Ike's Spies

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  To accomplish this seemingly impossible objective, Ike was fortunate to have working for him the best spies in the world, the men and women of the British Secret Service. While the American factories produced landing craft to carry the troops across the Channel, the British intelligentsia completely fooled the Germans as to where those landing craft would come ashore. British brains and American brawn made OVERLORD a smashing success. How it was done makes a remarkable story.

  IT BEGAN, for Ike, with his arrival in London late on January 15, 1944, to assume command of the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). On Marshall’s orders, he had left the Mediterranean two weeks earlier and taken a short vacation with his wife, Mamie, at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. His movements had been kept secret from the press and public, and a heavy security blanket had been laid on for his arrival in London. When he got there, fortunately, a London pea-souper took care of security. Two men had to lead the way for Ike’s car and they got lost in the distance between curb, car, and the front door of 20 Grosvenor Square.3

  Eisenhower had returned to his old headquarters of the summer of 1942. Only the most senior government and military officials in Britain knew that he was there, and it was nearly a week before a public announcement was made. But almost as soon as he arrived, a German spy, code name Tate, managed to send a radio report to his controller in Hamburg that the new supreme commander had taken up his duties in London. It was an intelligence coup of the first magnitude.4

  Tate received his information from General Stewart Menzies, head of the British Secret Service. A few days later Menzies explained to Eisenhower why it was that the Abwehr, the intelligence arm of the German General Staff, was told of his arrival and new command when the information was kept secret from the British and American people. Ike listened, incredulous, as Menzies outlined for him the activities of the London Controlling Section and the workings of the Double-Cross System.

  Section BI-A, the counterespionage arm of MI-5, the British internal security agency, had located every German spy in the British Isles. Each had been evaluated by Sir John Masterman, former university don and avid cricketer, who served during the war as head of BI-A. If Masterman thought the man unsuitable for any reason, he was either executed or imprisoned. The rest were “turned,” that is, made into double-agents. They continued to report by radio to the Abwehr, but only under the direct supervision of their controllers, who were BI-A agents. The queries the spies received from Berlin, along with ULTRA intercepts, provided a constant feedback and check on how well the Double-Cross System was functioning. As Masterman later claimed, correctly, “For the greater part of the war we did much more than practise a large-scale deception through double agents: by means of the double-agent system we actively ran and controlled the German espionage system in this country.”5

  Tate was only one of more than a dozen double-agents under Masterman’s control, but he was typical enough. He had landed by parachute in September 1940, been picked up almost immediately, broke down under interrogation, and agreed to work for the British (his alternative was a firing squad). He transmitted and received messages to and from Hamburg from October 1940 until the day the Allies overran Hamburg in May 1945. The Abwehr sent him large sums of money (he kept demanding more) and awarded him the Iron Cross, First and Second Class. Meanwhile he merged with the British public, working as a newspaper photographer, and even managed to get himself on the voting rolls, which in 1945 gave him an opportunity of voting for or against Mr. Churchill. Regrettably, Masterman would not allow him to exercise that privilege.

  Menzies told Ike that from the moment the Double-Cross System came into being, the British had decided to aim it exclusively toward that moment when the Allies returned to France. In the dark days of 1940, control of German spies and ULTRA were the two most precious possessions the British held, and they did not intend to squander them for short-term gains. Displaying impressive patience, the British had not used the spies for purposes of deceiving the Germans, only controlling what information they got. Even more impressive, the BI-A risked providing the Abwehr with authentic information via the spies, information that would not otherwise have been available to the enemy. The London Controlling Section (LCS), a branch of the Joint Planning Staff (of the British Chiefs of Staff), was responsible for the devising and coordinating strategic cover and deceptions schemes. It made the decision as to what information to give to the Germans.

  It was a complex game. What the British told the Germans through the turned agents had to be authentic, new, and interesting, but either relatively unimportant or something that the Germans were bound to discover in any case. The idea was to make the agent trustworthy and valuable in the eyes of the Germans, so that when the supreme moment came, on D-Day, the agents could be used to deceive the enemy into thinking the attack was coming someplace other than the actual site. As Masterman wrote in 1972, in his book The Double-Cross System, “We always expected that at some one moment all the agents would be recklessly and gladly blown sky high in carrying out the grand deception, and that this one great coup would both repay us many times over for all the efforts of the previous years and bring our work to an end.”6

  Double-agents, even triple-agents, are as old as war itself, but never before had all the spies in one country been turned. Ike grinned as Menzies sketched out to him some of the possibilities for deception, and nodded his understanding as Menzies explained that the supersecurity surrounding Ike’s movements the past couple of weeks, and Tate’s message to his controller in Hamburg on Ike’s appointment to the supreme command and his arrival in London, were an integral, although small, part of the scheme. Masterman wanted Berlin to think that Tate had high-level contacts inside SHAEF itself, and giving Hamburg a scoop on Eisenhower’s appearance in London was exactly the kind of information the British liked to give the Germans. It was exciting news, it made Tate (and his controller) look good, it gave the Germans something to gossip about, but it was, in the end, of no real military value.

