Agent Zigzag

by Ben MacIntyre

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Ben Macintyre is a columnist and associate editor at the Times of London. He has worked as the newspaper’s correspondent in New York, Paris, and Washington, D.C. He now lives in London with his wife and three children. Agent Zigzag is his fifth book.

  Ben Macintyre returns with the untold story of the grand, final deception of World War II and of the extraordinary spies who achieved it.

  Available from Crown Publishers

  An Excerpt from Ben Macintyre’s

  New Book

  In the summer of 1943, a genteel and soft-spoken intelligence officer wearing tartan trousers and smoking a pipe put the finishing touches to a secret weapon he had been working on for more than three years. This weapon—unique in its power and unlimited in its range—was quite different from any built before or since. It was so shrouded in secrecy that its inventors were, for some time, unaware that they possessed it and unsure how to use it. This weapon did not kill or maim. It did not rely on science, engineering, or force. It did not destroy cities, sink U-boats, or pierce the armor of panzers. It did something far more subtle. Instead of killing the enemy, it could make the Nazis think what the British wanted them to think, and therefore do what the British wanted them to do.

  Tar Robertson of MI5 had built a weapon that could lie to Hitler, and at the most critical juncture of the Second World War he urged Winston Churchill to use it.

  Allied military planners were already working on plans for the great assault on Nazi-occupied Europe. The D-Day invasion, so long awaited, would decide the outcome of the war, and both sides knew it. If the Allies could sweep across the English Channel and smash through the massive German coastal defenses known as the Atlantic Wall, then the Nazis might be rolled back out of Paris, out of Brussels, and then across the Rhine all the way to Berlin. Hitler, however, was convinced that if the invaders could be successfully resisted in the early stages of an assault, even for one day, then the attack would fail; Allied morale would slump, and it would take many months before another invasion could be attempted. In that time, Hitler could concentrate on destroying the Red Army on the eastern front. The first twenty-four hours would be, in Erwin Rommel’s famous words, the “longest day”: how that day would end was far from certain.

  D-Day stands today as a monumental victory and, with hindsight, historically inevitable. It did not look that way in prospect. Amphibious assaults are among the most difficult operations in warfare. The Germans had constructed a “zone of death” along the coast more than five miles deep, a lethal obstacle course of barbed wire, concrete, and beaches sowed with six million mines. As Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, observed in a gloomy diary entry just before D-Day: “It may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war.”

  In war, no variable is more important, and less easy to control, than the element of surprise. If the Germans could be confused or, even better, actively misled as to where and when the landings would take place, then the odds of success improved dramatically. German forces in occupied France greatly outnumbered the invaders, but if they could be kept in the wrong place at the right time, then the numerical equation appeared less daunting. Conversely, if the Germans knew where the assault was coming, they would attack the invasion force at sea, as Rommel planned, and prevent the Allies from establishing a beachhead. By 1944, the war was claiming the lives of ten million people a year. If Hitler had correctly anticipated the site of the D-Day invasion, then the war might have been extended for an additional year, or two, or more, with an incalculable cost in bloodshed and misery. The stakes could not have been higher or the margin for error smaller.

  At the Tehran Conference in November 1943, the first of the “big three” meetings bringing together Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, the Allies laid plans for the invasion of Europe code-named “Operation Overlord,” which would take place in May 1944 (later delayed by a month), with General Dwight Eisenhower as supreme Allied commander and General Bernard Montgomery as Allied ground forces commander for the assault across the English Channel. During the conference, Winston Churchill turned to Joseph Stalin and uttered a typically Churchillian remark that has since become a sort of myth: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” Stalin, who had little time for literary metaphor, replied: “This is what we call military cunning.” The D-Day invasion would be protected and supported by a comprehensive, worldwide deception campaign, a body of lies to shield the truth: in a tip of the hat to Churchill’s remark, it was code-named “Bodyguard.”

  The central aim of Operation Bodyguard was to fool the Germans into believing the invasion was coming at a point where it was not, and that it was not coming in the place where it was. More than that, to ensure that those troops preparing to fight off the bogus invasion were not redeployed to repel the real one, the deception must be maintained after D-Day. Goliath could be cut down to size only if he didn’t know which direction David’s slingshot was coming from and was kept guessing. The target range for a cross-Channel invasion, however, was extremely narrow. The Germans were sure to spot the buildup of troops in Britain, and since the assault had to take place within fighter range, there were only a handful of suitable spots for a massed landing. In the words of one planner, it was “utterly impossible to disguise the fac
t that the major attack would come somewhere between the Cherbourg Peninsula and Dunkirk.”

