SINCE THEIR FIRST MEETING IN January 1941, it had been the ambition of the Twenty Committee to use the double agents of B1a in a major deception against the Germans. Now, with Allied aerial supremacy limiting German reconnaissance flights over Britain, the most important and successful means of delivering Fortitude directly to German High Command was through the agents under Twenty’s control. This was exactly the sort of show that had been envisaged by Masterman in early 1941, for which the double agents had been built up and made to appear plausible to their German employers. The committee was quite prepared to blow all its agents on one big show and Overlord fitted the bill perfectly.
The first inkling that the spies would be used in the invasion deception came in the late summer of 1943. At a meeting of the Twenty Committee’s parent body – the W Board – in September 1943, Johnny Bevan was co-opted as a member. Still at the planning stages of the invasion cover plan, Bevan asked MI5 and SIS representatives if all the German agents operating in the United Kingdom were under their control. Given that no other networks had been picked up by the RSS through postal censorship or from discussions intercepted by ISOS, they concluded there was still no evidence of any other clandestine German activities.
After this meeting, towards the end of 1943, there followed a review of all the double cross cases, after which the W Board cherry-picked those it believed could be used to support Bodyguard. From the continual daily monitoring of ISOS intercepts, B1a were able to report that, in German eyes, the three strongest cases were Tricycle, Garbo and a relative newcomer to XX work called Brutus, who will be fully introduced later. In the second line were Tate, Mullet, Mutt and Jeff, and three female agents: Gelatine, Bronx, and a recent addition to the team codenamed Treasure. Taking that as their running order, at the W Board meeting on 21 January 1944 the members authorized the Twenty Committee to go all out on the deception plan for Overlord, even if it meant sacrificing all the agents.
Having made this decision, the Twenty Committee took more of a back seat in the invasion deception. It was decided that SHAEF Ops. B would be the approving authority for deception material and that a representative from that body should sit on the Twenty Committee. Since his secondment to Ops. B in April 1943 from Army Intelligence, Lieutenant Colonel Roger Fleetwood-Hesketh, working under Jervis-Read, had become the linkman between COSSAC and ‘Special Means’. Through the auspices of the LCS, Hesketh had been made aware of the existence and availability of B1a’s double agents. Under COSSAC, approval for ‘special means’ traffic had been given by a weekly sub-committee known as Twist. Chaired by Bevan, these meetings were used to allocate leakages and other ‘special means’ information to the best channel for it to reach the enemy. Anticipating the increased workload prior to D-Day, Bevan decided it was best to cut out the middle-man and shut down Twist in favour of direct meetings between Ops. B and B1a. To achieve this, an MI5 officer from B1a, Major Christopher Harmer, was posted to Ops. B to act as a liaison between the two organizations.
From that point on the coordination of the double agents used for D-Day happened extremely informally, with the majority of decisions made after direct conversation between Hesketh and the case officers.1 Hesketh was based in Eisenhower’s headquarters at Norfolk House, 31 St James’s Square, just a short walk along King Street to MI5’s headquarters at 58 St James’s Street. Case officers like Tommy Harris (for Garbo) and Hugh Astor (for Brutus) would go over to Hesketh at Norfolk House and thrash out the details of messages to be sent by their particular agent. In turn, Hesketh would often visit the London Controlling Section’s offices at Storey’s Gate on the other side of St James’s Park. There he would explain developments to Harold Peteval, who dealt with ‘special means’ traffic on behalf of Johnny Bevan. As the Fortitude South plan developed, Hesketh also had to consult with the deception officer, Colonel Strangeways, before approving anything relating to Twenty-First Army Group. Hesketh therefore had his brother Cuthbert seconded to Ops. B and used him more or less daily as a despatch rider between Norfolk House and Montgomery’s Twenty-First Army Group HQ at Southwick Park near Southampton.
XX
Just as it was on the verge of making its greatest contribution to the war, there were private fears that the whole double cross system might collapse at any point. Having kept the system alive through all the scares from its inception to the spring of 1944 was a great achievement in itself.2 Partly through the judgement of the case officers, of Masterman, Tommy Robertson, Guy Liddell, and in no small part down to German inefficiency and sheer luck, they had weathered many storms. The stakes were enormously high – perhaps too high for the system to continue. Even at this late hour, if the Germans suspected one of their agents was blown, they could have read the deception messages in reverse and deduced the Allies’ real intentions. This eventuality was perceived to be so serious MI5 did consider shutting down all the agent cases except Garbo; and even then he too was in grave danger of being shut down by his case officer over fears about the traffic being read the wrong way.
