Agent Garbo

by Stephan Talty

  Garbo was winning the game. He, along with Brutus and Tate, had succeeded in creating a million-man ghost army in England where there were only empty tents and spoof vans. But that was only half the mission.

  As D-Day rapidly approached, the next question became: How can we convince the Germans that the real army that will land on French shores on June 6 isn’t real? That it is, in fact, something else entirely? Now that he and Strangeways had conjured a million men out of thin air, Garbo had to take the real American and Canadian and British soldiers, and the thousands of tanks and jeeps that were going to hit the beaches of Normandy, and make them disappear.

  For a number of reasons, some of them obvious, some of them completely unforeseen, that turned out to be a much more difficult proposition.

  18. The Buildup

  INSIDE GERMANY, THE SPLIT in the German High Command that Tommy Harris had long predicted was becoming a reality.

  Hitler had been firmly in the Calais camp for months. But by mid-spring 1944, he was focusing more and more on Normandy. On March 4, the Führer pointed to Normandy and Brittany as the most likely targets of the invasion. At a meeting with his generals on the twentieth, he gave them the same message: watch Normandy. In April, studying a map of the French coastline, he tapped his finger on the rocky shore and said, “I am for bringing all our strength in here.” On May 2, the deputy of General Jodl, chief of the Operations Staff, rang Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt at his headquarters, a stunning mansion on the Seine west of Paris, and told him that extra men and materiel were needed to shore up the defenses in Normandy and Brittany. “A partial success by the enemy in the two peninsulas would inevitably at once tie down very strong forces of OB West,” the German armies in France and occupied Europe.

  Roenne and Rommel, along with most of the German High Command, had backed the Calais option all along. Even an amateur war buff could instantly see the advantages to attacking its coastline, and the training that German officers received—with its emphasis on logical and orthodox theory, not on deception—backed up that thinking. But in the beginning of May, Rommel lobbied Hitler for control of the reserve forces to bulk up the defenses in Normandy. Rundstedt protested; he wanted those divisions held in reserve until the main attack came. For the moment, Hitler sided with Rundstedt, but Rommel was increasingly nervous about the thin line of defenders behind the beaches that would become known as Omaha, Utah, Gold, Juno and Sword.

  There was a secondary fracture in the leadership: some German analysts warned of a one-strike invasion and others believed that there would be two attacks, the first one a ruse. Hitler wavered on whether the opening attack would be a feint or the real thing. But by May, Jodl was telling the chief of staff of the commander in chief in the West that Normandy “would be the first target of the enemy.” The first target—indicating, of course, that there would be a second, and much more powerful, assault elsewhere.

  In their office, Pujol and Harris had been working nonstop to strengthen this suspicion. On April 9, Garbo radioed Madrid: “The situation as explained to me by the agents from the south coast is really alarming, enemy action is expected from one minute to the next.” He begged his contacts to confirm what he was hearing. “You must make reconnaissance over the north west ports of England to ascertain whether the ships mentioned in my message of yesterday are actually there.” Garbo knew, of course, that the ships would be there; he never sent a message without knowing that assets were in place.

  Then, in late April, the fictitious Gibraltarian waiter known as No. 4 “sent” a letter to Garbo in London saying the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division had been issued vomit bags, life vests and cold rations. These were the last things a soldier got before being sent on an amphibious assault. The only possible conclusion? The invasion was a go.

  Was D-Day here? Garbo flew into a frenzy. But Agent J (5)—the secretary in the War Ministry with whom Garbo was having a torrid affair—contradicted the reports. She claimed the movements that No. 4 had seen were just part of an exercise, practice for the real thing. A bitter conflict erupted between the two subagents, created and expertly manipulated by Garbo, who took the side of No. 4. When that operative “reported” that the 3rd Canadian had been ordered to clear an area of its camp to prepare for the arrival of second-line troops, the spymaster pounced on the claim that this was just an exercise: “This proves J (5)’s lie, because she suggested, naively, today that troops in the southern area were on maneuvers.” Garbo messaged Madrid that his lover, J (5), was being hoodwinked. He warned the German High Command to prepare for a million men coming ashore in France beginning in the next few hours.

