Agent Garbo

by Stephan Talty

  Garbo remained above suspicion, but the Germans were picking apart the deception plan in real time. And it wasn’t hard to understand why: the ports and harbors of southern England were filling up with an array of landing craft. So many planes were crowding the airfields that people joked that you could walk from one end of England to the other on the wings of fighter planes. Everywhere there were soldiers. “They came by land, by train, bus, truck, or on foot,” wrote the historian Stephen Ambrose. “They formed up by the hundreds in companies and battalions, by the thousands in regiments, to march down narrow English roads, headed south. When they arrived in their marshaling areas, they formed up by divisions, corps, and armies in their hundreds of thousands—altogether almost 2 million men.” They brought with them nearly 500,000 vehicles, 4,500 cooks, thousands upon thousands of tents and tons of bulky equipment.

  The army brass did their best to disguise the new arrivals: gravel paths were laid in their camps so that the Luftwaffe couldn’t snap pictures of new trails through the English grass; wire netting shielded the tanks and jeeps from curious eyes; MPs patrolled the “sausages,” or camps, to prevent thirsty soldiers from mixing with the locals in nearby pubs; and campfires were forbidden, even though the English countryside was still covered with morning frost. But London at any given time had half a million soldiers from sixty different nations thronging its bars and cabarets, and they’d brought with them so much equipment that the running joke among the British and American soldiers was that the only thing keeping England from sinking into the sea were the silver barrage balloons tethered to the land.

  Everyone involved in trying to hide this enormous army felt the pressure rise at the beginning of 1944. Pujol was becoming increasingly consumed by his creation, Garbo, as the operation grew to a fever pitch. Some days he composed and sent four or five messages, the longest running to 8,000 words, in addition to the 1,200 wireless messages he wrote during the war. “The work Tommy Harris and I did was hard,” he wrote. “It meant having to solve complex problems and make difficult decisions.” Harris watched his partner closely; Pujol couldn’t be allowed to burn out before the final chapter. “His entire existence remained wrapped up in … the work,” Harris wrote.

  Pujol was able to escape the war for only a matter of hours. He and his family were evacuated at one point to the country town of Taplow, in Buckinghamshire, and put up at a hotel by the Thames. The idyllic place seemed a world away from the torn-up capital, and it was filled with twenty-five fellow refugees, among them a redheaded Jewish girl who asked Pujol to give her Spanish lessons, a Czech couple and a vice consul from the Spanish embassy. There were parties in the evening, and Pujol never missed one; he craved light conversation and, especially, dancing. “In my youth I was considered a good dancer,” he said, and now he took up the paso doble and the foxtrot with a vengeance, striking his heels on the hotel’s wooden floor to the delight of everyone.

  But Pujol couldn’t tell his fellow guests his real reasons for being in England or reveal his anxiety about the mission.

  By 1944, the Abwehr was an imperfect organization, often at war with its rivals, the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, and even the military it advised. But it had sixteen thousand agents spread all over the globe and it was adept at many areas of the spy game. “What evidence there is,” Masterman wrote, “goes to show that the Germans were at least our equals in all the arts connected with espionage and counterespionage.” In the justly famous Venlo Incident in 1939, the SD had convinced British intelligence that a group of disgruntled German officers in the Dutch border town of Venlo were planning a coup against Hitler. When two SIS agents went to meet with the plotters, the Brits were captured and Hitler was handed a gift-wrapped excuse for invading Holland, as the SIS’s presence in Venlo proved that the Dutch were no longer neutral. The brilliantly executed plot haunted British spymasters for years. Even if the Abwehr was flawed at the top, it couldn’t miss the signs of the greatest invasion in history, signs that would be everywhere to see in the harbors of England and the back alleys of Lisbon.

  To detect the invasion, the Germans had to be barely competent. To disguise it, the British had to be illusionists of genius.

  Garbo especially was under the gun. He’d expanded his operation in the south and southwest of England in the previous months, bringing in new “recruits,” from Welsh Aryans who “hated the British like death” to a rabid Greek communist to saboteurs and fascists, all to prepare for D-Day. The Germans knew that something was happening in Southampton and Devon, and would expect their star agent to let them know exactly what that was, down to the regiment insignia and number of tents.