Another problem was that the double cross system was becoming too well known. From a closed circle of acquaintances it now included operators in Canada, Iceland, Ireland, Ceylon and the Middle East. Also, because the Allies expected to find ‘stay behind’ agents as they advanced into Europe, it had become necessary to indoctrinate a number of front line security officers in how to handle captured agents and play them back. In preparation for the invasion, B1a had been asked to provide training for officers and set up a ‘school’ for XX work. Sooner or later it was feared someone would let the cat out of the bag, or, after the invasion, would be captured and interrogated.
By 1944 there were also a number of competitors to B1a’s spies vying for the attention of the German intelligence service. Although the British controlled all the agents operating in the United Kingdom, several freelance operators working outside Britain were fraudulently selling secrets to the Germans on the back of having informants in Britain. In Lisbon the most successful of these bogus operators was Czech businessman called Paul Fidrmuc, codenamed Ostro. By the autumn of 1943 the Abwehr in Lisbon was reporting that Ostro had up to five sub-agents in Britain and regarded him as one of their best sources of information. He was highly paid and his messages were sent straight to Berlin for action. When Ostro’s reports were transmitted to the German capital they were intercepted by the British Y Service and sent to Bletchley Park for decoding. From the content of the messages the British realized that Ostro was not in the United Kingdom, and was making it up. However, he was inventive, and thus a threat. There was always the chance he would get lucky and guess Normandy was the Allied target.
The Security Service was at a loss as to what to do, as Ostro was not on its turf. Johnny Bevan suggested having Ostro eliminated, while Tommy Robertson was backed by the Twenty Committee when he called for him to be discredited and blown. The only other option was to gamble and try to bring Ostro under British control. In the event, ‘C’ blocked every attempt to do anything against Ostro in order to protect the source of their information on him. Although MI6’s reluctance to endanger Bletchley Park was understandable, the Twenty Committee’s worst fears were realized on the eve of the invasion. Guy Liddell’s diary for 5 June 1944 recorded that Ostro did indeed ‘hit the target area’. Citing an officer on Montgomery’s staff as the source, Ostro forecast that the Allies’ main assault would be against the Cherbourg peninsula.3
The second troublesome operator was a certain Dr Krämer, an Abwehr officer posing as a German press attaché in Stockholm. Karl Heinz Krämer had been an assistant to Nikolaus Ritter in Hamburg during the days of the invasion spy offensive. He had then been sent to Sweden to report on air intelligence and appeared to be quite successful. Setting up a network of contacts in the Finnish, Hungarian and Japanese secret services, Krämer made contacts with the French military attaché’s office, a well-placed Swedish businessman and an airline employee who brought information in from Britain, Lisbon and the United States. When reporting back to Berlin, Krämer codenamed all his air-related intelligence Hektor, while naval matters were codenamed Josephine.
When these two codenames began appearing on ISOS, both MI5 and MI6 feared there were two uncontrolled agents operating in the United Kingdom. Josephine in particular proved a worthy adversary and the Security Service was somewhat dismayed to read Krämer’s prediction that the invasion would come in June. He also reported some material that obviously related to Fortitude, and this, coupled with a number of mistakes in his reporting, allowed MI5 to conclude that his agents were notional. In addition to his normal sources of information, it is believed that Krämer was shown German daily intelligence summaries, which made mention of Fortitude material being reported by B1a’s agents in the United Kingdom. Krämer embellished these reports with other information picked up in Sweden and regurgitated it back to Berlin. In that sense, unlike Ostro, the Josephine and Hektor reports did at least have their foundation in the Allies’ deception plan.4
The biggest fear was that something unforeseen would blow the cases before they could make the finish line. More than any other, this fear was realized and a number of the most important cases literally collapsed a matter of days before the invasion began. Experience with agents such as Snow and Summer proved that the agents could be erratic and suddenly go off track. However, few could have foreseen the major crisis sparked by the most improbable circumstance imaginable: the death of an agent’s pet dog in quarantine.
Nathalie ‘Lily’ Sergueiev was born in Petrograd in 1912, but raised in Paris after her parents emigrated when the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917. Working as a journalist for a German newspaper, she eventually allowed herself to be recruited by the Abwehr in late 1940. Coming under the control of Major Emile Kliemann, Lily volunteered for a mission in Britain on the back of having relatives in the Bristol area. She received extensive training and in June 1943 was sent to Spain from where she sought passage to Britain. Unfortunately for the Abwehr, Lily was unable to get permission to pass through Portugal because of her Russian background. The Portuguese were apparently very wary of communist infiltration and so they denied her access to Lisbon from where she could have flown to Britain.