  For Garbo and Tommy Harris it was a calculated risk. Would Garbo lose credibility by foreseeing a massive attack that wouldn’t materialize? Or would he gain credibility by showing he was human and didn’t always interpret his own intelligence correctly? The troops, of course, didn’t come. Indeed, the movement that Garbo’s invented subagents were seeing was part of an actual rehearsal: Exercise Fabius was the final dry run for D-Day. On May 3, assault divisions across the south of England poured into their naval support craft and each set off for a replica of its landing zone. Elements of the 3rd Canadian stormed Bracklesham Bay in West Sussex, while the U.S. 1st Infantry pounded up the beach at Slapton Sands.

  A week before, during another rehearsal called Exercise Tiger, nine German patrol boats had spotted the American landing craft and attacked. Mayhem had ensued: Allied craft were raked by friendly fire, and soldiers unused to the water put on their life vests incorrectly and sank like stones. Sherman DD tanks spilled into the sea, and a transport struck by German bullets erupted in a fireball. The American troops jumped into the drink, where the weight of their combat packs forced their heads under the waters of Lyme Bay. Six hundred eighty-three soldiers died, all American, all for a mere exercise. When the survivors crawled up on Slapton Sands, more snafus caused the heavy cruiser HMS Hawkins to open up with live ammo, and 308 more men perished in the chaos.

  It had been another black cloud over the invasion. The carnage had also harmed the deception plan. Unknown to the Brits, Hitler received reports of the disastrous exercise and, with his uncanny recall for the obscurities of coastal anomalies, remembered that the beaches at Slapton Sands closely resembled those of Normandy. The blunder reinforced his growing belief that the Allies would come ashore there.

  Now Exercise Fabius, the last drill before the actual D-Day, was under way. The messages from Agents No. 4 and J (5) were part of the deception: they showed the Germans that Garbo’s network was primed and ready for the invasion. When it became clear that Fabius wasn’t the real thing, on May 7 Garbo sent his regrets that he’d jumped the gun; he blamed the whole thing on a twitchy operative: “4 has displayed the ability of a simpleton. I am very disgusted with him though I have not let him know this.”

  This was a subtle psychological trick that Garbo often used: kvetching about how idiotic his agents were, something the Abwehr men could sympathize with. It was like water-cooler talk among spymasters, and the Abwehr responded in kind. “We here, in the very small circle of colleagues,” they wrote him at one point, “who know your story and that of your organization, talk so often about you that it often seems as if we were living the incidents which you relate to us, and we most certainly share, to the full, your worries.” There were other ways that Garbo bound Kühlenthal and Federico to him; his discovery of secret Aryans and anti-British and corrupt ministers told the Germans what they wanted to hear: namely, that England was honeycombed with Nazi sympathizers who wanted the Germans to invade. Garbo presented a vision of an enemy that almost wished, and certainly deserved, to be defeated. It was all part of what the Germans called “nerve warfare.”

  Garbo reported to Madrid that No. 4 was a little discouraged by his great stupidity. Kühlenthal urged forgiveness: “You should give him more encouragement as, if not, it might happen that when the real invasion is about to take place he will not notify this owing to over-precau
tion.” Everyone was on a hair trigger, looking for the first signs of D-Day. Meanwhile, the stock of Agent J (5), who’d correctly identified Fabius as an exercise, shot up. It was exactly what Garbo had wanted.

  In May, the French resistance reported that Rommel had moved the highly capable Panzer Lehr Division from Hungary to France, and the 21st Armored Division had been sent to Caen, only thirty minutes from the Normandy beaches. There were rumors that other panzer divisions would follow, which indicated that the Germans now believed the real invasion was coming at Normandy. The news disturbed the invasion planners in London. Was the deception effort a lost cause? Normandy was being more and more exposed as the likely target of D-Day. The second part of Garbo’s mission—the Calais deception—had to be ramped up to distract the German High Command from the Allies’ true intentions.

  The chimera was ready to move.

