Agent Garbo (25 page)

The staff wrote paper after paper, subsection after subsection, with titles such as “Factors against the possibility of disguising the purpose of the expedition” and “Possible means by which the truth about our intentions may become known to the enemy.” Bevan read the papers and sent them back covered with comments, demanding more and more detail, more realism. He was furious if his officers assumed something would go well. There were interlocking cogs in the machinery—if one scheme failed in Turkey, another in Norway could go haywire—and Bevan wanted every possible disaster accounted for. Perhaps Starkey still haunted him. Perhaps the American soldiers he saw sauntering in the streets of Whitehall, their lives in his hands, had unsettled this nervous but kind man. Whatever the reason, with each draft the Bodyguard plan grew longer and darker.

Gradually, Dennis Wheatley came to realize that “it had become a hopelessly depressing document
. . . virtually informing the Chiefs that the chances were ten to one against the cover plan . . . succeeding.” The novelist read his superior the riot act and finally convinced Bevan the plan had to be changed. The staff whittled it down from twenty pages to three. The chiefs of staff accepted it “without a murmur.”

Churchill, one of the driving forces behind the scheme, was excited. “The plan has to be just close enough
to the truth to seem credible to Herr Hitler, but will mislead him completely.” Bodyguard would earn the Allies “a thin extra edge that could mean the difference between a glorious triumph and a bloody debacle . . . If we pull this off, it will be
the greatest hoax in history!
” By December 1943, the plan was up and running. The great departure from Operation Cockade was a simple one. This time, there
was
an invasion coming. They just had to disguise two facts about it: where and when.

Reduced to its essentials, Bodyguard laid out what the Allies wanted the Germans to believe before D-Day—that there would be a fake double-pronged attack, a spring assault on Norway and a summer invasion of the Pas de Calais. The divisions needed for an invasion of Europe, however, were understrength and the production of landing craft was behind schedule, so that “no large scale cross-Channel operations would be possible
until the late summer.” July 15 would be put forward as a likely D-Day. The Norway feint would be known as Fortitude North, and the Calais ruse would be Fortitude South.

The intelligence agencies began to divide up Bodyguard and put it into practice. By January, when Eisenhower took over planning for D-Day, his staff realized that the double agents “were proving themselves to be by far the most effective channel
for controlled leakage.” They would be the tip of the spear, with Garbo and Brutus—the Polish airman—in the lead. The entire deception operation would pivot off a few men and their case officers.

From their little office, Pujol and Harris began to advertise how far the Allies were from being ready for invasion. On January 5, Garbo told Madrid, “I have read in the English press
commentaries on the alleged belief in German official circles that the offensive against the Continent will begin within the next 15 days. If this is the belief of our High Command you can affirm to Headquarters immediately that no danger whatever exists in this period.” He’d spotted a new type of American landing craft propped up at Albert Dock in Liverpool on January 15 and sent a sketch, but there was only one vessel, hardly a sign of impending apocalypse. On January 21, he wrote: “Conversation with a friend.
He considers that the Anglo-American offensive against the Continent, should this take place, would not happen for a long time.” The other double agents were also blitzing the Germans with stories of late-arriving troops and snafus. “Labor troubles in the United States,” Tate—Wulf Schmidt, MI5’s first double agent—reported on January 20, “have curtailed production of invasion barges to such an extent that the dates of future operations may be affected.” Brutus chimed in three days later: “There is an opinion held amongst us that Montgomery will probably, as in Egypt, train all the troops all over again.” The Abwehr’s sources reported that artesian wells
for troop encampments were being drilled in Kent, something no army would do unless it was planning for a long stay.

But the messages from London weren’t getting through. The Germans radioed Garbo that their analysts were seeing a spike in reports of increased activity. Something major was being planned. The Abwehr sent Garbo a string of highly detailed questionnaires on the invasion force: “News from various sources
speak of preparations being in full swing for operations of great importance at a very near date from those islands. I await with urgency and the greatest interest your reports.” January 14: “For tactical reasons one must assume
that the danger centers for future operations are Devon, Cornwall and the south coast between Weymouth and Southampton.” That was exactly right; those were the real embarkation areas for D-Day. “Numerous reports of the alleged postponement
of the invasion,” read a March telegram from the German embassy in Lisbon, “are, in the opinion of this Abteilung [department], to be regarded as systematic concealment of the actual plan.”

