BEFORE HE GOT HIMSELF ARRESTED in Madrid, Dudley Clarke’s visit to London had set in motion the formation of a controlling section for deception. Although caught up in Clarke’s enthusiasm for deception, no one in London was quite sure how to make such a section work, least of all the man who was put in charge of it.
Colonel Oliver Stanley was instructed to form a staff of three officers, each representing one of the armed services. To represent the army, the War Office sent Lieutenant Colonel Fritz Lumley, a one-legged veteran of World War I. With the air war and the battle of the Atlantic in full swing, the RAF and Royal Navy were less enthused about losing senior officers. While the navy dragged its feet finding a candidate, the RAF sent a civilian to the post rather than losing a group captain.
The well-known author Dennis Wheatley had served as a gunner on the Western Front during World War I and had been injured in a German gas attack. Invalided from the Army, he took over his father’s wine-making business in 1926, but was later forced to sell it during the economic slump of the 1930s. It was then that he turned to writing the occult thrillers for which he was best known. At the beginning of World War II his second wife Joan joined MI5 and, at her suggestion, Wheatley was commissioned to write a number of papers on subjects relating to invasion defences and the conduct of the war.1 These papers were widely read by members of the Joint Planning Staff (JPS) and the Chiefs of Staff Committee and, in some cases, were even passed to the King.
In November 1941, when looking for a recruit to send to the deception section, the Director of Plans (Air), Group Captain William Dickson, invited Wheatley to lunch and introduced him to Stanley as a possible candidate to represent the Air Force. A formal interview took place shortly afterwards and Wheatley was accepted into the deception planning fraternity.2
According to Wheatley’s memoir The Deception Planners, the first months in the controlling section were frustratingly dull. The department occupied two offices on the third floor of the War Office overlooking St James’s Park. Although the offices were grand in design, the real business of running the war went on in the basement of the building. Secluded in its upper-storey offices, the deception section struggled to be noticed. Oliver Stanley did not help matters. He was so obsessed with secrecy that he appeared unwilling to let anyone know that his department existed. Wheatley very correctly suggested that Stanley ought to hold weekly meetings with all the parties interested in deception, namely ISSB, PWE, MI5, SIS, MEW, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), and so on, but the Controlling Officer declined the idea. By doing so, he condemned the department to a slow and lingering death.
In defence of Stanley, during that dark part of the war things appeared to be going badly on every front. With no offensive operations planned, there was little scope or requirement for cover plans to be developed by his organization. At this early stage there was still some confusion between the new section and the ISSB, the body responsible for operational security. The controlling section’s sole success in this period was in the development of Operation Hardboiled, a notional assault against Stavanger in Norway. This was the first of many successful attempts to pin down frontline German forces in Norway and it played on a very real concern Hitler had for this northernmost of his conquests. Although Hardboiled was never intended to go ahead, the operation was planned as meticulously as if it had been real and actual troops were assigned to it. Although the Germans appeared to take the bait and strengthened their Norwegian garrisons, Hardboiled died a death after the troops earmarked for it were transferred to an operation against Madagascar.
This setback caused a loss of impetus and by May 1942 the department had more or less fallen apart. Lumley spent most of his day on The Times crossword, dreaming of postings elsewhere. When he eventually secured a posting to SOE in West Africa he was ecstatic. At the time of Lumley’s departure, Stanley’s wife fell terminally ill and he went on leave to care for her. Increasingly frustrated at his inability to make inroads of any kind, Stanley asked Churchill for permission to be released so that he could re-enter politics.
At this make or break point in the development of organized deception, the creating force behind A Force again played a leading hand. General Wavell arrived in India in July 1941 and by the spring of 1942 was heavily engaged against the Japanese. He decided to set up a deception organization for the Far East on very similar lines to A Force. This organization was initially known by the designation GSI(d), but later came to be better known as D Division.
In the Dudley Clarke role was Lieutenant Colonel Peter Fleming, elder brother of Ian Fleming who then worked for Naval Intelligence and would only later rise to public celebrity for writing the James Bond novels. Before the war Peter Fleming was an acclaimed travel author and had been a special correspondent for The Times and the literary editor of The Spectator. At the beginning of the war Fleming had been instrumental in setting up the first of the so-called Auxiliary units in Kent during the 1940 invasion scare. The Auxiliaries were a prototype resistance guerrilla force, trained to allow the German Army to roll over their positions and then come out of hiding to attack their supply lines from the rear. According to Wheatley, Fleming taught the men unarmed combat and was well suited to the role, the novelist likening his appearance to that of a jaguar.
At the beginning of 1941 Fleming was asked to go to Egypt by Colonel George Pollock, the head of SOE in Cairo. The plan was for Fleming to make a tour of Italian POW cages and to recruit potential resistance agents from among anti-fascist prisoners. These would then be dropped into Italy by SOE to bring about an uprising in Italy. When this plan failed to develop, Fleming was charged with raising the ‘Garibaldi Legion’. This would be a force at least a thousand strong that would accompany the Allies when they landed in Italy. Despite great willingness on Fleming’s part, the Garibaldi Legion failed to attract recruits and the plan collapsed. Fleming spent the next few months in Cairo doing very little and growing increasingly frustrated. The time would have been entirely fruitless had he not become acquainted with A Force and Wavell, who had read his travel books and was very taken by him.3
When it became clear that the Germans were on the verge of invading Greece, Wavell agreed to let Fleming travel there with a team to organize a post-invasion resistance, much the same as he had done in Kent in 1940. Despite a complete lack of local knowledge and having no one in his party of desperadoes who could speak Greek, Fleming travelled to the Monastir Gap, one of the expected invasion routes. Unfortunately Fleming arrived too late to carry out his mission and instead spent his time blowing bridges and railway locomotives during the retreat, before returning to London.
