Double Cross

by Ben MacIntyre

  Even more worrying than their reluctance to accept Tate’s deceptions was the danger that the Germans might believe the fabrications of another informant, which just happened to be correct. Paul Fidrmuc, Agent Ostro, had been inventing reports for the Abwehr since 1940, based on gossip and guesswork. MI5 had long feared that Ostro might hit the truth with his scattergun inventions and, since he was evidently trusted by Berlin, draw the enemy toward the landing site by accident. Sure enough, in early June, Bletchley decoded a message in which Ostro reported that one of his nonexistent informants, a colonel on Montgomery’s staff, had identified Normandy as the Schwerpunkt. “Ostro, in a long message, though entirely inaccurate, has hit on the target area,” Liddell wrote in his diary for June 5. With just twenty-four hours to go, there was nothing to do but hope that one lucky, accurate falsehood would not be enough to outweigh the great mass of misleading untruths that had already been dumped on the enemy.

  Shortly before midnight on the eve of D-Day, in deep blackout, a peculiar little procession entered the house at 35 Crespigny Road, in Hendon. Leading the way was Juan Pujol, followed by Tar Robertson, Tommy Harris, and Roger Fleetwood-Hesketh. Bringing up the rear was Sergeant Charles Haines, the former bank clerk who operated Garbo’s wireless. All wore civilian clothes. Earlier in the evening, they had enjoyed dinner at Harris’s home in Mayfair, lubricated with a magnum of Château Ausone 1934 from his excellent cellar. Refreshed, eager, and extremely tense, this oddly assorted group was about to commit what was, on the surface, an act of astounding treachery: tipping off the Germans to the time and place of the D-Day landings.

  Harris had argued strenuously that in order to maintain Garbo’s standing with the Germans, Pujol must be allowed to send advance warning of the invasion—not so soon as to make any military difference but sufficiently early that when the Allies duly landed in Normandy, Pujol would be able to say he had told them so. This was not vanity. The follow-up phase of Fortitude—maintaining the threat to the Pas de Calais to prevent the Germans from redeploying forces to Normandy—was as important as the first, and sustaining German belief in Garbo’s infallibility was crucial. After some hesitation, Eisenhower had agreed that the Double Cross team could alert the Germans no more than three and a half hours before the first troops landed at 6:30 a.m. The delay in transmission from Madrid to Berlin was about three hours, so by the time the German High Command got the message, the invasion should be under way. Pujol had told Kühlenthal he was expecting important news from Scotland and asked him to ensure that the wireless operator in Spain was waiting to receive a message at 3:00 a.m.

  Number 35 Crespigny Road was and is a perfectly nondescript house on a quiet street in an unremarkable corner of London. It looked like every other house on the road and a million other houses across Britain, which was, of course, why MI5 chose it. If any building could claim to be a master of disguise, it was this one. But if the house seemed innocuous, unlikely to play any part whatsoever in winning the war, then so did Juan Pujol. He was now all but bald and wore large glasses, which made him seem less like the fighting bantam he had resembled on first arriving in England and more like a tiny, intensely focused owl. He appeared to be exactly what his neighbors on Crespigny Road thought he was: a shy, polite foreign gentleman who did something dull at the BBC.

  Just before 3:00 a.m., with Allied paratroopers already in action in France, the five men gathered around the wireless in the upstairs bedroom, and Haines prepared to send the message. The story, as befitted the occasion, was a dramatic one, although buried, as usual, in Pujol’s nomadic circumlocutions. Fred, the Gibraltarian waiter, had linked up with two American deserters from Hiltingbury Camp and gone AWOL in order to bring Garbo the news that the invasion had started.

  He has told me that three days ago cold rations and vomit bags had been distributed to troops of the 3rd Canadian Division and that the division had now left the camp, its place now taken by Americans. There were rumours that the 3rd Canadian Division had now embarked. The situation of this agent is very compromising because his absence must have been noted due to the many hours which have elapsed since he left the camp. In order to protect the service [i.e., the network] I have taken a decision to put him into hiding.

