The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  What Churchill learned about GARBO and the double agents during 1943 left him with the conviction that, ‘In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’ No military operation in British history has ever been so successfully protected by deception as OVERLORD, the Allied invasion of occupied northern France in 1944. Late in 1943 conferences of the British and American Combined Chiefs of Staff in Cairo and Tehran took the decision to launch the invasion in May 1944 (a date later deferred until the D-Day landings on 6 June). Colonel Bevan of the LCS was instructed to prepare the deception plans for OVERLORD. The key aims of the deception were:

  a. To induce the German Command to believe that the main assault and follow up will be in or east of the Pas de Calais area, thereby encouraging the enemy to maintain or increase the strength of his air and ground forces and his fortifications there at the expense of other areas, particularly of the Caen area [in Normandy].

  b. To keep the enemy in doubt as to the date and time of the actual assault.

  c. During and after the main assault, to contain the largest possible German land and air forces in or east of the Pas de Calais for at least fourteen days.62

  All three aims were achieved.

  The two main deception plans which became an integral part of OVERLORD were FORTITUDE SOUTH and FORTITUDE NORTH. FORTITUDE SOUTH was intended to reinforce the belief of most German commanders that the Calais region was the logical place for the Allied attack. As well as requiring the shortest sea crossing, the Pas de Calais was also the best landing point from which to advance on the German industrial heartland in the Ruhr. FORTITUDE NORTH was designed to play on Hitler’s obsession with Norway as his ‘Zone of Destiny’ and persuade him and his high command that the Allies were planning a major diversionary attack on Norway that would require them to keep large forces there which might otherwise be redeployed to meet the Allied attack on northern France. Many elements went into the deception plans: among them bogus radio messages from non-existent army units which the Germans were intended to intercept, disinformation abroad spread by British diplomats and agents, and dummy military installations. Shepperton Studios built a huge fake oil-storage complex near Dover, designed by Basil Spence (later one of Britain’s leading architects), which received official visits from King George VI, General Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces for OVERLORD, and Montgomery, commander of land forces.63 The role of B1a’s double agents was crucial.

  The double agent who contributed most to the success of the FORTITUDE deceptions was, once again, GARBO. During the first six months of 1944, working with Tomás Harris, he sent more than 500 messages to the Abwehr station in Madrid, which, as German intercepts revealed, passed them to Berlin, many marked ‘Urgent’. Right up to D-Day, however, B1a was acutely aware that the Germans might discover that they were being deceived. The greatest threat of discovery appeared to come from Johann Jebsen, the Abwehr case officer of the double agent TRICYCLE. After seeing his case officer in Lisbon in the autumn of 1943, TRICYCLE was ‘absolutely sure’ that Jebsen knew he was working for the British. However, he also reported that Jebsen had anti-Nazi sympathies and had discussed with him the possibility of taking refuge in Britain. Late in September, Jebsen was recruited as a double agent and given the codename ARTIST. In January 1944 ARTIST confronted B1a and the Twenty Committee with a difficult dilemma when he revealed the names of some of the agents being run against Britain by the Abwehr’s Lisbon station. At the top of his list was GARBO (known to the Abwehr as ARABEL). If the British authorities took no action against GARBO, ARTIST might well realize that he was a double agent. And even if ARTIST did not tell his Abwehr colleagues about GARBO, what would happen if he was interrogated by the Gestapo, which was known to be suspicious of him? Tomás Harris was so concerned at the risk posed by ARTIST to the whole Double-Cross System that at the end of February he recommended that GARBO should no longer be used for deception operations.64 The Twenty Committee even considered, but rejected, the possibility of asking SIS to arrange ARTIST’s assassination.65 A Security Service report to Churchill on 7 March 1944 concluded, however, that the problem could probably be managed:

  [ARTIST’s] zeal and ability . . . 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 it appears that 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.66

  The attempt to divert ARTIST’s attention failed. By mid-April he was in no doubt that GARBO was a double agent working for the British.67 GARBO and his fictitious agent network were so highly rated by both B1a and the Twenty Committee, however, that, despite the risk that ARTIST would expose them, they were allowed to retain their key role in the FORTITUDE deceptions.