Despite his lack of success he was not forgotten by Wavell, who requested that he join him in India. Fleming had to wait until February 1942 before he could leave the United Kingdom, travelling from Glasgow to Freetown in Africa on the aircraft carrier Formidable. From there he made his way to Cairo and reacquainted himself with A Force, spending time reading through the records of their operations, learning how the art of deception had been successfully employed to date. He arrived at Wavell’s HQ in Delhi in March 1942 and took over GSI(d) just at the point when Imperial Japanese forces appeared poised to strike into India.
One evening after dinner Wavell explained to Fleming the principles of the Meinzerhagen haversack ruse used in Allenby’s 1917 campaign against the Turks. Taking note of the lesson, towards the end of April Fleming abandoned a car near the advancing Japanese position, in which some documents were deliberately left behind. Among the letters were some false reports indicating that a strong reinforcement of two armies was expected in India and that a secret weapon had been developed for use against the Japanese. There was also a letter to Wavell from his friend Joan Bright in the Cabinet Office in London deliberately filled with all manner of indiscreet tittle-tattle on military matters.4
Whether the documents were ever found by the advancing Japanese and if the ruse actually came to anything was never established by its creators, but it did spur Wavell into writing to London on the subject of deception. On 3 May he wrote to Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) describing the ploy and then again, on 21 May, he wrote to Churchill urging him to ensure deception was taken seriously in London.
This intervention was later described by Masterman as the ‘real turning point’ in the campaign to implement an energetic, globally linked deception plan.5 To what extent Wavell’s letter was provoked by observations made by Fleming on the state of deception in London following Dudley Clarke’s mission the previous October is uncertain. However, the timing of Wavell’s letter does indicate that Fleming passed on some information about the malaise surrounding Oliver Stanley’s small team. In his letter, therefore, Wavell told the Prime Minister that deception in the Far and Middle Eastern theatres would be effective only if it was part of a widespread deception plan worked out in advance by London and Washington together.
The letter was spectacularly well timed because at that moment the British and Americans were making their first plans for offensive action. In a ‘knocking heads together’ exercise, Churchill circulated Wavell’s letter to the Defence Committee of the Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff, who referred it to the Joint Planning Staff.
The same day the letter was written, Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Bevan was appointed as the successor to Lumley. At the age of 46, Bevan was perhaps best known as a stockbroker and the son of a chairman of the Stock Exchange. A veteran of World War I, Bevan had served as an infantry subaltern on the Western Front where he gained a Military Cross. In 1918 he was given a rare opportunity to make his mark. Summoned to Versailles, he was asked to make an appreciation of the German order of battle, taking into account the German forces freed up by Russia’s exit from the war following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Given access to secret intelligence and allowed as much clerical assistance as he required, Bevan delivered his appraisal before an assembly of top Allied politicians and ‘brass’. Seated before him at his presentation was the Prime Minister Lloyd George, Churchill, Haig, Clemenceau, Foch, Pershing and all the various Allied army commanders. As it turned out, Bevan’s predictions were accurate to within three divisions and his forecast for the point of attack was good to within ten miles. Churchill was suitably impressed and summoned Bevan to his quarters at the Paris Ritz to discuss his views in more detail.
With this past link to Churchill and with the coincidental arrival of Wavell’s letter on deception, it should come as no surprise that by the time Johnny Bevan arrived at the War Office on 1 June to replace Lumley, he was instead given the top job, Churchill having accepted Stanley’s request to go back into politics. Arriving at what became officially known as the London Controlling Section (LCS), Bevan invigorated it. The name of the department was deliberately vague and it was mostly referred to by the initials LCS. Even if someone had worked out what the initials stood for, they would still have little idea what this London section actually controlled. As the new Controlling Officer of Deception Bevan acted as a stimulus to the department, which began to develop very rapidly, moving from secluded isolation to a post of paramount importance in the Allied war effort.
The advancement of the department was built on ‘old school tie’-style networking and informal chats with the right people over agreeable dinners. Here Wheatley excelled in promoting the interests of the department. Relatively low in rank, Wheatley would enter a superior officer’s office very formally, stand smartly to attention and observe all protocols. Once the officer asked Wheatley to sit down, things would become much less formal. Wheatley was the same age as many senior military figures and a lot of them had read his books. With the ice broken, Wheatley would somewhat impertinently offer to take them out for lunch. If that went well, he would invite them to dinner at his home. Because most officers had sent their wives out of London to escape the bombing, the domestic setting with Wheatley and his wife was all the more attractive to them – and Wheatley was well-known for providing a good table.
