I wrote my history of Operation FORTITUDE during the three years following demobilisation in 1945. At that time it was considered inappropriate to record the names of those directly concerned in the implementation of the plan despite the fact that the work was to be classified as a top-secret document. This classification remained unchanged until 1976, when, subject to a few very minor deletions, I was given permission to publish.
I had hoped that this would provide me with the opportunity of paying my own belated personal tribute to all those, most of whom were employed in the secret agencies, whose skill and ingenuity contributed so vitally to the success of the Operation. But I am informed that official policy lays it down that the names of those who serve the secret agencies cannot be revealed, it being a tradition of the service that any credit which they earn must redound to the service as a whole. The names of those to whom the anonymity rule does not apply are included in both this Foreword and in the text of the book itself.
When General Morgan’s planning staff (COSSAC) was set up in April 1943, a section known as Ops (B), with Lieutenant-Colonel John Jervis Read in charge, was formed to deal with deception. At the time of its formation I was posted to it with the task of dealing with any parts of a deceptive operation which it was felt could best be promoted by controlled leakage, or as we usually then called it ‘special Means’. As COSSAC had no troops of its own, it was obliged, where physical deception was concerned, to enlist the help of the appropriate fighting service or other outside agency for the execution of any deception plan. For controlled leakage, any information that we might want to pass to the enemy was to be channelled through the London Controlling Section (LCS). In the event, COSSAC only sponsored one deceptive operation, namely COCKADE, and it became my task to present COSSAC’s requirements to a sub-committee of LCS known by the name of TWIST, which sat under the chairmanship of Colonel John Bevan, who was, of course, the head of the London Controlling Section as a whole. This committee then decided what channel would be the most appropriate for conveying the misinformation to the enemy and would see that it was despatched accordingly.
In January 1944, when General Eisenhower took over command, COSSAC was absorbed into SHAEF and Ops (B) was enlarged, being divided into two sub-sections, the one dealing with physical deception and the other with Special Means. Colonel Noel Wild, who had served under Brigadier Dudley Clarke, the officer in charge of deception throughout the North African campaign, became head of the section with Colonel Jervis Read as his deputy. The latter also continued as head of the sub-section dealing with physical deception, while I was given charge of the Special Means sub-section.
At this time, Colonel Bevan, realising that from then onwards the bulk of the controlled agents’ work would be the implementation of FORTITUDE, decided that the right course would be to abolish the TWIST Committee and allow us to work directly with B1A. This was the section of MI5 which managed the controlled agents, who by this time were proving themselves to be by far the most effective channel for controlled leakage.
In the field of deception an important change in command and control was brought about by the FORTITUDE Directive of 26th February, 1944, issued by General Eisenhower. This made the Joint Commanders (Admiral Ramsey, General Montgomery and Air Chief Marshal Leigh Mallory) responsible for the detailed planning of FORTITUDE SOUTH. In practice this virtually meant, so far as we were concerned, 21 Army Group. Shortly afterwards General Thorne, GOC Scottish Command, was given a similar responsibility for the Army’s share of FORTITUDE NORTH. On the other hand Eisenhower retained full control of the implementation of both operations by Special Means. Thus, from February until mid-summer when SHAEF resumed undivided control of FORTITUDE SOUTH, the basic function of the physical deception staff at SHAEF was one of co-ordinating the plans of the Joint Commanders in the South with those of GOC Scottish Command in the North, the latter having become the executants, while the function of the Special Means sub-section was to adapt the plans, both North and South, to suit the needs of the channels made available to them and through those channels to plant the story on the enemy. This demanded the closest co-operation between SHAEF and 21 Army Group in the field of deception, for whereas the latter had charge of the conduct of the Operation as a whole, the Special Means sub-section of Ops (B) was now responsible for the implementation of the plan by controlled leakage. This meant that every troop location or movement that we wished to pass to the enemy had to have 21 Army Groups prior approval. During the weeks immediately preceding the invasion, a despatch rider, usually my late brother Cuthbert, who served in the Special Means sub-section of Ops (B), travelled almost daily between Norfolk House and Southwick Park near Portsmouth, where Field Marshal Montgomery’s headquarters were then housed, in order to have our requirements cleared by the Army Groups Deception Staff, known as G (R), and under the control of Colonel David Strangeways.
At the time when the FORTITUDE Directive came into operation, SHAEF had already prepared and issued a plan for FORTITUDE SOUTH, but soon after the Joint Commanders had taken charge this was superseded by a new plan embodying certain important changes which General de Guingand, Montgomery’s Chief of Staff, had been advocating for some time, chief of these being the need to add greater weight to the post assault phase with the object of holding the German 15th Army in the Pas de Calais for as long as possible after the invasion. This was the plan which the Special Means sub-section at SHAEF was now required to feed to the enemy. It will be seen that the plan (Appendix V of this book) tabulates in chronological order the movements of every formation taking part in the Operation, the purpose being to provide a framework within which the agents’ movements, real or imaginary, could be made to synchronise with those of the troops, again real or imaginary, that we wished to be brought to the enemy’s notice. It also helped in co-relating the release dates of the agents’ messages. I had worked out this method of presentation during the previous summer for the TWIST Committee in connection with COCKADE and its three subsidiary Operations, TINDALL, WADHAM and STARKEY.
