Looking back, the most clear-sighted German officer knew that the failure to counterattack in Normandy had cost Germany the battle, and perhaps the war. Shortly before he was forced to kill himself, Rommel conceded that it had been a “decisive mistake to leave the German troops in the Pas de Calais.” But far from realizing they had been fooled, the Germans assumed that Allied plans had changed. On August 30, Garbo reported that the planned attack on the Pas de Calais had been canceled, and the Germans believed him, as they had believed him from the start. Only later did the truth dawn. “All this Patton business wasn’t a trick, was it?” Professor Percy Schramm, the keeper of the OKW War Diary, asked his interrogators. “Were all those divisions sent to southeast England simply to hold our forces in the Pas de Calais?” But others clung to the deception long after the war was over. Jodl was interrogated in 1946, still congratulating himself on being fooled:
We knew that you had one Army Group in the south of England and one in the southeast. We know now that the South-Eastern Army Group was not in fact launched against the Channel coast, but its continued presence in the southeast of England constituted a threat which it was not possible for us to ignore. We therefore did not feel justified in authorising any large-scale release of Fifteenth Army formations for use in Normandy until a considerable time after the invasion had started. Had our picture of your dispositions in the UK been less complete and had we not been aware of the presence of the First US Army Group in the southeast of England we might have dispatched more of the Fifteenth Army to Normandy earlier, which might have had very serious results for yourselves.
On the Allied side, there was no doubt that the Germans had been induced to make what Major General Kenneth Strong, Eisenhower’s intelligence chief, called an “unparalleled blunder.” If the huge German army in the north had been deployed to Normandy at once, instead of waiting for a second invasion, then the Allies would have faced an even bloodier fight, with every possibility of defeat. Those additional forces “might well have tipped the scales against us,” wrote Eisenhower. “I cannot overemphasize the importance of maintaining as long as humanly possible the Allied threat to the Pas de Calais area, which has already paid enormous dividends and, with care, will continue to do so.” Montgomery concurred: “The deception measures,” he wrote, “played a vital part in our successes in Normandy.” The Double Cross report for Churchill was a fully justified hymn of self-congratulation.
It seems from all indications that the Germans have accepted the stories which we have told them about an impending attack on the Pas de Calais. It seems pretty clear that the congratulatory messages, especially to Garbo, to some extent reflect the general military appreciation of the German High Command. It is known for a fact that the Germans intended at one time to move certain Divisions from the Pas de Calais area to Normandy but, in view of the possibility of a threat to the Pas de Calais area these troops were either stopped on their way to Normandy and recalled, or it was decided that they should not be moved at all.
John Masterman knew, as Churchill did not, just how close the deception had come to disaster: “We were not very far from failure just before the period of our greatest success,” he later wrote. But the team had put on a superb all-around performance in what his colleague in American intelligence, Norman Holmes Pearson, called “the greatest Test Match of the century.” After the war, British intelligence combed through captured records and established exactly which elements in German military thinking could be traced directly to agents’ reports: only eleven of Tate’s messages registered with the German analysts; Garbo’s network clocked an impressive eighty-six; but it was Brutus who made the highest score, with no fewer than ninety-one messages reflected in the German intelligence summaries, just nine short of his century.
The postmatch analysis was, and remains, universally admiring. Thaddeus Holt, author of the most comprehensive account of wartime deception, has called Operation Fortitude “the most successful strategic deception of all time.” Even Kim Philby, that master of deceit, called it “one of the most creative intelligence operations of all time.”
But the most important tribute to the deception’s success came from the Germans themselves. On July 29, nearly two months after D-Day, Kühlenthal sent a wireless message to Garbo:
With great happiness and satisfaction I am able to advise you today that the Führer has awarded the Iron Cross to you for your extraordinary merits, a decoration which, without exception, is granted only to front-line combatants. For that reason we all send you our most sincere and cordial congratulations.
