Agent Garbo (27 page)

The Germans had been preparing for the cross-Channel invasion for two years, and they had ten armored divisions held in reserve for the counterattack. Eisenhower worried in particular about the German Fifteenth Army, with its three panzer divisions, camped just miles from the coast of Calais. MI5 estimated that if Garbo could prevent a single division out of that reserve from moving toward the beaches at Normandy for a full forty-eight hours after D-Day, the extraordinary time and effort that had gone into his character would have been worth it. One division for two days. That was the marker. Ten days was considered the absolute limit for the deception’s lifespan.

Garbo himself wanted to achieve more. His hatred for Hitler had only increased in the past few months, as the war decimated regiments and whole cities at an appalling rate. “I’m not Jewish or Polish or French,”
he said, “but I felt the pain of the Jews and the Polish and the French.”

The Fortitude strategy for Garbo was to feed the Abwehr a stream of mostly harmless information from the south and southeast of England—the fake embarkation points—that, at the beginning, was almost 100 percent true. The occasional phony report tossed in the mix would be covered by the checkable facts surrounding it. Then, over time, the ratio of truth to falsehood would be slowly and imperceptibly altered until the reports were 100 percent sham.

Just as Garbo was preparing to build his ghost divisions, a new questionnaire arrived from Madrid: “It would be of the greatest interest
to know how many armies there will be and how many have already been formed. Headquarters and names of the commanders of each Army as well as their composition, i.e., corps and divisions under command, the objectives assigned to each army.” The Germans had practically invited Garbo to fill in their charts with the fake regiments.

Garbo began to send “extremely high-grade” material, up to five and six messages a day; so much traffic
was flowing to Madrid that he had to largely forget about writing long letters. He relied almost solely on the wireless. Between January 1944 and D-Day, he would send or receive more than five hundred messages, a breakneck pace. The Abwehr in Madrid
set up a special office to deal with the “vital information” pouring in from his network alone.

He was sketching the outlines of a huge army unfolding itself across southeast England. There was no more time for flourishes; his prose grew Hemingwayesque. “By the main road between Leatherhead and Dorking
I saw hundreds of lorries and cars parked. Jeeps. I also saw there about forty tanks camouflaged with nets . . . I also saw the insignia of the Second Army on a convoy of supply lorries in transit through Oxford in the direction of London. American insignias seen: The star of the SOS, the 8th Army Air Force, ground personnel of the USAAF, the head of an eagle . . . There are two or three American camps
in the District and at least a Pioneer Corps of Negroes. The Americans carried out an exercise in Port Talbot starting 25th February employing artificial smoke.”

Strangeways insisted that Garbo never point the finger at the Pas de Calais. “You don’t take a great big silver salver
and give it to him on that. He’s got to make the story up himself. Then if the story goes wrong he blames himself, not you.” Garbo was careful never to mention the fake target; in fact, in the thousands of messages and rumors and psych-ops actions,
no one
was allowed to mention Calais. It was a gaudy piece of risk-taking on Strangeways’s part. What if Roenne and the Germans didn’t assemble the points of information into the portrait that the British desired? Subtlety had proven deadly during Operation Cockade. But if they were too obvious, Roenne and Hitler would suspect deceit.

As he built up
FUSAG,
Garbo also devised a strange piece of black propaganda aimed at the doubters in the Third Reich. On February 23, he sent a letter concealed in a piggy bank shaped like Churchill’s head. In it, he revealed he’d had a long conversation with “his friend at the Ministry” and learned that the British government was preparing plans in case the German army deserted France in advance of a possible invasion. The Russian advance in the East, he told Madrid, had convinced Whitehall that the Germans might retreat to their home soil because they knew that Stalin’s forces “will have respect for no one, they will destroy her [Germany] completely and will remove every useful man and use him as a slave to reconstruct Russia.” British intentions, on the other hand, were much more benign. “[German commanders] know we do not wish to see
a ruined Germany. It is not our intention to subjugate the German but to destroy everything which smells of Nazism and militant conquests. I believe that it is very possible that the German Army itself will ask us to go to their assistance to save them from the cataclysm which is approaching.”