  The next most important double agent in the FORTITUDE deceptions was the former Polish fighter-pilot Roman Garby-Czerniawski (codenamed BRUTUS), who had been captured by the Germans while running an agent network, the Reséau Interallié, in occupied France in 1941. The head of Abwehr counter-intelligence in Paris, Colonel Oscar Reile, recruited Garby-Czerniawski as a German agent (or so he believed) by playing on his hostility to Communism and the Soviet Union, and by promising that, if he worked as an Abwehr agent in Britain, no members of his network would be harmed.68 Soon after he arrived in England in October 1942, he turned himself in and asked to work as a double agent for the British. Though his MI5 interrogators found Garby-Czerniawski ‘intensely dramatic and egotistical’, they eventually recommended he be taken on. Masterman, however, argued that the risks were too great. BRUTUS’s primary loyalty was to Poland; the Germans might well suspect that he had decided to work for the British rather than the Abwehr; and the Russians were intensely suspicious of the British use of Polish agents.69 BRUTUS was the cause of probably the biggest dispute between Masterman and B1a case officers in the history of the Double-Cross System. Whereas Masterman was initially preoccupied by the risks, the young Turks of B1a were determined not to waste the deception opportunities which BRUTUS offered. BRUTUS’s first case officer, Christopher Harmer, claimed later that ‘old JC’ (Masterman) was ‘hell bent on chopping him and intrigued behind my back’. On 5 March 1943, the day before his wedding Harmer found time to send Masterman ‘one of the rudest letters I have ever written . . . it took some time to heal the breach.’ The breach was healed because Masterman knew B1a had to be adventurous and B1a realized Masterman had to be cautious. ‘I loved the old boy,’ Harmer wrote later, ‘and I suppose he was only doing his job – of exercising a wise and mature restraint on the irresponsibilities of the hot-headed youngsters of those days.’70

  The memoirs of Oscar Reile, BRUTUS’s Abwehr recruiter, strongly suggest that Masterman’s fears of the risks involved in running him as a double agent were fully justified. Reile claims to have realized that it was a ‘probability bordering on certainty’ that BRUTUS (codenamed ARMAND by the Abwehr) was under British control: ‘Not the least of my reasons for arriving at this conclusion was that none of the radio messages which came from England contained any enquiry about the 66 members of the Reséau Interallié who were still in the hands of the Germans.’71 BRUTUS also became involved in a dispute in London with the head of the Polish air force which led to his court martial in the summer of 1943.72 As Reile complained, however, German military operations officers had no doubt that BRUTUS’s reports contained important intelligence and dismissed his own suspicions of a British deception. BRUTUS’s service background made it possible for B1a to include in his messages more military detail than would have been credible in GARBO’s reports. Hugh Astor, who succeeded Harmer as his case officer in December 1943, wrote later:

  Undoubtedly GARBO sent a far greater volume of traffic but the traffic sent by BRUTUS was much more profess
ional in style and it was obvious from ULTRA that the Germans attached importance to his messages. Certainly I was under the impression that their projection of our order of battle was chiefly derived from BRUTUS.73

  After reporting on (non-existent) preparations in Scotland for an attack on Norway, BRUTUS radioed the good news to the Abwehr on 26 May that he had been posted as a member of an Allied mission to the HQ of the (equally non-existent) First United States Army Group (FUSAG) at Wentworth, near Ascot, and had obtained its complete order of battle. TATE complemented and corroborated BRUTUS’s battle-order intelligence by providing a schedule of FUSAG troop movements which he claimed to have acquired from a railway clerk in Ashford, Kent.74 The size of the non-existent FUSAG, whose reality was never doubted by the German high command, was greater than that of all the US forces which actually took part in the Normandy landings.75

