by Ronald Weber
gloomy sight of scores of [Allied] men—probably hundreds—who fell dead on barbed-wire fences. The commentator did not explain how they were killed, but the general impression was that the barbed wire carried a strong electric current, because some were holding the wires tight with both hands.
The Germans overreached in another and equally apparent way when they remodeled a Lisbon building for use as a tourist agency and began operating it following the Allied invasion of North Africa. The Portuguese, hardly taken in by a tourist agency with some twenty young “clerks” when there was no tourism, referred to the refurbished building as the “second front.” They delighted in dropping in and innocently asking if vacation trips were available to Hamburg or if they might buy tickets to Stalingrad. Such inquiries were reportedly met with a courteous and deadpan no.
Gradual Allied success on the battlefield also deflected the impact of German propaganda aimed at the Portuguese, and may even have weakened previously tight Nazi control over the prewar German colony in Portugal. As early as the summer of 1941 the Lisbon correspondent of the London Times reported that though attendance at National Socialist meetings, financial contributions, and acceptance of some tasks were still expected of them, local Germans who only passively approved of Hitler were now treated with less bullying, even with a measure of kindliness. It was as if, the correspondent speculated, the Germans in Portugal, both the leaders and the led, were “subconsciously trying to pick up again former contacts unconnected with Nazi ideas—old German and neutral friendships, old hobbies and interests, all those things which can continue and develop when the Nazi regime has passed away.”
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Together with its propaganda endeavor within Portugal, Britain used the country as a launching pad for black propaganda aimed at occupied nations and the German heartland. In the autumn of 1941 David E. Walker arrived in Lisbon with just such a psychological warfare mission. An agent of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret sabotage, subversion, and black propaganda group formed after the fall of France for action in neutral and enemy countries, Walker had behind him wide experience with British intelligence operations in Switzerland, Romania, and the Balkans. His cover for the clandestine work had been that he was a freelance journalist sending reports to the London Daily Mirror, in reality his former employer. He was back in London and working as a journalist when he was recruited by the SOE and sent to Portugal with the cover that he was now a staff correspondent for the Mirror, which in fact he was.
Lisbon was rich turf for Walker’s deception assignment, given its population of Axis nationals who mingled in bars, cafés, and hotel lounges in the guise of businessmen or stranded exiles, and eagerly soaked up information to relay to Berlin or Rome. Axis diplomats offered fertile ground as well, and it seemed wholly natural for a journalist to seek them out for seemingly routine conversations. Walker cultivated his territory with a cadre of troops he engaged and sent into action with London’s consent. The stories they planted, all hatched in London and known in the trade as Sibs—short for sibilant, a hissing sound, a whisper in the ear—were calculated, as a British source delicately put it, “to inconvenience the enemy” to the extent, in accumulated form, of weakening his will to continue the war.
Once a week an attractive woman met Walker in one of Lisbon’s coffee houses. They sat and gossiped, then the woman left and Walker stayed behind to pay the bill—and pick up a newspaper the woman had left behind. Inside was a piece of paper with some unrelated words on it—to all appearances, the sort of random notes a journalist might make as reminders for himself. For Walker the jottings were Sibs to set in word-of-mouth motion.
His first Lisbon effort involved planting a markedly low-level Sib aimed at the enemy’s economy. Among the ways the manufacturing behemoth I. G. Farben propped up the German war machine was by acquiring foreign currencies through its sales, with aspirin one of its humble but profitable overseas products. Since sexual prowess was everywhere important to men and, so it was believed, mightily so in Latin counties, the Sib whispered about in Lisbon was that German aspirin, taken regularly, led to impotence. That men did not speak out about the unwelcome condition was explained as normal reticence about intimate matters. Certainly, as the Sib went on, Farben would correct its aspirin problem, but the necessities of German war manufacturing might slow the process. In the meantime, the wise course was to buy other brands.