By the time of Bevan’s arrival, Wheatley’s unofficial dining club consisted of top generals, admirals and air commodores. Wheatley naturally introduced Bevan into these circles and the new Controlling Officer made his own invitations for them to dine at his expense. Thus between the two deception officers and their dinner services, they had access to some of the highest authorities in the land.
Bevan was also keen on country pursuits, much more so than Wheatley, and found that Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, shared his interest in bird watching. This gave Bevan an excuse for lunch with Sir Alan two or three times a month. Through his sister, Bevan was also brother-in-law to General Sir Harold Alexander, who would become Commander-in-Chief of the Middle East and an important player in the war. According to his secretary from February 1944, Lady Jane Pleydell-Bouverie, Bevan became great friends with Churchill’s Chief of Staff, General ‘Pug’ Ismay and ‘C’, the head of MI6. On a periodic basis Bevan was also sent for by Churchill to discuss deception plans in person, the Prime Minister retaining a strong interest in the subject throughout the war.
This intensive social networking was what made the difference between the Stanley era and the new one under Bevan. Later in 1942 the opportunities to network were greatly increased by the recruitment of Ronald Wingate as Army representative. Ronald Wingate was the son of the noted Sir Reginald ‘Wingate of the Sudan’ and cousin to Major General Orde Wingate, the legendary Chindit commander in the Far East. Like his predecessor Lumley, Wingate had made his career in India. However, where Lumley had remained a relatively obscure figure, Wingate had risen to some significance, becoming the governor of Baluchistan, a rank equivalent to lieutenant general and entitling him to an escort of lancers. Wingate had also negotiated British protectorates with a number of oil sheikhs in the Persian Gulf.
To compensate for his service overseas in all manner of ‘lice-ridden hovels’ in the king’s service, Wingate took an extended leave every two years.6 He would return to Europe and motor round the major resorts on the Continent, becoming an expert on hotels and fine dining. With extensive social networks and certain monarchs numbered among his friends, Wingate was naturally in good stead with his new colleagues in deception. His knowledge of politics was unbridled and his negotiating skills and cunning made him perfect for weaving his way through the cluttered halls and offices of the War Office.
The other key members of the team who joined in 1942 were Major Harold Peteval and Commander James Arbuthnott RN. Peteval was also a World War I veteran and had gone on to manage a soap factory. At the start of the war he had enlisted and had been at Dunkirk, where he was known for his calmness under shellfire. Despite this Wheatley remembered Peteval as being shy and extremely reluctant to leave the office to attend conferences. Instead he was studious and, like Bevan, worked extremely long hours, while Wheatley and the others would generally knock off at 6pm.
Arbuthnott was another veteran from the Great War and had since gone on to become a tea planter in Ceylon. Before joining the deception section Arbuthnott spent a year in GHQ Cairo. When in London, he was quizzed about what he knew of Dudley Clarke and A Force from his time in Cairo. Such was the security surrounding Dudley Clarke’s outfit that Arbuthnott confessed that although he had heard the organization mentioned he had absolutely no idea what it did.
One of Bevan’s first acts was to move the section’s offices from the third floor of the War Office to the overcrowded basement where the planning staffs were located. Amid the noise of air conditioning and the glare of electric lights, the basement was like a dungeon. Wheatley tried to brighten the place up by pinning giant maps to the wall and bringing some of his own furniture into the office, including some Persian rugs and a boardroom table complete with a Graeco–Roman-style statuette in the centre. By planting himself in the middle of a rabbit warren of decision-making, Bevan ensured the LCS would not be overlooked or forgotten.
Bevan’s next move was to draft a directive for the section, giving it a purpose and a goal. On 21 June the directive was endorsed by the Joint Planning Staff, formally setting out Bevan’s mission: 7
1. Prepare deception plans on a world-wide basis with the object of causing the enemy to waste his military resources.
2. Coordinate deception plans prepared by Commands at home and abroad.
3. Ensure that ‘cover’ plans prepared by the ISSB fit into the general framework of strategic deception.
4. Watch over the execution by the Service Ministries, Commands and other organizations and departments, of approved deception plans which you have prepared.
5. Control the support of deception schemes originated by Commanders in Chief, by such means as leakage, propaganda.
In addition, the directive confirmed that the LCS was not to limit itself to strategic deception, but to include anything ‘calculated to mislead the enemy wherever military advantage may be gained’. This was perhaps an open invitation for Bevan to concern himself with intelligence-led plans rather than just operational ones. To that end, the LCS was to open and maintain links with JIC, PWE, SOE, SIS and other government organizations and departments, one of which, although not mentioned in name, would be the Twenty Committee.
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While Bevan was assembling his team, the Twenty Committee was making equally positive steps to ensure the future of the double cross system. In June 1942 the question of access to the decrypts coming out of Bletchley Park was finally resolved. There had been a long-running turf war between Liddell’s B Division and Felix Cowgill’s Section V over the distribution of what was called Ultra or the ‘Most Secret Source’ (MSS), with the Security Service very critical of the SIS’s apparent mania for withholding information derived from decrypts relating to the double agents, even if it was to the detriment of their cases.
