Agent Garbo (29 page)

By May, Roenne counted
79 divisions in England, when there were only 52. The deception gap had increased from 18 to 27. Yet that number was the result of more than the double agents’ cunning. One day in the summer of 1943, Roenne had buttonholed his operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel Lothar Metz, who worked up Foreign Armies West’s daily report on the Allied forces. “From now on,” Roenne told Metz, “we have to exaggerate.
The Operations Staff deducts a certain percentage from everything that we report. So we have to get ready for that. We have to exaggerate.”

Roenne knew that Hitler refused to accept accurate estimates of the Russian forces in the East, because doing so would make it clear that the Wehrmacht was overmatched. Anyone who told the truth about the enemy was branded a defeatist and either persecuted or ignored. Roenne felt an ancient duty to protect Germany, and inflating the numbers, he believed, would serve as a hedge against Hitler’s rejection of the truth. Even if the Führer reduced Roenne’s manpower estimates, they would still be closer to the truth than the rosy numbers proffered by Hitler’s underlings.

Metz was stunned. “Herr Colonel, I can’t do that. I learned as a soldier that you must answer for what you do. It has to be true.”

Roenne told his underling to think it over for twenty-four hours. The next day, Metz came back with his answer. He would do it.

The deception planners had been unable to exploit most of Hitler’s psychological quirks. But here was a German officer reacting to the Führer’s denial of reality by creating an illusion to compete with Hitler’s illusion. Garbo’s chimera was receiving an unexpected boost from inside Germany.

“Tangle within tangle,”
Churchill wrote. “Plot and counter-plot, ruse and treachery, cross and double-cross, true agent, false agent, double agent, gold and steel, the bomb, the dagger and the firing party, were interwoven in many a texture so intricate as to be incredible and yet true.”

The route to Berlin was clear. Every single message
Garbo sent to Madrid was being relayed to the German capital and then teleprinted on to Colonel Roenne’s staff at Zossen. Not only that, every eyewitness report of a drunken American soldier in an English pub or a company of paratroopers spotted through a windshield was being forwarded to Berlin—and, due to Roenne’s scheme, the number of soldiers was being dialed up. “The movement and regrouping
of all notional and misplaced formations,” Harris wrote, “the subject of the reports of the Garbo network, became the subject of the Daily Intelligence reports of the German Supreme Command, to be widely circulated in German official circles, and on which all German appreciations were subsequently based.”

Garbo was winning the game. He, along with Brutus and Tate, had succeeded in creating a million-man ghost army in England where there were only empty tents and spoof vans. But that was only half the mission.

As D-Day rapidly approached, the next question became: How can we convince the Germans that the real army that will land on French shores on June 6
isn’t
real? That it is, in fact, something else entirely? Now that he and Strangeways had conjured a million men out of thin air, Garbo had to take the real American and Canadian and British soldiers, and the thousands of tanks and jeeps that were going to hit the beaches of Normandy, and make them disappear.

For a number of reasons, some of them obvious, some of them completely unforeseen, that turned out to be a much more difficult proposition.

18. The Buildup

I
NSIDE GERMANY, THE SPLIT
in the German High Command that Tommy Harris had long predicted was becoming a reality.

Hitler had been firmly in the Calais camp for months. But by mid-spring 1944, he was focusing more and more on Normandy. On March 4, the Führer pointed to Normandy and Brittany as the most likely targets of the invasion. At a meeting with his generals on the twentieth, he gave them the same message: watch Normandy. In April, studying a map of the French coastline, he tapped his finger on the rocky shore and said, “I am for bringing all our strength
in here.” On May 2, the deputy of General Jodl, chief of the Operations Staff,
rang Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt at his headquarters, a stunning mansion on the Seine west of Paris, and told him that extra men and materiel were needed to shore up the defenses in Normandy and Brittany. “A partial success by the enemy
in the two peninsulas would inevitably at once tie down very strong forces of OB West,” the German armies in France and occupied Europe.

