The men listened anxiously, waiting for the moment when Haines would start sending Garbo’s message. But again and again they heard the operator tap out the call sign. His finger lay still on the button.
The unthinkable had happened. The Germans weren’t listening.
The men huddled around the wireless were gutted. All that work, only to have a radio operator let them down. Finally, at 8 a.m. the Abwehr operator tapped back and Garbo blasted a response. “I am very disgusted as, in this struggle for life and death, I cannot accept excuses or negligence,” he snarled before sending a slightly altered text saying that Agent No. 4 had made contact:
He arrived after a difficult journey created by the steps he took to slip through the local vigilance. He told me that three days ago cold rations and vomit bags had again been distributed to troops of the 3rd Canadian Division and that the division had now left the camp, its place now taken by the Americans. The American troops which are now in the camp belong to the First US Army.
The only conclusion that the Germans could draw was that the invasion was under way—yet if FUSAG was still in camp, Normandy had to be a feint. The radar indications of thousands of “airplanes” approaching Calais must be part of a complex deception.
Now the deceivers waited.
At the same time that Haines’s Morse key was sounding in the ether, an American GI named William Funkhouser was crawling up Omaha Beach with a 60-mm mortar strapped to his back. He was with the 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One. Moments before he’d stepped off a landing barge and struggled ashore, ripping off his life preserver as he went. A German machine gun was sending tracers inches above his head. “I was so scared that if I never moved again from that place, that would be all right.” As his fingers dug into the wet sand and he willed himself down into the earth, Funkhouser saw a “white explosion” go off to his left in the murky light. Oddly, he felt no concussion wave travel through his body, just the flash of white. Ahead of him when Funkhouser looked up, spread in a radius from the center of the explosion, was a collection of randomly distributed pieces of flesh—not limbs but chunks of flesh, the largest the size of a man’s fist, all of them “just as white as snow.” A soldier named Speckler had been carrying a load of TNT to blow up German pillboxes, and it had exploded too soon. Funkhouser stared at a single piece of flesh that had come to rest in his path. In the midst of the noise and concussions, it held his attention as if it were some kind of talisman. “I can’t crawl through that,” he said to himself. He tried to stand but his legs gave out. He felt for the 60-mm mortar on his back and threw it aside. The lost weight seemed to give his body strength. He stood and began to run, armed only with a .45.
Before D-Day, Funkhouser had believed, or been led to believe, that the Germans would surrender as soon as the American troops came trudging up the beach. Instead, every officer in his company was either dead or wounded, or would soon be dead or wounded. Now bodies were rolling in the surf, back and forth, three and four deep. “My company was just more or less eliminated as a fighting unit.”
It was men like Funkhouser whom Garbo had been assigned to protect in the next seventy-two hours. Sitting in the house on Crespigny Road, Pujol could only imagine the scene at Omaha Beach. “I remember thinking that the American beaches were in danger of being turned into a bloody fiasco. They were suffering terrible casualties and it was up to us to prevent a massacre.”
Harris had other things to worry about. Was Jebsen talking? Was Garbo’s last message being read in reverse and the panzer divisions already rolling toward the Normandy beaches?
As the Americans shot their way ashore at Omaha, the phone rang in Rommel’s headquarters at the château in La Roche-Guyon, forty miles west of Paris. Rommel himself was home, in Herrlingen, Germany; he’d spent part of the previous day picking a bouquet of wildflowers for his wife’s birthday. On the other end of the phone was Colonel Roenne, in his bunker at Zossen, just outside Berlin. The invasion was under way, the slim aristocrat told Rommel’s second-in-command, but Roenne’s analysis indicated that a second, much more powerful blow was being readied for Calais. “Not a single unit of the 1st US Army Group, which comprises around 25 large formations north and south of the Thames, has so far been committed … This suggests that the enemy is planning a further large-scale operation in the Channel area, which one would expect to be aimed at a coastal sector in the Pas de Calais area.” He emphasized that no forces were to be withdrawn from Calais to reinforce Normandy. It was a victory for Garbo and the XX Committee, but the higher-ups still had to decide on a final strategy.