This led to an unreal situation developing over the Garbo case.8 At face value, Garbo looked like a fraud. His story was so outlandish, so implausible, that the service representatives on the Twenty Committee would not agree to provide information for the case. It was only when Garbo’s story was seen in the light of the ISOS decrypts that it was clear he had been telling the truth and that he was highly prized by the Abwehr. However, with the exception of the Admiralty and the SIS and MI5 representatives, the members of the Twenty Committee were not privy to MSS and therefore the army and air force representatives remained sceptical of Garbo to say the least. On 5 June Masterman wrote to ‘C’ and explained the problem to him. Fortunately the head of the SIS saw sense in the argument and on 11 June agreed that in future, all decrypts relating to the double agent cases would be made available to the Twenty Committee at its weekly meetings.
Buoyed by this concession, Tommy Robertson raised the stakes still further by drafting a memo for consideration by the W Board on Wednesday 15 July. In the memo he claimed that MI5 controlled the only active German espionage networks operating in the United Kingdom, and that it was ‘inconceivable’ that an unknown major network was functioning. It was a bold statement but there were a number of important clues to support this assertion. Firstly the RSS intercept service had not picked up any illicit radio signals other than those under B1a’s control, nor had mail censorship discovered anything indicating contact with known Abwehr cover addresses. There had been no attempts to pay anyone from the £18,000 that Tate had pocketed after Plan Midas, and most importantly of all, there was nothing indicating unknown spies on ISOS decrypts of the Abwehr’s wireless traffic. Taking this into account Robertson concluded that a valuable opportunity existed to begin deceiving the German High Command on a grand scale.
This opportunity would not be realized unless there was a change at the heart of how B1a did business. Since the formation of the committee, agents and their case officers would submit reports to be vetted by the various service representatives on the panel. What Robertson believed should be happening was the reverse: that the service representatives ought to be providing the agents with misleading information to be passed to the Germans. To do this the service representatives should be allowed to work on XX full time, not just the two hours a week then allocated at the time.
Perhaps the most radical of his proposals was that the Twenty Committee ought to be attached to the Operations branch of the services rather than Intelligence. This would allow the Twenty Committee to get its deception schemes into operational planning at the earliest possible stage.
Robertson passed the memo on to Liddell, who met with ‘C’ and the DMI on Monday 13 July. Liddell explained the nature of the memo and Robertson’s call for the service representatives to work full time on deception. The DMI was unhappy with the proposal, fearing the service representatives would find themselves discussing the existence of the Twenty Committee with their colleagues on the operational staff and before long the secret would be out of the bag. Instead the DMI smartly suggested bringing Johnny Bevan onto the W Board and making him fully acquainted with the work of the Twenty Committee, something that had been withheld from Oliver Stanley. The following day, Liddell took Robertson’s proposal to the DNI, Director of Air Intelligence and Findlater Stewart. The Directors of Naval and Air Intelligence supported Robertson’s proposal and agreed to allow their members to work on deception full time. They confirmed this at the actual W Board meeting on Wednesday 15 July, also endorsing the DMI’s suggestion to make Bevan au fait with the secrets of the double cross system and Signals Intelligence.
Johnny Bevan quickly became flavour of the month. In addition to being invited to join the Wireless Board, in August the DNI suggested that Bevan might like to take over chairmanship of the Twenty Committee from Masterman and that the whole double cross system ought to be a spin-off from deception. Masterman was against this, although apparently not for any personal motives. On 5 September he wrote to Liddell explaining that the Twenty Committee was not only interested in deception and that only MI5 was in a position to run double cross agents.9
On 24 September the W Board met with all members in attendance plus Bevan and Tommy Robertson. It was at this point that Bevan became fully indoctrinated into the double cross secret. ‘C’ opened proceedings by reading out a note that Liddell suspected had been drafted by Cowgill, designed to inflate the role of MI6 in the enterprise and show that MI5 was not solely responsible for the double agent organization. Liddell explained to Bevan that the present network had begun with the agent Snow and developed through the arrival of different parachute agents and other arrivals, along with several agents who were recruited in the United Kingdom. The system had originally been devised for counter-espionage purposes, to capture German spies and, by running them as double agents, to alleviate the need for the Germans to send more to the British Isles. It also had a practical purpose for the intelligence service, both in terms of code-breaking and also in gleaning German intentions from the nature of the questionnaires sent to their agents. Deception had only been envisaged as a subsidiary advantage, but was one that now presented very useful opportunities. In summing up, Liddell cautioned Bevan that the counterespionage purpose of the system meant that the Director General of MI5 retained the right of veto over any information given to the double agents to pass on that might put the network at risk.10 As for the DNI’s suggestion that Bevan should become chairman of the Twenty Committee, this was quashed. Bevan did not want to burden himself with the day-to-day running of the agents, something that was beyond his remit as Controlling Officer and at which B1a was far more accomplished.11
According to Montagu, C also promised to furnish Bevan with the relevant ‘Special Material’, by which he meant Bletchley decrypts. The initial rewards of this were more of a trickle than a flood and so Montagu very improperly went to his boss the DNI and asked Admiral Godfrey if he might cut a few corners and pass Bevan anything he felt might be useful. This was against MI6’s strict orders on the propagation of MSS, but Godfrey very rightly did not believe in allowing red tape to become a hindrance to the fighting of the war. Montagu continued to supply Bevan until the flow from MI6 increased to a more reasonable level.12
To preserve secrecy, Bevan divided his department into two parts: Operational and Intelligence. All the secret intelligence/double cross work was undertaken by Harold Peteval in isolation from the others. Peteval attended the weekly meetings of the Twenty Committee on Bevan’s behalf and was also privy to the information supplied by Bletchley Park, where his wife worked. An indication of how tight security was surrounding the ‘Most Secret Source’ was that it was two years before Peteval realized that his wife’s work at Bletchley was in any way connected with his own.13
XX
At their September meeting with Bevan, the W Board solved an additional problem by agreeing to make an approach to the Americans. General Eisenhower and Admiral Stark were each asked for an officer from their respective services to be appointed to approve information relating to American forces, something on which the German questionnaires were focusing more attention. To this end the Americans set up a body known as Joint Security Control consisting of Major General G. A. Strong of the US Army and Captain George C. Dyer of the US Navy.
