The Spy with 29 Names (26 page)

I never like to give my opinion unless I have strong reasons to justify my assurances. Thus the fact that these concentrations which are in the east and south east of the island are now inactive means that they must be held in reserve to be employed in the other large-scale operations.

So far so good: everything pointed to another Allied assault subsequent to Normandy. The question was, where?

The constant aerial bombardment which the area of the Pas de Calais has suffered and the strategic disposition of these forces give reason to suspect an attack in that region of France which at the same time offers the shortest route for the final objective of their illusions, which is to say, Berlin.

To underline his point, Garbo returned to another piece of information he had gleaned the night before from his mistress.

From J(5) I learned yesterday that there were 75 Divisions in this country before the present assault commenced. Supposing they should use a maximum of twenty to twenty-five Divisions they would be left with some fifty Divisions with which to attempt a second blow.

The message was clear, nothing more could be said.

The only thing was to make sure that the intelligence Kühlenthal was now receiving went straight to German High Command.

Like a puppetmaster, gently pulling strings from faraway Hendon, Garbo urged his supposed spymaster in Madrid to act:

I trust you will submit urgently all these reports and studies to our High Command since moments may be decisive in these times and before taking a false step through lack of knowledge of the necessary facts they should have in their possession all the present information which I transmit with my opinion which is based in the belief that the whole of the present attack is set as a trap for the enemy to make us move all our reserves in a hurried strategical disposition which we would later regret.

It was done. It was ten past two in the morning. Charlie Haines and the rest of the Garbo team could finally go to bed.

Would the message get through? Even assuming that Garbo’s words got passed up through German intelligence to reach High Command, would anyone be listening? Could the Panzer divisions now tearing down to Normandy be stopped?

All Pujol and Harris could do was wait.

GARBO’S MESSAGE HAD
successfully been radioed across to the German intelligence station in Madrid – this time they had been listening . . . So far, so good. Everyone in Allied deception now waited on tenterhooks to see if his words would filter through the enemy’s secret service all the way to German High Command. Even if it made it that far, however, there was the question of whether it was enough to halt the enemy’s tank reserves.

Having been received overnight, Garbo’s message had to be decoded into clear script at the other end before anyone could read it. It was long, and the process took some time. It would have been mid-morning on 9 June by the time that Kühlenthal finally read the last lines, and the warning that the Normandy landings were a trap.

He wasted no time, quickly writing a report based on Garbo’s text – using whole phrases verbatim. This was then encoded once again and sent via Enigma machine to the German secret service HQ in Berlin.

Kühlenthal had performed his part; his link in the chain had held firm. This fact alone, however, was little short of remarkable. Only a short time earlier his own mentor, Admiral Canaris, had been deposed by Himmler and the Abwehr had effectively been closed down. Long suspicious of the diminutive spymaster and his true loyalty to the
Nazi regime, Himmler had built up a dossier of mistakes and treacherous behaviour by members of the Abwehr, using it to get rid of its chief. Canaris was given an insignificant desk job, and the SD – Himmler’s parallel Nazi intelligence agency – took over the running of the Abwehr stations and machinery.

It was a personal blow to Kühlenthal: the man who had mentored and safeguarded his position was now removed from power. Kühlenthal was working directly for the very people who would persecute him over his Jewish blood.

Somehow he had managed to survive – not because of any lack of zeal on the part of the Nazi ideologues. The extermination of Jews was accelerating at this stage in the war, unaffected by the military reverses of the Wehrmacht on the battlefields. His certificate of ‘Aryanisation’ was a legal fig leaf. He was still vulnerable – now more than ever. The number of secret service staff at the German Embassy in Madrid was reduced to only a hundred and twenty-nine. Of these, forty-two were forced out into offices dotted around the city, losing the diplomatic protection that the embassy afforded them. Kühlenthal survived because he was allowed to, because of his worth to the whole German intelligence and military system.

What saved him was Arabal – Garbo.