Rommel’s chief of staff nodded. He’d already been informed that some of the paratroopers who had landed near St. Valéry behind the German lines had turned out to be fakes. In fact, they were another of Operation Bodyguard’s stratagems: four live paratroopers from the SAS had jumped in with two hundred dummies, a number of gramophones to play battle sounds and cries for help, along with chemical bombs that gave off the odor of cordite. The diversion helped convince the chief of staff that the whole invasion was a ploy.
At General Rundstedt’s headquarters, a clerk remembers, “D-Day … was marked by a ‘let’s not get excited’ attitude … This was regarded as just another feint.” But Rundstedt’s chief of staff was worried. He called Berlin and requested the release of the strategic reserve of panzers to smash into the divisions that were rolling up from Omaha and Utah beaches.
Now the decision lay with General Jodl in Berlin. He pondered the request and declined to send in the tanks. The invasion was a sham, he believed, and the real blow was coming at Calais. He refused to wake Hitler. The German Seventh Army, positioned in Normandy but being held away from the action, slumbered through the darkness and failed to emerge from their barracks when the American troops poured ashore. Jodl’s deputy chief of staff would later admit, “On 5 June 1944 … German Supreme Headquarters had not the slightest idea that the decisive event of the war was upon them.” It wasn’t until Hitler awoke and ordered the Panzer Lehr and 12th SS divisions to the battle—at 4 p.m., hours after the invasion had begun—that the High Command reacted. The order was too late to affect the first day’s action.
The foothold had been established—but the Allied generals had planned on that. The question was, would the illusion last? And would the German divisions guarding Calais break out of their camps and head toward Normandy? “We feared a massive counterattack every minute,” Pujol said. D-Day plus one and D-Day plus two passed without any more significant German reinforcements. How much longer would the illusion last?
On June 9 beginning at 1:44 a.m., Garbo sent his most important message of the war. He announced that he’d met with his four key operatives—Agent No. 7 (2), the Welsh seaman from London; 7 (4), the Indian poet from Brighton; 7 (7), the Aryan fascist from Harwich; and No. 4, the Gibraltarian waiter from Scotland. It was a gathering of Garbo’s supposed brain trust, and he confirmed their conclusions with a visit to his “source” at the Ministry of Information. Garbo no longer fed the Germans bits and pieces of the Calais plot; that time had passed. He now presented them with the whole conspiracy, gathered from his dazzling array of sources.
I today lunched with 4 (3) and obtained from him an interesting bit of information. He told me that FUSAG had not entered into the present operation … being carried out in the greater part by troops who have come from the Med, reinforced mainly by Canadian and American troops. From the reports mentioned it is perfectly clear that the present attack is a large scale operation but diversionary in character for the purpose 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 a blow somewhere else with ensured success … The constant bombings that the area of the Pas de Calais is suffering and the strategic situation of these forces make me suspect an attack on that French region, which is also the shortest route to their prized final objective, that is, Berlin.
For nearly two hou
rs and two minutes, Haines’s right index finger tapped out the encrypted message, the climax of Garbo’s role as the great soothsayer of Allied war plans, the role he’d been crafting for three long years. He wasn’t just feeding the Germans information, he was drawing conclusions and trying to convince Hitler that he, above all others, knew what the Allies were planning to do.
As the message was being sent, General Rundstedt in Berlin was urgently requesting Hitler to give him the armored reserve in order to attack the invaders at their most vulnerable point, the Normandy coast. His Seventh Army had emerged from its barracks and was embroiled in a ferocious battle with the invading forces in the town squares and hedgerows. But was this the real invasion? “It is clear that Hitler and his entourage were in a highly undecided frame of mind.”
Finally, Hitler gave in. He agreed to send Rundstedt the 1st Panzer Corps, along with the 2nd Panzer and 21st Panzer divisions. The commanders on the ground received the order to move south to attack the American and British forces at Normandy. What Eisenhower had feared most was beginning to unfold. It was D-Day plus three.