While in Madrid, Lily made an approach to the SIS representative at the British embassy. She explained her mission, the fact she could not get to Portugal and asked for help, in return for which she would come under Allied control. The British gave her access to Gibraltar and from there things appeared to go more smoothly. Before leaving Spain, Lily Sergueiev made one demand of the British. She knew about the strict quarantine laws for animals entering the country, but she wanted to take her pet terrier Frisson with her. This clause became a major obstacle in the smooth running of the case.
While the British officials insisted the dog would have to undergo six months’ quarantine in Gibraltar, Lily fell in love with a USAAF lieutenant, Kenneth Larson. He promised to smuggle the dog to Britain for her. Reassured by Larson, Sergueiev continued with her mission and was given the codename Treasure by MI5. She agreed to go to Britain on the strength of Larson’s promise and became enormously upset when the dog did not materialize a few weeks later. In December Treasure told her case officer, Mary Sherer, that because the British had broken their promise to her she felt able to do the same and would no longer work for them. When Sherer implied that Treasure could be forced to work for the British, the spy only dug her heels in more. Sherer explained the dog situation to Tommy Robertson, advising him that Treasure’s American boyfriend had let her down; she asked Robertson if they could get the Navy involved to bring the dog over quietly and avoid quarantine.
Robertson’s patience must have been worn very thin by such a seemingly unimportant matter as Frisson the dog. Elsewhere that month Robertson had just learned that the cases of Jeff and Summer might have been compromised. The problem concerned suspected Abwehr officer Erich Karl, who had been taken captive but was then repatriated. Karl had been held with other Nazi German internees at Camp L on the Isle of Man. This camp was dangerously close to Camp WX which held former Camp 020 inmates. Once the two camps became aware of one another’s existence, the two sets of inmates began clandestine communications by means as simple as messages tied to bricks thrown between the camps.
Learning about this breach of security, in December 1943 MI5 carried out an investigation that established that Camp WX inmates had probably explained their plight to the inmates of Camp L and that Karl might well have been one of those made privy to the secret messages. If the fate of Jeff and Summer was known, this would immediately compromise Mutt and Tate. Because of Plan Midas, suspicion of Tate would also put suspicion on Tricycle and his network. Faced with this dilemma, it was decided simply to ignore the problem. There was no concrete proof that Karl knew anything, and so Robertson’s report on the subject to the W Board on 21 January concluded that they had probably got away with it again.5
With this as a background, the fate of Treasure’s dog might not have been B1a’s first priority. However, shortly after the bust up with Mary Sherer, Treasure was admitted into hospital. In fairness, the agent’s erratic behaviour may have been in part down to a serious kidney illness she was suffering. Soon after her outburst at Sherer, Treasure consented to see a doctor. Over Christmas 1943 she was told she had just six months to live unless she agreed to an operation. She refused. Robertson took time out to visit Treasure in hospital and tried to convince her to have the operation, which she again refused, claiming that she would not want to die on an operating table in England and be buried in damp British soil. When she broached the subject of bringing Frisson to Britain with Robertson, he simply replied: ‘I’m afraid it’s not possible.’6
Treasure recovered her strength and agreed to go to Lisbon in February to collect a radio. Posing as an employee of the Ministry of Information making propaganda films for the soon-to-be liberated territories, Treasure met with case officer Kliemann and received a radio disguised in a gramophone player. She returned to the United Kingdom with instructions to report on the weather and on whether troops were being assembled in the area between Bristol and Salisbury Plain. If the Allies assembled their troops in this area it would indicate they were planning to invade at Normandy. If the troops were on the Channel coast, it would indicate the Pas de Calais.
When Treasure returned to the United Kingdom at the end of March, she learned that her pet dog had died in quarantine. She held MI5 squarely to blame for the death of her dog and planned to get revenge. A week after beginning transmissions, on 17 May Treasure informed her case officer that she had been given a security code to insert in her messages if she was working under British control. She would establish contact with the Germans and then blow her case at a vital time. Robertson interrogated Treasure about this and concluded that she was lying and that no such code existed. However, by now his confidence in the case was at rock bottom. From that point on she ceased to have any involvement in the case and her signals were sent by a substitute.