The piggy-bank letter was a gambit to get the Germans to surrender to the British, pumping up their fear of what Stalin would do once he reached Berlin and at the same time offering generous terms for capitulation. The Ministry of Information was tasked with making sure there were no reprisals against collaborators or Nazi sympathizers, which told the Germans that the Brits were intent on protecting them, while the Soviets would presumably slaughter them like sheep. (The letter foreshadowed the division of Berlin and the first days of the Cold War.) Garbo added the startling claim that
FUSAG,
the enormous army that was gathering in the south of England, wasn’t an invasion force but an army of occupation.

Garbo even filched a leaflet—completely fake—that was to be dropped over France once the Germans left:

Frenchmen,

German troops are now evacuating French territory.
French and Allied troops are now landing by sea and air in various parts of your country.

Avoid any popular manifestations against collaborators which might give grist to riots or similar occurrences. Whatever may be the feelings of anger against the enemy or those who may have collaborated with them, or acted against those patriots who have resisted German oppression, individual vengeance may lead to disturbances . . .

France is liberated. Long live the United Nations!

Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Commander in Chief of the Allied Expeditionary Force.

Of course, in sending the letter, the “super-Nazi” Garbo mocked the idea of withdrawing from France. “I told [the minister] the German was not a man who would withdraw like the Italian, and that his losses would be paid for in blood by those who took the gains.” The seed, however, had been planted.

But even as Garbo began to cast his spell, the Germans almost immediately pierced it. In March, German embassies and legations around the world received an urgent message from Joachim von Ribbentrop, the minister of foreign affairs. It ordered them to find out
what the code name Overlord meant, no matter the price. The secret name of the D-Day invasion was out, a tremendous coup for the aloof Colonel Roenne, who could now scan any Allied report for the code word.

As with Cockade, the genius in Zossen was proving much more formidable than the spymasters in Madrid.

17. The Backdrop

A
S THE CALENDAR
ticked toward June, the Allies were moving heaven and earth—and knocking heads together at a furious clip—to make Garbo’s ghost army real.

General George Patton, commander of the real Third Army, was named commander of the imaginary million men of
FUSAG.
He was a logical choice: Hitler regarded Patton as the Allies’ best leader, and the German High Command respected his unpredictable approach to war. Patton was soon spotted everywhere around southeastern England, rallying the nonexistent troops in appearances that were heavily reported in the press. A self-described “goddamned natural-born ham,”
Patton professed that he enjoyed “playing Sarah Bernhardt.” His performance wasn’t subtle: he would say goodbye to fellow generals by calling out, “See you in the Pas de Calais!”
And when he addressed the men of the Third Army, he’d awkwardly remind them, “You don’t know I’m here at all.”

David Strangeways had eliminated almost all of the physical deception from Operation Fortitude, preferring to rely on the double agents and wireless traffic. But the overall Operation Bodyguard still called for an enormous stage show to fool the Germans—and lend authenticity to Garbo’s stratagems. Truth and falsehood were mixed together with calculated abandon: 250 Wetbobs—five-and-a-half-ton landing-craft decoys painstakingly constructed out of a thousand separate pieces—were moored in British harbors. Security was tight: when one unlit decoy was struck by a barge on the Orwell River, the barge’s captain and crew were arrested
and held until after D-Day. (Bumping a decoy immediately revealed that it was a hollow prop.) Ersatz camps were built and campfires were kept burning by crews dashing from one to the next to maintain the right amount of rising smoke. Bulldozers carved fake airstrips into farmland and crews installed fake lights and built fake wooden aircraft to rest just off the runways, even turning them 90 degrees every day to give the illusion that they’d been flown during the night. When darkness fell, car headlights mounted on makeshift carriages were pulled up and down the airstrips to simulate fighters taking off and landing. The Luftwaffe attacked some of these chimeras that shimmered in their bomb sights, and crews worked furiously to repair the bomb craters, exactly as they would have done if the airstrip was real. The set decorators also devised fake bomb craters out of canvas, one version for bright days (with heavy shadows) and another for overcast days. The work was so lifelike that several RAF pilots tried to land on the runways and wrecked their planes in the process.