At that moment, a condensed version of Garbo’s message was being flashed from Madrid to Berlin, arriving at 10:20 P.M. Hitler’s personal intelligence officer, Friedrich Adolf Krummacher, read the report and drew a pen stroke under the phrase “diversionary maneuver,” then added his own note: “Underlines the opinion already formed by us that a further attack is to be expected in another place. (Belgium?)” He rushed the message to Jodl, who drew his own line under the words “southeast and eastern England,” initialed it and put it on the Führer’s desk. Roenne wrote to Jodl to confirm Garbo’s analysis: “The main thrust must be expected momentarily in the Pas de Calais.”
When Hitler spotted Garbo’s report sitting on his gleaming desk, he read it carefully and contemplated its message. Then he reached for his pen, dipped it in ink and signed it “erl,” for erledigt (“done,” or in this context, “seen”). Soon afterward, a message flashed out from the High Command: “As a consequence of certain information, C in C West has declared a ‘state of alarm II’ for Fifteenth Army in Belgium and Northern France … The move of the 1st SS Panzer Division will therefore be halted.” The long lines of German panzers gunned their 300-horsepower Maybach engines and turned back toward Calais.
Ten armored divisions in France and Belgium had been ready to reinforce Normandy, including the 85th Infantry and the 116th Panzer, the latter stationed just west of Paris. Now all but one returned to Calais or broke camp to head there, to prepare for Garbo’s spectral army. Only a single armored division, the 2nd Panzer, crossed the Seine and headed south toward Normandy.
Garbo had not only stopped the German army in its tracks, he’d forced it to reverse course.
The person who nearly undid all this good work was none other than Winston Churchill. On the morning of the invasion, he gave a speech in the House of Commons. The entire British government—its ministers and diplomats—had been ordered not to mention a second landing at Calais or anywhere else on the French coast, or even to imply one was on the way. If the attack really was coming, as Garbo was telling the Germans, then no one would dare talk about it. Except the prime minister did, in front of microphones broadcasting his speech to the world. “I have also to announce to the House that during the night and the early hours of this morning, the first of a series of landings in force upon the European continent has taken place.” The deception planners gasped.
Garbo rushed to his radio to explain the gaffe to the Germans: “In spite of recommendations made to Churchill,” he told Madrid, “that his speech should contain every possible reserve, he based it on the consideration that he was obliged, on account of his political position, to avoid distorting the facts and would not permit that his speeches should be discredited by coming events.” The Germans, amazingly, accepted the explanation. They wanted to believe their agent, even if it meant believing that Churchill had made a terrible blunder.
Pujol and Harris celebrated their world-altering coup with a dinner at a tiny black-market restaurant in Soho owned by a Basque expatriate. Harris had asked the man to prepare an authentic Basque meal: huevos escalfados bilbaína, cold poached eggs served on a layer of chopped onions and tomatoes, substituted for impossible-to-get pimientos. The owner poured glass after glass of Basque wine, from a glass pitcher known as a porrón, as the two men moved on to pollo de Pamplona, laughing and telling stories as they ate, until the proprietor was holding the porrón high above their heads and, cheered on by the other diners, pouring ropes of vino directly into their mouths as the Spanish and Basques do when celebrating a great event. Four porrones later, the two men stumbled giddily out into the London night.
It was the American GIs, British troops and Canadian aviators now moving toward Paris who would save Europe and the Western world. But it was these two mysterious and half-soused men who’d saved those soldiers.
Two weeks after the Normandy invasion, there were actually more Axis forces in the Pas de Calais than there had been before the attack. A month after, a total of twenty-two Calais divisions stood on alert, ready to repel the invaders that would never come. In a top-secret interview conducted the following year in Nuremberg, an interrogator asked Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Germany’s equivalent of a war minister, why the panzers ordered to Normandy had turned around at the last moment. He pointed to Garbo’s June 9 report. “You can accept it as 99 percent certain that this message was the immediate cause of the counter order.” General Eisenhower was just as certain:
Lack of infantry was the most important cause of the enemy’s defeat in Normandy, and his failure to remedy this weakness was due primarily to the success of the Allied threats leveled against the Pas de Calais … I cannot over-emphasize the decisive value of this most successful threat, which paid enormous dividends, both at the time of the assault and during the operations of the two succeeding months. The German Fifteenth Army, which, if committed to battle in June or July, might possibly have defeated us by sheer weight of numbers, remained inoperative throughout the critical period of the campaign.