In reply, Garbo professed to be so overcome with pride and emotion that he was lost for words. Then the words came tumbling out in a great, frothing torrent.
I cannot at this moment, when emotion overcomes me, express in words my gratitude for the decoration conceded by our Führer, to whom humbly and with every respect I express my gratitude for the high distinction which he has bestowed on me, for which I feel myself unworthy as I have never done more than what I have considered to be the fulfilment of my duty. Furthermore, I must state that this prize has been won not only by me but also by the other comrades, who, through their advice and directives, have made possible my work here, and so the congratulations are mutual. My desire is to fight with great ardour to be worthy of this medal which has only been conceded to those heroes, my companions in honour, who fight on the battlefront.
You can almost hear Pujol and Harris sniggering with glee in the background. But Garbo was right to see the award as a collective honor. He had not mounted the deception alone. His “comrades” included the agents he had invented, the other, real agents and their own inventions, and behind them the men and women who built the system, the case officers, spymasters, and inspired dissemblers who imagined the Double Cross project, and the farsighted planners who, amazingly, let them get on with it. Those who fought on the battlefront of D-Day never knew that a Polish patriot, a Peruvian gambling girl, a French dog-lover, a Serbian playboy, and a Spanish chicken farmer, together and in deepest secrecy, had lied them to victory.
Agent Garbo accepted the Iron Cross on behalf of them all.
Aftermath
In German eyes, Agent Brutus had proved himself “the noblest Roman.” In the wake of D-Day, having failed to predict the real invasion and pumped his handlers full of lies about the false one, he could do no wrong. Most Secret Sources showed that his reports were being “studied not only by the operational sections, but by the most prominent persons in Berlin, including Hitler and Goering.” German intelligence regarded him as an oracle, a sage: “We shall presently reach a stage where high-level questions on military matters are addressed personally to Brutus,” Astor crowed. In July 1944, a flying bomb landed in Barnes in southwest London, blowing out the windows of 61 Richmond Park Road and leaving Monique Czerniawski with serious facial injuries. MI5’s bean counters agreed to pay the fifty pounds needed for plastic surgery, noting that Czerniawski had “worked valiantly for us over a long period of time without receiving any remuneration.”
In his assumed role as a secret international statesman, Czerniawski bombarded the Germans with unsolicited and unhelpful advice. “Nobody here believes any more in a German victory,” he told them. “As a Pole, can I suggest that neither is it in our interest nor in yours [that] the Russians be allowed to occupy Central Europe.… I believe this is a good psychological moment for attempting to reach an agreement with the Anglo-Saxons, and I am inclined to think they may accept your military propositions.” The reply came back from Reile: “Once again I thank you with all my heart for your excellent work. I have passed on all your political propositions, especially concerning your country, recommending them to accept them.” Still hungry for an Iron Cross, Astor longed to deploy Czerniawski on one final deception and suggested parachuting him into France ahead of the retreating German forces. Once there, he would contact German intelligence and explain that he had been sent by the British “to recruit and organise an in
telligence service behind the lines”—and offer to work for Germany again. He would then be “in a position to receive the Germans’ deception plans which might reveal their real intentions.” No other spy had made so many journeys back and forth between loyalty and betrayal: first an agent in occupied Paris; then a double agent for the Germans; then a triple agent, working for the Allies once more; he now offered to go back to France as a quadruple agent, while in reality a quintuple agent, still working for Britain.
By the terms of the deal with the Germans, Czerniawski’s family and former colleagues in the Interallié network would not be harmed if he played his part. When Paris was liberated, so were the hostages. Before leaving, the Germans left a final token of their faith. Beside the road out of Paris, Reile dug a hole, in which he buried a new radio transmitter and fifty thousand French francs, in the expectation that if the indefatigable Agent Hubert arrived with the advancing Allied troops, he would wish to keep in touch—an act that hardly squares with Reile’s later claim that he knew Czerniawski was a double agent. “On Nationale 3 between Paris and Meaux there is a milestone which, according to the inscription upon it, is 2.3 km from Claye and 12.4 km from Meaux. The equipment is concealed 5 metres from this stone in a ditch under a mark on the grass, buried 10 cm deep.” The German retreat was too swift to put the Quintuple Cross plan into operation, and Czerniawski’s parting gift from his German spymaster was forgotten. In the 1960s, Route Nationale 3 was widened, covering over the hiding place. Every day, thousands of motorists on the road from Paris to the German border pass over this buried memento to Agent Brutus.