An entire valley in Cornwall was dammed, flooded and lit up. The deception planners hoped that Luftwaffe night raiders
would mistake the flooded valley for a harbor and send their bombs into the water. Battalions, consisting of an average of 700 or 800 men, were ordered to impersonate divisions, which comprised about 15,000 soldiers. All the accoutrements of a real division were put in place: orders were issued to the commander, mail was sent to its headquarters, and the colonel or brigadier in charge of the battalion would emerge from his tent in the morning dressed in the uniform of a major general and step into a staff car flying a major general’s pennant. All his staff officers got fake promotions
and new uniforms (though their pay stayed the same), and their cars were repainted with the correct decals and insignia. They drove around town, flirted with
WAC
s, got drunk in the local bars if they were lucky, all the while wearing their costumes and advertising their presence in the area. Hospitals and warehouses made out of wire, wood and canvas were thrown up in record time to service the fake assault forces.

One of the centerpieces of the scheme was a gigantic oil-storage facility built out of old wharf jetties, abandoned oil tanks and sewage pipes scavenged from wrecked cities. It was erected on a three-mile-long piece of shoreline near Dover. The Allies requisitoned a wind machine from a British movie studio
to send billows of dust across the area so that the Luftwaffe would think construction crews were hard at work. Only if you walked around the gargantuan site would you see that the huts and buildings were all abandoned and the only thing flowing through the pipes was wind.

Monty and King George VI were shown in the newspapers inspecting the mammoth facility—newspapers that were being read in the Berlin Abwehr offices soon after—and Eisenhower gave a speech at the White Cliffs Hotel in Dover for the men who’d built the depot. RAF and American fighter planes patrolled over the fake terminal, but they were under orders to let a certain number of Luftwaffe reconnaissance planes fly past it unmolested—unless the planes dropped below 30,000 feet, considered to be the point at which their cameras would detect the illusion. Those low-flying aircraft were sent flaming into the ocean. But the pièce de résistance came when the powerful German batteries at Cap Gris Nez in Calais began sending their rounds arching toward the oil facility. When this happened, the skeleton crew of British soldiers who maintained the station lit sodium flares to fool the German spotters into thinking they’d scored a direct hit and the depot was engulfed in flames.

Pigeons were also drafted into something called Operation Columbia. Boxes of the birds were parachuted into Belgium, France and Holland with messages taped to their legs identifying them as property of
FUSAG.
Notes attached to the crates informed the finders that the homing birds would return to England if released; the notes also encouraged the local partisans to tape messages to the creatures’ legs. Many of the pigeons returned to their home stations, one with a note attached to its leg, written in German cursive: “Here is your bird,”
it read. “We ate the other one.”

The plot extended to the bookstores of Istanbul, Bern and Lisbon. Men and women marched into the shops and asked the proprietors if they had Michelin Map 51. If the owner didn’t have a copy, the customer would raise his or her voice and demand that it be ordered. Map 51, of course, covered the Pas de Calais.
Entire books and technical journals were written
and printed by MI5 with invasion theories pointing to Calais, then slipped past the censors and sent to Germany.

In March, Churchill visited a sham armored division,
arriving in his Humber staff car and puffing on a cigar as he inspected the fake tanks made out of rubber by movie-set designers from Shepperton Studios. “A most impressive display of armor,” he remarked to his guide, Major General Hollis of the War Cabinet. “Yet, so you assure me, Hollis, each of these huge tanks could be vanquished by a bow and arrow?” Hollis told him a boy with a hunting knife could do the trick. Earlier, a bull had escaped a farmer’s field and charged a dummy tank—and was spooked when the thing collapsed in a heap.

Vicars in Suffolk and Kent protested against the “decline of morals” among their female parishioners, due to the influx of strapping young American GIs in the eastern provinces. One outraged Brit wrote his local newspaper complaining about the sudden appearance of hundreds of used condoms near army camps. Women wrote in, furious about the dust that American jeeps sent billowing into their freshly washed sheets and nappies hanging on clotheslines. The GIs were real, of course, as was the culture shock when they arrived: the soldiers brought with them records like “Flat Foot Floogie” and “Mairzy Doats,” called any Englishman they didn’t know “Mac” and received checks that were five times the pay
of the ordinary British soldier. But they were mostly in the west and south of the country, where the real embarkation ports were. All those outraged letters that appeared in newspapers from the east of England were written by young intelligence officers back in London. The double agents “spotted” the letters and sent clippings to their controllers in Madrid and, eventually, Berlin.