Roenne and Rommel, along with most of the German High Command, had backed the Calais option all along. Even an amateur war buff could instantly see the advantages to attacking its coastline, and the training that German officers received—with its emphasis on logical and orthodox theory, not on deception—backed up that thinking. But in the beginning of May, Rommel lobbied Hitler for control of the reserve forces to bulk up the defenses in Normandy. Rundstedt protested; he wanted those divisions held in reserve until the main attack came. For the moment, Hitler sided with Rundstedt, but Rommel was increasingly nervous about the thin line of defenders behind the beaches that would become known as Omaha, Utah, Gold, Juno and Sword.

There was a secondary fracture in the leadership: some German analysts warned of a one-strike invasion and others believed that there would be two attacks, the first one a ruse. Hitler wavered on whether the opening attack would be a feint or the real thing. But by May, Jodl was telling the chief of staff of the commander in chief in the West that Normandy “would be the first target of the enemy.” The
first
target—indicating, of course, that there would be a second, and much more powerful, assault elsewhere.

In their office, Pujol and Harris had been working nonstop to strengthen this suspicion. On April 9, Garbo radioed Madrid: “The situation as explained to me
by the agents from the south coast is really alarming, enemy action is expected from one minute to the next.” He begged his contacts to confirm what he was hearing. “You must make reconnaissance over the north west ports of England to ascertain whether the ships mentioned in my message of yesterday are actually there.” Garbo knew, of course, that the ships would be there; he never sent a message without knowing that assets were in place.

Then, in late April, the fictitious Gibraltarian waiter known as No. 4 “sent” a letter to Garbo in London saying the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division had been issued vomit bags, life vests and cold rations. These were the last things a soldier got before being sent on an amphibious assault. The only possible conclusion? The invasion was a go.

Was D-Day here? Garbo flew into a frenzy. But Agent J (5)—the secretary in the War Ministry with whom Garbo was having a torrid affair—contradicted the reports. She claimed the movements that No. 4 had seen were just part of an exercise, practice for the real thing. A bitter conflict erupted between the two subagents, created and expertly manipulated by Garbo, who took the side of No. 4. When that operative “reported” that the 3rd Canadian had been ordered to clear an area of its camp to prepare for the arrival of second-line troops, the spymaster pounced on the claim that this was just an exercise: “This proves J (5)’s lie, because she suggested, naively, today that troops in the southern area were on maneuvers.” Garbo messaged Madrid that his lover, J (5), was being hoodwinked. He warned the German High Command to prepare for a million men coming ashore in France beginning in the next few hours.

For Garbo and Tommy Harris it was a calculated risk. Would Garbo lose credibility by foreseeing a massive attack that wouldn’t materialize? Or would he gain credibility by showing he was human and didn’t always interpret his own intelligence correctly? The troops, of course, didn’t come. Indeed, the movement that Garbo’s invented subagents were seeing was part of an actual rehearsal: Exercise Fabius was the final dry run for D-Day. On May 3, assault divisions across the south of England poured into their naval support craft and each set off for a replica of its landing zone. Elements of the 3rd Canadian stormed Bracklesham Bay in West Sussex, while the U.S. 1st Infantry pounded up the beach at Slapton Sands.

A week before, during another rehearsal called Exercise Tiger, nine German patrol boats had spotted the American landing craft and attacked. Mayhem had ensued: Allied craft were raked by friendly fire, and soldiers unused to the water put on their life vests incorrectly and sank like stones. Sherman DD tanks spilled into the sea, and a transport struck by German bullets erupted in a fireball. The American troops jumped into the drink, where the weight of their combat packs forced their heads under the waters of Lyme Bay. Six hundred eighty-three soldiers died, all American, all for a mere exercise. When the survivors crawled up on Slapton Sands, more snafus caused the heavy cruiser HMS
Hawkins
to open up with live ammo, and 308 more men perished in the chaos.

It had been another black cloud over the invasion. The carnage had also harmed the deception plan. Unknown to the Brits, Hitler received reports of the disastrous exercise and, with his uncanny recall for the obscurities of coastal anomalies, remembered that the beaches at Slapton Sands closely resembled those of Normandy. The blunder reinforced his growing belief
that the Allies would come ashore there.

Now Exercise Fabius, the last drill before the actual D-Day, was under way. The messages from Agents No. 4 and J (5) were part of the deception: they showed the Germans that Garbo’s network was primed and ready for the invasion. When it became clear that Fabius wasn’t the real thing, on May 7
Garbo sent his regrets that he’d jumped the gun; he blamed the whole thing on a twitchy operative: “4 has displayed the ability of a simpleton.
I am very disgusted with him though I have not let him know this.”