Hugo Bleicher and Roman Czerniawski, Paris, 1972
After the war, Roman Czerniawski settled in Britain. Though he thought a “Polish government set up by Moscow is a degree better than having no Polish government at all,” he could never return to his homeland with a communist regime in power. He was secretly appointed an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for his wartime role. He became a printer, settled in West London, amicably divorced Monique, remarried, divorced, married again. He adored cats, and in old age he liked to sit in his front room, watching James Bond films with his cats. The cat population in the Czerniawski household eventually reached thirty-two. He never lost his heavy Polish accent or his whole-souled Polish patriotism, and he intrigued to the end, spending his final years secretly working for the Solidarity movement. He died in 1985, aged seventy-five.
Mathilde Carré, once Czerniawski’s partner in the Interallié network, was extradited to France in January 1949 after six years in British prisons, and charged with treason. The trial of “The Cat” was a sensation. She sat wordless throughout, with a “withdrawn air of detachment,” as thirty-three witnesses came forward to denounce her for sleeping with the enemy. The prosecution summed up with an entry from her own diary from the night she first made love to Hugo Bleicher: “What I wanted most was a good meal, a man, and, once more, Mozart’s Requiem.” Mathilde was sentenced to death, later commuted to hard labor for life. In Rennes prison she suffered cat-filled nightmares.
She was finally released in 1954. A few months later she was approached by Bleicher, who had served time in prison and was now running a tobacconist in Württemberg. He asked her to write a book with him, a “harmless literary collaboration,” he called it. She had done enough collaborating with Bleicher and wrote her own book, I Was the Cat, insisting that her crimes had been “committed to achieve a noble, patriotic ideal.” Few believed her. She died in 1970, a recluse. Mathilde Carré was either treacherous or just desperately unlucky. Like Czerniawski, she claimed she had only worked for the Germans in order to betray them. As her lawyer argued, “At certain moments in the life of a spy, the double-cross is all part of the game.” Czerniawski felt a residual sympathy for his fellow spy, forced by war to make impossible choices in circumstances not of her own making. Years later, he was still troubled by her fate. “I don’t know how I would have behaved,” he wrote. “Do you?”
A month after D-Day, Lily Sergeyev divulged her last secret. Mary Sherer had turned up with a cake and invited Lily to come for a walk. She was still fishing for the control sign, and as they walked down Piccadilly she asked Lily, for the last time, to reveal the arrangement she had made with Kliemann. She asked her not as an MI5 case officer but as a friend.
It was the nearest these two diametrically different women—one melodramatically French and the other so stolidly English—had come to intimacy. Lily suddenly turned to her former case officer: “Okay, you win.”
On a piece of paper she sketched out the system of dashes agreed with Kliemann to indicate when she was operating her wireless under British control.
“Is that all?”
Lily nodded.
Mary raced back to the office, pulled out the file for Agent Treasure, and extracted the wireless traffic, every message sent by Lily since her return from Lisbon. Sometimes Lily had put a dash in the original, sometimes in the repeated message, and sometimes in neither. But never in both. There was no double dash. Lily had never gone through with her threat. MI5 had been sent into a completely needless tailspin by the fear that their D-Day plan had been fatally undermined by a hysterical woman in mourning for her dog. But by putting her British handlers through the mill and keeping her secret until revealing it made no difference, Lily felt she had evened up the score. “I will be able to close my notebooks and forget,” she wrote in her diary. “One forgets quickly. Maybe it’s for the best.” Babs was avenged.