The panic over Treasure came just after the collapse of one of the longest-running and most successful agent cases of the war. Throughout 1943 Tricycle had been making frequent visits to Lisbon where he was able to pass information relating to Cockade and to expand his network beyond Balloon and Gelatine. In league with his friend in the Abwehr, Johnny Jebsen, Tricycle came up with a ploy to recruit genuinely pro-Allied colleagues in Yugoslavia by having them recruited by Jebsen as German agents.
It was an elaborate game of double, and sometimes triple, bluff, with potential recruits very unsure of what they were getting into, and whose best interests they were actually serving. The way the system worked was this: Tricycle’s brother Ivo Popov (codenamed Dreadnought by the British) would select potential candidates in Yugoslavia who would travel to England where, he declared, Tricycle would take care of them. Once Dreadnought had gained their confidence, he would pass them on to Jebsen, who would take them to Berlin for spy training. On graduating from spy school, they would make their way through Spain and Portugal, before continuing on to Britain where they would begin their careers as German agents, albeit under MI5’s control.
The first spy out was a Croat officer codenamed Meteor. He arrived in April 1943 and began communicating with the Germans through secret letter writing. The next to arrive was the Worm, who came in September after causing a security scare as he passed through Europe. TheWorm had been seen numerous times going into the Abwehr’s Paris headquarters at the Hotel Lutetia. Hearing the news, Tommy Robertson thought the Worm had turned and warned Tricycle there was a good chance his own case had been ‘burned’. In typical fashion, Tricycle neglected Robertson’s offer for him to retire from the field. In fact the Worm turned out not to have betrayed the network at all. The simple explanation was that the Worm was an irrepressible party animal who had been taking advantage of the Abwehr by running up a large expense account in their name. His frequent visits to the Hotel Lutetia were simply to have them settle his bills.
Taking the escape route idea a step further, Tricycle saw a way of satisfactorily explaining his frequent trips to Lisbon. Airline seats between Portugal and Britain were at a premium, so Tricycle needed a good excuse for his continued ‘business trips’. He told the Abwehr that the British were organizing an escape route for a number of Yugoslav officers who were in Switzerland. As a Yugoslav, the British had offered Tricycle the chance to help out and had guaranteed him permission to travel to Lisbon as often as he pleased in order to facilitate this escape route. The Abwehr were sold on the idea because it secured Tricycle’s services and presented an opportunity to slip a few spies into those passing through. The first of these agents was Count Nicholas Ruda, who became the subject of mirth after becoming infested with crab lice in a Madrid brothel. Arriving in Britain in December 1943, Count Ruda was unkindly codenamed Freak and became the radio operator for Tricycle’s network.
The most interesting component of the whole Tricycle operation remained Jebsen, whom the British codenamed Artist. After Tricycle’s visits to Lisbon in the summer and autumn of 1943, he reported that he was certain Artist knew he was working for the British. By September Artist agreed formally to work for the British and came under SIS control when he was in Lisbon. In November 1943 Tricycle returned to Lisbon and stayed until January. During that stay, British representatives had a long discussion with Artist and concluded that he was genuinely anti-Nazi and could be trusted.
Through Artist the British obtained first-class information on the Abwehr. More importantly in terms of the deception plans, Artist was able to act as a weather vane on how Tricycle’s traffic was being viewed in Berlin. He confirmed that the Germans believed Tricycle had been under Allied control at some point. However, the material he was now delivering was considered so detailed and of such a classified nature that it was unthinkable the British were planting it on him.
Unfortunately, the Artist case became very troublesome for B1a. Artist gave the British enough information for them to have arrested Garbo if he was not already under their control. The fact that Garbo’s traffic continued after Artist passed this advice meant that it probably became obvious to Artist that Garbo worked for the British. This was intensely troubling, and in February 1944, case officer Tommy Harris actually recommended that Garbo no longer be used for deception work. If Artist had a sudden pang of guilt or patriotism, he could blow B1a’s two most successful operators out of the water.
As D-Day approached, the vultures began circling Artist. As an organization the Abwehr had long been stalked by the Nazi Party’s own intelligence service, the RHSA. A branch of the SS, the RHSA was probably justified in claiming the Abwehr was defeatist and incompetent. The RHSA was investigating claims that Abwehr chief Canaris had spent large sums of money getting seven Jewish families to Switzerland. It noted that the Head of Section I, Colonel Hans Piekenbrock, had resigned in 1943 and volunteered for an active command on the Russian Front because he did not want the Nazis to win the war. His replacement Georg Hansen found the department in such a mess that the obvious conclusion was that Piekenbrock had deliberately encouraged inefficiency in his subordinates. The final straw came in February 1944 with the defection of Abwehr officer Erich Vermerhen and his wife to the British in Turkey. Hitler responded by sacking Canaris and putting the organization under the control of Himmler’s SS.