No one was about to remove an intelligence chief with an entire network of agents working for him from inside enemy territory. Take Kühlenthal away, the trusted link and case officer, and the whole enterprise might unravel. Kühlenthal might be quarter-Jewish, but he was useful. With much of his intelligence system dismantled, the Arabal traffic was practically all he had left.

And now he had just been handed a message from his top man in London that might change the course of the war. He had to get it to the right people as quickly as possible.

The intelligence men in Berlin were the next link in the chain. With all the recent changes since the SD takeover of the Abwehr, the operation was not running as smoothly as it might. It posed a danger at this critical moment – not only for the Germans, but for the Allies, who were relying on the flow of communications within German intelligence in order to feed misinformation.

With Canaris gone, the man in charge of foreign intelligence was Walter Schellenberg, a thirty-four-year-old Nazi and Himmler protégé.
Bright, hard-working and ambitious, Schellenberg had masterminded the Venlo Incident that had so out-foxed MI6 at the start of the war. He kept a list of over 2,000 people who were to be immediately arrested after an invasion of Britain, had a desk in his office with machine guns built into it that could be fired at the press of a button, and was rumoured to have been the lover in Paris of the fashion designer Coco Chanel.

Busy with his reorganisation of the German secret services after Canaris’s fall, commonly working twenty-hour days, he had removed many Abwehr men from their foreign postings and replaced them with SD members – true believers. The Abwehr itself ceased officially to exist on 1 June, just days before D-Day. Kühlenthal, however, was still in his post. And when his message reporting Garbo’s text came through, Schellenberg’s organisation quickly and unquestioningly passed it on to the relevant bodies within the Wehrmacht.

Miraculously, the next step had been successfully completed.

The first intelligence man within the armed forces to read
Garbo’s message was Colonel von Rönne, the head of Fremde Heere West (FHW).

Owing to the intensive Allied bombing of Berlin, much of the military command structure had moved to the town of Zossen, just to the south of the capital. It was here that Schellenberg and von Rönne both had offices in the headquarters of the German High Command.

Von Rönne was not a Nazi. In fact he was a member of the movement now plotting to remove Hitler from power. But he came from an aristocratic German family and was loyal to the German military. Not only that, he was quick and extremely competent – some of his colleagues regarded him as something of a genius when it came to military and intelligence matters. More importantly, Hitler himself – unaware of von Rönne’s political sympathies – trusted his judgement.

Tall, slim and with round spectacles perched on his large hooked nose, von Rönne now pored over the report from Madrid. The FHW’s job was to evaluate the Allies’ strength in the west, basing their conclusions on all sources of evidence available: intercepted military communications, interrogations with POWs, photographs from spy planes, and reports from spies working behind enemy lines.

Garbo’s message fell clearly into the last category: because of the difficulty of flying over Britain at the time, information from agents in the field had now become the main source of information for the FHW’s assessments. In general, owing to the bad name that the Abwehr had earned itself over the previous years, there was suspicion in German military circles about spies’ reports. They had shown themselves too often to be unreliable. But this particular agent in London had proved his worth – his earlier material had been good and von Rönne had come across his reports before.

The latest message came complete with eyewitness sightings of Allied divisions based in south-east England from three different sub-agents. The London spymaster’s conclusions were therefore backed up by evidence. He was surely right – Normandy was a trap into which they must not fall. Besides, it made better military sense to invade the Pas-de-Calais, the closest point to the British coast.

Von Rönne’s immediate response was to call the two generals closest to Hitler at that time: the head of German High Command, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel; and his chief of operations Colonel-General Alfred Jodl. Both were in Berchtesgaden with Hitler, and both agreed with von Rönne’s assessment of this new, highly valuable report from the London-based spy. They had to act quickly before it was too late.

Subsequently, and with the clearance of High Command, von Rönne issued an initial warning from FHW to all commands in the west:

In all probability major landing by enemy on the Belgian coast is to be expected on June 10. Withdrawal of our forces from 15th Army sector
[Pas-de-Calais and Belgium]
untenable.