  The most recently recruited double agent to play an important part in the FORTITUDE deceptions was Nathalie ‘Lily’ Sergueiev, a French Abwehr agent of White Russian origins who changed sides after being sent on a mission to England in November 1943.76 Masterman wrote later that Sergueiev was ‘intelligent but temperamental’ and eventually ‘proved exceptionally troublesome’.77 B1a’s choice of TREASURE as her codename seems to have been deliberately satirical. As well as being one of the few female double agents of the war, TREASURE was the only one with a female case officer, Mary Sherer, who was not, however, allowed officer rank.78 Though the two women sometimes operated as an effective professional partnership, they never bonded. TREASURE later complained that her determination to undermine the Nazi war effort had been weakened by the unfeeling attitude of the British authorities to her and her dog Babs.79 From the moment she arrived in London, she was preoccupied with the treatment of Babs, whom she had left in Gibraltar in order to avoid having to subject her to six months in English quarantine kennels. TREASURE believed she had been given a promise that a way would be found, despite quarantine regulations, to bring Babs, to whom she was devoted, to join her in London. In December 1943 she refused to send more letters to the Abwehr until her dog arrived. Sherer, who does not seem to have been particularly sympathetic, reported that TREASURE was being ‘very unreasonable’.80 It is difficult to believe that the whole affair could not have been better handled.

  TREASURE eventually suspended what Sherer called her ‘strike’ after falling ill at the end of the year and spending a week in hospital. In March 1944 she flew to Lisbon to meet her Abwehr case officer and collect a radio transmitter81 – a fact of sufficient importance to be reported to Churchill.82 While in Lisbon she was also given money and codes for her mission in England, presented with souvenir photographs of herself and her case officer, and rewarded with a diamond bracelet.83 After returning to London TREASURE reported to the Abwehr by radio that, during regular weekend visits to Bristol, she had seen very few troop movements in south-west England,84 thus reinforcing the German belief that the main Allied troop concentrations were in the south-east, preparing for an invasion of the Pas de Calais. (In reality, in preparation for D-Day, most Allied forces were in the south-west.) The Abwehr attached great importance to TREASURE’s reports. Bletchley Park reported in May that ‘The messages of TREASURE and BRUTUS are being so consistently relayed verbatim on the German Intelligence W/T [wireless telegraphy] network that, with the assistance of this “crib”, there has been a very considerable saving of time and manpower in deciphering Most Secret [SIGINT] Sources.’ This, the Security Service told Churchill, was proof that the double agents ‘have, at a critical period, acquired a value which it is scarcely possible to overestimate’.85

  The code given to TREASURE by her Abwehr case officer.

  Coded radio message from TREASURE to her Abwehr case officer falsely reporting her arrival in Bristol in November 1943.

  Churchill was also given evidence of how much German intelligence valued the disinformation sent them by TRICYCLE and TATE. Pride of place in the double-agents section of MI5’s April monthly report to the Prime Minister went to TRICYCLE, just returned from visiting ‘his German masters’ in Lisbon: ‘He has once more succeeded in convincing them of his complete reliability and has extracted from them a large sum in dollars as an advance against his future services.’86 Churchill was told that, when TATE transmitted his thousandth radio message to the Abwehr on 24 May:

  He took the opportunity of referring to this fact and expressing his loyal devotion to the Führer. A cordial reply has been received, and it is hoped that this will be followed up by the further advancement of TATE in the Order of the Iron Cross, of which he already holds the First and Second Class.87

  During the month before D-Day, however, the Double-Cross System suffered two near-disasters. The first derived from the death in Portugal of TREASURE’s much loved dog Babs, for which she blamed the uncaring British. On 17 May TREASURE startled her case officer, Mary Sherer, by admitting that she had planned a terrible revenge. While in Lisbon she had obtained from her Abwehr case officer a ‘control signal’ to add to her transmissions; if she omitted it, that would be a sign that the British had taken over her transmitter:

  She had meant, on her return, to get the W/T working well and then blow the case by omitting the signal. She confessed that her motive was revenge for the death of her dog for which she considered we were responsible. On return from Lisbon she had changed her mind about blowing the case. She refused to divulge what the signal was.88

  Tar Robertson was thus faced, less than three weeks before D-Day, with an appalling dilemma: either to arouse German suspicions by abruptly ending TREASURE’s transmissions or to allow her to continue in the hope, but without the certainty, that she really had ‘changed her mind about blowing the case’. Probably after consultation with Masterman, Robertson chose the second option.89