The most effective Sibs were those with at least a modest factual basis. After Hitler attacked Russia in June 1941, physical conditions facing the Wehrmacht in winter offered many possibilities. The Sibs simply helped spread accounts given out by returning troops of typhus, frostbite, compulsory delousing, and overwhelming physical filth on the eastern front. London always sought confirmation that launched stories were reaching their intended targets, with the come-backs, as they were known, the tool used to evaluate SOE agents in the field. Reports from intelligence agents in occupied Europe indicated that accounts of physical misery in Russia had indeed gotten back to German troops preparing, with evident lack of enthusiasm, to go into action. Whether a successful Sib had been initiated in Lisbon or in such other neutral sites as Stockholm, Cairo, Buenos Aires, Dublin, Madrid, Berne, or Ankara, London never disclosed.
Of course some Sibs, possibly most, never got off the ground at all. Some were so obviously senseless they were never tried. At times, though, it was possible to give a jolt of life to a feeble story by stressing that it was obviously false. “Have you ever heard such bunkum?” Walker would say. “Some damned Italian here from Rome claims that Himmler has been dead three months—killed on Hitler’s orders. They’re using a standin until they make the news official.” In theory Walker was not to initiate stories himself, though opportunities that came his way were hard to resist. “Never in my life, before or since,” he wrote, “have I had so much to say, so many things to tell people, as during the Lisbon interlude.”
Most of his work was done through his dissemination team of various nationalities and language abilities and with contact lines to several enemy groups. The essence of the job was to fit his workers into places that were plausible settings for what they were selling. Some Sibs were best initiated by waiters in restaurants, others by seamen in the bars and brothels along the Tagus waterfront. Sibs of a higher order were more at home in diplomatic receptions and garden parties. Nightclubs were always good starting points since recent Axis arrivals, enlivened by Lisbon’s lack of blackouts and ample food and drink, were determined to enjoy the evenings—and likely to carry back home what they had overheard in the unguarded atmosphere. For Walker’s purposes, the best of the Lisbon nightspots was the Nina Bar, packed each evening with Britons and Germans, Free French and Vichy French, Greeks and Italians, all sitting side-by-side at tables and brushing shoulders on the dance floor. The owner of the bar, a dapper young Austrian, circulated among the partygoers each night, dispensing the latest London Sibs.
To carry on with his undercover operation, Walker had to maintain his cover as a Daily Mirror correspondent, and in this he was innocently aided by Time magazine naming him and quoting a report he had written about neutral countries having reason to worry about Hitler’s intentions. “Germany’s most dangerous secret agents are at work in Portugal,” Walker wrote. “One of them is an old enemy of mine. He is notorious and wears a monocle. I was personally depressed last night to see him in Lisbon. The last time I saw him was in … Bucharest, just before the occupation of Rumania, and in … Belgrade, before the attack on Yugoslavia.” Time commented that “such E. Phillips Oppenheimish apprehensions were commonplace realities last week among Europe’s chief neutrals.” By the spring of 1942 Walker was doing his newspaper work from an office in an area of Lisbon where few foreigners lived. The building also housed the office of a correspondent of the London Daily Herald, and on the ground floor was a printing operation, both adding to the picture that he was just another working journalist. He seemed all the more so when he began repo
rting for the Christian Science Monitor and the London Times as well as the Mirror. The Times position—a choice job since the paper was held in high regard throughout the Portuguese government—came about when its Lisbon man, W. E. Lucas, was expelled from Portugal and Walker was appointed acting correspondent.
