On the day she sent the telegram to Lisbon, Elvira wrote a letter in secret ink that would arrive in Lisbon after D-Day, ex post facto evidence that her tip-off had been genuine. It was one of Bronx’s finest confections.
After a cocktail party I stayed on at the Four Hundred Club with Captain David Ormsby-Gore. After having a good deal to drink, he told me that I should hear some startling news on the wireless the next day, as there was to be an airborne attack on the U-boat base at Bordeaux, preliminary to the invasion. Yesterday he came to see me, very much upset, and asked me to swear not to repeat anything as he had been drunk and now the attack had been postponed by a month, and if I repeated the conversation I would endanger thousands of lives. I am convinced that he spoke the truth and have, therefore, decided to send you a telegram to warn you of the raid.
David Ormsby-Gore was a figure of profound respectability. Son of a baron, grandson of a marquis, and great-grandson of a prime minister, he was an officer in the Royal Artillery serving in a secret reconnaissance unit with airborne troops and special forces. After the war, he became an MP, an ambassador to the United States, and a peer. He was a pallbearer at Robert Kennedy’s funeral. He supplied John F. Kennedy with Cuban cigars, brought in by diplomatic bag. Elvira had never clapped eyes on him. He was not a heavy drinker and would never have been so imprudent as to discuss an imminent invasion with someone like Elvira. He was press-ganged into the fiction; he had no choice in the matter. David Ormsby-Gore died in 1985, a pillar of the British establishment, wholly unaware that he had taken part, unwittingly, in tipping off the Germans to an invasion that never was.
On the day Elvira sent her telegram to Lisbon, Major Ignacio Molina Pérez, Spanish liaison officer and spy for the Germans, was looking out of a window of Government House, Gibraltar, into the courtyard below, when he saw a large car draw up, out of which hopped an instantly recognizable figure, “wearing battledress and famous beret.” He was greeted by the governor, Lieutenant General Sir Ralph “Rusty” Eastwood. With the window open, Molina could hear every word.
“Hello, Monty, glad to see you,” said Sir Ralph.
“Hello, Rusty, how are you?” said Lieutenant Clifton James, until recently a star on the Leicester variety stage.
Molina had been invited to Government House to discuss routine business with the colonial secretary, who had stepped into the next room, the better to allow Molina a free view of the courtyard. “His interest in happening on this significant scene was too great to hide,” reported the colonial secretary, who, when quizzed by Molina about what Montgomery was doing in Gibraltar “with well-feigned embarrassment, was forced to confess that the commander-in-chief was on his way to Algiers.”
James was suffering an attack of stage fright, but he “played his difficult part with expert skill,” MI5 recorded. He had breakfast with the governor, who congratulated him on his performance and told him: “You are Monty. I’ve known him for years.” Then, with perfect stage management, “His Excellency was handing ‘General Montgomery’ into his car” at the very moment Molina emerged from the building.
The spy sped away in his own car and was observed making “an urgent trunk call” in the Spanish town of La Línea. “The material reached Berlin in twenty minutes,” MI5 estimated. Molina even embellished his own role, telling one of his confidants (who happened to be a spy working for the British) that he had shaken hands with Montgomery himself. “The Governor introduced me to him. He seems muy simpático.” This informant (who rejoiced in the code name “Pants”) reported that Molina was “very satisfied with himself.” The next day, Bletchley Park intercepted a message from Madrid to Berlin that read: “General Montgomery arrived Gibraltar. Discussions held with Governor and French General.” The British had a double agent working in Algiers Airport code-named “Gaol,” a former wireless operator for the Free French. Gaol informed Berlin of Monty’s arrival in Algiers and his reception by General Maitland “Jumbo” Wilson, the supreme Allied commander in the Mediterranean. German reviews of the performance, as revealed in Most Secret Sources, were uniformly positive, and a subsequent report by von Roenne concluded that the presence of Monty in North Africa “might point towards additional operations in South of France in addition to the main invasion.” Liddell wondered if the masquerade had been performed “a little too early,” but German intelligence seemed satisfied that Monty was still in North Africa on May 28. And if he was there, then he could hardly be organizing a massive assault across the Channel. The plot “had gone through from start to finish without a hitch, and we knew that the main feature of its story had reached the Germans,” MI5 reported.
