Double Cross

by Ben MacIntyre

  The deception plan was divided in two: Fortitude North was the fake threat to Norway; Fortitude South would pose and maintain the threat to the Pas de Calais. In order for the plan to work, the Germans must be made to expect three separate invasions—a feint in Normandy and two major landings in Norway and the Pas de Calais—and therein lay a major hurdle. There were simply not enough soldiers in Britain to do what the planners wanted the Germans to believe they were about to do, so they invented them. It was Strangeways who came up with the idea of inventing an entire army in southeast England, poised to invade the northeast coast of France. This ghost army, supposedly stationed directly across the Channel from the Pas de Calais, was dubbed the First United States Army Group, or FUSAG. Another fake force, the British Fourth Army, would be created in Scotland to keep German minds focused on a threat to Norway. These counterfeit armies would threaten bogus targets while living soldiers prepared to attack the real target, in Normandy.

  Masterman was itching for the game to start. “We had always expected,” he wrote, “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 bring our work to an end.” There were voices of caution, and some of skepticism, including the British army representative on the Twenty Committee, who insisted that “the German General Staff will not move a single German division on an agent’s report alone.” Unless, of course, they discovered the agent was a double agent and the division was then moved in precisely the wrong direction. “An agent who turned out not to be believed by the enemy might wreck the whole enterprise, or, even worse, his messages might be read ‘in reverse’ and the true target of the attack be exposed instead of revealed.” There was every possibility the plan could backfire disastrously.

  Churchill and Roosevelt were kept fully apprised of the roles planned for the double agents in the deception, as was Stalin, both officially and secretly. The NKVD mole Anthony Blunt, now promoted to major, was still burrowing deep into British intelligence, digging up every scrap of secret information he could find and shipping it all to Moscow. “I have managed to get myself in touch with Robertson who runs the double agents,” he told his Soviet handlers. “In this way I can usually get an idea of what is actually planned and what is being put across as cover.” If there was an equivalent German mole within Soviet intelligence, then the entire deception would be blown. Or it might have been, had it not been for the paranoia ingrained into Soviet officialdom. Moscow did not believe what Blunt was telling them, because it was too good to be true. Having discovered that Britain was practicing an intricate double-cross operation on the Germans, the Soviets convinced themselves that they, too, must be victims of such a deception. According to the warped logic of the NKVD, the Cambridge Five (Blunt, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and John Cairncross) were sending such high-grade information that they must be double agents sending deliberate disinformation; and since the information from the five tallied perfectly, this was further proof that they were in league.

  The chief exponent of this gymnastic exercise in doublethink was Colonel Elena Modrzhinskaya, a blonde, rotund, zealously conspiratorial NKVD officer responsible for assessing British intelligence. Her suspicion of Blunt and his fellow spies was based on the assumption, firmly held and quite wrong, that the British could not be so foolish as to allow former communists to occupy senior positions in the intelligence services. Therefore Blunt and the others must have been working for the British from the beginning. A splendidly incompetent NKVD surveillance team was sent to gather evidence of the Cambridge spies making contact with their British handlers. Since Blunt worked inside MI5, this “evidence” of contact with British intelligence was not hard to find. As the D-Day deception was being crafted, Moscow sent a letter to its London spy chief warning of a vast, organized deception by these British double agents. “Our task is to understand what disinformation our rivals are planting on us,” since “all the data” from Blunt and the others indicated a double-cross operation. (The irony that Moscow was only aware of the existence of the British Double Cross system because Blunt had revealed it to them was entirely lost on Colonel Modrzhinskaya.)

  But in the mirroring world of espionage, Blunt and Modrzhinskaya might actually end up supporting the deception. If Agent Tony was a double agent, then his false information should be read in reverse; if he indicated that Normandy was the real target and the Pas de Calais a decoy, then the Pas de Calais must be the real target and Normandy a feint. And if a German mole had penetrated Soviet intelligence, then that was the information he would be passing back to Berlin. In a nutshell: if the Germans believed that the Soviets thought the British were trying to make them believe something that was untrue, then the deception would still be on track. At the very least, Soviet suspicions would muddy the waters to an opacity beyond human penetration.

  By the end of 1943, wrote Masterman, the Double Cross team was “far more powerful and better equipped than it had ever been before.” The double agents were reaching peak fitness. Tricycle (Popov) was beloved and admired by his German handlers, with Jebsen, the latest addition to the team, on hand to protect him; Garbo sat on Crespigny Road, Hendon, arguing with his wife and spinning ever more elaborate fantasies; Treasure was now in place, lonely and lovesick without her dog but ready to start feeding misinformation back to Kliemann. Bronx, the socialite spy, was in regular contact with Germany. Even the excitable Brutus might soon be back in play, if the Pole could be extracted from prison.

  The Double Cross idea had always been based on lateral thinking without boundaries, a willingness to contemplate plans that others would dismiss as unworkable or, frankly, barmy. Flights of fantasy were integral to the system, which perhaps explains why, just as the D-Day deception plans were falling into place, the Double Cross system suddenly took wing and soared into the surreal.