Meanwhile, Bevan asked the DMI for an officer who could go to Washington and try to explain the concept of strategic deception to the American Chiefs of Staff and maintain a presence there for liaison with the LCS. The DMI put forward Major Michael Bratby for the post. A relatively young officer by LCS standards, in his early thirties, Bratby did not make a good impression on Bevan or Wheatley. The problem was in his dress, which was sloppy. Bevan was always immaculate and was described by Wheatley as having the best-polished shoes in the British Army. He did not appreciate the idea of being represented in Washington by a scruff. As it turned out, Bratby had worked with the Americans while posted to Iceland and proved to be a great success in Washington. Direct links were also set up with Eisenhower when he arrived in England to take command of Operation Torch, the planned Allied landings in French North Africa set for November 1942. The LCS’s main contact with his staff was through the British brigadier Eric Mockler-Ferryman. Better known as ‘the Moke’, he charged former Mid-West railway executive Lieutenant Colonel Goldbranson with keeping in touch and assisting the LCS.
Operation Torch was the first real test for Bevan, who was tasked with providing a cover plan for the operation. Since the United States had entered the war against Germany, the British and Americans had been arguing over the merits of how best to prosecute the war in Europe and bring it to as speedy an end as possible. For the Americans there was one clear objective: take Berlin and remove Hitler. Confident that their mighty economic and industrial potential would defeat Germany, the Americans developed a plan for a direct assault across the English Channel into north-west Europe. This they aptly codenamed Sledgehammer.
Churchill was opposed to Sledgehammer for a number of reasons. It was unclear if the Americans appreciated quite how tough German opposition was going to be. The large-scale Allied raid on Dieppe in August 1942 was an absolute bloodbath and showed in no uncertain terms how strongly the Germans would resist any such invasion attempt. Churchill believed that Sledgehammer would lead to a repeat of the 1914–18 war and the slaughter of the trenches. Churchill favoured using the Mediterranean to attack ‘the soft underbelly of the Axis’. He had advocated a similar course in World War I and the resulting Gallipoli campaign was a disaster. Despite this he pressed his argument, knowing that the security of the Mediterranean would reap as much reward politically as it would militarily. Britain’s supply route through the Suez Canal with the eastern half of its empire would be secure and a powerful message would be sent out to the Italians that they would be next.
Eager to get American troops into action against Germany before the end of 1942, and thinking that Sledgehammer would not be ready before that deadline, Roosevelt went against his advisors and agreed to Churchill’s request on 24 July 1942. Three days later Bevan was told to prepare a cover plan for the operation, which would keep as many German troops tied up in north-west Europe for as long as possible and prevent them from being sent to the Mediterranean or to the Russian Front.
On 5 August Bevan submitted a plan for a series of deception operations that would achieve these ends. They included a bogus cross-Channel invasion codenamed Overthrow, a threat against Norway codenamed Solo, a notional plan to relieve Malta codenamed Townsman, and Kennecott, a cover plan for the actual destination of the invasion convoys once they were under way.
Operation Overthrow was a continuation of the discarded Sledgehammer plan. Bevan wanted to encourage the Germans to believe there would be further major cross-Channel attacks in 1942. Landing platforms or ‘hards’ for invasion craft were built on the Thames and Medway and rumours were put out through the usual channels that the Dieppe raid had been a dress rehearsal for a much larger attack.
In the development of this cover plan it was agreed that a number of double cross agents would be used, including some who were relative newcomers to the B1a stable. With the passing of GW after Calvo’s arrest, the only one of the early spies still in business was Rainbow, who was now working as a pianist in a dance band in Weston-super-Mare. Held on ice for long periods, Rainbow eventually developed into an important agent and moved to London in February 1942, where he could get work in a factory. He thus became an important channel for misinformation on industrial and economic topics. Of the other early spies, Gander’s career had proved very short lived and Summer and Snow were locked away for the duration, along with Jeff who was notionally posted with the Norwegian forces but whose traffic was in reality now all handled by Mutt.