  Garbo continued to put across the party line. After a discussion with his friend the minister, he wrote Madrid that the official believed that Germany would be brought down by air power, not land attacks. Garbo’s lover, the homely secretary, confirmed the view a few days later. “She emphasized one point above all, which was that the Anglo-Americans will not start the offensive until they have everything absolutely ready.” But how could Garbo continue pretending that nothing of real interest was going on in England when it was crisscrossed by his agents? As good as he was, even Garbo couldn’t cloak a continental invasion force in complete darkness.

  One person in particular was bothered by Operation Fortitude. He was a small, imperious and elegantly turned-out man by the name of David Strangeways. The name fit: Colonel Strangeways was an unorthodox man who rubbed many of his peers the wrong way. “Much disliked,” said one fellow soldier; “an impossible and insufferable enfant terrible,” remembered another (although both admitted they secretly admired Strangeways). The colonel hated bureaucracy with a passion and would simply ignore procedures if he thought they were wrong-headed. When a historian interviewed him years later, he was unapologetic: “‘I was not a much loved person,’ he admitted cheerfully.” David Strangeways had an internal compass that was as strong as Montgomery’s or Patton’s. When, after he’d left the service, he became an Anglican priest, he developed a theory that no sermon should last more than eight minutes. Although a wonderful speaker, Strangeways never exceeded that time limit, something his flock in the parish of Ipswich grew to admire.

  Born in 1912, Strangeways was the darkly handsome son of the founder of a prominent research hospital. He’d read history at Trinity College, Cambridge, and joined the Duke of Wellington’s regiment in 1933, serving in Malta before seeing his first action at the retreat at Dunkirk. Stranded on the shore with the German army advancing behind him, disaster only hours away, Strangeways spied an abandoned Thames barge floating near shore. He ordered his men to strip off their uniforms so the water wouldn’t weigh them down and swam with them out to the unwieldy vessel. Using the sailing skills he’d learned as a boy, he got them safely back to Portsmouth, where the mayor and a group of photographers were waiting to greet returning troops. The quick-thinking officer emerged from the hold dressed in the barge’s curtains. Strangeways was mentioned in dispatches for saving his men.

  In 1942, he’d had his first taste of intrigue. Strangeways was chosen to deliver the deception plans for Operation Torch—the North African invasion that Garbo had cut his teeth on—to the generals in Cairo, by way of Gibraltar. In his luggage he carried a copy of the deception planner Dennis Wheatley’s latest potboiler, with a letter inside from Wheatley to a friend, filled with bits of gossip about the forthcoming invasion that the Allies wanted passed to the Germans. MI6 knew that Gibraltar hotel employees on the payroll of the Abwehr often rifled through the luggage of British arrivals. Strangeways carried out the little scheme, and the information made its way to Berlin.

  The dapper officer came into his own when he began to work under Dudley Clarke, the mastermind of Allied espionage, in the Middle Eastern campaign. Clarke was the fountainhead of deception thinking, a genius who had, in the opinion of one of his officers, “the most all-containing brain of any man I ever met.” Blond, small and well dressed, with a “gently booming voice”
and eyes that sparkled with secret delight, Clarke became a legend in the Middle East before moving on to the European theater. Many of the concepts that the XX Committee used—the importance of timing, the need for a story to feed the enemy—Clarke had developed in the wild days in Cairo, where he’d placed his office below a brothel so that no one would notice all the officers coming to his address. “He was certainly the most unusual Intelligence officer of his time, very likely of all time,” said David Mure, one of his staff officers. “His mind worked differently than anyone else’s and far quicker; he looked out on the world through the eyes of his opponents.” Clarke had a near-photographic memory, keeping the details of half a dozen complicated plots in his head at once. Under his leadership, the deception outfit known as A Force had become an innovator and a technical marvel: it scoured the Middle East and built a library of 1,200 different kinds of paper for forgery purposes; it collected nearly every revenue, metal, rubber and embossed stamp used by the Nazis; it could reproduce the signatures of the most important German officials and maintained a huge index file that could tell you where General X was on any given day. Like the modern-day FBI, it could re-create a burned or shredded document. It could even dye a man brown so that he might pass as an Arab.