  To shift German eyes from west to east, FUSAG hit the road. The actual Third U.S. Army had been annexed to the sham FUSAG, lending it some real boots on the ground. The Third Army was then located in Cheshire, in the northwest of England, but if it was going to be part of an invasion of Calais, it had to be on the east coast, closer to the target. Instead of transferring the men and jeeps and tanks hundreds of miles—a plan that would have placed a heavy strain on commanders—the move was transmitted through the air. A squad of writers eavesdropped on the Third’s signal traffic, then created new “scripts” that placed them in the east. Though the chatter was secret—and enciphered—the text in the messages was pure gibberish, laboriously created by signal operators by choosing the fourth or fifth word of a newspaper article, until IBM invented a machine that spewed out a completely random series of words. Everything was done under a tight cover of secrecy; the radio operators who sent the messages were themselves never told if the traffic was real or imaginary. Even a tiny change in their technique might give away the game to the Germans.

  The Third Army’s wireless network in the west of England went silent, then popped up weeks later in East Anglia, close to the eastern shore. The Allies had invented a device that allowed a single set to mimic the traffic of six radios, so that the entire division’s signals could be imitated by one operator. The Germans soon picked up the traffic and placed a pin on their maps locating the Third Army in its new home of East Anglia, when the real troops were hundreds of miles away.

  Troop trains and road convoys were coordinated so that the double agents could “see” the locomotives pass through real towns at the real times that Garbo reported. A card catalog was even kept showing the position of every FUSAG regiment and battalion; when double agents “traveled” through a part of southeastern England, they knew which units they’d run into. Garbo’s Agent 7 (7), the treasurer of the Brothers in the Aryan World Order, “spotted” tank officers in Ipswich, hundreds of miles from their home base, and reported it; the Germans duly moved the flag for their unit on their big map: “The 6th American Armored Division, hitherto believed to be in the county of Worcester, is … said to be in the East of England in the Ipswich area.” Every sighting pushed the German gaze east, away from the real embarkation points in the west. “The main enemy concentration,” a May 15 intelligence report stated, “is showing itself ever more clearly to be in the South and SouthEast of England.” The real invasion force hadn’t moved an inch. The fake one was now facing Calais.

  Garbo flashed sightings from his subagents, who spotted FUSAG insignias—the black Roman numeral I on the blue pentagon he’d planted in the Germans’ minds weeks before—in towns near the coastline. Plotting the reports onto a map, the Germans saw the forces were heading toward the ports around Dover. On May 29, a massive convoy of actual fighter aircraft, composed of 66 airborne squadrons, took off from airfields in Hampshire, in the south of England. One of Garbo’s invented subagents watched them go, but reported they were really leaving from fields around Kent and Sussex, which pointed the finger away from Normandy. The planes dropped their bombs on Calais, and the Luftwaffe confirmed the raid.

  As D-Day drew closer, Garbo’s 80-watt radio glowed hot. May 25: “Through an American contact in the 28th Division I have learnt that Churchill, Smuts, Eisenhower and Patton were on the 12th May at the demonstration of a secret weapon …” (It was a device for blowing up concrete fortifications like the ones dotting Omaha Beach.) May 31: “Sutton Common North east Sutton Shottisham Road has been churned by tanks and is obviously tank exercising and testing ground.” Garbo’s network was now so large that he could feed the Abwehr production information from the United States: “Present aircraft production 300 per month. Military transport vehicles about 15000 per month. Priority now given to aircraft and signals equipment. Canada sending to England 1 million tons flour, 1/2 million tons bacon and pork, 43000 tons canned fish, 64000 tons cheese, 480 million eggs.”

  The spy even tried a classic reversal technique. On May 22, Garbo told Madrid that J (3), his Ministry of Information contact, had invited him to work for the Political War Executive (PWE), the masters of black propaganda. Madrid leapt at the chance, giving its approval the next day. The purpose of Garbo’s scheme was to supply the Germans with propaganda leaflets that they would read in reverse: if the PWE said Normandy was the target, then the Germans could be certain that the Allies were headed for Calais. “What I was clearly able to get out of it,” wrote Garbo after studying the PWE’s work, “and what I consider to be of the maximum importance is the intention to hide the facts in order to trick us.”