Against this backdrop, Artist feared that he was under investigation by the Gestapo and had been tipped off never to return to Berlin. True enough, Artist had been carrying out some illegal currency deals on behalf of various Nazi officials in Switzerland. He had also been upsetting some of his colleagues in Lisbon by investigating Ostro. As the net drew in, from MI5’s point of view Artist was now endangering the whole show. The most obvious solution was to get Artist out of Lisbon into protective custody. However, this was quickly ruled out. If Artist deserted, the Germans would expect him to reveal everything he knew about the German spies in Britain. Therefore bringing Artist out would certainly torpedo Tricycle and his sub-agents, if not Garbo et al.
In the end events overtook them. On 17 April Artist was ordered to Biarritz in France to meet with the financial administrator of the Abwehr’s foreign stations. When he didn’t go, he was kidnapped in his Lisbon home on 29 April. Artist was taken to the French resort and then on to Berlin where he was questioned. Although never completely explained, ISOS evidence suggested that the most likely cause for his abduction was the currency scams in which Artist had become involved. However, Artist was a friend of Vermerhen and the Germans must have feared that Artist may have been planning to follow his lead and defect. If he did defect it would blow the Yugoslav ring, which was then considered an excellent source of information at a critical time, just before the invasion. Ironically, Artist’s demise was probably a German move to protect Tricycle. Johnny Jebsen was never heard from again. It is believed that he was murdered in Oranienburg concentration camp. Importantly, there is no evidence that he betrayed his friend Tricycle.
However, in those crucial days of 1944 the British were not to know that Artist would be brave enough to hold out under interrogation. Although Tricycle protested that his friend would never betray him, the Twenty Committee also saw fit to take precautionary measures. Until such time as Artist returned, or his fate was revealed, as a precaution the Freak transmitter was shut down along with all Tricycle’s other direct sub-agents, who were found various excuses not to be able to carry on reporting.
More drastically, the British feared that Artist might wreck the whole deception plan. Artist knew that Tricycle and Garbo were under Allied control. Even if Artist had been arrested for a relatively minor offence, under Gestapo interrogation he might blurt out the truth and cause all the agents in the United Kingdom to come under suspicion. The Germans would then realize the Twenty Committee’s worst fears by reading the deception messages backwards.
Already the Twenty Committee had started to implement Plan Premium, an attempt to draw German attention toward the Pas de Calais. This utilized the Mullet, Puppet, Hamlet set up. Before the war Mullet’s insurance company did a lot of business in Belgium and northern France and he was therefore privy to sensitive information on industry sites in the area. Mullet told Hamlet that his company had been asked to furnish details of these sites on behalf of the government for ‘unspecified use’, the inference being that it was to gain intelligence prior to the invasion.7 As a precaution against the Germans reading messages in reverse, this plan was stopped. All mention of an attack on the Pas de Calais by ‘special means’ was ceased. From then on the threat to Calais would only be implied indirectly, by building up the FUSAG order of battle.
XX
The loss of Tricycle was offset to some degree by the growing importance of a Polish double agent called Brutus. His real name was Roman Czerniawski, a Polish air officer who had headed a resistance network in France before being betrayed and captured. Curiously, Brutus was not maltreated in prison and he allowed himself to be recruited by the Germans to come to Britain to stir up discontent among the large Free Polish contingent there. Brutus was allowed to escape and make his way to England in October 1942, where he gave himself up to the authorities and gave them his cover story.
Initially Brutus told his interrogators that he had escaped from prison unaided. He later changed this story and explained he was a German agent. In his initial interrogation Brutus had been questioned by members of the Free Polish Intelligence Service. Fearing this organization might have been penetrated by German spies, Brutus stuck to his cover story. However, once with the British, he produced a document called The Great Game in which he outlined how he proposed to double cross the Germans. All this appeared quite plausible. Brutus came across as a prima donna, but appeared to be sincere. For that reason, on 20 December he was allowed to begin radio communications with the Germans.