  The most obvious target was the Pas de Calais in the northeast, the region nearest the British coast. Deepwater ports at Calais and Boulogne could easily be resupplied and reinforced once they were in Allied hands, and a bridgehead in Calais would offer the most direct route for a march on Paris and the German industrial heartland in the Ruhr. The logic of attacking Calais was not lost on German tacticians. Hitler himself identified Calais as the likeliest target: “It is here that the enemy must and will attack, and it is here—unless all the indications are misleading—that the decisive battle against the landing forces will be fought.” Hitler was fully alert to the possibility of being misled: he had been wrong-footed over the invasions of North Africa and Sicily. He would be far harder to dupe this time.

  By July 1943, Allied military planners had concluded that, “in spite of the obvious advantages of the Pas de Calais provided by its proximity to our coasts,” the coast of Normandy north of Caen represented a better target. The Normandy beaches were long, wide, and gently sloping, with suitable gaps in the dunes through which an invading force could spread quickly inland. The lack of a deepwater anchorage would be ingeniously solved by constructing vast artificial ports, code-named “Mulberry harbours.”

  The successful deception surrounding the Sicilian landings in 1943 had persuaded the Germans that the most likely target was not the real target. Now the aim was reversed: Hitler must be made to think that the most plausible target really was the target. If generals always fight the last battle, then this one might be won. Along the mighty 1,600-mile Atlantic wall, the brickwork was thinnest in Normandy. That was where the wrecking ball would hit. But in order to strike with maximum effect, the truth would need to be protected by a bodyguard of liars, which is precisely what Tar Robertson had created.

  Robertson and the small team of intelligence officers under his command specialized in turning German spies into double agents. This was the “Double Cross” system, coordinated by the intensely secret Twenty Committee, so named because the number twenty in Roman numerals, XX, forms a double cross. Hitherto these double agents—several dozen in number—had been used defensively: to catch more spies, obtain information about German military intelligence, and lull the enemy into believing he was running a large and efficient espionage network in Britain, when he was running nothing of the sort. In June 1943, Robertson reached the startling conclusion that every single German agent in Britain was actually under his control. Not some, not most, but all of them—which meant that Robertson’s team of double agents could now begin feeding the Germans not just snippets of falsehood but a gigantic, war-changing lie.

  The D-Day deception plot involved every branch of the secret war machine: scientists laid false trails, engineers built dummy tanks, radio operators put up a barrage of fake signals, and counterfeit generals led nonexistent armies toward targets that were never in danger. While the overall, global deception campaign was code-named “Bodyguard,” the plan specifically covering the cross-Channel invasion, the pivotal element in the deception, was named “Fortitude,” the quality most essential to its success. Operation Fortitude, the ruse to bottle up German troops in the Pas de Calais and keep them there, was an extraordinary collective effort, but at its core it depended on Robertson’s spies and a web of deception so intricate and strong that it would snare Hitler’s armies and help to carry thousands of soldiers across the Channel in safety.

  The military saga of D-Day has been described many times, and the role of Operation Fortitude in that victory, though long shrouded in secrecy, has slowly emerged since the war. But the story of the five spies who formed the nucleus of the Double Cross system, Robertson’s secret weapons, has never been fully told before. The spies themselves expected their story to remain hidden, as it would have had the Security Service (better known as MI5) not chosen, in recent years, to declassify its wartime intelligence files. Indeed, if their stories had been told at the time, no one would have believed them.

  For the D-Day spies were, without question, one of the oddest military units ever assembled. They included a bisexual Peruvian playgirl, a tiny Polish fighter pilot, a mercurial Frenchwoman, a Serbian seducer, and a deeply eccentric Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming. Together, under Robertson’s guidance, they delivered all the little lies that together made up the big lie. Their success depended on the delicate, dubious relationship between spy and spymasters, both German and British.

  This is a story of war, but it is also about the nuanced qualities of psychology, character, and personality, the thin line between fidelity and treachery, truth and falsehood, and the strange impulsion of the spy. The Double Cross spies were, variously, courageous, treacherous, capricious, greedy, and inspired. They were not obvious heroes, and their organization was betrayed from within by a Soviet spy. One was so obsessed with her pet dog that she came close to derailing the entire invasion. All were, to some extent, fantasists, for that is the very essence of espionage. Two were of dubious moral character. One was a triple, and possibly a quadruple, agent. For another, the game ended in torture, imprisonment, and death.

