The Spy with 29 Names

by Jason Webster

  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.

  26

  Northern France, Southern Germany and Belgium, 6–9 June 1944

  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.

  News of the documents, and the intelligence they contained, moved higher up the chain of command and arrived at La Roche-Guyon early on the morning of 8 June. Rommel was delighted. Finally he had what he needed to get Hitler to release the Panzer divisions that he had been holding back the day before. This was it – Normandy was the real Second Front. There was just time to hit the Allies hard with everything the Wehrmacht had available.

  Von Rundstedt agreed, and quickly got on the phone to High Command in Berchtesgaden.

  There were doubters: General Blumentritt, von Rundstedt’s chief of staff, wondered if the documents might not be a plant. What if the Allies had deliberately left the papers on the officers for the Germans to find, in order to confuse them? It would not have been the first time they had carried out such a stunt . . .

  Rommel was adamant, though. The Normandy landings were strategic, no mere diversion. There was not a moment to lose.

  High Command took von Rundstedt’s request to Hitler, who by now had seen copies of the documents found on the US officers. He did not reply immediately, but when the call came back the news was good: the Führer agreed.

  The Panzer divisions were now in Rommel and von Rundstedt’s hands. They wasted no time.

  As Allied soldiers on the ground were painfully discovering, the 21st Panzer, Panzer Lehr and 12th SS Panzer Hitler Youth divisions were already in Normandy, doing all they could to halt their advance. To their number were now to be added 2nd Panzer, 116 Panzer, and the 2nd SS Panzer Division, driving up from their base in Toulouse.

  Not only that, Hitler had ordered that his best fighting unit, the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler (LAH), which was now stationed in Belgium, should attack as well.

  It was known as ‘Case Three’ – the Allies’ nightmare scenario in which all the Germans’ available armoured reserves were sent into Normandy to crush the invasion. This was now happening. Almost as soon as it had begun, Operation Overlord was in danger of being snuffed out.

  In Hasselt, northern Flanders, the waiting was over. After months of refitting, training his new recruits and rebuilding his Panzer regiment into a fearsome fighting unit, Jochen Peiper was ready to go. The nights spent reading quietly in quasi-monastic abstinence while his fellow officers went out drinking and cavorting with the local girls had ended.

  The LAH was put on alert, and during the night of 8–9 June the SS men prepared for the order to move out at first light, readying their combat and supply vehicles for the journey across northern France to the battle zone.

  The division itself now numbered around 20,000 men, of whom 12,000 were considered to be ‘bayonet’, or combat, forces. Peiper’s regiment had already been equipped with over sixty tanks – including the deadly Panthers – and more were on the way. Under the command of Teddy Wisch, the LAH was a crack force, battle-hardened from its brutal experiences on the Eastern Front.

  As dawn broke on 9 June, the first tanks and armoured cars fired up, and the LAH started moving out.

  Jochen Peiper was on his way to Normandy.

  PART SEVEN

  ‘We must be practical. The important bee to deceive is the Queen Bee. Can you see which is the Queen Bee from down there?’

  A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

  27

  London, 9 June 1944

  IT WAS HARRIS’S idea to wait until the Germans had actually started sending their armoured reserves into Normandy before making a move. That way, he argued, if they could be made to turn around, German High Command was less likely to change its mind again in a hurry, and as a result they would keep the dangerous SS Panzer divisions away from the Allied troops for longer.

  It was a good theory. But would it work?

  Some of the deception planners in MI5, SHAEF and the London Controlling Section had their doubts. What if the Germans did not fall for the idea of a second landing in the Pas-de-Calais? What if, once the tanks and heavy weaponry had set off on their journey towards Normandy, they could not be stopped? Surely it would be better to prevent them from moving out in the first place?

  It was a huge risk, and everything hung in the balance. Sufficient evidence to give Harris’s plan the green light eventually came from an unusual source, however.

  On 27 May, the Japanese Ambassador to Berlin, Baron Hiroshi Ōshima, had met Hitler at Berchtesgaden. A fluent German speaker, Ōshima was a lieutenant-general in the Japanese Imperial Army and had become a confidant of the Führer over the course of his postings to the Third Reich
. Ōshima was an avid supporter of Nazism, and he diligently reported back to Tokyo every conversation and observation as he toured Germany and the occupied countries. Thanks to his keen military eye, these even included troop positions and movements. What Ōshima did not know – and up to his death in 1975 he remained ignorant of this – was that his communications with the Japanese government were being tapped and deciphered by the Americans in a project known as ‘Magic’. So good was the intelligence that he unwittingly passed over to the enemy that US General George C. Marshall declared after the war that Ōshima had been ‘our main basis of information regarding Hitler’s intentions in Europe’.

  The US decrypts were being shared with the British, and it was thanks to the reported conversation that Ōshima had with Hitler just over a week before the Allied invasion of France that the deceivers in London were able to see with their own eyes that Harris’s idea had a chance of success.

  The seeds of Fortitude, it appeared, had fallen on fertile ground.

  Speaking of the Second Front, [Ōshima told Tokyo in his 27 May report] Hitler said that he, himself, thought that sooner or later operations for the invasion of Europe would be undertaken. He thought that about eighty divisions had already been assembled in England . . .

  There were in fact only forty-seven.

  Ōshima continued:

  I then asked him in what form he thought the Second Front would materialise, and he told me that at the moment what he himself thought was most probable was that after having carried out diversionary operations in Norway, Denmark and the southern part of the west coast of France and the French Mediterranean coast, they would establish a bridgehead in Normandy or Brittany, and after seeing how things went would then embark upon the establishment of the real Second Front in the channel.