When peace came, Lily was soon reunited with her parents in Paris. “My joy has no end,” she wrote. Lily then took a job with the U.S. occupation forces in Germany, helping to administer vaccinations under the command of Major Bart Collings, a bluff former parachutist from the Midwest who was most attentive to her. “I’ve lost my solitary state,” she wrote. “I’m no longer alone.” Her health improved and, for the first time in her life, she was completely happy. But Lily had not quite finished tormenting MI5.
In March 1946, Billy Luke warned Tar Robertson that Lily was planning to write a book about her wartime experiences: “You may find your name appearing in a first-class spy thriller.”
Tar was aghast. “I don’t honestly think there is anything we can do with this wretched woman,” he told Gisela Ashley. “She will always be a source of trouble to us, no matter what restrictions we put on her, short of imprisonment for life. I don’t know if there is anything you can say which might appeal to her better nature, if she has one.”
He need not have worried. The book would not appear for another twenty years. Lily was simply doing what she had done before: driving the straitlaced British into a lather with a threat she would not carry out.
In 1947, Bart Collings and Lily Sergeyev married and moved to Michigan. Theirs was a happy marriage, though childless and tragically brief. Lily’s illness returned, this time with a vengeance. She died of kidney failure in 1950. Difficult, petulant, and spirited, she had played a double-edged role in the Double Cross story, a mainstay of the deception who had planned to destroy it. The good folk of St. Mary’s Avenue, Detroit, had no inkling that Mrs. Collings, the excitable Frenchwoman with many dogs who lived at number 17542, was really Agent Treasure, a spy of the highest value, whose life, in her own words, had been one of “unbelievable reality.”
Juan Pujol maintained the facade, and the Germans loved him to the end: “We have in your personality, your character, your valour, all those virtues that become a gentleman.” As the Third Reich disintegrated in a welter of blood and fury, Garbo exhorted his handlers to keep the Nazi faith. “The noble struggle will be revived,” he told Kühlenthal. “I only regret not being at your side.” The last act of the drama was the dismantling of a network that had never existed. Even the Welsh fascists were becoming disillusioned, Pujol reported: “They cannot hope for anything from us.” Garbo’s final wireless message was a wordy eulogy to the martyred Hitler: “His deeds and the story of his sacrifice to save the world from
the danger of anarchy which threatens us will last forever in the hearts of all men of goodwill,” he waffled. “I am certain that the day will arrive in the not too distant future when the noble struggle will be revived.” On May 8, 1945, the Catalan watched the crowds celebrating in central London and allowed himself a flush of private pride.
After the war, MI5 wondered whether to continue his espionage career by “selling” him to the Soviets; if recruited by Moscow, he might be able to deceive the KGB as he had once foxed the Abwehr. But Garbo knew when to leave the stage. He had extracted an estimated $350,000 from the Germans, and an Iron Cross. The British gave him fifteen thousand pounds and appointed him a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. He divorced Aracelli and settled in Venezuela. A lifelong lover of language and literature, he became a Spanish teacher for Shell Oil and opened a bookshop. At his urging, Tommy Harris spread a rumor that Pujol had died of malaria in Angola. Garbo slipped quietly and completely out of the limelight, settling in Zulia, on the shores of Lake Maracaibo. “No one knew about my past. Nobody knew what I had done.” In 1984, he briefly emerged from the shadows when the writer Nigel West found him and persuaded him to return to London for a formal recognition of his wartime achievements at Buckingham Palace. He then disappeared back to Venezuela. He died in 1988 and is buried in Choroní, by the sea. “My main pride and satisfaction,” he wrote, “has been the knowledge that I contributed to the reduction of casualties among the tens of thousands of servicemen fighting to hold the Normandy beachheads. Many, many more would have perished had our plan failed.” Pujol was a warrior who fought to save lives, not to take them, using words as his only weapons.
Juan Pujol, MBE, outside Buckingham Palace, 1984
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