double-pronged attack, a spring assault on Norway and a summer invasion of the Pas de Calais. The divisions needed for an invasion of Europe, however, were understrength and the production of landing craft was behind schedule, so that “no large scale cross-Channel operations would be possible until the late summer.” July 15 would be put forward as a likely D-Day. The Norway feint would be known as Fortitude North, and the Calais ruse would be Fortitude South.

  The intelligence agencies began to divide up Bodyguard and put it into practice. By January, when Eisenhower took over planning for D-Day, his staff realized that the double agents “were proving themselves to be by far the most effective channel for controlled leakage.” They would be the tip of the spear, with Garbo and Brutus—the Polish airman—in the lead. The entire deception operation would pivot off a few men and their case officers.

  From their little office, Pujol and Harris began to advertise how far the Allies were from being ready for invasion. On January 5, Garbo told Madrid, “I have read in the English press commentaries on the alleged belief in German official circles that the offensive against the Continent will begin within the next 15 days. If this is the belief of our High Command you can affirm to Headquarters immediately that no danger whatever exists in this period.” He’d spotted a new type of American landing craft propped up at Albert Dock in Liverpool on January 15 and sent a sketch, but there was only one vessel, hardly a sign of impending apocalypse. On January 21, he wrote: “Conversation wit
h a friend. He considers that the Anglo-American offensive against the Continent, should this take place, would not happen for a long time.” The other double agents were also blitzing the Germans with stories of late-arriving troops and snafus. “Labor troubles in the United States,” Tate—Wulf Schmidt, MI5’s first double agent—reported on January 20, “have curtailed production of invasion barges to such an extent that the dates of future operations may be affected.” Brutus chimed in three days later: “There is an opinion held amongst us that Montgomery will probably, as in Egypt, train all the troops all over again.” The Abwehr’s sources reported that artesian wells for troop encampments were being drilled in Kent, something no army would do unless it was planning for a long stay.

  But the messages from London weren’t getting through. The Germans radioed Garbo that their analysts were seeing a spike in reports of increased activity. Something major was being planned. The Abwehr sent Garbo a string of highly detailed questionnaires on the invasion force: “News from various sources speak of preparations being in full swing for operations of great importance at a very near date from those islands. I await with urgency and the greatest interest your reports.” January 14: “For tactical reasons one must assume that the danger centers for future operations are Devon, Cornwall and the south coast between Weymouth and Southampton.” That was exactly right; those were the real embarkation areas for D-Day. “Numerous reports of the alleged postponement of the invasion,” read a March telegram from the German embassy in Lisbon, “are, in the opinion of this Abteilung [department], to be regarded as systematic concealment of the actual plan.”