  If the Canadian troops had not returned, that could only mean they had set sail for France; and since Hiltingbury is just eight miles from Southampton, and Southampton is opposite Cherbourg, then the logical target must be Normandy. The Germans would read the clues instantly.

  At 2:59, Tar told Haines: “All right Sergeant, let them have it!” Haines keyed in the call sign. The only response was a crackle of static. “I don’t get it,” said Haines. “Normally Fritzy answers right away.” He repeated the call after fifteen minutes. Again there was no reply. The radio operator had either left his post or fallen asleep. Haines kept calling. Harris observed: “The trouble is, life in Madrid really only begins at midnight. Kühlenthal’s operator is probably at Chiquotes having a copita with his friends.” Robertson and Fleetwood-Hesketh eventually made their excuses and went home to bed, like guests peeling off from a dud party. The message was strengthened, adding information that would have breached security a few hours earlier, to make the warning more stark and enhance Garbo’s standing further. Finally, at 8:00 a.m., the Madrid wireless operator either woke up or came into work, and the message was picked up and acknowledged. By which time the Canadian Third Division was no longer gathering up its vomit bags and preparing to embark but under heavy fire from the German 716th Division on Normandy’s Juno Beach.

  Far from being an anticlimax, Garbo’s carefully timed non-warning had achieved its purpose. He had passed over what must be seen, in German eyes, as the most important intelligence tip-off of the war, and they had missed it. Like the Madrid radio operator, the Germans had been caught napping.

  On the afternoon of June 4, Lieutenant Commander George Honour gingerly maneuvered his midget submarine into its reconnaissance position a quarter of a mile off the beach code-named “Sword”—the most easterly of the landing beaches where, in just thirty-six hours, the British Third Infantry Division was due to attack. He raised the periscope and peered toward the shore. “We saw a lorry-load of Germans arrive. They started playing beach ball and swimming and at the back of my mind I thought, ‘I hope there are no Olympic swimmers and they don’t swim out and find us.’ There were the Germans having a Sunday afternoon recreation and little did they know what was sitting and waiting for them.”

  The invasion of Normandy was a military sucker punch. Senior German commanders were not only unprepared but positively relaxed. Rommel, in charge of improving the Channel defenses, was five hundred miles away at home in Ulm, celebrating his wife’s birthday. Hans von Salmuth of the Fifteenth Army, defending the Calais area, was on a hunting expedition. The intelligence chief, Colonel Georg Hansen, was taking the waters at Baden-Baden. Divisional commanders in the Seventh Army’s area had left for a war-gaming exercise in Rennes designed to simulate an Allied landing. The German navy, having reported that an invasion was “improbable” owing to the poor weather, canceled patrols in the Channel, and the troops in their dugouts and bunkers were told to get some rest. Von Roenne’s situation report for June 6 did not even mention Britain and focused almost exclusively on the Mediterranean.

  The day before D-Day, von Rundstedt, with 1.5 million men of the Wehrmacht under his command, sent out a reassuring situation report: “That the invasion is actually imminent does not seem to be indicated as yet.” Even his convoluted grammar suggests a man who thought he had time on his hands. The defenders manning the great Atlantic Wall were assured of its impregnability—convinced that the enemy would be repulsed—and thoroughly disinclined to get agitated. When a private in the German Seventh Army Intelligence Corps informed the duty officer that the front line was reporting an attack, he was told, “Don’t make a big production of it. Remember Dieppe”—a reference to the failed Allied raid of 1942.

  Colonel Oscar Reile, Brut
us’s wily case officer in Paris, had become an expert in interpreting hidden messages to the French resistance contained in apparently meaningless phrases broadcast in French by the BBC. On June 5, German intelligence picked up fourteen such messages and concluded that the invasion was imminent. The Seventh Army, in Normandy, ignored the warning; the Fifteenth Army, at Calais, raised its state of alert, but von Salmuth remained catatonically calm: “I’m too old a bunny to get excited about this,” he said.