Tate continued to send his colourful messages to Hamburg. He had notionally been posted to work on a farm, travel from which was infrequent and which limited his ability to spy. He reported to the Germans that he had a girlfriend called Mary who worked for the Admiralty and was on loan to the US Naval Mission. She supposedly introduced Tate to a number of officers, many of whom would stay at their flat and indiscreetly leave documents out for inspection. Tate thus became one of the most important channels for naval deception.
In August 1941 Tricycle had been sent by his Abwehr controllers on a mission to set up an espionage network in the United States, and therefore he played no part in the Torch planning. However, his two sub-agents Balloon and Gelatine were still active, the latter reporting on gossip she notionally picked up from her society friends in the services.
Of those agents yet to be introduced, the longest serving was codenamed Dragonfly. Born to German parents, Hans George was contacted by the Abwehr as early as April 1940. He reported this contact to the British authorities and in November of the same year, acting on MI5’s instructions, accepted the Abwehr’s offer during a business visit to Lisbon. He returned to England with a radio set hidden in a gramophone player and instructions to report on the RAF and to send meteorological reports. Working under MI5 control under the codename Dragonfly, this new double agent established radio contact with a station in Paris in March 1941. Although his primary importance was in sending meteorological information, he was used by the Germans to help another spy communicate with them.
This spy was the double agent known as Father. Arriving from Lisbon in 1941, Father was a distinguished Belgian Air Force pilot called Henri Arents. He had returned to Brussels after the fall of France in search of means to travel to England. To that end he offered his services to the Abwehr, offering to travel to England, using the cover of having stolen a German aircraft. Unsurprisingly the Germans did not agree to the loss of an aircraft and instead suggested that Arents travel to America and get work as a test pilot there. Arents travelled to Lisbon in December 1940, where he applied for a travel visa. When it appeared that this would not be forthcoming, Arents suggested he should go to England, steal an RAF plane and fly it back to France. This idea was appealing and Arents was allowed to travel to the United Kingdom to carry out his mission. Unluckily for the Abwehr, Arents had contacted the Belgian government in exile in Lisbon and explained his story. His arrival in the United Kingdom was not therefore unexpected and he was quickly turned to double cross work and codenamed Father, writing his first letter to the Germans the day after he arrived in June 1941.
It was a similar story with Agent Careless, a Polish airman shot down and wounded in 1939. He managed to escape to France and then Spain in April 1941 where he allowed himself to be recruited by the Abwehr, who knew him by the name Clark Korab. He was sent to Britain with a questionnaire on Air Force matters, in particular the supply of aircraft from the United States. He came to Britain by sea and was denounced by three Polish refugees who had travelled with him. Luckily for Careless, he had already revealed his contact with the Abwehr to the ship’s captain and after interrogation by MI5 was retained as a double cross agent. Once set up, his prime focus became antiaircraft defences, although a number of indiscretions on his part saw him locked up in Camp 020.
The star performer was Garbo, who reported that he had found himself freelance work with the BBC and the Ministry of Information. These jobs afforded Garbo some access to official circles and helped explain how he was able to recruit so many sub-agents. The first of Garbo’s notional contacts was officially designated Agent J1 and was known only as the ‘Courier’. He was an unsavoury character who worked for an unspecified airline company and used KLM employees to smuggle Garbo’s letters to Portugal. The ‘Courier’ was also said to be involved in smuggling and operated a money-laundering racket for members of the British underworld.
In addition to the ‘Courier’, Garbo had ‘recruited’ the first three of his imaginary sub-agents while still working in Lisbon. The first recruit was Agent 1, Carvalho, a Portuguese commercial traveller living in Newport from where he was able to report on activities in Devon and Cornwall. He was followed closely by Agent 2, William Gerbers, a Briton of Swiss-German descent. Based in Merseyside, Gerbers was responsible for high-grade naval reports. Agent 3 was ‘Pedro’, a Venezuelan of private means educated at the University of Glasgow.
Once actually in Britain, Garbo increased the size of his organization by recruiting more fantasy figures with the help of his case officer Tommy Harris. Agent 4 was said to be ‘Fred’, a Gibraltarian waiter. Reporting that his confidence in Fred had been built up over seven months, Garbo added him to the payroll in May 1942. Due to the shortage of hotel workers, Fred was highly employable and could work more or less anywhere in the country. Garbo asked the Germans where they wanted him to work and from their response the British were able to see what area the Germans were most interested in: in this case the north-east. Garbo also reported that Fred had acquired a wireless transmitter on the black market in London. Garbo explained that he knew nothing about radios, but if the Germans wanted, he would purchase it. Fred had a friend who was a wireless mechanic employed at the EKCO factory, who could operate the radio on his behalf, believing it was in the cause of Spanish Republicans. This, however, was one piece of bait the Germans did not seize upon straight away, and so Garbo’s principal means of communication remained secret letter writing.
Another nameless agent was J2, an RAF officer based at Fighter Command to whom Garbo had become close. As notional as his colleagues, this agent allowed the British to pass material from the Air Ministry to the Germans. Next in line came Agent J3, a high-ranking official in the Spanish Department of the Ministry of Information where Garbo worked. Although never named as such, Agent J3 was based on the real head of the Spanish section, as the Germans would have realized had they enquired more deeply. Agent J3 had been introduced to Garbo by Agent 6, a South African called Dick who hated Communists. In return for his services Garbo had promised Dick a prominent place in the New World Order and was thus assured his constant and unwavering loyalty.