Before he committed suicide by cyanide on October 14, 1944, Field Marshal Rommel made a curious confession to his son. It had been “a decisive mistake,” he said, “to leave the German troops in the Pas de Calais.”
As Pujol and Harris walked unsteadily through the streets of London, Operation Fortitude’s mastermind, the irrepressible David Strangeways, was battling his way through France. Strangeways was at the head of R Force, a unique unit composed of both deception technicians and infantry soldiers. The unit was tricking the Germans into sending their panzers and troops into what were called “notional areas”—that is, empty fields or deserted farms—by using the full battery of physical deception: fake wireless traffic, “night lighting exercises” that could simulate everything from airstrips to large convoys, false division HQs, flash simulators to mimic artillery guns, battle noise simulators to suggest the landing of paratroopers, misleading signposts, phony tanks, fake bomb craters and a host of operations cooked up on the march. The unit’s technicians even mocked up some very convincing “dummy sniper heads,” which were so successful in drawing out enemy sharpshooters that one officer went to the studio of a local artist, Monsieur Deleroulk, and asked if he could mass-produce 500 of them. (He could, for 200 francs each. ) They churned out rumor after rumor and spread them across the French countryside. R Force, with David Strangeways at its head, was like a traveling carnival, drawing rabbits out of their hats.
By late summer of 1944, his R Force was pushing toward the Rhine. On August 31, Strangeways led his soldiers toward the French city of Rouen from the south. As usual, his daring surprised and infuriated his superiors. The brigadier of one infantry group was “horrified to learn that R Force is lying so far forward and recommends that it is withdrawn at once.” Strangeways and his men eventually took the city, after which he departed to give a lecture on the elegant art of deception at the Palais d
es Beaux Arts. “It is fair to say,” concluded one report on R Force’s work in this period, “that no major attack has taken place which has not to some degree gained surprise.”
Strangeways passed wide of Le Postel, the town far to the south of Rouen that had been obliterated as part of the failed Operation Cockade. One late afternoon in September, as R Force was heading north toward Germany, a small milestone was marked in the coastal town. The last German garrison in the area around Le Postel had surrendered. But there was no one around to celebrate; no townspeople rushed into the streets and waved the tricolor or offered wine to advancing troops. Le Postel was empty. It had never recovered from the bombing that was intended to cover Cockade.
The man who could have destroyed Garbo, Johann Jebsen, spent D-Day in Sachsenhausen, one of the oldest concentration camps in the Third Reich, earmarked for political prisoners and enemies of the state. Sachsenhausen was a model camp, surrounded by electric wire and a high stone wall, as well as a “death strip” of pale gravel that the inmates were forbidden to step on. Anyone who did was shot by the guards. A man who’d occupied the cell next to Jebsen’s later reported that, after the spymaster had been dragged back to his cell following a brutal beating, he called out to the guards, “I trust I shall be provided with a clean shirt.” Another prisoner met Jebsen in September 1944 and found him lying on his bed, his ribs broken. It was the last sighting of the tragic spy.
His friend Dusko Popov, Agent Tricycle, feeling both guilty and enraged about Jebsen’s fate, drove through the ruins of postwar Germany searching for the man he held responsible for his colleague’s death. His name was Walter Selzer, and he was a minor functionary who’d carried out Jebsen’s execution. After weeks of detective work, Popov found Selzer in the German city of Minden. Popov abducted him and drove him to a lonely forest to kill him. But Selzer proved so meek and pathetic that Popov found himself unable to pull the trigger. He left Selzer cowering in the trees and consoled himself by rescuing Jebsen’s wife; Popov even knocked on the doors of theater directors in Berlin’s British zone, trying to get her work as an actress. It was an act of atonement for the man he felt he’d failed.
Agent Garbo Page 25