  An even greater threat to the Double-Cross System arose from the arrest by the Gestapo in early May of TRICYCLE’s Abwehr case officer in Lisbon, ARTIST, who had himself become a double agent.90 Before his arrest ARTIST had made clear to his British case officer that he knew TRICYCLE and GARBO were double agents,91 and it was thought likely that he suspected other German agents in Britain had also been turned. Only three days before D-Day Churchill was warned by the Security Service that ‘the TRICYCLE case is passing through a most critical phase and must be handled with the greatest care in view of Overlord’.92 ARTIST was believed to have been arrested for embezzlement rather than because the Gestapo suspected him of being a British agent. But, as Masterman wrote later:

  That belief was small consolation. Under interrogation it was to be presumed that much, if not all, of the history of [ARTIST’s] activities would come to light, and in that case many of our best cases were doomed.

  … We were saved by time and fortune. D Day arrived before the Germans had succeeded in unravelling all the tangled skein of the ARTIST case, and presumably there was little opportunity after D Day for patient research into such matters in German offices.93

  On 1 June Bletchley Park produced reassuring evidence that, despite the potential threats posed by ARTIST and TREASURE, the key elements of the strategic deception on which the D-Day landings depended were still intact. A Japanese decrypt revealed that Hitler had told the Japanese ambassador, Baron Hiroshi Oshima, that eighty enemy divisions had been assembled in Britain for the invasion. In reality there were only forty-seven, but the Führer, like his high command, had been deceived into believing in the non-existent FUSAG as well as misled about where the main Allied attack would come. Hitler told Oshima that after ‘diversionary attacks . . . in a number of places’, the Allies would then use their main forces for ‘an all-out second front across the Straits of Dover’.94

  The final act in the pre-D-Day deception was entrusted, appropriately, to its greatest practitioners, GARBO and Tomás Harris. After several weeks of pressure, Harris finally gained permission for GARBO to be allowed to radio a warning that Allied forces were heading towards the Normandy beaches just too late
for the Germans to benefit from it. Though the Abwehr radio station in Madrid normally shut down from 11.30 p.m. to 7.30 a.m., GARBO warned it to be ready to receive a message at 3 a.m. on 6 June (D-Day).95 But, for unknown reasons, Madrid did not go on air until after 6 a.m., and received the warning several hours later than intended.96

  The Security Service’s August 1944 report informed Churchill that a German map (above), captured in Italy, showing the location of Allied forces in the UK, accorded ‘precisely’ with the disinformation fed to the enemy by the double agents and wireless deception pointing to an attack in the Calais region. The map opposite shows the real deployment of Allied forces preparing for the Normandy landings.

  At noon on 6 June, Churchill, watched by his wife and eldest daughter from the Speaker’s Gallery, announced to a packed and expectant House of Commons: ‘During the night and early hours of the morning, the first of the series of landings in force upon the European continent has taken place.’ The Prime Minister must have thought his reference to other landings which were to follow D-Day would help to reinforce the German belief that an even bigger Allied assault was being planned in the Calais region. Tar Robertson and others in B1a, however, were shocked by Churchill’s statement, which – though he did not realize it – contradicted an earlier message sent by GARBO to the Abwehr reporting a bogus Political Warfare Executive (PWE) directive on the need to avoid any public reference to ‘further attacks and diversions’.97 The Prime Minister’s faux pas seemed to justify Petrie’s and Liddell’s earlier fear that, if Churchill was informed of a deception operation (as he was in this case), he might take some rash initiative of his own.98 At 8 p.m. on D-Day GARBO radioed Madrid, saying that he had spoken to the PWE Director, who was dismayed that Churchill had ignored his directive. The Prime Minister, claimed GARBO rather lamely (without, however, arousing the suspicions of the Abwehr), had felt obliged not to distort the facts when announcing the invasion to the Commons and to the country.99 GARBO rounded off his radio message with a withering denunciation of the failure of Madrid to come on air at 3 a.m. that day to receive vital intelligence on the imminent Allied landings on the Normandy beaches: ‘This makes me question your seriousness and sense of responsibility. I therefore demand a clarification immediately as to what has occurred.’ By the following morning, after a supposedly sleepless night, GARBO radioed a further message of recrimination, this time combined with self-pity: