This was the essence of the anti-Nazi resistance: to oust Hitler, ally with the West, defeat the Bolsheviks, and salvage some German pride. Anthony Blunt certainly passed this report to the Soviets, doubtless compounding Stalin’s suspicions that the British and Americans might make peace with Germany and then turn on the Soviet Union. Churchill believed that the war could only end with Germany’s unconditional surrender, but de Bona brought hard evidence that Abwehr officers were now actively maneuvering to oust the Führer. Riven with conspiracy, double-crossed from within, under attack from its rivals, German military intelligence was starting to implode.
Kenneth Benton made his way upstairs in the British embassy in Madrid to a small attic room usually “used as a bedroom for escaped POWs.” There he found a young man “who was chain-smoking and looking rather sweaty and apprehensive.” The man rose, shook hands, and spoke in perfect, accentless English: “I am an officer in the Abwehr and I wish you to protect me from the Gestapo.”
Benton offered his guest a whiskey. The Abwehr man “smiled rather charmingly,” revealing nicotine-stained teeth: “Where I come from we love whisky, and I could certainly do with a drink right now.”
Sipping whiskey and soda in his well-cut suit and monocle, he might have been an Englishman. He wore a “very small blond moustache” and fiddled restlessly, lighting one cigarette from another. “My name is Johnny Jebsen,” he said. “I suppose you are Mr. Benton.” The MI6 man was taken aback. His real name was supposed to be a closely guarded secret, even within the embassy. Jebsen smiled again.
“You’re in trouble?” asked Benton.
“The Gestapo are on my tail because I made a report on their dealings in forged banknotes.”
“Have they followed you here?”
“No, I shook them off.”
Jebsen had every reason to be agitated. Not only was the Gestapo closing in, but he had learned that Kammler, the Abwehr official in Lisbon skimming Popov’s pay, had denounced him to the bosses in Berlin. Jebsen feared that his hotel room in Lisbon might have been bugged and his “indiscreet” conversations with Popov overheard. His supporters within the Abwehr had advised him to stay away from Germany. He might need an escape route.
They talked for two hours, and as Jebsen relaxed, he became ever more informative and opinionated, revealing the identities of senior Abwehr officers in Spain and “their special fields of interest,” his role as a freelance agent-recruiter, and sinking German morale: “There is hardly a soul any more in Germany who believes in victory. Probably the only man who really does is Hitler.” He drank more whiskey and cracked dark jokes: “During an air raid Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and Himmler took refuge in the same air raid shelter. The shelter received a direct hit. Who was saved? Germany.” He described again the “secret weapon” being built in Germany, “which would spread terror throughout the whole of the south of England.” Jebsen said he “did not know any details about the mystery weapon” but could find out more.
“I’m giving you a lot of information, aren’t I?” he remarked with a grin. “Well, it’ll be up to you to help me in return.” Jebsen was ready to cut a deal. If the Gestapo came after him, he wanted the British to get him out, quickly. In return, he would reveal everything he knew. Benton knew that smuggling Jebsen back to Britain from Spain would be simple enough, but the consequences of such a move were unpredictable: when the Abwehr discovered Jebsen’s defection, it would assume he had revealed all, and anyone associated with him would immediately become suspect. Jebsen had thought of a solution. He would leave a fake suicide note to cover his sudden disappearance, in which he would write: “I shall take poison and swim far out into the sea. It may be days before my corpse is washed up and it will then be no longer recognisable.” It is hard to imagine even the most idiotic Abwehr officer falling for such an obvious ruse. MI5 would later dismiss Jebsen’s suicide plot as a “piece of extreme foolishness brought on by excessive nervous strain.”
Benton felt drawn to Jebsen. The spy spoke warmly of his love for England, his wish to study at Oxford after the war, his friendship with P. G. Wodehouse, and his bossy English secretary, Mabel Harbottle, who refused to type letters that might undermine the Allied war effort. “He was an interesting and well-educated man and very good company,” thought Benton, but also worldly, cynical, and dissolute. “He had a great liking for pornographic films and admitted that one of the reasons why he came so frequently to Madrid was the existence of two clandestine Madrid cinemas which specialised in this kind of film.” He made no secret of his fears and no claims to courage. With a “visible shudder” he described the Ablege Kommandos, a “trained hijack team, skilled in seizing a wanted man and smuggling him back across the frontiers without arousing suspicion.” Even in neutral Spain, he might be kidnapped at any time and taken back to Germany, a prospect that terrified him.