  This was the flowering of Garbo’s longest game, begun back in the wild old days of Lisbon. He was playing analyst again, doing what no other spy did. Garbo wasn’t just aiming to outwit people like Roenne. He wanted to, in a sense, replace them.

  As the days counted down, conflicts arose. The XX Committee ordered Harris and Pujol to pass traffic about a proposed invasion of Bordeaux, a feint called Operation Ironside, which would be launched with two divisions on “D plus 10”—that is, ten days after D-Day. The two men didn’t think much of the plan: Bordeaux wasn’t on the Germans’ radar as a target, and just how many feints were the Nazis expected to believe anyway? Two second-tier agents— Tate and a young Peruvian beauty code-named Bronx—did as ordered and hinted about a coming invasion. Bronx had been given special codes by the Germans, each of which indicated a different target. A telegram reading, “I need 175 pounds for dental work,” meant the attack was coming in the Balkans, and a request for 200 pounds meant Greece. Bronx now sent a message to the Abwehr that her dental work would cost 125 pounds. It was the signal for Bordeaux.

  But Garbo held out. He would eventually send a message on June 5, but then he qualified the report by saying he doubted its accuracy. Pujol and Harris weren’t about to sacrifice their hard-won reputation over a trifle like Ironside.

  Even between agents, tempers flared. When Garbo and Agent Brutus passed almost identical messages relating to Patton, Brutus’s case officer blew up: “It seems to me preposterous,” he wrote to his MI5 superiors, “that two agents should have obtained such exactly similar material on so important and secret a matter.” Identical messages pointed to a script—which could indicate to the Germans that the two agents were under Allied control. Luckily, the Abwehr saw Garbo’s report not as exposing Brutus’s information, but as confirming it. The Allies’ luck was holding.

  As Garbo moved his army group east toward its imaginary jumping-off point, Allied Bomber Command joined the effort. Their planes dropped high explosives on forty-nine enemy airfields, hitting twice as many in Calais as in Normandy. Nineteen railroad junctions were bombed in Calais, none in Normandy. Pilots flew sorties and blew out the bridges over the rivers Seine, Oise and Meuse and the Albert Canal, snapping the telephone and telegraph wires that led out of Calais. But they had done the same for Cockade, and everyone knew what the result had been. Were the Germans watching? Were they putting the pieces together correctly?

  In May, the German general Hans von Cramer, a veteran of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, wa
s released from an Allied POW camp because of ill health. As a high-ranking officer, before leaving he’d been treated to a dinner with the legendary General Patton, who was described throughout the meal as the commander of FUSAG. Patton charmed General von Cramer, and no expense was spared on the food and wine. The conversation drifted now and then to the delights of the French regions, in particular Calais.

  Von Cramer left the dinner and was taken to a Red Cross ship that sailed across the English Channel to occupied France. After arriving, von Cramer rushed to the High Command in Berlin and told them about the amazing things he’d seen and heard: on the way to the ship, he’d managed to sneak several peeks out of the transport window. The roads were packed with American and British troops, thousands upon thousands of them, clearly getting ready to embark for an invasion. The harbor he was taken to was thick with assault craft of every description. And the two officers who’d escorted him to the ship had let slip where they were: near Dover, straight across the Channel from Calais.

  The members of the High Command listened with growing astonishment. Von Cramer was the only German eyewitness to the D-Day preparations. The veil had slipped. They packed von Cramer into a car and sent him to Hitler’s headquarters, where he repeated his story to the Führer.

  Of course, von Cramer’s route to the Red Cross ship had been carefully planned to show him as many troops as possible. From the car he’d had a clear view of the regiments marching along the road. The two British officers who’d gossiped about their whereabouts were actually intelligence officers. The roads von Cramer had been traveling on were in southwestern England, not the southeast. And the harbor where the ship was waiting had been Portsmouth, the natural launching point for an attack on Normandy.