  So, when Eisenhower took up his post, he got not only the British Army, Navy, and Air Force to help him accomplish his objective, but the use of every German spy in Britain.

  THE QUESTION WAS, how to use this invaluable asset to deceive the Germans. Before this query could be answered, the Allies had first of all to decide where and when and in what strength they were going to land, what other means of deception were available to them, and how these means could be used.

  The whole plan had to be internally consistent, a unified and believable operation. The Allies could hardly hope to make the Germans believe that the assault was not coming in 1944—all the world knew that it was—or that it would come ashore far from the actual site, because it was a relatively simple matter for German intelligence to figure out the maximum distance at which fighter airplane cover could be supplied, and thus define the limits of possible invasion sites. Further, the Germans had good military sense and, for a variety of fairly obvious reasons, they knew that the attack would come somewhere between the Cotentin Peninsula and Dunkirk.

  Ike had long ago selected Normandy as the site. Back in 1942, before the decision to invade North Africa had been made, Eisenhower had been planning a cross-Channel attack for 1943. At that time he chose Normandy as the target for numerous reasons—the proximity of the port of Cherbourg for unloading purposes, the narrowness of the Cotentin Peninsula, the nature of the terrain, and the access to the major road network at Caen—but the major factor had been surprise. For all Normandy’s advantages, the Pas de Calais had even more. It seemed the obvious target—it was close to Antwerp, Europe’s best port, and closer to Germany and to the British home base, and inland the terrain was good—but precisely because it was so obvious, the Germans had their strongest defenses there. That eliminated the Pas de Calais as a target, as far as Ike was concerned, a decision that remained in force when he took command of the cross-Channel operation again in January 1944.

  The aim of OVER
LORD was to get ashore and stay. Once a solid beachhead was established, the war was as good as won because American productivity would overwhelm the Germans. But landing craft, always short because they were so badly needed in the Pacific as well as in the Atlantic Theater, were sufficient to lift only five divisions to France on D-Day. The follow-up capacity was also limited, painfully so.

  To get ashore, Ike absolutely had to fool the Germans into believing that he was landing somewhere other than Normandy; to stay ashore, he needed to fool them into believing that OVERLORD was a feint. Otherwise, the Germans would draw on their nearly ten-to-one manpower and armored superiority in France to mount a counterattack of such proportions as surely to drive the Allies back into the sea whence they came. The air forces could help keep the Germans away from Normandy by blowing up bridges and railroad facilities, but by themselves the Allied planes could not keep panzer divisions immobilized. Only a successful deception could do that.

  Fooling the Germans would not be easy—the Germans themselves were experts at deception. At the beginning of 1942 they had mounted one of the more elaborate and successful operations of World War II, Operation Kreml. Its objective was to make the Russians think that the main German offensive for 1942 would take place on the Moscow front, not at Stalingrad. As Earl Ziemke writes, Kreml “was a paper operation, an out-and-out deception, but it had the substance to make it a masterpiece of that highly speculative form of military art.” To make it appear real, the German High Command did not inform division commanders and their staffs that it was a phony, depending on the skill of Soviet intelligence officers to pick up hints and find the pieces to fit together into a picture. They used false radio traffic to manufacture dummy armies that supposedly threatened Moscow.

  The Germans were successful, probably even more successful than they themselves realized, in an operation that in most of its essentials was similar to FORTITUDE (code name for the OVERLORD deception plan). In fact, Kreml was exactly like FORTITUDE in one especially crucial aspect—both aimed to make the enemy believe the attack would come at the most logical spot. That is, in the spring of 1942, Moscow was a more sensible target than Stalingrad, just as in 1944 the Pas de Calais was a more sensible target than Normandy.7

  The Pas de Calais was the obvious choice for the false target for Normandy because the Germans were already inclined to believe that it would be the landing site. The task was to reinforce that belief, strengthen it, harden it until it became a dogma with both Hitler and the German General Staff. Geography reinforced Ike’s choice of Normandy, with the Pas de Calais as the feint, because Hitler would not keep troops in Normandy following major landings at the Pas de Calais for fear of their being cut off from Germany. But he might be persuaded to keep troops in the Pas de Calais after a landing in Normandy, for they would still be between the Allied forces and Germany.

  The execution of FORTITUDE involved thousands of men and women in dozens of distinct tasks and roles, FORTITUDE included dummy armies, fake radio traffic, false spy reports, and elaborate security precautions. It was a joint venture, with British and American officers working together in complete harmony. In terms of the time, resources, and energy devoted to it, FORTITUDE was unique in the history of warfare—never before had any commander gone to such lengths or expense to deceive his enemy.

  The British and American governments had given Ike tremendous resources to draw upon. This vast force needed a single guiding head. Someone had to give it direction; someone had to take all the information gathered, make sense of it, and impose order on it; someone had to maintain a grip on all the various acts of subterfuge going on at once; someone had to decide; someone had to take the responsibility.

