The Spy with 29 Names

by Jason Webster

  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 Ōshima 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.

  The text came complete with an evaluation from German intelligence in Zossen:

  The report is credible. The reports received in the last week from the Arabal undertaking have been confirmed without exception and are to be described as especially valuable. The main line of investigation in future is to be the enemy group of forces in South-Eastern and Eastern England.

  Had Harris and Pujol been able to read the assessment of their message at this moment, and the high esteem in which Garbo was now held by the Germans, they might well have danced for joy.

  As it was, Krummacher underlined the passage in the text about a ‘diversionary manoeuvre designed to draw off enemy reserves in order to make a decisive attack in another place’. He then wrote his own comment at the bottom: ‘Confirms the view already held by us that a further attack is to be expected in another place (Belgium?)’

  The midnight conference was approaching. Krummacher showed Garbo’s message to Jodl, who underlined the words ‘in South-East and Eastern England’, and then took it in to show Hitler.

  It was precisely what the Führer needed to see. Reading Garbo’s actual words put paid to his earlier indecisiveness. There were other reports as well that added to its impact – that US General Marshall was soon to be visiting Patton’s FUSAG HQ, while a message to the Belgian resistance had been decrypted on the 8th which called for guerrilla action to start the following day.

  It all pointed to the Pas-de-Calais area, where Hitler’s superior fighters – the LAH – had been stationed only the day before, and from which he himself had ordered them away.

  There was still time. They could be turned back. He needed his best troops in the right place to receive the most threatening Allied forces – Patton and his FUSAG poised just over the Channel for a second assault.

  Garbo’s message, straight from London, had tipped the balance and given Hitler the evidence he needed to reach his decision. He issued new orders immediately.

  Keitel telephoned through to von Rundstedt in France. The next morning, at 0730 on 10 June, von Rundstedt issued the following message:

  As a consequence of certain information, C-in-C West has declared a ‘state of alarm II’ for the 15th Army in Belgium and North France. The move of 1st SS Panzer Division will therefore be halted.

  Jochen Peiper and the tanks of the LAH were on the road. Now news came through that they had to change direction. Not to Normandy after all, but to the area just east of Bruges, behind the infantry of the German 15th Army, where a second, bigger and more important Allied invasion was expected at any moment.

  Following their orders to the letter, they halted and turned around as quickly as possible to head to their new posting.

  They were the right men for the job: ruthless vanquishers of the Reds on the Eastern Front, equipped with the best tanks in the world, lovers of fighting for its own sake and with a cause they were prepared to die for. They could take on the best that General Patton could throw at them and hurl the Allies back into the Channel.

  Within hours, the new orders had been carried out, and the LAH took up its defensive positions around the Scheldt River.

  Settling down in his new command post, Peiper kept his eyes trained on the horizon, and waited.

  29

  London, 10 June 1944

  IN LONDON, MILITARY commanders, politicians and deception planners waited nervously to see if their great hoax had worked. A whole community of men and women working in numerous departments now sat on their hands, watching for news that their top double agent’s ploy had paid off.

  Over the next few hours the Bletchley decrypts would tell them whether it had been a success or a failure. Would Hitler’s order for the Panzer units to move into Normandy – the ‘Case Three’ scenario – remain in force, or would the Führer’s mind be changed?

  Ronald Wingate of the London Controlling Section was there, an eyewitness at government offices in Whitehall, where US and British chiefs of staff wandered around in an atmosphere ‘heavy with tension and pipe and cigarette smoke combined with a faint aroma of good whisky’.

  Their card had been played, yet still, according to their information, the Panzer divisions were moving towards the Allied landing areas.

  ‘It was a frightful moment – there were these big red blobs on the war maps moving towards Normandy all the time . . . Would the [German] tanks have to come round through Paris . . .? Ought we not to bomb the bridges over the Seine in Paris? Had Garbo overplayed his hand?’

  At that moment, the secretary who looked after the Bletchley reports knocked on the
door and came in, saying that a message had just been received that might interest them. The British and US chiefs of staff, General Sir Alan Brooke and General George Marshall, were the first to go over and have a look.

  ‘They were all smiles,’ Wingate remembered. ‘We looked at the Ultra – and there it was: Hitler had cancelled Case Three. We’d won, and what an astonishing moment that was! We knew then that we’d won – there might be very heavy battles, but we’d won.