Clifton James found playing the part of Monty extremely stressful. He was taken to a safe house in Cairo, where he remained, with a copious supply of whiskey, until the Normandy landings were under way. Like all method actors, he struggled to get out of character: “He was under terrible pressure and strain,” said the wife of an intelligence officer detailed to look after him as he decompressed following the performance of his life. “Coming out of that part was very difficult for him.”
On the sunny afternoon of May 27, Adolf Hitler had tea with one of his favorite guests in the Berghof, his chalet in the Bavarian Alps above Berchtesgaden. General Baron Hiroshi Oshima, Japan’s ambassador to the German Reich, was a regular visitor to Hitler’s private retreat and the Führer’s closest foreign confidant. A deep-dyed fascist and fawning Hitler devotee, Oshima had first met Hitler in 1935, when he was Japanese military attaché in Berlin. No one worked harder than the Japanese ambassador to cement the alliance between Germany and Japan. The American journalist William L. Shirer called him “more Nazi than the Nazis.” He spoke German fluently and shared Hitler’s views on Jews, the iniquity of the Soviet Union, and the need to kill the survivors of U-boat attacks. If Hitler had been able to make friends with a racially inferior being, then he might have counted Oshima as a friend. A professional soldier with formidable powers of recall, after each cozy and informal chat with the Führer, Oshima compiled a detailed update on Hitler’s military thinking and planning, which was encrypted and sent by wireless, with German approval, to the Japanese Foreign Office. These reports were read with avid interest in Tokyo—and Washington and London.
American cryptanalysts had broken the Japanese wireless code in 1940. Using a duplicate of the cipher machine used by Japanese Foreign Office officials, the Allies were able to read the enemy’s sensitive diplomatic cables as soon as they were sent. Indeed, the messages were sometimes read by the Allies before they were read in Tokyo, since wireless traffic from Germany to Japan was often held up in transmission. This was the Japanese equivalent of Most Secret Sources, code-named “Magic,” an almost miraculous insight into Japan’s secrets. Oshima supplied the most interesting reading of all: some seventy-five of the ambassador’s reports were picked up in 1941, a hundred in 1942, four hundred in 1943, and no less than six hundred in 1944. His commentaries were like having a bug in Hitler’s headquarters, only more efficient, since the Japanese ambassador was a military expert with a crisp prose style who boiled down his conversations with Hitler to the essentials—so Allied intelligence analysts did not have to.
Oshima furnished copious information on U-boats, mobile forces, military production, technological developments, the effects of Allied bombing, and the state of the German economy. In November 1943, he was taken on a four-day tour of German fortifications on the Channel coast of France. His resulting twenty-page report described the location, strength, and weaponry of every German division, the dimensions of antitank ditches, and the layout of machine-gun emplacements. If the invaders landed there, he predicted, “lateral shell fire from the neighbouring posts and the appearance of mobile forces would annihilate them.” Allied intelligence agencies could not have produced a better picture of the enemy’s defenses had they been invited on the tour themselves. As early as December 1943, Oshima reported that his friend Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, expect
ed an invasion in Belgium or across the Dover Straits. In January 1944, he informed Tokyo that Hitler was speculating that the Allies might attack Bordeaux—giving hope to Operation Ironside. General George Marshall, the U.S. Army chief of staff, paid tribute to Oshima’s contribution to the Allied war effort: “Our main basis of information regarding Hitler’s intentions in Europe was obtained from Baron Oshima’s messages from Berlin.” If Baron von Roenne was the best way of planting an idea in Hitler’s head, then Baron Oshima was the most reliable way of finding out if it had taken root there.