In addition to this complicated web of spies, Garbo’s unique style of writing must be emphasized. Where Tate’s messages were short to the point of being rude, for every line of useful information given by Garbo the poor German decrypting the message would have to wade through ten lines of waffle, of which the following is but a tiny example. In a long letter complaining that he was short of funds he inserted the following:
All this has worried me a great deal and I want you to know that if it were not for the esteem which I feel personally for you, which I feel you reciprocate, as well as the interest which I have in helping our cause for which I have fought for three years during our war, and continue to fight for, though in a more responsible position in order to terminate this plague of Reds, I must tell you that in all sincerity, and as a friend, that I would have returned to Spain some time ago.14
Garbo’s letters were littered with such pieces.
For the Overthrow operation Garbo cautioned the Germans not to be misled by reports that the Allies lacked enough ships to mount an invasion. In fact there was talk, he reported, that the Allies were planning to use all manner of smaller craft in a cross-Channel dash at several points. Taking the bait, the Germans instructed the eccentric Spaniard to learn more. By 5 October even Hitler was convinced something was afoot and began issuing directives to strengthen the Channel coastal defences and that troops stationed along the coast should be put on high alert.15
While Hitler suspected the Allies had their sights set on Cherbourg, the German Commander-in-Chief West, von Rundstedt, was concerned that Normandy and the north coast of Brittany might be targeted. In keeping with the rumours coming out of Britain, von Rundstedt believed Dieppe had been no more than a dress rehearsal for bigger things to come and by 12 October was predicting that the attack would come at any time. Also that month rumours began to circulate through Kent that civilians were being evacuated from the coast and that hospital beds were being prepared. In a clear indication that the Germans had no idea what the Allies were planning, towards the end of October Garbo was sent an urgent message instructing him to send agents to the south coast, in particular the Isle of Wight and south Wales, to locate troop concentrations and storage areas.16 It was not until the winter settled in that von Rundstedt finally ruled out an Allied operation against him in 1942.
With forces successfully pinned in France, Bevan was also successful in keeping the Germans busy in Norway. Following the earlier Hardboiled plan, the LCS hinted that Trondheim and Narvik were the target of the troops mustering on the Clyde and earmarked for Torch. This cover plan was codenamed Solo I, an obvious anagram of Oslo, the Norwegian capital. It played upon a long-held German suspicion that the Allies would attempt to wrest Norway back from them. Although the Mutt and Jeff double act was put on the case, Garbo again played the leading role in this ruse. According to Tommy Harris the Garbo network reported that Canadian and Scottish troops were training in the vicinity of Ayr and Troon. Their target was said to be a mountainous country and large supplies of anti-freeze, snow chains and skis had been gathered.17
Bevan now had to explain the enormous build up of supplies in Gibraltar. The place was packed with men and war materials and it was inconceivable that this build up was not being reported on by Axis agents planted among the large numbers of Spanish who worked there. To explain it, he commissioned Plan Townsman, which hinted that the British were going to relieve the beleaguered island of Malta.
Bevan asked the DMI to provide him with a trustworthy officer who could go to Gibraltar and Malta and brief the respective governors on the cover plan about Malta. The officer selected was Major David Strangeways. Unlike the DMI’s previous offering, Michael Bratby, Strangeways immediately endeared himself to Bevan and Wheatley by turning up dressed in an absolutely immaculate uniform. Wheatley invited him out to dinner and was equally impressed with his blue undress uniform. Strangeways was a professional officer who liked being in the thick of it. At Dunkirk he had got his men home on an abandoned Thames barge that he sailed back to Dover, before rushing up to London and meeting his wife for dinner at the Savoy that same evening. He was clearly the ‘right sort’ and would become a major player in due course.
After a few days being briefed by the LCS, Strangeways set off on his mission to brief Lord Gort at Gibraltar and General Mason MacFarlane at Malta. He was also given a number of despatches, which he was to take on to Cairo and give to the new Commander-in-Chief of the Middle East, General Sir Harold Alexander – Bevan’s brother-in-law. Strangeways was also given a little deception mission of his own to carry out.
Wheatley was friends with Henry Hopkinson, the foreign advisor to the British Minister of State in Cairo. Giving Strangeways an autographed copy of his latest novel to pass to Hopkinson, Wheatley slipped a letter to his friend inside the book. It was common knowledge that German spies were to be found among the Spanish hotel staff working in Gibraltar. Any British officer spending a night in a Gibraltar hotel was almost certain to have his luggage rifled and any loose documents copied. Wheatley’s letter was written on Cabinet Office headed notepaper and contained all manner of indiscreet information about his new job in Planning and speculation on what the build up for stores on Gibraltar was really all about.
Strangeways accomplished his missions in Gibraltar and Malta without a hitch. He travelled on to Cairo with his important despatches, delivered them and was introduced to Dudley Clarke. Returning to the United Kingdom he was quickly raised to the rank of lieutenant colonel and was told that he had been poached by A Force. Rather than the action posting he desired, he was given orders to go to Tehran to head A Force operations with PAIFORCE – the British forces in Persia and Iraq. He was genuinely quite disappointed.
