Double Cross

by Ben MacIntyre

  Jebsen was an odd figure, Wilson reflected, raddled and raffish but oddly romantic. “Looks ten years older than his thirty years; reddish, blond hair combed back; heavy moustache; very slender, body bent forward; grey blue eyes and very pronounced cheekbones; unhealthy pale complexion (lung disease?); smokes about 100 cigarettes over a day; very bad teeth from frequent smoking; eats little and drinks only champagne; unable to drive; rides horseback; writes philosophical books.” Yet as Jebsen’s trail of seduction showed, there was something intensely attractive about him and a core of strength that belied his twitchy manner. Wilson trusted him. “No doubt Artist is acting mainly out of self-interest but of a clear-sighted and long-term character. A man of his undoubted intelligence is unlikely to try to deceive us on any matter where he is liable to be found out after the war.” Wilson was quite sure that Jebsen was prepared to risk his life for the Allied cause. “I am convinced that Artist sincerely desires to continue to work wholeheartedly with us.” When they parted, Wilson told him: “I hope our collaboration will endure a very long time.”

  Wilson’s report caused both delight and consternation in London. This was intelligence of the highest quality, with the promise of more to come. On the other hand, as Astor and Harris had feared, Jebsen was in a position to expose the falsity of the German networks in Britain, now supplying actively deceptive material in the run-up to D-Day. “The extent of Artist’s possible knowledge of Garbo is a matter of some concern,” wrote Tar, who wondered whether Jebsen knew or merely suspected that the German agents in Britain were frauds. “Obviously if Artist were approached directly on this matter it would immediately arouse his suspicion.” Wilson assured him: “I do not think he has any positive proof.” But then, Jebsen did not need any. The continued flow of information from the D-Day spies would be proof enough of the massive hoax being perpetrated on the German High Command.

  “Artist’s zeal and ability,” Churchill was told, “has verged upon the embarrassing. He has begun to provide us with information about the networks maintained by the Germans in this country. Of these the principal one is the Garbo organisation of which it is clearly undesirable that he should make us too fully aware. We are engaged at the moment in the delicate operation of diverting this valuable agent’s attention elsewhere. There is good promise of success.”

  While Jebsen was getting to know his new British spymasters, Dusko Popov settled back in with his German handlers. Von Karsthoff was genuinely glad to see him: Popov was not only his most valuable intelligence asset but also the guarantor of his profligate lifestyle. He examined Popov’s haul of information with something less than a critical eye and pronounced it excellent. Canaris had recently questioned whether Popov was “worth his pay,” but the latest batch of intelligence, von Karsthoff predicted, would convince the Abwehr chief that he was “really valuable.” He threw a dinner party in Popov’s honor and invited Jebsen, Aloys Schreiber (the new head of counterintelligence), and their secretaries. It was a bizarre occasion. Two of the guests were German intelligence officers, and two others were secretly working for British intelligence; Jebsen was sleeping with Schreiber’s secretary, who was spying on her boss; the married von Karsthoff was having an affair with his secretary, Elizabeth Sahrbach, while ripping off the Abwehr. Popov was conducting at least six love affairs. Everyone was involved in the lying and cheating game … except Mabel Harbottle, Jebsen’s secretary, who was not sleeping with or deceiving anyone and probably never had. Von Karsthoff proposed a congratulatory toast, declaring that, in return for his latest intelligence haul, Popov could expect a payment of fifteen thousand dollars.

  Aloys Schreiber agreed that Popov’s report was “good and had been sent by courier to Berlin.” His manner, however, was chilly.

  After the dinner party, von Karsthoff flew to Baden-Baden for an Abwehr conference and returned ecstatic: Popov was now considered “the best man the Abwehr have.” The accolade was duly passed back to Wilson in London, who observed: “This may well have been deliberate flattery, but there seems to be no doubt he is at the moment extremely highly regarded.” With greedy relish, von Karsthoff told Popov that “if his work was really good he could get almost anything he asked for.” Plans were already being laid to send him back to Britain with more money, a fresh batch of secret ink, and a new questionnaire demanding a range of information on just about everything, as Popov later put it, “short of a detailed account of Churchill’s digestive processes.” Popov was instructed to begin transmitting from outside London, as Hitler’s flying bombs would soon be laying waste to the capital.