Hitler was ludicrously proud of his hideously kitsch, self-furnished chalet at Berghof, purchased with the profits from Mein Kampf. “This place is mine,” he told Homes & Gardens magazine in 1938. “I built it with money that I earned.” The Führer welcomed the Japanese ambassador into an entrance hall “filled with a curious display of cactus plants in majolica pots.” Together they strolled down a path to the teahouse in the woods. On the way, Hitler remarked that the Japanese government ought to publicly hang every U.S. pilot captured during air raids on Japan. “Our attitude cannot be ruled by any humane feelings,” he believed, a view with which Oshima heartily concurred. This was the kind of brutal small talk they enjoyed. Tea was served by members of the SS acting as waiters. The two allies sat on the wooden terrace under a large, colorful parasol, overlooking the Berchtesgaden valley.
“What is your feeling about the Second Front?” Oshima asked.
“I believe that sooner or later an invasion of Europe will be attempted,” mused the Führer. “I understand that the enemy has already assembled about eighty divisions in the British Isles. Of that force, a mere eight divisions are composed of first-class fighting men with experience in actual warfare.”
“Does Your Excellency believe that those Anglo-American forces are fully prepared to invade?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder what ideas you have as to how the Second Front will be carried out.”
“Well, judging from relatively clear portents, I think that diversionary actions will take place in a number of places—against Norway, Denmark, the southern part of Western France, and the French Mediterranean. After that—when they have established bridgeheads in Normandy and Brittany, and have sized-up their prospects—they will then come forward with an all-out Second Front across the Straits of Dover. We ourselves would like nothing better than to strike one great blow as soon as possible. But that will not be feasible if the enemy does what I anticipate; their men will be dispersed. In that event we intend to finish off the enemy’s troops at several bridgeheads. The number of German troops in the west still amounts to about sixty divisions.” Oshima scurried back to Berlin to write up his notebook.
When Oshima’s report of his teatime conversation with Hitler duly arrived in Britain on June 1, relief flooded through Allied intelligence. In almost every respect, Hitler’s assessment mirrored what the framers of Operation Fortitude had hoped for. “It gave the first definite assurance that the Germans greatly overestimated our strength,” wrote Roger Fleetwood-Hesketh. Hitler believed the major assault would come in the Pas de Calais, with precursor attacks in Norway and southwestern France; he believed von Roenne’s wildly inflated estimates of Allied troop strength; he had faith in the “clear portents” being fed to Germany by the double agents; he expected a number of attacks at different points, whereas the Allies were even now preparing, in Hitler’s own words, “one great blow” at Normandy. Some were uneasy that Hitler had correctly predicted an attack on Normandy, but he had made clear that he believed this would be nothing more than a diversionary assault, a prelude to the main invasion across the Straits of Dover.
Hitler told Oshima he thought an attack would come “sooner or later.” With five days until D-Day, the attack would come far sooner than he imagined.
24. Garbo’s Warning
The Allied armies streamed down the country lanes of southern England like water running through numberless rivulets and channels toward the coast, gathering and spreading into a wide estuary of men, weapons, tanks, and ships. “The south coast was just unimaginable,” recalled Private Fred Perkins of the Royal Berkshire Regiment. “It was just one vast marshalling yard of men and materiels all the way along.” Sergeant Joe Stephens of the Royal Artillery was waiting on the parade ground at Hawick Camp when Montgomery arrived for a last, sinew-stiffening visit. Monty climbed onto the hood of his Jeep. “Gather round me, men,” he said. “We’re going to Europe; the Germans know we’re going to Europe, but they don’t know when and where, and this will be the deciding factor. I wish you good luck.” Then he drove away.
Major Peter Martin led his men past ripening fields toward the coast, wondering at the “unreal feeling” of marching to war through this gentle, bucolic landscape. “Everything was totally normal and the countryside was gorgeous, and in a few days’ time one would be going into an absolute charnel house.”
Within a week, seven thousand warships and landing craft, eleven thousand planes, and nearly 160,000 men would be hurled at the Atlantic Wall, the largest amphibious invasion ever attempted and the first and naval phase of Operation Overlord, code-named “Neptune.” German defenses would be pummeled by air and naval bombardment; one British airborne division would try to secure the eastern flank, while American forces would land to the west by parachute and glider; shortly after dawn, six Allied infantry divisions—three American, two British, and one Canadian—would storm onto five selected Normandy beaches.