The second line was a clear reference to Hitler’s order the previous day that the Panzer reserves could be sent into Normandy. From that moment the Führer’s best troops of the 1st SS Panzer Division LAH had begun to move from Belgium westwards towards the invasion area. And they were making steady progress. If this armoured force was allowed to carry on much further it would be difficult to haul them back to Calais in time for the expected second prong of the Allied invasion. Added to the other formations that had been released for Normandy by Hitler’s order, a total of 50,000 soldiers with around 500 tanks were falling into the trap that the Allies had so carefully
laid, and which the Germans’ spy network in London was now warning them about, just in time.

Garbo’s message had already worked its way close to the top of the German military hierarchy, unhindered and virtually unchanged from the original words first shaped by Harris and Pujol, encrypted and then transmitted by radio by Charlie Haines in the middle of the night from a modest, rather drab north London house.

But von Rönne’s assessment alone was not enough. The Panther tanks of Jochen Peiper’s Panzer regiment were still rumbling along the roads of northern France towards the Allied invasion force in Normandy. Only one man could stop them now, make them turn around and head back the other way.

Already that morning Hitler had ordered the 9th and 10th SS Panzer divisions from their rest posting in Poland to Normandy. Together they numbered 35,000 men and had 350 tanks, but they would take weeks to cross the Reich from east to west and reach their destination. Rommel and von Rundstedt in France needed armoured reserves immediately if they were successfully to snuff out the Allies while they were still vulnerable. Hitler’s order of the day before had given them just what they needed.

But now, with Garbo’s message and von Rönne’s subsequent warning of a new and imminent Allied attack, there was a dilemma. Allow the Panzer reserves to carry on to Normandy and risk weakening the defences around Calais? Or send them to Calais, and thereby weaken the response to the Normandy landings that had already taken place?

Von Rönne had made up his mind. The question was whether the Führer could be made to change his.

Just before midday von Rönne called the intelligence liaison officer at Berchtesgaden, Colonel Freidrich-Adolf Krummacher. Krummacher was Hitler’s personal intelligence officer, the link between intelligence and High Command. He was also a former Abwehr man, and as such had a greater trust for reports sent in by spies.

Von Rönne explained the situation quickly to Krummacher, reiterating the fact that he had evidence that suggested a new invasion of France was about to be launched from eastern England, and that therefore the Panzer forces had to be stopped at all costs and sent up to Calais.

Krummacher was about to go into the midday conference, where
Hitler discussed military matters with his commanders and staff. He told von Rönne that he would pass on the information to the Führer and rang off.

But Hitler was not in the mood just then to change his mind. Listening to both von Rönne and Jodl make the point, he agreed that an attack on Calais made sense, that it was what he had expected all along. Had he not told Japanese Ambassador
Ō
shima that just such an eventuality would occur?

Nonetheless, he could not be sure. He would not, he said, change the order. Or at least not yet. He would think about it and make up his mind at the midnight conference later on.

Peiper’s tanks kept moving towards Normandy.

Before the midnight meeting took place, however, the actual text of Garbo’s message to Kühlenthal reached Berchtesgaden itself, and Krummacher was able to read almost the exact words of the Germans’ top spy in London, as reported by the head of the Madrid station:

After personal consultation on 8th June in London with my agents Jonny
[this was a misprint for ‘Donny’]
, Dick and Dorrick, whose reports were sent today, I am of the opinion, in the view of the strong troop concentrations in South-East and Eastern England which are not taking part in the present operations, that these operations are a diversionary manoeuvre designed to draw off the enemy reserves in order then to make a decisive attack in another place. In view of the continued air attacks on the concentration area mentioned, which is a strategically favourable position for this, it may very probably take place in the Pas de Calais area, particularly since in such an attack the proximity of air bases will facilitate the operation by providing continued strong air support.