Garbo remained above suspicion, but the Germans were picking apart the deception plan in real time. And it wasn’t hard to understand why: the ports and harbors of southern England were filling up with an array of landing craft. So many planes were crowding the airfields that people joked that you could walk
from one end of England to the other on the wings of fighter planes. Everywhere there were soldiers. “They came by land, by train, bus, truck,
or on foot,” wrote the historian Stephen Ambrose. “They formed up by the hundreds in companies and battalions, by the thousands in regiments, to march down narrow English roads, headed south. When they arrived in their marshaling areas, they formed up by divisions, corps, and armies in their hundreds of thousands—altogether almost 2 million men.” They brought with them nearly 500,000 vehicles, 4,500 cooks, thousands upon thousands of tents and tons of bulky equipment.

The army brass did their best to disguise the new arrivals: gravel paths were laid in their camps so that the Luftwaffe couldn’t snap pictures of new trails through the English grass; wire netting shielded the tanks and jeeps from curious eyes; MPs patrolled the “sausages,” or camps, to prevent thirsty soldiers from mixing with the locals in nearby pubs; and campfires were forbidden,
even though the English countryside was still covered with morning frost. But London at any given time had half a million soldiers from sixty different nations thronging its bars and cabarets, and they’d brought with them so much equipment that the running joke among the British and American soldiers was that the only thing keeping England from sinking into the sea were the silver barrage balloons tethered to the land.

Everyone involved in trying to hide this enormous army felt the pressure rise at the beginning of 1944. Pujol was becoming increasingly consumed by his creation, Garbo, as the operation grew to a fever pitch. Some days he composed and sent four or five messages, the longest running to 8,000 words, in addition to the 1,200 wireless messages he wrote during the war. “The work Tommy Harris and I did
was hard,” he wrote. “It meant having to solve complex problems and make difficult decisions.” Harris watched his partner closely; Pujol couldn’t be allowed to burn out before the final chapter. “His entire existence remained wrapped up in . . . the work,” Harris wrote.

Pujol was able to escape the war for only a matter of hours. He and his family were evacuated at one point to the country town of Taplow, in Buckinghamshire, and put up at a hotel by the Thames. The idyllic place seemed a world away from the torn-up capital, and it was filled with twenty-five fellow refugees, among them a redheaded Jewish girl who asked Pujol to give her Spanish lessons, a Czech couple and a vice consul from the Spanish embassy. There were parties in the evening, and Pujol never missed one; he craved light conversation and, especially, dancing. “In my youth I was considered a good dancer,” he said, and now he took up the paso doble and the foxtrot with a vengeance, striking his heels on the hotel’s wooden floor to the delight of everyone.

But Pujol couldn’t tell his fellow guests his real reasons for being in England or reveal his anxiety about the mission.

By 1944, the Abwehr was an imperfect organization, often at war with its rivals, the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, and even the military it advised. But it had sixteen thousand agents spread all over the globe and it was adept at many areas of the spy game. “What evidence there is,”
Masterman wrote, “goes to show that the Germans were at least our equals in all the arts connected with espionage and counterespionage.” In the justly famous Venlo Incident in 1939, the SD had convinced British intelligence that a group of disgruntled German officers in the Dutch border town of Venlo were planning a coup against Hitler. When two SIS agents went to meet with the plotters, the Brits were captured and Hitler was handed a gift-wrapped excuse for invading Holland, as the SIS’s presence in Venlo proved that the Dutch were no longer neutral. The brilliantly executed plot haunted British spymasters for years. Even if the Abwehr was flawed at the top, it couldn’t miss the signs of the greatest invasion in history, signs that would be everywhere to see in the harbors of England and the back alleys of Lisbon.

To detect the invasion, the Germans had to be barely competent. To disguise it, the British had to be illusionists of genius.

Garbo especially was under the gun. He’d expanded his operation in the south and southwest of England in the previous months, bringing in new “recruits,” from Welsh Aryans who “hated the British like death”
to a rabid Greek communist to saboteurs and fascists, all to prepare for D-Day. The Germans knew that something was happening in Southampton and Devon, and would expect their star agent to let them know exactly what that was, down to the regiment insignia and number of tents.