  ‘There was nobody more astonished than Bevan [head of the London Controlling Section], for I don’t think he thought that we’d really pull it off. Brooke’s attitude was the oddest. He said if Hitler was such a bloody fool why had it taken us so long to beat him? Then he stalked off.

  ‘The P.M. came in with [head of MI6] Stewart Menzies and the P.M. said this was the crowning achievement of the long and glorious history of the British Secret Service – or something like that.’

  Harris and Pujol’s gamble appeared to have worked. From being on the brink of suffering a head-on assault from the Führer’s fiercest troops, the Allied forces had won crucial breathing space in which to reinforce their positions. Soon they could start pushing from the beachheads deeper into the Normandy countryside. The battle of the numbers – who could get the most men and armour into the combat zone the quickest – was close to being won. Not only had the 1st SS Panzer Division been turned around, but the 116th Panzer Division, which had also been heading for Normandy from the Paris area, had also been rerouted to the Somme. In total seven German divisions which might have descended on the Allies were moved to or kept in the Pas-de-Calais instead.

  There was much work still to be done, but no one on the Allied side could have been happier. The most fulsome praise for Garbo’s achievement, however, came from the Germans themselves. A few days later Bletchley Park intercepted a message from the FHW assessors in Zussen to Kühlenthal in Madrid repeating the endorsement they had written on the back of of the Garbo message that had reached Hitler.

  The report is credible. The reports received in the last week from the Arabal undertaking have been confirmed almost without exception and are to be described as especially valuable . . .

  The most important sign that the Germans were pleased with Garbo’s work came from none other than Himmler himself. Georg Hansen, now acting as head of German intelligence after the removal of Canaris, sent a message to Kühlenthal expressing appreciation in the name of the SS chief for the work of the Arabal network in England, urging that further intelligence should try to ascertain when the embarkation of Allied troops in the south-east began and what their destination was.

  Not only had the Germans fallen for Garbo’s trick, they were also applauding his accuracy and usefulness.

  Everything had fallen into place. Now all Harris and Pujol had to do was continue telling the story that had diverted the best German troops away from the Allied forces and keep the deception running for as long as possible.

  They had pulled off a tremendous coup, yet much heavy and bloody fighting through the Normandy countryside lay ahead. The casualty figures on both sides were becoming comparable with those on the Eastern Front. The battle was far from over and the Panzer forces still had to be held in check.

  At this very moment, though, when things were going so well, Hitler launched his much-feared secret weapons on London. As a result, the Garbo operation was thrown into a new crisis which threatened to blow Pujol’s cover . . . and destroy everything.

  30

  London, 13 June–29 July 1944

  THOSE WHO HEARD it said it sounded like a motorbike with the silencer removed, or an old steam train struggling to climb a hill. It was early in the morning on 13 June. Without warning the strange noise in the sky stopped and there was silence. A few seconds later came a loud explosion.

  When the first V-1 flying bomb hit London, crashing into the East End where the Great Eastern Railway crosses over Grove Road, six people were killed, a further nine were wounded, and some two hundred lost their homes.

  The Germans called them Vergeltungswaffen – ‘vengeance’ or ‘retaliatory weapons’ for the Allied bombing of their cities. Londoners quickly dubbed them ‘doodlebugs’. Over the course of the summer as many as a hundred rained down every day causing over 20,000 deaths, almost all of them civilians.

  There had been rumours of a new German weapon since the summer of 1943. In September of that year a Swedish journalist wrote an article in the Telegraph about a German ‘rocket gun’ being established on the French coast with which to bombard the British capital. In the same month Tricycle had brought intelligence warning of the same. Pujol and Harris were instructed to try to find out as much as they could from the Germans about the terrifying new weapon, but Kühlenthal remained silent.

  Then, in mid-December 1943, Kühlenthal told Garbo that he should leave London.

  Circumstances dictate that you should carry out your propositions with regard to setting up your home outside the capital. This warning is strictly confidential for you . . .

  It was a clear warning that the new rocket or gun, or whatever it turned out to be, was soon to enter into operation.