  David Strangeways was one of Clarke’s best students. After studying at the feet of the master, he was dispatched to Tunisia, where he dreamed up a series of cunning and successful plots to outwit the best German commander, Erwin Rommel.

  One of the keys to the success of the Allied spy operation was a certain double capacity in the men who worked inside it. Juan Pujol could have become one of the world’s great swindlers had he chosen to, a Ponzi schemer or a gigolo, but instead he yearned to do good. Those qualities rarely go together: con men do not want to save humanity, and starry-eyed humanists could not fake their way past the best minds in the German intelligence service. David Strangeways had Pujol’s kind of doubleness: he was a brilliant strategist who was lethal in battle. In other words, he was a tough ground-level commander who had thought deeply about deception and how it could be woven into a kinetic war.

  Strangeways did it all, in Tunisia and elsewhere: he formulated the plans, picked the operatives to carry it out, oversaw the signals and physical deception, watched the Germans respond in real time and even fought in the battles that resulted. He’d done deception from beginning to end. No one in the European theater had the same experience. The Middle East was like a laboratory of deception where Strangeways could experiment and work out his theories to the end.

  The battle for Tunis exemplified this. In the winter of 1942, the British First Army and the American II Corps were closing in on the capital from the west. Strangeways directed the Germans’ attention to the south by passing traffic through a fake Abwehr agent code-named Cheese, supposedly a Syrian of Slavic heritage who was in reality an enterprising British lieutenant colonel named William Kenyon-Jones, who, against the express wishes of the British signal corps, had an amateur wireless set built from spare parts in Cairo and had won the trust of the Abwehr’s Athens station with his weirdly accurate reports. With Cheese sending out fake updates and with a few dummy tanks positioned in the south next to real ones, giving the Luftwaffe the illusion of a major armored movement, Strangeways hoodwinked the Desert Fox, Rommel, into believing the Allied armies were where they weren’t.

  But the capital, Tunis, still hadn’t been taken. Strangeways jumped into an armored car and dashed off to the smoking city, still echoing with the machine guns of the last of Rommel’s holdouts. When Strangeways arrived at German headquarters, he shot his way in, blew open the safe and confiscated the secret codes, confidential documents and cipher machines before the Germans could dispose of them, then rounded up the remains of the French colonial police and restored order in the city. Wheatley, putting on his novelist’s hat, claimed that Strangeways was “the first man into Tunis” that day. While that might have been an exaggeration, the Allied infantry did march into the city the next morning and found “the capital virtually under [his] control.” The notoriously difficult Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was so impressed with the dashing young officer that, when Monty was called back to England to take part in D-Day, he brought Strangeways with him to head up his deception outfit.

  Strangeways arrived in London around Christmas 1943. Wheatley remembered his first sight of this odd, brilliant man. “He was … so beautifully turned out that, even in battledress, he looked as if he had stepped straight out of a bandbox.” But the European theater he’d just entered was different from the Middle East: sprawling, enormous and very political. Plans took months to be approved and implemented. Each agency had its own bureaucracy. If you needed the Royal Navy in on a scheme, you had to spend weeks just getting to the right person. The power relationships were as complex as any government’s, and Strangeways was outranked by almost everyone he needed for Fortitude.

  But Strangeways didn’t care how many stripes you wore on your sleeve; he was notorious for trampling in people’s private domains and overruling people he had no right to overrule. In fact, he seemed to enjoy needling his superiors. “He thought he was Monty,” said one officer.

  Operation Fortitude had taken the best minds in London months and thousands of man-hours to put together. Everyone had signed off on it. But Strangeways, the newcomer, took one look at the scheme and decided it was complete rubbish. “Put it this way. The plan had been made by people who had been in England and had never been out doing any practical deception work. That is, deception work which was combined with military activity.” Strangeways could practically see a well-lubricated Dennis Wheatley coming back from a heavy lunch in his silk-lined jacket and working this thing up before his afternoon nap. It was a plan conceived in an office without windows. It wouldn’t do.