Benton advised Jebsen to spend that night at the embassy. “It is in your interest. By tomorrow I’ll have a safe house.” Over a last nightcap, Benton asked his new recruit if there were other Abwehr officers who might be willing to defect. Jebsen replied: “I’m sure some of them have been turned and I know one Abwehr agent, a man I recruited myself, who has either been turned already or would go over to your side at the drop of a hat.”
“Who is that?”
“Dusan Popov,” Jebsen answered. “He’s a prolific agent, run from both Berlin and Lisbon.”
Jebsen had recruited Popov into the Abwehr. Popov, once turned, had urged the British to recruit Jebsen. Now Jebsen, in the process of being turned, urged the British to recruit Popov. He was being deliberately disingenuous. Jebsen knew by now, and probably had known from the beginning, that Popov was working for the British. Henceforth they would be working together.
Benton sat up late drafting a long report to London about Jebsen, whom he code-named “Artist.” The reply read: “Artist is telling you the truth. He is a Forscher, and well known to us. This contact has great potential value. Use utmost caution.”
Jebsen told him he would remain in Spain for the time being, see what developed, and keep in touch. “I was very sorry to part with Artist,” Benton later wrote. Jebsen was plainly being honest about his espionage activities, if not his financial dealings: “Artist told me that he suspected the Gestapo of lining their pockets with forged British banknotes, but I was never quite sure it was not the other way around.” With Jebsen, it was always tricky to work out which way round the truth lay.
Lily Sergeyev’s first moments on British soil could not have been more inauspicious. She had been told not to answer questions until she was interrogated. “You won’t have to open your mouth from here to London,” O’Shagar had told her as she left Gibraltar. Mary Sherer had sent instructions that she “should be dealt with at the airport in an absolutely normal manner,” since Lily was “particularly anxious that as few people as possible should know about her case, as she has a family still in Paris.”
The very first official she encountered was an immigration officer named Gold, “fat, with big ears,” and a stickler for the rules. Gold asked her name. She refused to answer. He asked where she was born. Lily said nothing. Finally, in what was later admitted to be a “rather ill-advised attempt to make her feel at ease,” Gold remarked: “It’s alright, you needn’t worry. We know all about you, the Germans have sent you here.”
Lily exploded. She had been in Britain less than an hour, and already some lumpen official with outsize ears was telling her that everybody knew her secret. Lily was still shouting when a severe-looking policewoman appeared, saying she had been sent to escort “Miss Tremayne” to London.
She was driven to a house in Balham, through the pouring rain, and put to bed by a motherly woman calling herself “Mrs. Maud.” The next morning, after a deep and exhausted night’s sleep and a breakfast of porridge, she was ushered into a second-floor room to find a woman in a red suit, sitting “on the edge of a chair, her arms folded, chin resting on her hands.” Mary Sherer appra
ised Agent Treasure coolly “through slightly slanted greenish eyes.” For a few moments, neither spoke. Lily then perched on the sofa and reeled off her story. Mary took notes, saying little. After an hour, she stood up. “You can be extremely useful to us, and the opening you provide may be of vital importance. We will be delighted to work with you, but you must realise the gravity of the situation. By helping the British you will be working for France, for her liberation.” She escorted Lily to a waiting car.
Lily was driven to flat 19, Rugby Mansions, in Kensington, and introduced to Maritza, a Yugoslavian woman who would be her housekeeper, Mary explained. She did not explain that the flat was an MI5 safe house under surveillance: the phone was bugged, the post monitored, and Maritza Mihailovic was herself a double agent, code-named “The Snark” (after the Lewis Carroll nonsense poem “The Hunting of the Snark”; since Carroll himself could not explain what a snark was, this may be one code name with no relevance whatsoever to its subject). A domestic servant, she had been recruited by the Abwehr in Yugoslavia and arrived in England as a refugee in 1941. B1A had run her as a double agent for a time, but for unknown reasons the Germans had lost interest in her, and since 1943 she had worked for MI5 as a cleaner and as a spy. The Snark would be keeping a close eye on Treasure.
