The Spy with 29 Names (24 page)

Much would depend on how hard the Germans could hit them over the following few days, and how many other Panzer divisions would be sent in.

Tens of thousands of Allied soldiers were now pressed into tiny, liberated patches of Normandy. They had artillery and tanks, air cover from the RAF and USAAF, and the backing of thousands of ships behind them in the Channel. Yet they would be helpless if the Germans rapidly sent in their best forces to engage them.

Success now depended on the deceivers back in London, with the Garbo team poised to act. Would the months of preparation, of lying and hoodwinking, be enough?

PUJOL, HARRIS AND
Haines took turns to sleep during the night of 5–6 June. After their D-Day message had failed to get through, one of them would check the radio at regular intervals to see if there was any signal coming back from Kühlenthal in Madrid. The sun was rising and Pujol began to reflect on his work, on his family back in Spain, and on the lives that were being lost across the Channel at that very moment on the beaches of France.

The new day was a Tuesday. There was a traditional Spanish saying:
Martes – ni te cases ni te embarques
. It was meant to be the worst day of the week for getting married or setting sail. Would the Allied soldiers crossing the Channel be fortunate or unfortunate that day?

Moments later Harris woke up and they exchanged a few words. Harris was as optimistic as ever, and now he had to head back to St James’s Street: it had been a busy night but the days ahead would be even busier.

Despite the failure to communicate with the Germans during the night, the deception plan was still alive. There had been no word over the fate of Johnny Jebsen: MI5 were working on the assumption that the double-cross system had not been blown, that the Abwehr man had given little, or perhaps nothing, away. Although for how much longer was not certain.

The person who did put a spanner in the works at this most crucial
moment, however, was the least expected – Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

All concerned knew that the idea behind Fortitude was to convince the Germans that Normandy was a feint, and that the main thrust of the invasion would come later over the Pas-de-Calais. It was a deception about a deception. As such all efforts had to be made to avoid references in public to any possibility of a second invasion force – otherwise the Germans might suspect that this was just a ruse. If not, why talk about it? Blurting out the ‘secret’ made it no secret at all.

But that was precisely what Churchill did in his morning speech to the House of Commons on 6 June. Harris had seen a copy the day before, but there was nothing MI5 could do to have it changed. Despite knowing everything about the deception plan, and being aware that all ministers and commentators had been asked not to speculate on any other possible landings in France, Churchill went ahead and effectively let the cat out of the bag.

After talking at some length about recent developments in Italy, and the fall of Rome, the Prime Minister finally commented on the events of the previous night, and the fierce fighting that was taking place on the beachheads as he spoke.

‘I have to announce to the House that during the night and the early hours of this morning the first of the series of landings in force upon the European continent has taken place . . . There are already hopes that actual tactical surprise has been attained, and we hope to furnish the enemy with a succession of surprises during the course of the fighting . . . All this, although a very valuable first step – a vital and essential first step – gives no indication of what may be the course of the battle in the next days and weeks, because the enemy will now probably endeavour to concentrate on this area, and in that event heavy fighting will soon begin and will continue without end, as we can push troops in and he can bring other troops up.’

On hearing this, the Germans might be expected to wonder why, if the Allies were secretly preparing for a second attack, Churchill was openly talking about such a possibility. What if the whole thing was just a hoax?

The problem was exacerbated by Eisenhower’s radio broadcast that
same morning to the people of Western Europe, in which he talked of the Normandy landings as an ‘initial assault’. Clearly the implication was that more were to come. Which again begged the question.

The Normandy campaign had begun, and Garbo’s most important work was still ahead of him. Now, however, the very foundations of the deception plan were being shaken. Harris and Pujol had to limit the damage as quickly as they could.

In theory Garbo still did not know that his message of the night before had not gone through in the early hours as planned. His reaction on learning of the Germans’ lapse would come later. In the meantime, in preparation for that evening’s reports to Madrid, Harris and Pujol concocted a story about Garbo heading off in the morning to his job at the Ministry of Information.

I arrived to find the Department already in a complete state of chaos, everyone speculating as to the importance of the attack which had started this morning against France.

At the Ministry, Garbo received a copy of a special directive issued by the Political Warfare Executive, the British propaganda agency, which he passed on to the Germans. It clearly stated that ‘care must be taken to avoid any reference to further attacks and diversions’, and that ‘speculation regarding alternative assault areas must be avoided’.

The plan was, Harris argued, that the Germans would read this ‘directive’ in reverse, and therefore come to the conclusions that the Allies wanted them to. The only problem was that Churchill and Eisenhower were busy undermining the scheme.

The Garbo solution was to attack it head on, and try to bluff his way through.

In his message, Garbo said that he brought this very discrepancy up with his boss at the Ministry – his unwitting agent J(3) – pointing out that the directive was in complete contradiction to the Prime Minister and Supreme Commander’s speeches. He had told J(3):

It was inevitable that these speeches would be quoted and used as the basis of propaganda by the World Press.

As was often the case with Garbo, the job of explaining away difficult truths was given over to someone else, someone who did not really exist.

J(3) told Garbo that he had seen the one flaw in the directive plan. Eisenhower, he said, was in a bind: he needed to stop people from rising too soon against the Germans in areas where there was yet to be any fighting, but he had to keep that information from the enemy at the same time. Hence the broadcast. As Harris later wrote, they needed to convince the Germans that sometimes great men were bound to tell ‘the truth’ to their people, even if that truth went against security interests.

In the end, J(3) tried to shrug the matter off.

He said he did not think the enemy would be able to draw any definite conclusions from these speeches.

Pujol and Harris had to leave it at that and hope for the best. At least they might sow some doubt in the Germans’ minds about the meaning of the two speeches, and what the Allies’ real intentions were.

