Double Cross

by Ben MacIntyre

  Garbo was also categorical. “I never like to give my opinion unless I have strong reasons to justify my assurances,” he told Kühlenthal. (This was hardly true, since he gave his opinions all the time, on everything.) In the longest message to date, sent from Crespigny Road in the early hours of June 9, he and Harris laid out exactly what the German High Command ought to think.

  After personal consultation on 8th June with my agents … I am of the opinion, in view of the strong troop concentrations in S.E. and E England which are not taking part in the present operations, that these operations [in Normandy] are a diversionary manoeuvre designed to draw off enemy reserves in order then to make a decisive attack in another place. It may probably take place in the Pas de Calais area, particularly since in such an attack the proximity of the air bases will facilitate the operation by providing continued strong air support.… The constant aerial bombardment which the area of the Pas de Calais has suffered and the strategic disposition of these forces give reason to suspect an attack in that region of France which at the same time offers the shortest route for the final objective of their illusions, which is to say Berlin.

  Garbo listed every unit, genuine and invented, in the south of England and calculated that the Allies must be “left with some fifty divisions with which to attempt a second blow.” He concluded with what sounded like an order.

  I trust you will submit urgently all these reports and studies to our High Command since moments may be decisive in these times and before taking a false step, through lack of knowledge of the necessary facts, they should have in their possession all the present information which I transmit with my opinion which is based on the belief that the whole of the present attack is set as a trap for the enemy to make us move all our reserves in a hurried strategical disposition which we would later regret.

  If the receivers of this vast screed had paused to reflect, they might have registered how unlikely it was that a wireless would have been able to operate for more than two hours without detection. But they did not. Garbo’s report, boiled down to readable form, hurtled up the chain of command, gaining traction as it went: from Madrid it passed to Berlin, and then on to Berchtesgaden. There it was read by Friedrich-Adolf Krummacher, the head of the High Command intelligence branch, who underlined the sentence describing the Normandy landing as “diversionary” and passed it on to General Alfred Jodl, head of the OKW operations staff, who underlined “S.E. and E England.” Then it was handed to Hitler.

  The Führer’s response may be deduced from the resulting intelligence assessment, which embraced Garbo’s conclusions with the sort of blind enthusiasm ideologues usually display on being told what they already believe.

  The report is credible. The reports received in the last week from the Arabel undertaking have been confirmed almost without exception and are to be described as exceptionally valuable. The main line of investigation in future is to be the enemy group of forces in south-eastern and eastern England.

  Elvira lent a hand with a letter in secret ink reporting: “Only part of Allied force in Normandy operation, bulk remains here at present.” The very artlessness and apparent naïveté of her letters made them, in a different way, as powerful as Czerniawski’s military reportage and Pujol’s detailed analysis. Two weeks after D-Day, she was still hinting at a looming second invasion, worrying about her overdraft, and wondering what to spread on her toast. “Lord Stanley of Alderney says bad weather hinders ships leaving south coast ports,” she wrote. “Fruit spoiled by frosts, jam to be sent from America. Still no money.”

  As planned, as soon as Overlord was under way, Treasure, once the darling of the Double Cross team, was unceremoniously fired. Lily Sergeyev had taken extraordinary risks on behalf of British intelligence and played a crucial part not just in the deception but in winning Kliemann’s trust to the extent that her wireless traffic, relayed verbatim, had “absolutely saved the bacon of GC and CS [the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley] during June.” But she had allowed her feelings to intrude into a business that had little time for such things; she had loved her dog too much, and in withholding information and seeking revenge for its death, she had broken the most fundamental rules of intelligence. And she was still refusing to reveal her control signal.

  Three days after D-Day, Tar came to the Hill Street flat to sack her in person, accompanied by Mary Sherer. He was wearing his Glengarry cap with tartan facing and the trousers of the Seaforth Highlanders. He sat in the armchair. Mary took up a position by the window.

  “I have some hard things to say. I’ll come straight to the point.”

  “Go ahead,” Lily said, with mock insouciance.

  Tar did not easily rise to anger, but when he did, he flushed crimson. Gripping the arms of the chair, Robertson leaned forward: “Mary has told me that when you were in Lisbon you arranged a security check. We have accordingly decided that you are no longer trustworthy. It is quite impossible for me to place any confidence in someone who behaves in this manner. You will not transmit any more. We’ll do that ourselves. We have already started to work without you.”

  Lily smiled. Tar turned a deeper shade of red.

  “The situation is as follows: you cease to work for us; we shall continue to pay you £5 a week for your maintenance; as soon as possible I shall organise your return to Paris. You must leave this flat. You have a fortnight to clear out.”

  Lily still said nothing. Tar was beginning to boil.

  “If I have any cause to think that you are in any way acting contrary to the interests of the Allied cause, I will at once take severe action and either put you in prison or hand you over to the French authorities, who would no doubt deal with you pretty severely.”

  Lily noticed a darning hole in the left knee of his tartan trousers. Tar was unshaven and looked tired and a little shabby, she thought.

  Tar waited for a response: “What do you have to say?”

  “Your first allegation is correct,” said Lily. “And you can keep your money.”

  “You will take the money whether you like it or not. You can do what you like with it after that. I suppose that you don’t want to give us the security check?”

  Lily shrugged. “You said a while ago I couldn’t be trusted,” she muttered. “If I gave you the sign, how would you know it is not exactly the opposite of what you wanted?”

  Tar had had enough of the game. “I didn’t say we would believe you.”

  Without another word, he left, followed by Mary Sherer. As soon as she heard the front door close, Lily burst into tears, of self-pity, perhaps, but also of regret. This had been, as she later put it, the “big scene from Act Three.” She had planned to end the drama in her own way, either as a heroine for the Allies or by blowing the whole operation in retaliation for the death of Babs. Instead, she was being sent away with a meager payoff and a dressing-down from a man with a red face and a hole in his trousers.

  In a last attempt to get Lily to divulge the control signal, Tar sent Gisela Ashley to see her. They had always gotten on well, and Gisela was handy at extracting information.

  “Why did you do it?” she asked.

  “I refuse to be beaten by them, by your damned intelligence service.”

  Gisela Ashley put her arm around Lily. “Ducky, that’s just pride.”

  In a rare moment of self-knowledge, Lily wrote in her diary: “I have destroyed my own work, or at any rate rendered it useless.”

  Double Cross was built on sideways thinking. But as Operation Fortitude stretched beyond D-Day, the thinking went from lateral to outlandish. Intoxicated by their success, Hugh Astor and Roman Czerniawski came up with an idea that was ingenious, daring, and quite mad: what if they could entice the Germans into sending an assassination squad to kill General Eisenhower and his senior officers at the fake headquarters of the fake army?

  The plan was simple: Brutus would send an urgent radio message to Reile “inviting the Germans to make an airborne raid on the notional FUSAG Hea
dquarters at Wentworth.” The message would read: “General Eisenhower and a few other eminent persons are holding a conference, at the end of which Eisenhower is to address all officers. This represents an ideal and unprecedented opportunity for capturing or destroying some of the most eminent personages on which the success of the invasion depends.” Wentworth, Brutus would point out, is “surrounded by golf courses suitable for airborne landings.” Czerniawski himself would “flash a torch to indicate the exact landing point, and direct the raiders to the mess where the exalted persons will be holding their post prandial celebrations.” Immediately on landing, the German paratroopers would be ambushed and taken prisoner. “Arrangements will have to be made to give the raiders a suitable reception and to ensure none of them escape.” Czerniawski would need an excuse for why the assassination plot had failed. “On the following day Brutus will himself transmit a furious message explaining that although he was vigorously flashing his lantern, the airborne troops landed several fields away, where they were naturally rounded up by the Home Guard.” The plot, Astor argued, would reinforce German belief in the invented army in the southeast: “If the Germans refuse to play, no harm will have been done, as the threat to the Pas de Calais will have been continued and Brutus will again have shown himself to be a man of courage and resource.” The Germans surely could not resist this “appetising dish.”

  Tar Robertson rejected the idea out of hand, pointing out that there were easier ways to catch German attention than inciting heavily armed Nazi assassins to run around the golf courses of the Home Counties in the middle of the night, looking for American generals to kill.

  Some elements of the grand deception were more effective than others. Flight Lieutenant Richard Walker had spent months preparing his pigeon double-cross scheme. He recruited hundreds of second-rate homing pigeons, equipped them with faked German leg rings, and dropped them over occupied Europe in the expectation that they would destroy the German pigeon service from within.

  Walker’s grand deception was a damp squab: there is no evidence that it had any effect whatsoever. The Germans never detected the double-agent pigeons in their midst. Indeed, when the Wehrmacht officer in command of the pigeon service was interrogated after the war and asked whether his lofts might have been infiltrated by Allied pigeons, he responded that such a thing was impossible since the impostors would have been spotted immediately: no one, he said, could attach a fake leg ring to a pigeon without soldering it. This, of course, was precisely what Walker had managed to do. The plot failed because of its excessive ingenuity. The double-agent pigeons, too feeble to fly home, simply blended in with the local pigeon populations and, like so many ex-combatants, made new lives for themselves, their wartime heroics unsuspected and, until now, unsung.

  The charade of Monty’s double may also have had only a limited effect on German thinking. The mise-en-scène in Gibraltar was certainly reported back to Berlin, but as MI5 candidly admitted, “What they deduced from it, and how far it had any effect upon their plans, unfortunately we have never been able to find out.” The ruse may have concentrated German attention on a possible landing in the south of France, but the meeting between the fake General Montgomery and the real General Wilson at Algiers does not appear to have been reported to von Rundstedt or to have affected German defense of the Channel. The most that can be said of Operation Copperhead is that it compounded German confusion and provided considerable entertainment for its organizers. It also put paid to Molina Pérez, whose career as a Nazi spy came to an abrupt end. Armed with hard evidence of his espionage activities, the British declared the Spanish officer persona non grata and permanently excluded him from Gibraltar, much to his baffled annoyance.

  Elvira’s telegram warning of the imminent attack on the Bay of Biscay undoubtedly reached German intelligence, although the invasion was graded, at most, a “small calibre” operation. Even so, it was considered real enough that when German reconnaissance spotted Allied convoys near Brest, it was assumed these must be heading for the Biscay area for a “diversionary attack.” Allied military planners had anticipated that within a week of D-Day, two panzer divisions would be sent from southwestern France to Normandy. In fact, only one, the Seventeenth SS Panzergrenadier Division, headed north to join the counterattack, and even that did not move immediately: it finally reached Normandy and engaged in combat on June 11. The Eleventh Panzer Division remained in position, defending southwestern France from an attack that never came. John Masterman was sure that this was attributable to Elvira: “When the invasion took place, the Panzer division was kept in the Bordeaux area and not pushed north at once towards Cherbourg.” Astor agreed: “Their movement of a Panzer division to the Bordeaux area may to some extent be attributed to Bronx’s telegram,” ensuring that those troops remained “impotent near Bordeaux while the battle raged in Normandy.”

  Elvira’s follow-up letter suggesting that the Biscay invasion might yet happen further muddied the waters. As late as July, General Jodl told Admiral Abe, the Japanese naval attaché in Berlin, that a second series of invasions was expected: “We are prepared for landings in the vicinity of Bordeaux.” Agent Bronx and Operation Ironside may not have fully convinced the Germans that an attack on southwestern France was imminent or even likely, but they undoubtedly added to German confusion. And the credit for that uncertainty goes, in large part, to a frivolous party girl who lied about meeting a drunken officer in a club and told her spymasters of a conversation that never took place.