Tar Robertson soon arrived, exuding bonhomie: “So you are here at last. Let me congratulate you on your work: it’s a great success. Now you must relax, forget your fears and uncertainty; nothing more can happen to you. You are among friends.”
Lily made no reply. She was fairly impervious to English charm. Robertson plowed on.
“We look on you as a trump card. There is no doubt the German intelligence people have complete confidence in you, so we are in a unique position to feed them false information. We can pull off what is known in the trade as an ‘intoxication.’ ”
With Mary Sherer’s help, Tar explained, Lily would write her own letters. “I want you, yourself, to draft all the messages,” said Tar. “If you think that any of the stuff we want to send will seem unlikely to the Germans, you mustn’t hesitate to say so. The possibilities open to us are so precious that we must not take even the smallest risk.” For the next four hours, she went through her story yet again. She drew a map of Madrid showing where she had met her German contacts and even sketched portraits of Yvonne Delidaise and Emile Kliemann.
Lily’s sketches of Yvonne Delidaise and Emile Kliemann
“That only leaves the financial question,” said Tar, beaming. “We’ll take over the money and jewellery and give you £50 a month and ten per cent of anything else they send. Is that all right?” Lily nodded, but reflected that the Germans had offered her £250 a month. “I am not doing this for the money,” she told her diary, “but I am a little surprised.” The brooch and diamond ring were locked in the B1A safe, but not before MI5 had valued them and found the jewelry was worth just one hundred pounds, “rather a far cry from the £400 that Kliemann thought she would get.” The arrival of this promising new double agent was relayed to Churchill:
A French citizen of Russian origin, she has lived most of her life in Paris, where she occupied herself with journalism, and at one time gained a considerable reputation as an artist. Through a fellow journalist, a German whom she had known before the war, Treasure gained her first introduction to the German secret service. It was a long time before Treasure was able to persuade her German masters to send her to this country. She has had extensive training in wireless transmission and in secret ink writing. She did not bring a wireless set with her, but was assured that arrangements had been made for one to be sent.
Anthony Blunt had made a special request “to be informed when Treasure arrives”; news of Lily’s arrival was certainly relayed to the Kremlin.
Mary Sherer was far too English to show it, but she was pleased with Lily and already had the “very strong conviction that this, her first double agent, was going to be a success, come what might.” Kim Philby, her colleague in MI6, remarked darkly: “Poor girl. She’s in for a disappointment. Never trust a Tsarist émigré.”
Lily glumly appraised her new home, the flat with its large, ill-furnished rooms, “clean and impersonal, like the rooms of a hotel.” She went for a walk, Maritza hovering in attendance. The street was “bleak and gloomy” and Rugby Mansions a “plain-fronted house with neither imagination nor ornament, as sour as an old spinster suffering from jaundice.” She had imagined a London ferociously at war. This place was gray, damp, and foggy. Lily thought of herself as a bird of color, an artist, a child of bright adventure. This was not her world. “What strikes me is the shabby appearance of everyone in the street: worn-out overcoats, shiny sleeves, dowdy clothes. In the shop windows the dresses are straight, without facing, lapels, or belt—everything remotely frivolous has been pitilessly sacrificed.” Her new handlers seemed detached and distant. Mary Sherer was a puzzle: “I still cannot quite place her: is she my jailer, or nursery governess, or what?” she wrote. “I don’t even know what she feels about me, though I suppose this really doesn’t matter very much.” Lowering her spirits still further was the nagging, and growing, pain in her kidneys, a recurrence of her old malady.
Lily missed Paris, stylish even under Nazi occupation. She missed the excitement of playing one side off against the other. She even missed Kliemann. But most of all she missed Babs.
14. A Time for Fortitude
The D-Day deception plan went through many versions and many names in the months leading up to June 1944: Operation Jael (named after the Old Testament heroine who nailed her sleeping enemy’s head to the floor with a tent peg), aimed to persuade the Germans there would be no invasion in 1944; then came “Torrent,” or “Appendix Y,” intended to convince them that Calais was the sole target. The plan for Operation Bodyguard, combining elements of the earlier plans, was finally completed by Johnny Bevan, “haggard with sleeplessness,” just before Christmas 1943.