While workaday activity as a journalist formed Walker’s Lisbon cover, so too did spending his free time blending into the background as a British expatriate—a task, as he later wrote, that “was certainly not arduous.” He found the Portuguese friendly, living costs cheap, and the Salazar dictatorship nothing to be greatly upset about. The contrasts between life in battered London and bountiful Lisbon caused him only passing pangs of conscience. On sunny days Lisbon seemed to him to rise away from the Tagus like a wedding cake, tier upon tier of beauty; at dusk it took on a rose coloring, and by moonlight it looked Athenian. “Despite all the poverty and squalor hidden by its superficial charms,” he noted, “the city was meticulously clean; and there were very few who did not fall under its easy-going, noisy, garrulous spell.” One day on a tennis court he met a woman recently arrived from London and fell under her spell. In May 1943 they married and spent their honeymoon on a farm near Caldas da Rainha—more evidence, if more was needed, that he was just another Brit comfortably at home in Portugal.
With the war elsewhere, the British community went about keeping up the national rituals of tennis and cricket at Ajuda, golf in Estoril, pink gins at the Royal British Club. They went native to the extent of eating octopus or dried cod done in various ways, drinking the country’s tart green wine, attending bullfights—in which, in the Portuguese manner, the bull was never killed in the ring—and in nightclubs listening to the mournful laments of fado (“the immensely sad songs of Portugal,” as Walker described them, “that had everybody weeping, except the English who could not understand them”). During cocktail parties in villas along the Sun Coast there would now and then come the distant sound of explosions at sea from bombs falling on convoys. “We were sitting on the edge of the war,” Walker recorded of life in Portugal, “with our feet dangling over the side.”
As Lisbon took on more diplomatic and intelligence-gathering importance, the British colony swelled. In addition to the ministerial staff, the embassy had three military attachés, a press office with a staff of forty, various departments engaged in economic warfare, and a large number of young women busily encoding and decoding the cable traffic between Lisbon and London. There were also staff members for the consulate and passport office as well as the British Institute, the British Council, and the British Red Cross. And there was always a flow of English transients traveling under false identities of a sort. Once the naval attaché introduced Walker to a Mr. Mountain, and the three went out on the town for drinks. Oddly for a wily secret agent and inquisitive newspaperman, weeks went by before Walker learned that Mr. Mountain was Louis Mountbatten.
As the war evolved with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Allied landings in North Africa, Walker and his collection of agents had better material to work with. With it now certain that the next stage of the war would be a direct assault on Europe, Sibs arrived from London at a rapid rate—and there were “mid-week specials,” as Walker called them, that were to be pushed immediately to aid some tactical military maneuver. Stories were planted about corruption within the German homeland, Hitler’s sanity, what foreign laborers in Germany might be doing behind the backs of the troops, America’s immense economic power, the lawless nature of Russian soldiers, and what to expect when Allied bombing went into high gear. As the Italian campaign progressed and attention shifted to the cross-Channel invasion of France, the SOE’s deception work in Lisbon and elsewhere pulled out all the stops in a major campaign to disguise the Normandy beaches as the landing site.
After the eventual breakthrough from the beaches and the Allied drive across France, Walker’s work in Lisbon was essentially over. London agreed he could replace a Daily Mirror correspondent who had been killed on
D-Day, and in the summer of 1944 he resigned from the London Times and the Christian Science Monitor and closed up his deception section of SOE operations in Portugal. His team of devoted workers—Walker resisted an impulse to have a group photograph taken as a souvenir—faded back into their other lives, and he left from Portela airfield for London. By autumn he was attached to the American Ninth Army on its way from Holland into Germany.
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American entry into the propaganda war with the formation of the Office of War Information (OWI) in June 1942, under the direction of the popular radio commentator Elmer Davis, had given Britain’s FPD both a powerful partner and fresh problems. The two propaganda organizations were closely and effectively linked but inevitable strains arose over aims and means. The Americans typically combined propaganda with political aims while the British tended to keep the two separate. And the Americans came with piles of money for the services of local workers and a seemingly endless supply of Hollywood films, which the British could only hope to match with better quality. The British generally felt that any major American propaganda venture within Portugal was wasteful duplication since the country was already pro-British. Still, Marcus Cheke reported to London that the Americans “appear to have ambitious plans” for Portugal, and he wondered whether “a major reduction in our propaganda services is now desirable on political grounds.”