  Again, Harris and Pujol tried to find out when the attacks might begin, trying to force Kühlenthal, through a complicated story involving the radio operator and setting up a new transmitter, to give the game away, but to no avail.

  Pujol and Harris were already in Taplow and Earl’s Court. The Pujols stayed at the Amerden Priory Hotel, run by a couple from Valencia, the Terradas. Another guest was the Spanish vice-consul, to whom Pujol repeated his cover story that he was working in the Spanish section of the BBC. A Czech couple were also there, along with a Jewish woman with red hair who asked Pujol to give her Spanish lessons. In the evenings the guests would hold small parties, with Pujol showing off his paso dobles and foxtrots, of which he was rather proud.

  Since the showdown of the previous summer, Araceli had been causing fewer problems for MI5, but the threat of a new, unspecified German weapon about to target London could play on her already fraught nerves. Still, by this point Harris and Robertson trusted her to keep her husband’s secret; no one vetoed her being so close to a high-ranking member of the Spanish Embassy, especially in the months leading up to D-Day and the great deception. Pujol himself, one assumes, gave assurances that she could be trusted.

  On 6 January, Garbo informed Kühlenthal that he had moved. Over the rest of the winter and into the spring, Pujol and Harris tried again without success to get Kühlenthal to tell them what was to come – and when.

  In May Bletchley Park deciphered a message from Berlin referring to questionnaires that Madrid was about to receive with the prefix ‘Stichling’ (‘stickleback’). No one at the time knew exactly what this referred to, but the Berlin–Madrid traffic was put on priority watch for any sign of a Stichling message.

  Eventually one came through, on 16 June, three days after the first V-1 bombs had landed on London. From Madrid, Kühlenthal passed the Berlin message on to his top agent.

  It is of the utmost importance to inform us about the effects of the bombardments. We are not interested in partial details but wish you to communicate results as follows: Take as your basis a plan of London by the publishers ‘Pharus’ which I suppose you have in your possession and indicate how many targets or missiles have fallen in the determined squares on the plan, defining these by their ‘ordinates’ and ‘co-ordinates’ and the approximate hour.

  A couple of days later, living in terror of the new unmanned weapons, Pujol stayed in character and replied with pro-Nazi enthusiasm:

  I am proud that you have been able to try out this fantastic reprisal weapon, the creation of German genius. Although I have not seen the apparatus in flight personally, from what I have heard it must be an object of marvel and when the present trials have finished and when the scale on which it is used is increased I am certain that you will have managed to terrify this very pusillanimous people who will never admit that they
are beaten.

  As a Nazi spy – Alaric, head of the Arabal network – it was what he might be expected to say. As a double agent working for the British, however, he was in trouble. Through the press reports picked up via neutral diplomatic missions, the Germans would eventually discover where their flying bombs were landing. They were clearly asking Garbo to give them as accurate information as possible so that they could fine-tune their range and direction.

  If Garbo gave them what they wanted, he was helping the enemy and putting the lives of thousands at risk. Yet if he sent back false information the Germans would eventually realise, by cross-checking with the newspapers, that his reports were wrong and hence begin to question him as a source.

  It was paramount to keep up pretences, not to blow his cover. The success of the continuation of Fortitude depended on it. But to do so at the cost of so many people, almost all of them civilians?

  The Garbo operation was in a fix.

  For the time being, they tried to stall a little, continuing with reports on troop movements, maintaining the threat to the Pas-de-Calais area. There was a real problem, however, with the German instructions: no one could find a copy of the Pharus map of London anywhere. Eventually one was tracked down in the British Library; it turned out to be from before the First World War and had been out of print in Britain since 1908. German intelligence, it turned out, had been basing all its information on London on a map that was entirely out of date.

  Garbo eventually told Kühlenthal that it was unobtainable, asking whether he could use the Stanford map instead. Kühlenthal agreed, telling Garbo to pinpoint Tower Bridge, Wandsworth Bridge and Gospel Oak station on the Stanford map so as to be able to locate them on the Pharus edition and cross-refer between the two.

  It was now 22 June and Garbo had managed to pass a few days without giving over important information on the doodlebugs, but he could not stall for ever. On the same day he gave a half-hearted report about flying bombs landing in Bayswater Road, Hyde Park and other areas of the city, without specifying at what time they had hit.