  It all came down to Eisenhower. This put enormous pressure on him, pressure that increased geometrically with each passing day. “Ike looks worn and tired,” Butcher noted on May 12. “The strain is telling on him. He looks older now than at any time since I have been with him.”8

  Under the weight of his responsibilities, the number of cigarettes he smoked went up, to an average of eighty Camels daily while his hours of sleep went down, to an average of not much more than four hours per night. But Ike could take it.

  He enjoyed attacking the problems posed by FORTITUDE. “I like all this,” he scribbled along the margin of one set of proposals for deception.9 Obviously he did not himself initiate the specific programs, but he had to approve them all, make sure they were coordinated, and order the time of execution.

  General Harold R. Bull, head of the Operations Division (G-3) at SHAEF, exercised day-to-day control of the deception plan. He worked closely with the LCS and its American counterpart, the Joint Security Control (JSC). LCS and JSC were the organizations responsible to Ike’s bosses, the Combined Chiefs, for devising and coordinating strategic cover and deception schemes. The one they came up with for OVERLORD was complex, wide-ranging, and dangerously ambitious.

  Operation FORTITUDE, as Ike approved it, was designed to make the Germans think that the invasion would begin with an attack on southern Norway, launched from Scottish ports in mid-July, with the main assault coming later against the Pas de Calais. The attack on Norway would be the responsibility of a nonexistent British “Fourth Army,” while the wholly imaginary First United States Army Group (FUSAG) would make the landings at the Pas de Calais. There were other elements to FORTITUDE, designed to pose threats to the Biscay coast and the Marseilles region, to keep Hitler worried about possible landings in the Balkans, and in general to distract German attention away from Normandy, but Norway and the Pas de Calais were the big operations.

  FORTITUDE built on German preconceptions. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, commanding German forces in the West, agreed with Hitler that the invasion would come “across the narrower part of the Channel,” for such obvious reasons as shorter distance, which would reduce ships’ and planes’ transit time, closeness to the Ruhr and the Rhine, the heart of the German industrial system, and because the V-1 missile-launching sites were located near the Pas de Calais. Rundstedt felt that the Allies might make diversionary landings elsewhere, but the Pas de Calais was the certain site of the main attack.10

  To get the Germans to look north, toward Norway, instead of south, toward Normandy, for the diversionary attack, the Allies had first of all to convince their enemies that they had sufficient strength to carry out such a diversion. The task was doubly difficult because of Ike’s acute shortage of landing craft—it was touch and go as to whether there would be enough lift capacity to carry five divisions ashore at Normandy alone. Ike had been forced to put the target date for OVERLORD back from early May to early June, in order to have another month’s production of landing craft on hand for the assault, and the Combined Chiefs had been forced to cancel a simultaneous landing in the South of France because there were no landing craft available. Ike, in short, had neither the men nor the landing craft to make a diversion.

  To make the Germans believe the opposite, the Allies had to create fictitious divisions, on a grand scale. This was done chiefly by radio signals. There is a delicious irony here. The Germans thought that with Enigma they had the best encoding machine for radio signals in the world. They also believed that they were the best in intercepting and decoding the enemies’ signals. They were right about both conceits, but drew the wrong conclusions. As much as any other factor, these two beliefs caused the German defeat.

  The British Fourth Army, scheduled to invade Norway in mid-July, existed only on the airwaves, but that did not mean that its creation was a simple matter of sending out a few random messages. The Allies had to fill the air with an exact duplicate of the real wireless traffic that accompanied the assembly of an army, some of it in cipher, some in the clear. Colonel R. M. MacLeod was in command of the operation. He was told in his briefing, “The Germans are damn good at interception and radio-location. They’ll have your headquarters pinpointed with a maximum error of five miles. And it won’t take them more than a few hours to do so. What is
more they’ll be able to identify the grade of the headquarters—whether army, divisions, corps, or what not—from the nature of the traffic and the sets being used.”11

  Twenty overage officers were involved at army headquarters in Edinburgh Castle; fake corps and division headquarters were scattered across Scotland. Through the spring of 1944, they exchanged messages: “80 Div. requests 1800 pairs of crampons, 1800 pairs of ski bindings …” “2 Corps Car Company requires handbooks on engine functioning in low temperatures and high altitudes.” “7 Corps requests the promised demonstrators in the Bilgeri method of climbing rock faces …”12

  Other elements in the deception involved planting stories in Scottish newspapers, such as reports on “4th Army football matches,” or BBC programs like “a day with the 7th Corps in the field.” German spies in Scotland, operating under the close supervision of their British controllers, sent messages to Hamburg and Berlin about the heavy train traffic, new division patches seen on the streets, and rumors among the troops about going to Norway. Wooden twin-engined “bombers” appeared on Scottish airfields. British commandos made a series of raids on the coast of Norway, designed to look like preinvasion tactics.13

  ULTRA provided feedback, letting the Allies know what the Germans swallowed and what they rejected. It showed that Hitler had taken the bait. He not only kept his garrison troops in Norway, he reinforced them. By late spring, he had thirteen army divisions stationed there, along with 90,000 naval and 60,000 air personnel, including one panzer division.14 This was more than double the force Germany needed in Norway for occupation duties. It was a major triumph for the Allies—a maximum return on a minuscule investment.