  Of all the strands in Operation Fortitude, none was quite so bizarre, so wholly unlikely, as the great pigeon double cross, the first and only avian deception scheme ever attempted.

  Animal-based espionage and sabotage was all the rage among Allied plotters: SOE agents stuffed dead rats with explosives, and military zoologists explored the use of trained marine mammals for naval sabotage. In December 1943, Guy Liddell reported an American scheme for attacking Japan using thousands of exploding Mexican bats: “These bats should be put into crates shipped to Seattle. Attached to the feet and wings of the bats were to be small incendiaries. The bats were to be released from an aeroplane near Tokio [sic], the idea being that they would fly down chimneys and that Tokio would go up in flames.” The idea never took off but was taken seriously. “It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into,” said Roosevelt.

  People like Robertson and Walker flourished in that gray area between ingenuity and insanity; early in 1944 “our pigeon expert,” as Robertson called Walker, approached B1A with an audacious new plan. With D-Day approaching, and having failed to make much impact on enemy pigeons in Britain (because there weren’t any), the unstoppable Flight Lieutenant Walker “began to wonder if there were not some more offensive way of attacking the German pigeon service.” He came up with the “double-cross pigeon racket,” a plan that might wipe out the enemy pigeon population at a stroke.

  Every German intelligence station in occupied France had a pigeon section. Moreover, collaborationist French pigeon fanciers were being recruited as stay-behind agents to harbor German homing pigeons and then release them with intelligence from behind the lines in the event of a successful Allied invasion. Walker began to wonder whether Himmler’s interest in pigeons, and his taste for final solutions, could be manipulated to Allied advantage. If the Germans could be fooled into believing that British spy pigeons had infiltrated their lofts, then it would throw suspicion on the entire German pigeon service: if they could no longer trust their own pigeons, they might kill the lot. In the winter of 1943, he presented MI5 with a top secret memo laying o
ut his “Pigeon Contamination Plan.”

  A stray or lost pigeon will almost always find its way into some loft. If a number of British pigeons could be disguised as German pigeons by putting German rings on them and then released on the Continent (deliberately choosing second-rate birds which would be unlikely to attempt the long flight back), they would find their way eventually into German-controlled lofts. Sooner or later, the Germans would discover they were being fooled. They would find two birds with the same ring number, or a grey pigeon wearing a ring which their records clearly showed as belonging to a red pigeon. They would begin, then, to wonder how many of their pigeons were “phoney,” and the only thing they could do would be to call all their birds in and check them. Until they had checked all their birds in all their lofts they would be unable to use any pigeon services and by the time they had gone through them all, I would have delivered more “phonies.”

  MI5 was enthusiastic. With the Germans braced for an invasion, the discovery that their lofts had been penetrated by double-agent pigeons would “throw them off balance at a critical psychological moment,” in the words of Guy Liddell. The pigeon deception scheme was approved by MI5. After consulting expert technicians, Walker discovered a new aluminum welding process that could attach a forged leg ring to a pigeon with a “perfectly invisible joint”; he created a rubber stamp to counterfeit German wing markings; he constructed an automatic pigeon-release system out of a weighted Hessian bag large enough to carry eight birds, which could be thrown from a plane with a strap attached that would pull off an elastic band and release the birds beyond the slipstream; he consulted the Air Ministry to find out “when aircraft were going on special dropping missions.” And he began recruiting sluggish British carrier pigeons to be sent on this secret mission to infiltrate the German pigeon service and destroy it from within. Soon there was a force of 350 double-agent pigeons at his disposal, disguised as German pigeons, ready to do their bit.

  Fake pigeon wing markings

  The Allies now had a series of double-cross operations running simultaneously: a human one in Britain, another composed of pigeons, and a third, fledgling team of double agents in America.

  The Popov debacle in America had revealed the very different American and British attitudes toward double agents: what Robertson embraced as a golden opportunity Hoover regarded as a particularly nasty species of human vermin. Yet as the Allied intelligence services grew closer in the course of war, the FBI became first interested in the Double Cross system and then extremely good at it. The chief impetus for this change of heart was a man not unlike Popov in character: a rich, profligate wastrel with an eye for the ladies and the main chance. Jorge José Mosquera, an Argentinian by birth, was the owner of a leather export company based in Hamburg. In 1941, with war raging, he had decided to liquidate his German assets and relocate to South America. At this point the Abwehr had moved in, insisting that his funds would only be released if he agreed to spy for Germany in the New World. After training in wireless operations and secret writing, Mosquera headed to Uruguay, and promptly turned himself in at the American consulate in Montevideo. Described by the FBI as “a tall, pleasant-looking businessman with some glamour effect,” Mosquera was greedy, promiscuous, exactly the sort of person Hoover hated and ideal double-agent material. The FBI gave him, for some reason that has never been explained, a new German identity and pseudonym: Max Fritz Ernest Rudloff.