However, there was still a doubt about to what extent Brutus should be used for deception purposes. His case was discussed by the Twenty Committee on 31 December 1942, and then by the W Board on 13 January 1943. The main suspicion was Brutus might have been an unwitting plant by the Germans to watch how the British would play back a double agent. Throughout 1942 there had been a pervading fear that if one major double cross case was blown the Germans would re-examine all the other cases and conclude that they too were controlled. The Twenty Committee had carefully built up its network with a view to pulling off a major coup at the eventual invasion of France. As each passing month brought the promise of that goal tantalizingly closer they did not want to fall at the final fence. With these considerations in mind, Brutus was not considered for deception work immediately. He was given a post with Polish Intelligence and limited to reporting on the Polish armed forces in the United Kingdom. As for his primary mission, the formation of a pro-German faction among Polish soldiers, Brutus reported that this was extremely unlikely given the German treatment of occupied Poland.
While visiting Scotland, Brutus was notionally arrested by the Polish on a disciplinary charge. Before his arrest he announced to the Germans that he was going off the air and hiding his radio set. In late August he resurfaced and radioed that he was awaiting sentencing and could not be sure when he would open communications. The game continued until ISOS revealed that the Germans considered Brutus a reliable source of information. This admission changed MI5’s perception of the Pole and it was decided to put him back on the air as quickly as possible. His trial was carried out in December 1943 and Brutus received a two-month sentence, which took into account the time he had already spent incarcerated. Given his liberty, Brutus swiftly went on to the air and announced that he had recruited a radio operator in the guise of a recently retired Polish Air Force officer who held a grudge against Russia, where most of his family had died. The radio operator was codenamed Chopin by the British. The Germans approved of this recruit and rewarded Brutus with the announcement that they were planning to send him more money and a new radio set.
In April 1944 Brutus announced he had been seconded to a group of Polish troops in Scotland. This posting allowed him to become one of the principal channels for Fortitude North. On 12 April Brutus reported that he had identified Fourth Army HQ at Edinburgh. Four days later he revealed that an attack on Norway was expected in May. Adding further colour to the build up, he announced the arrival of a Russian liaison team in Edinburgh, all of which fitted in with the general pattern suggested in the Ops. B plan.8 In addition to Brutus, Mutt and, by proxy, Jeff also contributed to Fortitude North by reporting on troop movements in Scotland. In turn these reports were bolstered by a team of double agents working in Iceland, under the unattractive codenames Cobweb and Beetle.
The Artist crisis meant that B1a’s agents required redistributing to implement Fortitude South. Tricycle had been successful in taking a large number of documents relating to the FUSAG order of battle, but with the collapse of his network the hole needed to be filled. The next spy in line reporting on FUSAG had been Tate, but by 1944 B1a had very little idea if the Germans considered the Dane blown or not. The basic problem with Tate was that his traffic had been transferred from Paris to Hamburg. Unlike the other double agents whose controllers were based in Lisbon, Madrid, Paris and so on, Tate’s controllers were able to communicate directly with Berlin through landlines without the need for wireless transmissions. The absence of radio traffic meant that there was no opportunity for Bletchley Park to obtain intercepts to provide ISOS reports. The verifiable means of monitoring Tate was if information he imparted worked its way into the daily intelligence summaries. Although the same handicap was true for Brutus and Treasure, from the evidence on offer, Tate did not appear to be having any effect, even though he was to send his thousandth message by the end of May.
Tate had been portrayed as working for a farmer in Hertfordshire. So that he could report on FUSAG, Tate reported being transferred to a farm at Wye near Ashford. The farmer there was a friend of the farmer Tate worked for, but he was also an officer in the Home Guard and his military duties were taking up all his time. Tate’s employer loaned Tate to help out and the spy reported moving into the area on 1 June.9 Once in position – albeit notionally – Tate reported making friends with a railway clerk from Ashford. From this man, Tate managed to get his hands on the rail timetable for moving FUSAG from its concentration areas to the embarkation ports. Unfortunately, although Tate was feeding all the right pieces of information, the Germans did not seem to be taking the bait. Whether this was because Tate was not trusted, or because the Germans had not the wit to draw the conclusions the Twenty Committee expected them to, was uncertain.
Somewhat unexpectedly for the Twenty Committee, it appeared that Brutus was, above all others after Garbo, the agent most trusted by the Germans. Therefore on 18 May, Brutus announced that he was being posted to FUSAG on the 27th of the month. His excuse was that he had been appointed to a small section of Polish officers who would form recruitment parties for Polish workers in German-occupied territories liberated by the Allies. As part of his mission, Brutus claimed he had to travel round all the various units about to go into Europe and explain what to do with liberated Poles. From the German point of view, the only downside to the posting was that Brutus would be based at Staines, away from the main FUSAG HQ and also away from Chopin, who had set up their transmitter in Richmond. This meant that although Brutus was on the staff of FUSAG he could not be expected to be privy to everything going on in headquarters.