A prickly conflict arose when the OWI provided radio equipment to the BBC in return for use of time slots on its European Service, with the result that broadcasts to Portugal were cut back and replaced with programming by Voice of America. A British official protested—the American offerings were said to be poorly designed and the announcing “unpleasant”—and after the State Department intervened the OWI agreed to follow the BBC’s wealth of experience in broadcast matters. The British were also annoyed with the sheer size of the American propaganda project. By the end of 1943 the OWI’s Overseas Branch, operating from a base in London, had some 300 workers in the city; soon after the Normandy landings the number ballooned to more than 2,500 people churning out publications, leaflets, films, and radio programs destined for the Continent.
For all its size, OWI London was only part of the American propaganda effort abroad. In 1943 a second organization appeared with the formation of the Office of Strategic Service’s Morale Operations Branch (MO), with a mission of vigorously pursuing black propaganda warfare against Germany. Modeled on Britain’s SOE, the MO came late to the war and was always a much smaller organization than that put together by the OWI. Yet during a brief existence from 1943 to 1945 its no-holds-barred approach to covert operations—as one historian described its achievements—“implemented campaigns of a scope and level of sophistication beyond any propaganda ever practiced by the Nazis.”
An early MO undertaking was a profile of Hitler written by Walter C. Langer, a Harvard psychologist who later became head of the OSS’s Research and Analysis Branch. It drew on interviews with such German exiles as Ernst Hanfstaengl and Otto Strasser and was meant to provide the basis for a sweeping rumor operation directed against the Führer. Set in motion by undercover agents, radio broadcasts, leaflets, forged documents and letters, black newspapers, and plants in genuine newspapers, such psychological ploys were a favored MO style of attack—and judged as hitting their target if they were repeated in other media as legitimate information or angrily denounced by Nazi officials. An example was the League of Lonely German Women, dreamed up by the MO to prey on the anxiety of soldiers about the behavior of the women they had left behind. A widely circulated leaflet told the troops to display a small red heart when they were on leave in restaurants or bars, the badge marking them for members of the League, all of whom were eager to lift morale by bestowing sexual favors. Stories about the leaflets subsequently showed up in American and other national publications, and numerous captured German troops carried with them both a leaflet and a red badge of hopeful encounters.
Radio was one of the MO B
ranch’s more effective means of spreading deceptive material. Among its varied efforts was cooperation with the British in running a station supposedly broadcasting from Calais, France, while actually transmitting from Woburn, England. As the station expanded its popular programming—so popular that the Germans repeatedly warned against tuning in, though it was said that Goebbels did so—of news, music, and propaganda aimed at civilians and enemy troops, the MO drew on the services of Hollywood writers, an orchestra, film stars like Marlene Dietrich, and singers from the New York Metropolitan Opera for its twelve-hour-a-day schedule. After the failed attempt to kill Hitler in July 1944, the station carried the names of those possibly involved in the plot, trying in the confusion of the moment to eliminate a wide spectrum of German leaders. Reports after the war showed that the Gestapo took an active interest in the names.
As British and American bombers began making regular appearances over Europe, so too the Continent was bombarded by Allied radio broadcasts, with the Voice of America bridging the Atlantic by having its shortwave broadcasts picked up in England and sent on by British transmitters. Only just before the Normandy invasion did the OWI install its own medium-frequency transmitters in England for American broadcasting directly into Europe. After Operation Torch, new stations were set up in North Africa to penetrate Europe by radio from the south. But from whatever angle broadcasters took, they were up against the obstacle of unrelenting German jamming—and the threat of arrest or worse for those in the Reich or occupied countries caught listening to programs that did get through. The extensive and costly jamming effort was considered evidence that Germany believed Allied radio was a vital wartime tool, a view corroborated after the war by a study showing that roughly half of German adults said they had heard foreign broadcasts.