  For Popov and Jebsen, these weeks in Lisbon offered the first opportunity since the war had begun to speak to each other without dissembling or inferring what could not be spoken. They were now officially on the same side in the game, though utterly different in temperament. As P. G. Wodehouse once remarked of cricket: “Some batsmen are nervous all through a long innings. With others the feeling disappears with the first boundary.” Popov was unflappable, where Jebsen was a jangle of jagged nerves, but they made an outstanding partnership. They spent many happy, dissolute hours together: a pair of British spies pretending to be German spies, spending Hitler’s money on themselves. Jebsen took a house in Estoril with four servants, while Popov lived at the Palacio Hotel. They celebrated Christmas together, and Popov sent a cheery seasonal message, in secret ink, to MI5: “I shall spend my Christmas in Portugal buying National Lottery tickets and letting people shine my shoes,” he wrote. “Wishing you and all our friends a happy Christmas.”

  But as he boarded the plane for London a week later, Popov’s spirit was troubled. He knew he was leaving his old friend in dire peril. If Jebsen had asked for asylum, he would have been safely alongside him on the plane to Britain. But he had not. The Tricycle files contain a handwritten letter Popov wrote to Jebsen soon after his return to London. It offers a glimpse into what he called the “dilemma” of spying, balancing duty against friendship, risking the life of someone he loved to protect thousands he would never know.

  Given the choice between “helping a friend and ruining a much bigger cause, or making a friend take a chance and try to save the cause,” he wrote, “I would opt for the second solution. What is more, I am sure you would do the same.” In his uncertain English, Popov tried to tell Jebsen how much their friendship meant to him and to the cause they now shared: “If this case would depend on anybody else but you, I would be desperate.”

  17. Monty’s Double

  On the day Popov landed back in Britain, a brilliant British army officer and part-time transvestite emerged from an army cinema south of Naples after a screening of the Billy Wilder film Five Graves to Cairo, with one of the last (and oddest) elements of the deception swirling around in his mind. Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke was the head of “A Force,” a highly successful deception unit based in Cairo, and one of the architects of Bodyguard. He was a film buff with a flair for the dramatic. Indeed, Clarke’s taste for dressing up had landed him in hot water a year earlier, when he was arrested in Madrid wearing women’s clothes. Five Graves to Cairo was set in the North African campaign and starred Erich von Stroheim as Rommel. But it was Miles Mander, the actor playing a remarkably plausible General Montgomery, that set Clarke’s peculiar mind whirring.

  Montgomery would be the Allied ground troops commander for the D-Day invasion. If an actor playing Montgomery were to be spotted somewhere else in the world immediately before the invasion, then the Germans might assume the cross-Channel attack was not imminent. It could buy precious time and soften German defenses at a vital moment.

  Clarke’s idea was adopted with enthusiasm by the deception planners at LCS, and Operation Copperhead was born. But casting the right actor for the part proved tricky. Mander was found to be several inches taller than the real general, “a physical handicap it was impossible to disguise.” A substitute was found, who then “fell victim to a road accident and broke his leg.” The search was about to be abandoned when a Soho
theatrical agency came up with Meyrick Clifton James, an Australian-born lieutenant in the Army Pay Corps and a former variety performer. James was not a good actor. He could neither sing nor dance, and he had lost a finger in the trenches. He had volunteered to entertain overseas troops but instead wound up in Leicester, performing in the Pay Corps’ Variety Troupe. But he had one act that never failed to get the audiences cheering: with his thin face and gray, drooping mustache, he could do a splendid Monty impersonation. The actor David Niven, then a colonel in the Army Film Unit, contacted James and asked him to come to London, where he was assigned to Montgomery’s staff, under cover as a journalist, to study the general’s speech patterns and mannerisms.