Bodyguard was worldwide in scope and vaulting in ambition. Its aims were multiple: to tie down German troops in the Mediterranean with the bogus threat of assaults on the Dalmatian and Greek coasts; to dissipate German strength by suggesting that additional attacks might be made in northwest Italy, Bulgaria, Denmark, and, most important, Norway; to implant the idea that the bombing of Germany would take precedence over land-based assaults; and to make the Germans believe, for as long as possible, that no cross-Channel attack could take place until late summer. Bodyguard’s aim was to baffle and bemuse, to keep German troops away from where they would most be needed, hold them down where they could do the least harm, and lure them away from France and the eastern front and toward Italy, the Balkans, Greece, and Scandinavia. Bodyguard would be implemented in various theaters of war, but its most important element by far was the plan to mislead Hitler over the planned Normandy landings.
The choice of code name for this particular operation—the crux of Bodyguard—was much debated. Churchill had given instructions that no code name should be selected that might seem flippant in retrospect or give a hint of the individual or action involved. But he also disliked code names that meant nothing at all, which is why the original choice, “Mespot,” was rejected. Also vetoed were “Bulldog,” “Swordhilt,” “Axehead,” “Tempest,” and, obscurely, “Lignite.” Finally, a name was selected that seemed to evoke the resolution required to pull it off: Operation Fortitude.
A vast, secret army set to work on Operation Fortitude, fabricating physical deception, including dummy landing craft and rubber tanks at key points, and technical deception in the form of great waves of radio traffic, a blizzard of electric noise mimicking great armies training and assembling where none existed. British diplomats dropped misleading hints at cocktail parties to be overheard by the eavesdroppers and channeled back to Germany. Conspicuously large orders were made for Michelin Map 51, a map of the Pas de Calais area. The French Resistance, Special Operations Executive agents, saboteur and guerrilla teams, MI6, the code breakers at Bletchley, secret scie
ntists, and camouflage engineers would each play a part in this great, sprawling, multifaceted deception campaign. But at its core was Tar Robertson’s tiny team of double agents, telling lies to their spymasters in secret writing, by radio, and to their faces, forging a shield of deceit that would guard the soldiers, if it worked, onto the beaches of Normandy.
Many played a part in planning Operation Fortitude, but three principal architects of the deception plan stand out: Colonel Johnny Bevan, the head of the London Controlling Section; Major Roger Fleetwood-Hesketh, the leading intelligence officer within the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), whose task it was to merge military planning and deception; and Colonel David Strangeways, the head of General Montgomery’s deception section. Christopher Harmer of B1A would act as liaison between the headquarters of the Expeditionary Force and the Double Cross team. These were very different men. Fleetwood-Hesketh—a barrister with “one of the best claret cellars in England”—was “charming and witty,” with a fine sense of the absurd. Harmer described him as a “most tidy and meticulous worker” but “essentially a scorer rather than a player.” Strangeways, a hard-driving infantryman, was “impossible and insufferable,” according to Harmer, but frequently right and occasionally inspired. Bevan, overworked and under stress, was liable to volcanic eruptions of temper, always followed by heartfelt apology. Their roles were often ill defined and overlapping. Tempers frayed and snapped. The rows were spectacular, but the extent of their collaboration was even more remarkable. Between them, these individuals would fashion and then implement the most ambitious deception campaign ever attempted.
Operation Fortitude was revised over time. At one point, the acerbic Strangeways, in his own words, “rewrote the thing entirely,” igniting another furious argument (though his changes were finally accepted). In its final form, the plan had several interlinked aims: it sought to convince the Germans that the attack on Normandy (eventually scheduled for June) was merely diversionary, a ploy to draw off German forces before the main thrust of the invasion in the Pas de Calais around the middle of July; at the same time it sought to lure the Germans into preparing for an attack on Norway, along with another landing in the area of Bordeaux. Crucially, the threat to the Pas de Calais would be maintained for as long as possible after the Normandy landings, to ensure that the Germans did not send a large body of troops south to repel the real invasion.
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