During the three months immediately preceding the Normandy landings, the Special Means sub-section consisted of a major seconded from MI5, my brother, whose transfer from MI Liaison at the War Office had been arranged by Colonel Wild, a secretary supplied by MI5 who also kept our special registry, and myself. My brother, having before the war taken the Army Interpreters’ examination, was familiar with German military technical terms.
Once we had established our direct link with B1A and the Special Means plans had been approved, the next step was to decide which agent was best suited for each task. As soon as the choice had been made, the Case Officer in question would come across from St James’s Street to Norfolk House, where we would decide on the general sense of the message in hand, after which he would translate it into the particular idiom of the agent under his charge and then send it off. In fact, as my researches after the war were to prove, practically the whole of the Special Means cover plan was put over by two agents GARBO and BRUTUS (see Appendix XIII, ‘British Controlled Agents’ Share in compiling German Intelligence Reports during the Year 1944’), which meant that in practice one was closeted in our room at Norfolk House almost every day with their respective Case Officers, and I would go as far as to say that it was during these long sessions that the details of the plot were hammered out and the final form in which it was presented to the enemy determined. It should also be mentioned that the major from MI5, before being posted to the Special Means sub-section at SHAEF, where he now took part in these daily meetings, had himself been BRUTUS’s Case Officer and had done much to establish his credibility in the eyes of the enemy. The contribution made by these three Case Officers to the success of the Operation would be hard to overestimate. Others came as and when the services of the agents they controlled were required. We did put a certain amount of traffic through TATE, but for some reason, unlike GARBO and BRUTUS, hardly any of his messages found their way into the German Intelligence summaries. Appendix XIII of this book reveals that during the year 1944, out of a total of 208 passages in the OKH Lagebericht West or the Ueberblick des Britischen Reiches whose inclusion can be attributed to the work of British-controlled agents, 86 came from GARBO, 91 from BRUTUS and only 11 from TATE. TRICYCLE made one useful contribution with his visit to Lisbon in March 1944 when he took with him a false Order of Battle which Berlin accepted as genuine. But enemy reaction to the lesser agents was minimal.
In June 1944 the establishment of Ops (B) was enlarged to make provision for the fact that there would be two operating centres, one in France and one in London. But by the end of July, although we continued to churn out plans until well into the New Year, the days of Strategic Deception were over.
The interrogation of senior German officers after the war had ended was carried out by my brother and myself. In March 1946 we met Field Marshal von Rundstedt and his Chief of Staff General Blumentritt at the Bridge End prisoner-of-war camp in South Wales. An account of that interview is recorded in Chapter XXII of this book. The interrogation of Field Marshals Keitel and Jodl and of Colonel Krummacher at Nuremberg in the following month were conducted by my brother alone. His visit to Nuremberg convinced him that it was GARBO’s message, despatched on the evening of the 8th June, 1944, which changed the course of the battle in Normandy and no subsequent research led him to modify that view.
On the 18th April, 1946, he wrote me a letter from Nuremberg which I subsequently showed to the late Sefton Delmer, who quoted it in full on pages 187 and 188 of his book The Counterfeit Spy, first published in 1973. It runs as follows:
TOP SECRET. International Military Trials, Nuremberg.
My dear Roger,
I saw Keitel last night. He agreed that the halting of 1 SS Pz. Div. would have been an OKW decision as they were very hesitant and nervous about moving anything from the P. de C. at that time. He could not however recollect the incident, nor could he say for certain what the ‘bestimmte Unterlagen’ were. He suggested that it might have been air recce of shipping movements on the south coast, or some other report from the Marine or Luftwaffe. When he saw the RSHA message he as good as said, ‘Well there you have your answer.’ He read through the comment at the end and explained to me that it would have been written by Krummacher and that it exactly represented the frame of mind of the OKW at that moment, which was such that the RSHA report in question would have had just the effect of persuading them to countermand the move of those forces. He added, ‘This message proves to you that what I have been telling you about our dilemma at the time is correct.’ Later he said, ‘You can accept it as 99% certain that this message was the immediate cause of the counter order.’
This morning I managed to get hold of the OKW War Diary and I enclose an extract from it which I think will interest you. The rest of the sheet is a list of things which have recently been sent to London, the first one being in fact the War Diary, which I will try to get hold of when I get back as it covers the whole of 1944.
I am going to Regensburg tomorrow and return here on Monday to pick up a note which Keitel has promised to write in amplification of what he said yesterday. Then I hope to get the aeroplane on Tuesday to London.
Yours ever,
Cuthbert
ROGER HESKETH