  In February 1944, it was publicly announced that the victor of El Alamein had arrived in Britain to take command of Allied land forces. “From then onwards it was certain that German agents would do their best to watch his movements.” But where should the fake Monty be exhibited for German viewing? “Supposing he were to be seen somewhere in the Mediterranean a day or two before the Normandy invasion, the Germans would take it as a certain indication that they had at least a week or more to wait before the landings.” Gibraltar was selected as the ideal stage for Monty’s double. The airfield there was known to be kept under surveillance by the Germans. The Rock was also the stamping ground of a particularly efficient and unscrupulous spy, Major Ignacio Molina Pérez, who had been in MI5’s sights for some time.

  Molina was on the staff of the Algeciras military governor and liaison officer between the Spanish government and the British authorities in Gibraltar. Spanish officials were supposed to be neutral; in reality, MI5 knew that Molina was a fully paid-up German spy code-named “Cosmos” and “bad from head to foot”: “Molina has been decorated by the German government on various occasions, and it has been proved, with a wealth of detail, that Molina is the prime mover in an extensive Nazi secret service organisation in Spain and Morocco.” “Molina himself is not aware we are out for his blood,” the defense security officer in Gibraltar reported. “One of the most irritating aspects of the case is that although we know him to be a German agent, he continues to enjoy every facility to enter and leave the fortress. We have not been able to catch him in flagrante delicto. Something more must be done since at any moment he may get hold of some really valuable information.” Molina was the ideal target for the hoax: if he spotted Montgomery in Gibraltar, he would immediately alert the Germans, and the British would have copper-bottomed proof of Molina’s espionage. Operation Copperhead might have the satisfactory side effect of stuffing Agent Cosmos.

  The ground was prepared by spreading rumors that Montgomery was coming to North Africa, via Gibraltar, in order to discuss plans for the invasion of southern France before the launch of the main invasion in the north. James began rehearsing his part, which meant changing his habits: James was a heavy drinker and smoker, whereas Monty was teetotal and loathed smoking. A prosthetic finger was constructed to replace the missing one. The fake Monty trimmed his mustache, dyed his sideburns, and was issued khaki handkerchiefs monogrammed “B.L.M.” “Monty is rather flattered by the whole plan which, of course, is based on the theory that the Second Front could not possibly start without him,” Guy Liddell reported. “This is just the sort of plan that might conceivably come off, like [Operation] Mincemeat.” In obedience to bureaucratic niceties, James would be paid the equivalent of a general’s pay for every day he impersonated Monty.

  While a boozy actor was rehearsing the part of a fake general, a real general was preparing to take over a fake army. With the bogus First United States Army Group (FUSAG) supposedly assembling in Kent, the deception team needed someone to take command. George Patton, the inspiring, swashbuckling, and supremely unpleasant general who had led U.S. troops into Sicily, was under a cloud for abusing and slapping soldiers traumatized by battle in the belief that they were malingering cowards. “I ought to shoot you myself,” General Patton told one terrified man. “There’s no such thing as shell shock. It’s an invention of the Jews.” Eisenhower forced him to apologize and, to Patton’s fury, denied him overall command of ground forces for the coming invasion. Instead, Patton was ordered to serve under Montgomery as commander of the Third Army.

  The Germans rated Patton highly—“That’s the best man they have,” Hitler insisted—so, at the suggestion of Christopher Harmer, he was appointed commander of the ghost army. By a judicious combination of leaks, newspaper reports, and double-agent messages, the belief that General Patton was in command of FUSAG took root in German thinking. Patton stomped around England acting the part. He called himself “a goddam natural born ham,” which he most certainly was, loudly hailing other officers with such remarks as “See you in the Pas de Calais!” The scandal over the slapping incident even reinforced the deception, since the Germans assumed this was an invented story to disguise Patton’s command of the most important D-Day army. The general’s outspoken tactlessness enraged Eisenhower. “I am thoroughly weary of your failure to control your tongue,” he told him. But the intelligence services were delighted. Whenever Patton said something like “It is the evident destiny of the British and Americans to rule the world,” this made headlines, and the headlines made their way to Germany, keeping Nazi eyes firmly focused on Patton and his bogus army.