Meanwhile the governor general of Gibraltar, Lieutenant General Mason Macfarlane, was deliberately indiscreet, travelling to Malta and making a show of the arrangements for the island’s relief. This still did not explain the growing quantity of landing craft at Gibraltar. These, or so the rumour went, were earmarked for an operation against the port of Dakar in French West Africa.
This part of the deception was codenamed Solo II. The actual troops based in Britain earmarked for Torch were told their destination was Dakar. During mid-September the troops were told to expect a long sea voyage, were issued with mosquito nets and were vaccinated for tropical diseases. On 18 October, agent Dragonfly was asked by his German controllers where he thought the operation was going to occur: on the Atlantic or against Africa. Lending some credence to Overthrow, the agent replied that some soldiers expected an attack similar to Dieppe on the north French coast, but on a larger scale. There were no indications of an operation against the Atlantic or Africa on the south coast that he had seen, but Dragonfly reported press speculation and rumours about Dakar.
By hinting at Dakar the LCS had made a bit of a rod for its own back. It was important not to put too much credence on an attack against the Vichy French, or their forces would be put on high alert at the time of the landings and no one was sure to what extent the landings would be contested. Vichy France was still extremely upset with the British for sinking its ships at Mers-el-Kebir in 1940 and despite clandestine political overtures, it was expected that the French would resist the landing. To put the Vichy French at ease, the LCS and Dudley Clarke’s A Force began hinting that the actual invasion might be against Sicily and Italy. To back up the usual channels, British diplomats began making enquiries about how Italian ex-pats in the Middle East would react to an Allied invasion of Italy. Even the Vatican was consulted about the political situation in Sicily.
At the end of October 1942 the Axis was anticipating an invasion anywhere from Narvik to Dakar. The German appreciation of the situation was interesting. Some speculated that the fleet was destined for Sardinia, Sicily or Malta. If the fleet arrived at Malta, it was then expected to make an assault on Libya to attack the rear of Rommel’s forces in North Africa, then engage against the British close to Alexandria. Strangely this eventuality was about the only thing the LCS had not speculated upon, perhaps because they thought the idea was too ambitious.
The two Allied convoys set sail for Africa, the one from Britain sailing 2,760 miles (4,442km) and the one from the United States making a journey of 4,500 miles (7,242km) to reach its target. There was great tension in the map room as hour after hour passed with the members of the LCS waiting for news of an enemy response.18 It was a miracle that both convoys passed through U-boat-infested waters undetected and were unobserved until they reached the Straits of Gibraltar on 6 November.
On the following day, 7 November, the Axis air forces still did not materialize. Although reserves of bombers had been rushed to Sicily, their commander, Kesselring, held the Luftwaffe back expecting the convoys to pass the narrow straits between Sicily and Tunis as if going on to Malta. Kesselring believed he could smash the Allied convoys with his aircraft as they passed close to his bases. It was a similar story with the U-boats, which were ordered to the eastern Mediterranean to lie in wait. Instead the British convoy turned about and the assault went in at Algiers without a hitch, taking everyone by surprise.
It is difficult to gauge the effect of military deceptions. Masterman sounded a note of caution about any perceived successes over Torch. The Twenty Committee chairman believed the Germans were, if anything, guilty of deceiving themselves, erroneously believing the Allies did not have enough shipping to pull off such a large expedition. It was in fact a triumph of security, as the real plans were not deduced. In this case, the value of the control of the double agents was not in sending misinformation, but in not sending real and valuable information.
Perhaps the biggest dividend of the operation, albeit a long-term one, was the strengthening of the Garbo case in German eyes. When the convoys were sighted, elaborate plans went into action to protect Garbo from any fallout relating to his failure to report the convoys coming from England. On 29 October Garbo made a report about the sailing of one of the Torch convoys from the Clyde. The letter was sent on to Lisbon with instructions that it was not to be posted to the German safe house until after the Admiralty reported that the enemy had spotted the convoy. A second letter was written on 1 November and posted on the 4th. This letter said that Agent 3 had reported troop transports and warships leaving the Clyde with Mediterranean colours. Garbo also reported that he had personally seen a secret Ministry of Information directive about a landing in French North Africa. This letter was not sent by air mail until the day the landings took place.
By holding up the information until it was too late to be of any operational use, Garbo convinced his German employers that he had tried to warn them, but had not been able to do so because of his lack of a radio. This embarrassed them because they had not agreed to let Garbo buy the transmitter offered to him by ‘Fred’ the Gibraltarian.
Garbo also reported he had been handicapped by the mysterious silence from his Liverpool-based sub-agent Gerbers (Agent 2) who should have been in a prime position to warn him of ships from the Mersey. After an investigation into the matter, Garbo reported that Gerbers had unexpectedly died on 19 November as a result of illness. As proof he forwarded the obituary notice that had appeared in the Liverpool Daily Post, planted there by the British secret service. This account was believed and condolences were passed on to Gerbers’ widow.
The Spaniard’s standing with the Abwehr now rose to a level above and beyond that of all the other agents. His reports were described as ‘magnificent’, and there was a promise that a radio link would be set up for him as had been previously suggested.