  Hitler had stayed up late on June 5, discussing films with Eva Braun and Goebbels. Since the Normandy attack was assumed to be a diversion, it was not thought necessary to wake Hitler and tell him it had started. On D-Day he slept in until ten o’clock. When finally told the invasion had begun, he was cheerful, convinced the attack would be repelled with ease.

  The Double Cross team could not (and did not) claim sole credit for wrong-footing the Germans on June 6. The bombing campaign in northeastern France had steadily increased until every bomb that landed on Normandy was matched by two dropped on the Pas de Calais; twice as many radar stations were attacked outside the invasion zone as in it. Far behind the lines, parachutists set off flares and fireworks and blasted out recordings of small-arms fire to draw German troops away from the landing beaches, while an airborne army of dummy paratroopers compounded the confusion. As the real army plowed through the waves toward Normandy, two more fake convoys were scientifically simulated heading for the Seine and Boulogne by dropping from planes a blizzard of tinfoil, code-named “Window,” which would show up on German radar as two huge flotillas approaching the French coast.

  The Germans might have been taken by surprise, but they were far from defenseless. The coastline bristled with field and coastal batteries, mortars, machine guns and snipers, barbed wire, wooden stakes, mines, antitank “hedgehogs” made from welded steel girders, concrete pyramid-shaped “dragon’s teeth” to slow down and channel tanks into “killing zones,” and more than a million upright stakes in the fields beyond, known as “Rommel’s Asparagus,” to impede airborne landings. From bunkers, machine-gun nests, trenches, and gun emplacements, the German defenders poured fire onto the attackers. At Omaha Beach, the first men to land faced an “inhuman wall of fire.” More than 2,400 were killed or wounded. At Juno, the Canadians suffered 50 percent casualties in the first hour. Beyond Sword Beach, where German forces had played Sunday beach ball a few hours earlier, the Gestapo began reprisals: at the city prison in Caen, eighty-seven members of the French resistance were dragged into the courtyard and shot.

  News of the landings was brought back to Britain by Gustav, an RAF homing pigeon released by the Reuters war correspondent Montague Taylor. “His name might sound suspiciously foreign,” said the bird’s trainer, Frederick Jackson of Cosham in Hampshire, “but he was as English as they come.” Montague reported: “The invasion army has thought of everything, including carrier pigeons to carry the big news home if all else fails. A wing commander arrived here only a few hours before I embarked on my landing ship and presented me with a basket of four pigeons, complete with food and message-carrying equipment.” At 8:30 a.m., Montague released Gustav. Flying through thirty-mile-per-hour headwinds, dense cloud, and sporadic enemy fire, the pigeon completed the journey to his home loft on Thorney Island, near Portsmouth, in just five hours, sixteen minutes—a D-Day record. Sergeant Harry Halsey removed the message strapped to Gustav’s leg and relayed it to London: “We are just 20 miles or so off the beaches. First assault troops landed 0750. Steaming steadily in formation. Lightnings, Typhoons, Fortresses crossing since 0545. No enemy aircraft seen.”

  D-Day was the reason for the Double Cross system, the grand finale to which every preceding deception was a foretaste. The men who fought that day have become lasting symbols of courage and skill. But while they battled their way up the bloody dunes, an unseen force fought alongside them from many miles away, not with guns, bullets, and bombs but with subterfuge and stealth, to whittle away German strength and confidence, to confuse, surprise, and mislead, and to shield the invaders with lies. By the end of the first day of the invasion, the Allies had suffered at least 10,000 casualties and 2,500 dead. But 156,000 men had landed in France from the sea and 23,000 from the air, thrusting a spearpoint into occupied France. What those numbers might have been without the Fortitude deception, and what measure of that deception was attributable to the double agents is, of course, impossible to judge.

  But this is certain: if the Double Cross deception had backfired, if Johnny Jebsen had cracked, if Lily Sergeyev had inserted her control signal, if the great defensive net of lies had unraveled and the Germans had been ready and waiting in Normandy, reinforced and alert, then the invasion would have failed, and D-Day would have ended in a massacre of Allied troops.