By the end of May Brutus was able to deliver Fortitude to the Germans on a plate. Where Tate had spelled out the plan with hints and small observations, Brutus set his intelligence out in plain terms. On 31 May Brutus reported Patton had taken command of FUSAG, not Bradley, as had been first supposed. He also set out the order of battle for FUSAG as he had found it in his travels through Kent and East Anglia. It showed that Patton’s HQ was in Wentworth and that, like Montgomery, he was in command of two armies. These were the First Canadian Army, with four infantry and one armoured division, and the Third United States Army, with three armoured divisions and another corps in the process of being formed at Chelmsford.
Brutus finished sending his order of battle report on 4 June and was immediately asked to find out the composition of Montgomery’s Twenty-First Army Group. Of course, Brutus could only report that he knew very little and was not in a position to find out much. It was a similar story with almost all the double agents. The Germans were desperate to know what was going on in the south west of England, but frustratingly enough, all they ever heard about was the build ups in Kent, East Anglia and Scotland.10
XX
The real star of D-Day from the point of view of ‘special means’ was without doubt the Garbo network. By the beginning of 1944 the Garbo fictional network had grown in number and complexity, making it the top espionage ring the Germans had.
To recapitulate, Garbo had recruited a series of personal contacts, which he classified with the codenames J1–J5. These included J1, the Courier, whom the Germans called Smith but Garbo never actually named. An employee of BOAC or KLM, in addition to acting as Garbo’s courier, Smith had a few other profitable scams on the side. At one point Garbo complained that the Courier had guessed he was a spy and was trying to blackmail him. Curiously, the Germans instructed Garbo to pay Smith what he wanted, as from the point when he accepted Garbo’s money, he would be in the agent’s power for evermore. Agent J2 was a talkative RAF officer working for Fighter Command prone to giving away secrets; J3 was Garbo’s boss at the Ministry of Information; J4 was a left-wing fanatic working for Censorship; and J5 was a slightly misguided secretary at the War Office who had fallen in love with Garbo.
In addition to the early recruits Garbo was now served by the fictional Dagobert network. This centred on Stanley, a rampant Welsh Nationalist who belonged to the improbably titled group ‘Brothers in the Aryan World Order’. When Garbo first told the Germans he had made contact with an important Welsh Nationalist, they urged him to take extreme caution. They actually believed that Garbo had stumbled upon Snow’s colleague GW. Before agreeing to the new recruit they asked Garbo for a physical description of the man, his occupation and his first name. If the man had been GW the Germans would have expected the description of a tall, powerfully built ex-policeman with the unusual forename of Gwilym. Instead they were told that Stanley was the complete opposite and was a former merchant seaman.
The initial reason for recruiting Stanley was that he offered Garbo the chance to smuggle letters to the Continent if the radio operator was lost, or if the air link to Lisbon broke down. The secondary consideration was equally important. Stanley had seven colleagues in the Aryan group, all of whom could be used as informants and spies. The Germans agreed and codenamed the group Dagobert. In addition to a mixed bag of Welsh Nationalists, the Dagobert group contained an Indian poet known as Rags and his lover, Theresa Jardine, the group’s secretary and a serving Wren (member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service).
Other than the Dagobert agents, Garbo was still well served by Agent 1, Carvalho the Portuguese commercial traveller, who was based in south Wales. When Agent 2 (Gerbers) had died, his widow had stayed in touch with Garbo and he had taken her under his wing, using her as a housekeeper. She later helped with enciphering messages and as a ‘cut out’ between some of the agents. Agent 3, Pedro the Venezuelan in Glasgow, had come to be seen as his deputy. Pedro ran the Benedict network, an odd group comprising of an RAF NCO (Agent 3(1)), a lieutenant in the 49th Infantry Division (Agent 3(2)) and a Greek communist (Agent 3(3)) who believed that Garbo was working for the Russians. Working for Fred the Gibraltarian was another group of sub-agents, including Agent 4(1), the network’s radio operator. Fred also recruited a guard at a military depot hidden in the Chislehurst Caves (Agent 4(2)), along with Agent 4(3), the son of a senior American officer on Eisenhower’s staff working in the US supply service. Agent 5 was the brother of Pedro, and had relocated to Canada where he picked up an American sub-agent codenamed Moonbeam. Agent 6 was Dick, a British-hating South African employed at the War Office, but who was tragically killed in an air crash in North Africa in July 1943. By any standard, Garbo’s network was impressive, reaching right round the country and taking in a number of important civil and military organizations (see Appendix B).