  Mosquera’s German instructions were to make his way to New York, build a wireless transmitter, and begin sending military information as soon as possible. The FBI duly established a transmitter in a farmhouse on a secluded section of the Long Island coast, manned by three agents disguised as local workers and protected by a pack of guard dogs. The first transmission was sent in February 1942. Mosquera knew exactly how much money the Germans were sending him and demanded his share of the profits. Over the next two years he extracted more than fifty thousand dollars from the Germans. Soon he was sending several transmissions a week and recruiting fake subagents in the manner of Garbo: an engineer who worked in an aircraft factory and U.S. navy yard, an official in the War Department, and a civilian in the Navy Department. Mosquera had not been long in New York when he conceived a grand passion for a much younger woman of Italian extraction who wanted to be an opera singer. Mosquera demanded that the FBI hand over fifteen thousand dollars to enable her to pursue her operatic career. The bureau certainly arranged for Mosquera’s inamorata to “audition at the Metropolitan Opera,” the first and only time that institution has taken an active role in international espionage.

  Mosquera was the most important of the FBI’s double agents, but he was not alone. Next came a Dutchman named Alfred Meiler, a former diamond dealer sent to the United States to gather information on atomic research, who turned himself in and was set to work reporting tidbits of misinformation from naval dockyards. José Laraudogoitia was a seaman from the Basque country recruited by the Germans in Spain and picked up by the FBI in Philadelphia in May 1944, who swapped sides and was code-named “Bromo.” Helmut Goldschmidt, a Dutch-born Orthodox Jew who had renounced Judaism, deserted from the Dutch army, and then signed up with the Abwehr, was described by the FBI as “an extremely selfish individual, arrogant, extremely difficult to control, and of a very low-grade moral character.” Goldschmidt turned himself in and became “Agent Peasant.” Completing the stable of American-based double agents was Dieudonné Costes, a French former flying ace and former vice president of the Hispano-Suiza aircraft factory. Under German occupation he was recruited by the Abwehr and sent on an espionage mission to the United States. En route, in Spain, he turned himself in and was duly installed in New York’s Park Lane Hotel, where he began sending letters in secret ink. “Although he might not deliberately try to assist the Germans,” the FBI reported of the flamboyant and arrogant Costes, “he does not hesitate to resort to falsehoods in any situations and he is especially prone to elaborate upon his own superior qualities and position.”

  The FBI took a cautious, hands-on approach, seldom permitting double agents to fashion their own messages, “chicken feed” with misinformation thrown in. They reported on military production, insignia, and the units departing for the European theater. Folded into Operation Bodyguard, American double agents were set to work promoting the idea that the invasion would be postponed owing to lack of landing craft, industrial unrest, and the slow buildup of American troops. The American agents were not in a position to report on the immediate preparations for the D-Day assault, yet the slow but steady trickle of corroborative material provided a distinct minor melody in the major symphony now under way.

  As Masterman’s small orchestra of double agents tuned up, a faint discordant note became audible, growing louder as the day of the grand performance approached. There was, it seemed, another band of spies in Britain, playing their own song. Early in 1942, Most Secret Sources revealed the existence of a highly regarded German agent code-named “Ostro.” A Czechoslovakian businessman named Paul Fidrmuc, Ostro was based in Lisbon but boasted a wide espionage network, including five spies on British soil as well as more in other parts of the British empire, the Middle East, and the United States. Ostro was highly paid for his reports, which were passed directly from the Abwehr in Lisbon to Berlin. Indeed, he was sometimes sent the reports of other agents for evaluation and was “regarded in Berlin as a sort of prima donna who must not be ruffled.”

  Ostro was reticent about his sources of information, for good reason: he was making it all up. Like Garbo before him, Fidrmuc had worked out that the Germans’ hunger for information was so acute that the Abwehr would pay handsomely for invented information, and the more secretively that information was passed on, the more likely they were to believe it. Wartime intelligence often throws up such “freelancers,” canny individuals who realize that in a situation where the buyer cannot check the quality of the goods, dealing in false commodities is both easier and safer than genuine trade. The Germans had no idea that Os
tro was feeding them nonsense, but the British did.

  The Bletchley decrypts clearly showed that Fidrmuc’s reports were an amalgam of imagination, half-baked deduction, and quarter-baked gossip bearing little relation to reality. Yet Ostro was anything but harmless. His reports would inevitably contradict, at times, what was being reported by the controlled double agents and dilute their effect. More worryingly, his guesswork might accidentally reveal the truth. Ostro was spinning his own deception, and there was not room enough in the game for two. MI5, MI6, and the London Controlling Section discussed the options. Like Garbo, Ostro could be approached and brought under British control; alternatively, he could be discredited in Abwehr eyes if he was exposed as a fraud. A more radical alternative would be to kill him, an option backed by the shark-eyed John Marriott: “If liquidation means the literal abolition of Ostro by doing away with him altogether … then I naturally consider that the best solution to the whole affair.” Garbo was a fabulist who had been welcomed into the MI5 embrace; Ostro was also making it up and might have to be murdered. “We should try to buy him up or bump him off,” thought Liddell. For reasons more practical than humanitarian, it was finally agreed that MI5 would “try to discredit Ostro rather than eliminate him.” Any move against Fidrmuc risked revealing how he had been found out, and Most Secret Sources must be protected at all costs. Ostro’s life was spared, a decision MI5 would come to regret.