Garbo continued to put across the party line. After a discussion with his friend the minister, he wrote Madrid that the official believed that Germany
would be brought down by air power, not land attacks. Garbo’s lover, the homely secretary, confirmed the view a few days later. “She emphasized one point above all,
which was that the Anglo-Americans will not start the offensive until they have everything absolutely ready.” But how could Garbo continue pretending that nothing of real interest was going on in England when it was crisscrossed by his agents? As good as he was, even Garbo couldn’t cloak a continental invasion force in complete darkness.

One person in particular was bothered by Operation Fortitude. He was a small, imperious and elegantly turned-out man by the name of David Strangeways. The name fit: Colonel Strangeways was an unorthodox man who rubbed many of his peers the wrong way. “Much disliked,” said one fellow soldier; “an impossible and insufferable
enfant terrible,
”
remembered another (although both admitted they secretly admired Strangeways). The colonel hated bureaucracy with a passion and would simply ignore procedures if he thought they were wrong-headed. When a historian interviewed him years later, he was unapologetic: “‘I was not a much loved person,’
he admitted cheerfully.” David Strangeways had an internal compass that was as strong as Montgomery’s or Patton’s. When, after he’d left the service, he became an Anglican priest, he developed a theory that no sermon should last more than eight minutes. Although a wonderful speaker,
Strangeways never exceeded that time limit, something his flock in the parish of Ipswich grew to admire.

Born in 1912, Strangeways was the darkly handsome son of the founder of a prominent research hospital. He’d read history at Trinity College, Cambridge, and joined the Duke of Wellington’s regiment in 1933, serving in Malta before seeing his first action at the retreat at Dunkirk. Stranded on the shore with the German army advancing behind him, disaster only hours away, Strangeways spied an abandoned Thames barge
floating near shore. He ordered his men to strip off their uniforms so the water wouldn’t weigh them down and swam with them out to the unwieldy vessel. Using the sailing skills he’d learned as a boy, he got them safely back to Portsmouth, where the mayor and a group of photographers were waiting to greet returning troops. The quick-thinking officer emerged from the hold dressed in the barge’s curtains. Strangeways was mentioned in dispatches for saving his men.

In 1942, he’d had his first taste of intrigue. Strangeways was chosen to deliver the deception plans for Operation Torch—the North African invasion that Garbo had cut his teeth on—to the generals in Cairo, by way of Gibraltar. In his luggage he carried a copy of the deception planner Dennis Wheatley’s latest potboiler, with a letter inside from Wheatley to a friend, filled with bits of gossip about the forthcoming invasion that the Allies wanted passed to the Germans. MI6 knew that Gibraltar hotel employees
on the payroll of the Abwehr often rifled through the luggage of British arrivals. Strangeways carried out the little scheme, and the information made its way to Berlin.

The dapper officer came into his own when he began to work under Dudley Clarke, the mastermind of Allied espionage, in the Middle Eastern campaign. Clarke was the fountainhead of deception thinking, a genius who had, in the opinion of one of his officers, “the most all-containing brain
of any man I ever met.” Blond, small and well dressed, with a “gently booming voice” and eyes that sparkled with secret delight, Clarke became a legend in the Middle East before moving on to the European theater. Many of the concepts that the XX Committee used—the importance of timing, the need for a story to feed the enemy—Clarke had developed in the wild days in Cairo, where he’d placed his office below a brothel
so that no one would notice all the officers coming to his address. “He was certainly the most unusual Intelligence officer
of his time, very likely of all time,” said David Mure, one of his staff officers. “His mind worked differently than anyone else’s and far quicker; he looked out on the world through the eyes of his opponents.” Clarke had a near-photographic memory, keeping the details of half a dozen complicated plots in his head at once. Under his leadership, the deception outfit known as A Force had become an innovator and a technical marvel: it scoured the Middle East and built a library of 1,200 different kinds of paper for forgery purposes; it collected nearly every revenue, metal, rubber and embossed stamp used by the Nazis; it could reproduce the signatures of the most important German officials and maintained a huge index file that could tell you where General X was on any given day. Like the modern-day FBI, it could re-create a burned or shredded document. It could even dye a man brown
so that he might pass as an Arab.