Eisenhower called it the “great crusade,” but in his pocket he carried a scribbled note, the basis of what he would say if D-Day did not succeed and his forces “failed to gain a satisfactory foothold.” In the general’s mind, victory was anything but certain. “The troops, the air and the navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do,” he wrote in dread anticipation. “If any blame is found attached to the attempt it is mine alone.” Before turning in for the night on June 5, Churchill, haunted by memories of slaughter on the beaches of Gallipoli in the First World War, told his wife, Clementine: “Do you realise that when you wake up in the morning, 20,000 men may have been killed?”
As a real army along the southern edge of England prepared for battle, another deployment, even larger but wholly bogus, was under way in two quite unremarkable, pebble-dashed semidetached houses in the London suburbs. With Treasure and Tricycle hors de combat, it fell to Brutus and Garbo to ram home the Fortitude deception in the hours before D-Day. Mr. and Mrs. Roman Czerniawski had recently moved into 61 Richmond Park Road, Barnes: from here, Agent Brutus “drew all the loose threads together.” Through his invented wireless operator, Chopin, Brutus laid out the order of battle for the fake army FUSAG, with its HQ in Wentworth, under the command of George Patton. In three long reports, packed with details supposedly gathered from within the army’s operations room at Staines and through tours of Kent and East Anglia, he was able to present the Germans with, as Fleetwood-Hesketh put it, “the entire chain of command of the shadow army group in southeast England.” Patton’s army, he warned, gave “the impression of being ready to take part in active operations in the near future.”
While Brutus sketched out the contours of the fake army, on the other side of London, at 35 Crespigny Road, Garbo added the shading and colors. From Scotland came reports of major naval exercises in Loch Fyne, soldiers seen wearing Arctic uniforms, and troops assembling in east-coast ports preparing for an assault on Norway. Garbo reported that his subagent in Exeter, one of the Welsh Aryans, had been arrested for lacking the correct documentation in a prohibited zone, a convenient explanation for the lack of intelligence from the southwest. Backing up Bronx’s warning of an assault on Bordeaux, Garbo’s agent in Liverpool spotted American forces “destined for an attack on the South Atlantic French coast in cooperation with another army which will come direct from America.” Pujol himself described troops assembling in East Sussex. The Germans were so convinced of Garbo’s accuracy that on at least one occasion his repo
rt was simply tacked, unedited, onto the German situation analysis. But in case the enemy was unable to reconstruct this “imaginary Order of Battle” without help, Garbo, the “self-trained military reporter,” offered his own conclusions, leading the enemy by the hand to the wrong place: “I conclude that the Harwich-Ipswich area has become an important operational base for future operations,” he advised, while news from the north “indicates the possibility of an imminent attack against Norway.” No one asked him for his opinion; he merely proffered it, and the Germans grabbed it.
As the reports poured in from Britain, von Roenne faithfully drew and redrew his map: “The main enemy concentration is showing itself ever more clearly to be in the south and southeast of the island,” the German analysts noted on May 15. Then, two weeks later: “Further transfer of formations to the south and southeast of the British Isles again emphasises that the main point of enemy concentrations is in this area.” By June 2, the two-army scheme laid out by Brutus was as good as gospel: “According to a reliable Abwehr message of 2nd June, the forces at present in the south of England are organised into two army groups (twenty-one English and First American).” The German spymasters asked for details about the Twenty-first Army Group under Montgomery, the real army, but entirely failed to sense danger in the way their agents seemed so much keener to report what was happening farther east.
There is often one much-praised player on a team who fails to perform on the big day. Wulf Schmidt, Agent Tate, the veteran slogger who had clocked up more than a thousand messages, was not playing at anything like the expected level. He fed the enemy a “sustained diet of high-grade deceptive intelligence,” but none of it was being swallowed. The bogus units and their locations identified by Brutus and Garbo reappeared dependably in the German military summaries, but for some reason Tate scored a duck. “By the date of the invasion, not one of the messages which we had sent through him had found a place in the OKW intelligence summary,” wrote Fleetwood-Hesketh.
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