  At a famous meeting of intelligence heads, Strangeways stood and held up a copy of the Fortitude plan. He announced the plan was useless and proceeded to slowly tear it up in front of the men who’d written it. “It gave maximum offense,” reported one officer. “What was said about Strangeways hardly bears repeating.”

  This was in February 1944. D-Day was scheduled for May 1. The men who’d planned Fortitude weren’t amused. “Everybody was furious. This bumptious so-and-so, who does he think he is?” But because Strangeways had the backing of Monty, Britain’s most powerful military commander, the deception planners had to at least listen to his ideas. Then they hoped to bury them.

  Major Roger Fleetwood Hesketh was the sole intelligence officer of Ops (B), the deception operation embedded within SHAEF, Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, and he numbered among the minds who’d formulated Bodyguard. He was a former barrister and a gentleman, “the beau ideal of an English country squire,” whose twelfth-century manor, Meols, was regarded as the most haunted house in the country, while also boasting “one of the best claret cellars in England.” One could hardly have found a more confident and well-entrenched member of the British establishment. As Strangeways was set to deliver his new deception plan in early February, Hesketh assured his officers that the scheme would be no more than warmed-over Bodyguard, with “a few new ideas” thrown in to save face. In the battle to create the deception plan for D-Day, the old guard, not this arrogant ponce, would prevail.

  One day soon after his pronouncement, the revised document arrived at Hesketh’s office. He read it through silently, then handed it to an MI5 officer and liaison, Christopher Harmer.

  “What do you think?”

  Harmer paged through the plan, reading with mounting astonishment. “It was a revelation,” he would later say.

  He looked up at Hesketh and gave his verdict.

  “I can’t believe we will ever get away with this.”

  16. The Ghost Army

  MANY ALLIED OFFICERS believed that D-Day could not be “covered.” It simply defied logic. The thing was too big and too visible. The British general J.F.M. Whiteley, who’d helped plan D-Day, t
old his friends he wouldn’t wager a pound sterling on the success of the early version of Fortitude. One American intelligence officer, Ralph Ingersoll, called the idea of misleading Hitler like “putting a hooped skirt and ruffled pants on an elephant to make it look like a crinoline girl.” When a member of the London Controlling Section went in front of one key group of high-ranking officers to present Bodyguard, his audience “flatly refused to believe that it would be possible to deceive the enemy” before D-Day. Then there were those who simply didn’t understand what was being presented to them. When a staffer laid out the plan for Calais, one brigadier general protested, “But we are not going to land in the Pas de Calais.”

  Instead of scaling down the plan in the face of these doubts, Strangeways went in the opposite direction. He envisioned a much larger and riskier deception. The colonel proposed creating an imaginary army—the First United States Army Group, or FUSAG—of one million men where none existed, and sending it on an imaginary invasion where none was planned, at Calais. The new plan’s aim was to trick the Nazis into believing that Normandy was a feint and that a huge, almost totally hidden army was waiting to stage the real attack. No one had so much as contemplated such an audacious gambit.

  Strangeways wanted Garbo and the others to create an army of specters, while the Allies gave it a seething, audible, diesel-fumed life of its own, using specially trained regiments of soldiers and technicians, dozens of British navy ships and hundreds of the Eighth Air Force’s fighter planes and bombers. Strangeways and his men would focus on the double agents and fake wireless traffic, and other units, under Operation Bodyguard, would create an amy of special effects—taped sounds, fake explosions, fake everything, to look and feel like an actual invasion.

  The scheme was fresh and bold, miles away from the attacks on humble Nissen huts that the XX Committee had been engaged in only two years before. “After the initial shock, I think everyone was a bit shamefaced that they hadn’t thought of it themselves,” said the intelligence officer Christopher Harmer. A British historian would later describe Strangeways’s approach as “true to the tradition of English eccentricity ; the sort of thing that Captain Hornblower or [Sherlock] Holmes in fiction, or Admiral Cochrane or Chinese Gordon in fact, would have gone in for had they been faced with a similar challenge.”