In the meantime they had to carry on as normal, and prepare for a more important message to come over the course of the next few days: before finishing and handing over the text to be enciphered and sent over the airwaves to Madrid, Garbo mentioned that he had called all his active agents to London for an urgent conference.

There was, of course, the business of the message of the night before – the warning about D-Day in the early hours, which the Germans had failed to pick up at the scheduled time.

Pujol and Harris knew that the message had not finally been sent until 0800, when the German radio operator in Madrid finally came back on air. But the Germans did not know that they knew that. So they had to pretend. One can only imagine the smiles on their faces as they wrote out the final paragraph of their evening message.

The Allies, Garbo wrote triumphantly, had been

robbed of the surprise which they wished to create through the information from
[Agent]
Four
[Fred the Gibraltarian]
, as from the hour at which the assault is said to have started I am able to prove with satisfaction that my messages arrived in time to prevent the action coming as a surprise to our High Command. There is no doubt that Four has accomplished through this action a service which, though it will make it impossible to use his collaboration in the future, has justified a sacrifice by his last report.

Except that the Germans had not been listening when they were supposed to.

Continuing with the drama that was put on for Kühlenthal, moments after handing his evening message over to his radio operator, Garbo then hurriedly scribbled down a further text to be sent immediately afterwards. It was only now, he said, that the Widow had told him that his message had not gone out at 0300 after all, and was not able to be sent until much later. He had been robbed of his great coup, his moment of glory.

This makes me question your seriousness and your sense of responsibility. I therefore demand a clarification immediately as to what has occurred . . . I am very disgusted as in this struggle for life or death I cannot accept excuses or negligence. I cannot masticate the idea of endangering the service without any benefit. Were it not for my ideals and faith I would abandon this work as having proved myself a failure. I write these messages to send this very night though my tiredness and exhaustion due to the excessive work which I have had has completely broken me.

The tiredness was almost certainly real – Pujol and Harris were working very long hours at this point. Yet everything else – the indignation, the sense of victimhood – was all vintage Garbo. It was a trick he had used before: acting like a jilted lover, slapping his supposed masters down until they effectively became his playthings. Harris and others in MI5 laughed out loud when they read what Pujol had written: it was like something that Hitler himself might have said.

If anything, it was the best possible outcome. Not only could Garbo claim to have had prior knowledge of the D-Day landings, thus raising his status to a super-spy in the Germans’ eyes, but he could now also berate them for their failures.

When it came, Kühlenthal’s reply was suitably grovelling.

I have read your two messages of yesterday, and I perfectly well understand your state of morale . . . It would be difficult if not impossible to find out who is to blame if a culprit really exists, with regard to the delay in the transmission of the message of Four.

He went on to suggest that perhaps Garbo’s radio operator was at fault. He was, after all, unaware of what Garbo’s messages really contained, believing him to be a Spanish Republican sympathiser. As
such, not understanding the importance of that particular message and its need to go out at 0300, he might have gone to sleep and not sent it until later on.

Kühlenthal’s attempt to cover up for himself was risible, as Pujol, Harris, Tar Robertson and Roger Hesketh had all been standing over Charlie Haines at the given hour when the message was supposed to have gone out.

Still, the German spy chief recognised that there had been a mistake, and made efforts to soothe his prize agent’s wounded pride.

I reiterate to you, as responsible chief of the service, and to all your collaborators, our total recognition of your perfect and cherished work and I beg of you to continue with us in the supreme and decisive hours of the struggle for the future of Europe.

‘Perfect and cherished work’ . . . Kühlenthal was now both repentant and malleable – putty in Harris and Pujol’s hands.

THEIR WEATHERMEN HAD
let them down and their best commanders had been absent at the crucial hour, but the Germans did have a certain amount of good luck on their side on 6 June.

As night fell over the western, US sector of the landing area, German infantrymen near Omaha beach made a discovery. Floating in the waters of the River Vire was a little boat. Inside, the soldiers found the body of a US officer who had been killed in action earlier in the day. And chained to his body was a briefcase.

It did not take long for the briefcase to reach the division’s operations officer, and when he opened it he could not believe his eyes. There in front of him were the operational orders of the US units that had landed at Utah beach. Almost all the details that he could have wanted about which American divisions had landed and their scheme of manoeuvre were laid out for him. It was highly valuable information for the battles in the days ahead, particularly as stamped on the cover of the documents it clearly said, in English, ‘Destroy Before Embarkation’. For whatever reason, the US officer had failed to do so, bringing the valuable pieces of paper along with him. And now they were in the hands of the enemy.

Amazingly enough, the next day, 7 June, soldiers from the same
German division also found a very similar document – which again should never have been brought as far as the landing beaches – on the body of another dead US officer in the Omaha sector, giving similar details.

Both sets of papers were soon in the hands of Generalleutnant Max Pemsel, chief of staff of the German 7th Army, which was tasked with defending Normandy. As he pored over them, noting the US divisions that were now involved, and the vast numbers of men and equipment being shipped over the Channel to what had previously been a quiet little corner of France, he came to a chilling conclusion: the Normandy landings that had started the morning before must actually be the real thing.

‘The great expansion of the American bridgehead’, he said, ‘led to the conclusion that this operation required such a large number of American forces that a second landing at another point [e.g. the Pas-de-Calais] was not likely at all.’

Operation Fortitude, and the carefully laid-out plans to convince the Germans that Normandy was just a feint, had been rumbled. Thanks to a couple of officers who had disobeyed orders and carried operational plans with them into battle, not only were tens of thousands of Allied lives at stake, but the future of Operation Overlord and the liberation of France from the Nazis now hung in the balance.