  The stated, limited aim of Fortitude North had been to “contain some first quality divisions” in Scandinavia by a threatened assault on Norway. In this it succeeded, though perhaps less dramatically than hoped. The Germans certainly believed in the fictional Fourth Army under General Thorne, but they seem to have assumed that it was not big enough or sufficiently backed by air cover to do more than mount a diversionary attack. In early May, the Germans had described an attack on Norway as a “strong possibility,” and action against Denmark as a “certainty.” The seventeen German divisions across Scandinavia were put on full alert. The Germans certainly feared an attack, albeit not on a large scale. The deception may not have persuaded Hitler to do anything he was not already disposed to do; but it undoubtedly encouraged him to continue doing something he was already doing and the Allies needed him to continue doing. At no point did Hitler redeploy the 250,000 troops in Norway to the real zone of destiny, in northern France.

  If some subsidiary elements of Operation Fortitude were of debatable effectiveness, the main thrust of the deception was an undisputed, unalloyed, world-changing triumph. As the Battle of Normandy raged, the Germans held fast to the illusion, so carefully planted and now so meticulously sustained, that a great American army under Patton was preparing to pounce and the German forces in the Pas de Calais must remain in place to repel it.

  On D-Day itself, von Roenne insisted that “another landing would come in the Fifteenth Army area and no troops would be withdrawn from there.” Rommel agreed, arguing that the forces in the north should not be weakened. Nonetheless, the Fifteenth Army reserves were mobilized and on June 9, the mighty First Panzer Division, 25,000 strong, was ordered to head south from the Pas de Calais to join the counterattack against the Allied bridgehead. But then came Garbo’s explicit warning that the Normandy invasion was a ruse specifically designed to draw off troops from Calais before the main assault. The order to the First Panzers was countermanded. The division would remain in place for another crucial week. Several factors were at work in that decision, but Field Marshal Keitel later stated he was “ninety-nine per cent certain” that the warning from Garbo “provided the reason for the change of plan.”

  A week after D-Day, only one German division had moved from the Pas de Calais to Normandy. German belief in the phantom army was unshakable. On June 23, Oshima reported to Tokyo that “twenty-three divisions commanded by General Patton are being held in readiness to make new landings. This is one reason why Germany has avoided p
ouring a great number of men into the Normandy area.” Physical proof of success came when the British forces in Italy captured a map, drawn up by German intelligence on June 15, that showed exactly where the enemy believed the second Allied army was waiting in southeastern England to cross the Channel. “It was almost identical with Plan Fortitude,” wrote Liddell.

  A month after D-Day, no fewer than twenty-two German divisions were still held back in the Fifteenth Army sector. “Patton’s army group,” Jodl reported, “is being made ready in London and in southern England for the next landing.” The ever-helpful Oshima confirmed that the Germans still expected that “Patton’s forces will land in the neighbourhood of Dieppe.” Hitler had “reposed an almost mystic confidence in Garbo,” MI5 later concluded, and even in late July he “still could not rid his mind of the belief that a second landing was intended.” But von Roenne was now starting to have doubts, or pretending to. After warning for weeks that another, even larger attack was coming, he began to hedge his bets, suggesting that FUSAG “has not been given the decisive role” after all. Perhaps, like all experts, he was just adopting new certainties as events unfolded. But perhaps von Roenne had never been fooled by the chimera of Patton’s army, which he had done so much to reinforce. By July 27, he was singing a new tune: “A second major landing on the Channel Coast no longer seems to be so probable in view of the situation in Normandy.” Seven weeks after the first landings, four divisions were finally released from the Fifteenth Army to head south, far too late. As Eisenhower put it, “Every additional soldier who then came into the Normandy area was then caught up in the catastrophe of defeat.” The bridgehead, so vulnerable in the first days and weeks, was firmly established. The war was not won, but the end was in sight.