  25. Second Innings

  The sixth of June was the longest day. It had been assumed that for the double agents it might also be the last, once the Germans realized they had fallen victim to an elaborate hoax. They did not, and the Double Cross team now had a second innings to play: to foster the illusion that another, even larger invasion, would soon strike the Pas de Calais—and maintain that sham as long as possible. The spies would surely soon be exposed, but every hour that the fiction held, every hour that the Fifteenth Army awaited the fake invasion, could make a critical difference in blood spilled and territory won. The planners hoped the twin threats to Norway and Calais might be maintained for as much as ten days. Eisenhower would have settled for less. He knew that if even a part of the mighty German army in the north moved its guns to the fragile Normandy bridgehead, the invasion could still fail: “Just keep the Fifteenth Army out of my hair for the first two days,” he told the deception planners. “That’s all I ask.”

  The Double Cross agents plunged back into the shadow battle, following up the D-Day invasion with a volley of apologies from the spies who had failed to give prior warning and a blast of recrimination from the only one who had.

  Brutus’s excuse was that he had been busy finding out about the other army poised to cross the Straits of Dover: “Unfortunately, by remaining without contact with 21 Army Group and through awaiting a state of alert at FUSAG, I was not able to give you details of the first landings.” Tate was also contrite, pointing out that more troops seemed to be arriving in Kent. As soon as the Normandy invasion was publicly announced, Bronx sent a letter in secret ink, knowing it would not arrive for many weeks, insisting that her prediction of an attack on Bordeaux had been sent in good faith. “Distraught by the news of invasion and convinced of the genuineness of the information given by Captain Ormsby-Gore. Dined with him last night but he did not respond to my teasing on the subject of his indiscretion, merely reminding me that I had promised never to speak of it again. Can only suppose there has been a change of plan or else that this attack, also, will take place.”

  Garbo, by contrast, took a verbal flamethrower to his German handler for failing to pick up the warning message sent before the invasion began:

  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 in this struggle for life or death. I cannot accept excuses or negligence. Were it not for my ideals and my faith I would abandon this work. I write these messages to send this very night though my tiredness and exhaustion, due to the excessive work I have had, has completely broken me.

  Kühlenthal squirmed. He blamed the weather. He blamed Garbo’s wireless operator and his own. He blamed anyone but himself and offered a flood of groveling flattery.

  I wish to stress in the clearest terms that your work over the last few weeks has made it possible for our command to be completely forewarned and prepared. Thus 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.

  Churchill
made what he doubtless thought was a helpful contribution, by lying to the House of Commons and announcing that the assault on Normandy was “the first of a series of landings.” The only problem was that Garbo had already reported to Madrid, from his notional perch within the Ministry of Information, that officials had been specifically ordered not to allude to further attacks in order to preserve the element of surprise, and here was the prime minister doing just that, in the most public way. Pujol scrambled to explain that Churchill’s failure to follow the directive had caused consternation, and an investigation was under way. In the end, the prime minister’s gaffe probably did more good than harm.

  So far, the double agents had dropped hints of an impending invasion of the Pas de Calais; now they could “go all out” and baldly state that FUSAG was preparing to “attack across the Channel at any moment.” If the deception before D-Day was composed of subtle hints and nudges, the second phase was spoon-fed to the Germans with a spade. “Fortitude requires a threat to the Pas de Calais to be continued indefinitely,” wrote Astor, “to contain the maximum number of troops during the next few critical days.” Brutus immediately sent a message to Reile depicting the Normandy invasion as merely a starter before the main course. “It is clear that the landing was made only by units of the 21st Army Group,” he radioed on the evening of D-Day. “FUSAG, as I reported, was ready for an attack which is capable of being released at any moment, but it is now evident that it will be an independent action.” The agents reported American troops pouring into southeast England, radio traffic was increased, and sabotage in the Calais area was intensified, all pointing to a second army in an “advanced state of preparedness for offensive action.”