  The components of the plan were slotting into place. To keep enemy forces pinned down in Norway, Allied intelligence imagined into being the British Fourth Army, poised to attack from Scotland, supported by American Rangers deployed from Iceland. Fortitude North was backed up by wireless traffic mimicking a real army preparing for an amphibious landing and mountain warfare—in reality wireless trucks driving around Scotland sending volleys of Morse code into the ether, some 350 people representing a force of 100,000 men.

  The officer in command of this notional force was General Sir Andrew “Bulgy” Thorne, a whiskery First World War veteran who had met Hitler when he was military attaché at the British embassy in Berlin in the 1930s. Thorne and Hitler had fought on opposite sides of the trenches at Ypres and discussed their shared experiences. Hitler, it was calculated, would be more likely to take seriously an army under the command of an old warhorse he knew personally. Thorne even inspected real American troops in Northern Ireland as if he were their commanding officer, in the hope that German spies in Ireland would feed the information back to Germany. As the northern deception gathered speed, the planners would add additional touches: declaring the Firth of Forth a “protected area,” as if a great and secret host were assembling there; Soviet forces would mass on the Norwegian border, suggesting a simultaneous assault from the east. At the same time, diplomatic approaches were made to neutral Sweden, requesting the use of its airfields and asking the Swedish air force commander to consider a peacekeeping role in Norway in the event of an Allied invasion. (The pro-Nazi Swedish police chief was bugging the room in which this conversation took place, and the lie flew back to Berlin.)

  The officer responsible for implementing Fortitude North described the “strange mental attitude” brought on by inventing, organizing, and then deploying a completely invisible army: “As time went on we found it hard to separate the real from the imaginary. The feeling that the Fourth Army really existed and the fact that it was holding German troops immobilised made one almost believe in its reality.” This was precisely the mesmeric effect the planners hoped to induce in Hitler. The Führer had always considered Norway his “zone of destiny”; the aim of Fortitude North was to keep his attention—and hundreds of thousands of German troops—fixed there.

  A similar and even more elaborate charade was under way along the Channel coast. German forces defending Normandy, the Seventh Army, were formidable enough, but if they were reinforced by General Hans von Salmuth’s mighty Fifteenth Army, currently defending the Pas de Calais, then Normandy would be all but impregnable. The Calais troops must be kept where they were, not only before but for as long as possible after the first attack on Normandy. The
real Allied army massing in southwest England to attack Normandy should be as invisible as possible, while the fake army, supposedly gathering in the southeast, should be as loud and noticeable as Patton himself. Like stage managers on a massive scale, the planners began assembling props, scenery, and backdrops all over the southeast coast to simulate the mighty FUSAG, a force of 150,000 men, forming up, training, and preparing for battle: fake troop camps, bogus airfields, more than 250 dummy assault landing craft known as “wetbobs,” and dummy tank landing craft known as “bigbobs” (a “wetbob” being public-school parlance for a rower, while a cricketer was a “drybob”). The bigbobs, built from hollow steel tubes and canvas, were so light that in high winds they broke loose and flew through the air, like enormous misshapen kites. Stray cows tended to eat the fake aircraft made from wood and canvas.

  From April, wireless operators drove around Kent simulating the wireless traffic of an entire corps preparing for battle. Plans were drawn up to establish a ten-mile exclusion zone around the coast. Robertson could never be fully certain he had intercepted every spy, so as a precaution misleading signs were erected in Kent, pointing to fake embarkation points. In Dover, all was commotion as engineers scurried to and fro pretending to build tunnels and wireless stations. Imitation docks and an oil storage complex were constructed by set builders from Shepperton Studios following plans drawn up by the architect Basil Spence. King George VI’s tour of this impressive and entirely unusable installation was duly reported in the press for the Germans to read.