This was a subtle psychological trick that Garbo often used: kvetching about how idiotic his agents were, something the Abwehr men could sympathize with. It was like water-cooler talk among spymasters, and the Abwehr responded in kind. “We here, in the very small circle
of colleagues,” they wrote him at one point, “who know your story and that of your organization, talk so often about you that it often seems as if we were living the incidents which you relate to us, and we most certainly share, to the full, your worries.” There were other ways that Garbo bound Kühlenthal and Federico to him; his discovery of secret Aryans and anti-British and corrupt ministers told the Germans what they wanted to hear: namely, that England was honeycombed with Nazi sympathizers who
wanted
the Germans to invade. Garbo presented a vision of an enemy that almost wished, and certainly deserved, to be defeated. It was all part of what the Germans called “nerve warfare.”

Garbo reported to Madrid that No. 4 was a little discouraged by his great stupidity.
Kühlenthal urged forgiveness: “You should give him more encouragement as, if not, it might happen that when the real invasion is about to take place he will not notify this owing to over-precaution.” Everyone was on a hair trigger, looking for the first signs of D-Day. Meanwhile, the stock of Agent J (5), who’d correctly identified Fabius as an exercise, shot up. It was exactly what Garbo had wanted.

In May, the French resistance reported
that Rommel had moved the highly capable Panzer Lehr Division from Hungary to France, and the 21st Armored Division had been sent to Caen, only thirty minutes from the Normandy beaches. There were rumors that other panzer divisions
would follow, which indicated that the Germans now believed the real invasion was coming at Normandy. The news disturbed the invasion planners in London. Was the deception effort a lost cause? Normandy was being more and more exposed as the likely target of D-Day. The second part of Garbo’s mission—the Calais deception—had to be ramped up to distract the German High Command from the Allies’ true intentions.

The chimera was ready to move.

To shift German eyes from west to east,
FUSAG
hit the road. The actual Third U.S. Army had been annexed to the sham
FUSAG
, lending it some real boots on the ground. The Third Army was then located in Cheshire, in the northwest of England, but if it was going to be part of an invasion of Calais, it had to be on the east coast, closer to the target. Instead of transferring the men and jeeps and tanks hundreds of miles—a plan that would have placed a heavy strain on commanders—the move was transmitted through the air. A squad of writers eavesdropped on the Third’s signal traffic,
then created new “scripts” that placed them in the east. Though the chatter was secret—and enciphered—the text in the messages was pure gibberish, laboriously created by signal operators by choosing the fourth or fifth word of a newspaper article, until IBM invented a machine
that spewed out a completely random series of words. Everything was done under a tight cover of secrecy; the radio operators who sent the messages were themselves never told if the traffic was real or imaginary. Even a tiny change in their technique might give away the game to the Germans.

The Third Army’s wireless network in the west
of England went silent, then popped up weeks later in East Anglia, close to the eastern shore. The Allies had invented a device that allowed a single set to mimic the traffic of six radios, so that the entire division’s signals could be imitated by one operator. The Germans soon picked up the traffic and placed a pin on their maps locating the Third Army in its new home of East Anglia, when the real troops were hundreds of miles away.

Troop trains and road convoys were coordinated so that the double agents could “see” the locomotives pass through real towns at the real times that Garbo reported. A card catalog was even kept
showing the position of every
FUSAG
regiment and battalion; when double agents “traveled” through a part of southeastern England, they knew which units they’d run into. Garbo’s Agent 7 (7), the treasurer of the Brothers in the Aryan World Order, “spotted” tank officers in Ipswich, hundreds of miles from their home base, and reported it; the Germans duly moved the flag for their unit on their big map: “The 6th American Armored Division,
hitherto believed to be in the county of Worcester, is . . . said to be in the East of England in the Ipswich area.” Every sighting pushed the German gaze east, away from the real embarkation points in the west. “The main enemy concentration,”
a May 15 intelligence report stated, “is showing itself ever more clearly to be in the South and South-East of England.” The real invasion force hadn’t moved an inch. The fake one was now facing Calais.