  All weapons, including secret ones, are liable to backfire. Robertson and his spies knew only too keenly that if their deception was found out, then rather than diverting attention from Normandy and tying up German troops in the Pas de Calais, they would lead the Germans to the truth, with catastrophic consequences. German troops could be redeployed from Calais to Normandy in a matter of days: every hour the deception held firm would be measured in thousands of lives saved; if it failed, the butcher’s bill would soar. As it was, D-Day was a damn close-run thing and a brutal struggle: Allied casualty rates averaged 6,674 a day for the seventy-seven days of the Normandy campaign. Those numbers would have been far higher had it not been for a small and most peculiar band of men and women fighting a secret battle.

  The D-Day spies were not traditional warriors. None carried weapons, yet the soldiers who did owed the spies a huge and unconscious debt as they stormed the beaches of Normandy in June 1944. These secret agents fought exclusively with words, drama, and make-believe. Their tales begin before the outbreak of war but then overlap, interconnect, and finally interlock on D-Day, in the greatest deception operation ever attempted. Their real names are a mouthful, a sort of European mélange that might have sprung from a period novel: Elvira Concepción Josefina de la Fuente Chaudoir, Roman Czerniawski, Lily Sergeyev, Dusko Popov, and Juan Pujol García. Their code names are blunter and, in each case, deliberately chosen: Bronx, Brutus, Treasure, Tricycle, and Garbo.

  This is their story.

  Dusko and Johnny were friends. Their friendship was founded on a shared appreciation of money, cars, parties, and women, in no particular order and preferably all at the same time. Their relationship, based almost entirely on frivolity, would have a profound impact on world history.

  Dusan “Dusko” Popov and Johann “Johnny” Jebsen met in 1936 at the University of Freiburg in southern Germany. Popov, the son of a wealthy Serbian industrialist from Dubrovnik, was twenty-five. Jebsen, the heir to a large shipping company, was two years older. Both were spoiled, charming, and feckless. Popov drove a BMW; Jebsen, a supercharged Mercedes 540K convertible. This inseparable pair of international playboys roistered around Freiburg, behaving badly. Popov was a law student, while Jebsen was taking an economics degree, the better to manage the family firm. Neither did any studying at all. “We both had some intellectual pretensions,” wrote Popov, but “[we were] addicted to sports cars and sporting girls and had enough money to keep them both running.”

  Popov had a round, open face, with hair brushed back from a high forehead. Opinion was divided on his looks: “He smiles freely showing all his teeth and in repose his face is not unpleasant, though certainly not handsome,” wrote one male contemporary. He had “a well-flattened, typically Slav nose, complexion sallow, broad shoulders, athletic carriage, but rather podg
y, white and well-kept hands,” which he waved in wild gesticulation. Women frequently found him irresistible, with his easy manners, “loose, sensual mouth,” and green eyes behind heavy lids. He had what were then known as “bedroom eyes”; indeed, the bedroom was his main focus of interest. Popov was an unstoppable womanizer. Jebsen cut a rather different figure. He was slight and thin, with dark blond hair, high cheekbones, and a turned-up nose. Where Popov was noisily gregarious, Jebsen was watchful. “His coldness, aloofness, could be forbidding, yet everyone was under his spell,” Popov wrote. “He had much warmth too, and his intelligence was reflected in his face, in the alertness of his steel-blue eyes. He spoke abruptly, in short phrases, hardly ever used an adjective and was, above all, ironic.” Jebsen walked with a limp and hinted that this was from an injury sustained in some wild escapade: in truth it was caused be the pain of varicose veins, to which he was a secret martyr. He loved to spin a story, to “deliberately stir up situations to see what would happen,” But he also liked to broker deals. When Popov was challenged to a sword duel over a girl, it was Jebsen, as his second, who quietly arranged a peaceful solution, to Popov’s relief, “not thinking my looks would be improved by a bright red cicatrix.”

  Jebsen’s parents, both dead by the time he arrived in Freiburg, had been born in Denmark but adopted German citizenship when the shipping firm Jebsen & Jebsen moved to Hamburg. Jebsen was born in that city in 1917 but liked to joke that he was really Danish, his German citizenship being a “flag of convenience” for business purposes: “Some of my love of my country has to do with so much of it actually belonging to me.” A rich, rootless orphan, Jebsen had visited Britain as a teenager and returned a committed Anglophile: he affected English manners, spoke English in preference to German, and dressed, he thought, “like a young Anthony Eden, conservatively elegant.” Popov remarked; “He would no more go without an umbrella than without this trousers.”