Alas for the Germans, it was all false. None of the above persons ever existed, except J3, the unnamed senior official in the Spanish section of the Ministry of Information who gave Garbo part-time work. J3 was actually based on W. B. McCann, the real head of the Spanish section. McCann was informed about his alter ego and had some idea of the Garbo case, but the rest was a hoax. Nor were there secret depots in the Chislehurst Caves. Even the 49th Division was completely fictitious.
In addition to the size of the network, it is also important to emphasize how personally involved Garbo was in the creation of material passed over to the Germans. In other cases the agents had little choice in what was being said, but Garbo was different. The precautions of the early days had fallen by the wayside. The MI5 officers who dealt with him no longer used aliases as they had done in the early days, and Garbo went by the name Juan García, using his mother’s surname. The Spaniard was a frequent visitor to Tommy Harris’s home and was well acquainted with his wife, Hilda. As their workload increased before D-Day, Garbo was given an office in Jermyn Street, just round the corner from MI5’s home in St James’s Street. There he had a secure telephone link to MI5 and SHAEF headquarters at Norfolk House and would spend the day writing cover letters that would then have messages written between the lines in secret ink. Although Garbo never visited MI5’s offices and was never told about the existence of B1a or the Twenty Committee, he had a fairly good idea of how his messages were vetted by the service departments concerned. Quite often Harris would telephone Hesketh for last-minute corrections to messages with Garbo present. Garbo was given an accurate description of the cover plan for D-Day and was aware which military formations were real and which were bogus. He was also told the intended date of the landing several weeks in advance.
Between January and D-Day, over 500 wireless messages were sent by the network, at a rate of four per day. When they were received, Madrid would immediately forward them to Berlin where they would be distributed to the relevant intelligence section. Although no one in London knew it at the time, a high proportion of the messages was then sent to von Rundstedt, who would also see them repeated as part of the daily intelligence summary reports and the fortnightly intelligence bulletins on Allied intentions.
On 5 January 1944, the Germans asked Garbo to discover the dates of any attacks being planned on northern France, the French Atlantic coast, the Mediterranean or in the Adriatic. They also instructed him to make studies of all the various embarkation points in Britain and to count the number of landing craft, along with the number of warships available to protect operations. More questions followed, and on 14 January the Germans revealed their hand when they asked Garbo to explore the south west of England and southern coast between Weymouth and Southampton. If the Allied invasion was to come at Normandy, the Germans knew these would be the areas used for concentrating and embarking the Allied forces. If, however, this area appeared clear and the troops were gathering in the south east and east, then it would be the Pas de Calais.
Herein lay the foundation of the double cross system’s success and all its worth. If the Germans had possessed genuine spies in the United Kingdom, it is unlikely that they would have missed the vast build up of men and material in the areas now called into scrutiny. Equally, if all the German spies had simply been captured and shot previously, because the Allied air supremacy was so strong the Germans would have been forced to infiltrate new spies into the British Isles to find out what was going on. However, because the Germans believed they had a well-established and trustworthy espionage network in the United Kingdom, they did not feel it necessary to go to the time and trouble of recruiting and training a new set of agents. So when Garbo received this request he simply moved his imaginary pawns around to suit German requirements.
Of course, he had no intention of revealing the truth. In the same way that Gerbers had been sacrificed to protect Torch, Agent 1 had to be got rid of before D-Day. Based in Newport, south Wales, Carvalho spent much of his time in the south west, which was too close to the genuine build up area for Twenty-First Army Group. The excuse given for his departure was that a letter was intercepted by censorship during Plan Starkey and a number of arrests had followed. Although Carvalho had remained free, his nerves began to fail him and he offered his resignation. Investigation of the south and west was therefore entrusted to two members of the Dagobert network, agents 7(5) and 7(6).
Unfortunately for the Germans Agent 7(5) turned out to be a big let down. He was an unenthusiastic spy and nervous at the best of times. On 17 May he reported that he was at Exeter, inside the prohibited zone along the coast. Although he had so far wangled his way round the security checks, he informed his chief that he saw no possibility in remaining there for very long without discovery. Sure enough, on 2 June Agent 7(5) was apparently arrested for being in Exeter without the correct documentation. He was sentenced to a month in jail – a month that conveniently left Garbo’s network blind in a crucial reporting area. He had even less success with the next nearest placed, Agent 7(6). In April Garbo told the Germans that the reports from 7(6) were ‘stupid’ and concluded he could not be trusted on military matters.