Agent Garbo (23 page)

Even Pujol was growing frustrated. To get a message approved for sending to the Germans, he and Harris had to go through a byzantine process. First the planners provided the double agents with a number of “serials,” individual stories that were to be broadcast to the Germans, including target dates when the information had to go out and the real-world incidents connected to the story (say, the fact that two minesweeping flotillas would be leaving Dover on September 1). This way, the planners could storyboard the entire deception operation and hand out pieces of the narratives to different agents for transmission to the Abwehr, who the Allies hoped would take the bits and weave them back into the master narrative. Contradictions and false starts could be eliminated before they happened, and a coherent image created out of thousands of flashing lights.

It sounded brilliant on paper, but only on paper. “The difficulties with which we were confronted were enormous,” Harris wrote. The problem was rewrites. Harris would take the serial for the day and compose a rough message. He’d hand the message to Pujol, who would make changes to reflect the character he’d built up over so many months, then translate the revised version into Spanish. The message would then have to be translated back into English before being sent on to the planners, who would make their own changes and send the text on to the service that was involved—if it was a message reporting on a minesweeper, that would be the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy might have objections: the war situation was fluid, and the scenarios envisioned in the original serials might have changed overnight. An officer would make the navy’s changes and send the message back down the chain to Pujol and Harris. Pujol would “frequently” find something wrong with the new version; for example, the navy or the deception brass wanted him to say something that Garbo would never say or that conflicted with an earlier message. When it came to Garbo’s persona, Pujol was a rock: he had to protect the character at all costs. So the Spaniard would make his changes and the tortuous process would start all over again.

The normally unflappable Harris despaired. The system was “altogether chaotic,” “strenuous,” “exasperating.” He was finding that Pujol, so relaxed and easygoing in other areas of his life, was a raging perfectionist when it came to Garbo. “If I do just one thing,”
Pujol said later, “I want to do it well.” The process became a stream of chain letters that never seemed to end. It was like trying to write a novel in the middle of a battle that the novel was describing.

Garbo doggedly kept beating the drum of war to Madrid: “45 torpedo boats in Dover
. . . Hundreds of light naval craft arriving, including gunboats, being loaded with supplies, then shipping out for disguised rendezvous points . . . All RAF leave in specified areas cancelled effective August 25th.” To support his messages, frogmen and raiders on preparatory missions crawled onto the beaches at Calais, leaving letters behind seeking information from locals for the forthcoming invasion. A series of raids on the coast—called
FORFAR
missions—began, with orders for commandos to snatch any German soldier they saw and bring him back to England for interrogation (and to let the Germans know they’d been scouting targets). One raiding party climbed the steep beach cliffs but couldn’t cut through the barbed wire they found at the top. So as not to return empty-handed, they managed to snip off a piece of the wire and carry it back to England for engineers to study. Others couldn’t land because of high waves, or turned back to escape capture after spotting German patrols. The point was to make the enemy notice them, but there was no evidence that any of the
FORFAR
missions had ever been observed.

The planners had to ask themselves: What if we held an invasion and nobody came?

Across the Continent, anticipation swelled in the late summer of 1943. News of the fake invasion was radiating far and wide. The Chinese minister in Ankara reported back to his superiors in Chungking: “England and the United States will assume the offensive
on a second front at the end of September. Simultaneous air, sea and land operations will be undertaken on the Continent.” In The Hague, Hendrik Seyffardt, the pro-Nazi Dutch general, was assassinated. A grenade detonated in Lille,
France, killing twenty-three German officers. Danes trampled a German soldier
to death, and a train carrying Nazi troops was sabotaged near Ålborg. Belgian citizens called out to German soldiers, “Have you packed your bags yet? The Allies are coming!”

On September 7, Garbo sent a flash message to Madrid at 2033 hours: weather permitting, the invasion would take place the following morning. The message was relayed to Berlin and then on to operational headquarters in Paris. The German navy dynamited the hulls of several ships and sank them in the approaches to Calais to blunt the expected amphibious assault, known to the Allies as Operation Starkey. The Reich’s divisions in France
were put on alert. But the eighth dawned stormy, and D-Day was put off until the next morning. Churchill sent his blessings via telegram: “Good luck to Starkey.”

On the night of September 8, airfields in England rumbled with the engines of de Havilland Mosquitoes, coughing to life in the darkness. The Mosquitoes and the heavier Wellingtons lined up on the runways, aimed at the French town of Le Portel and the twin gun batteries, code-named Religion and Andante, that lay nearby. The combat aircraft were the point of the spear of a huge air armada of 258 planes, grudgingly loaned out for Cockade. Minutes later, heavy Halifax bombers, with code names like D-Dog and K-King, revved their engines and went airborne into a cloudless sky flooded with bright moonlight.
Because of the short distances to the target, the bombers carried minimum fuel and maximum bomb loads as they lumbered into the sky. The U.S. Army Air Force sent its planes aloft to 28,000 feet, while the Brits flew lower. Polish pilots pushed their planes hard; in the bellies of their aircraft were 4,000-pound “blockbusters,” the largest explosives in the Bomber Command’s arsenal. At a base in Cambridgeshire, Starkey claimed its first victims when a New Zealand crew aboard a Stirling heavy bomber veered off the runway and slammed into a pair of nearby houses, erupting in flames. As ground crews rushed to help, the bombs in the bay exploded, killing the would-be rescuers along with the pilot and his crew. Four planes in the air over France were raked by antiaircraft fire, others crashed with all hands killed. None of the thousands of men who took part, not the pilots or the navigators, had heard the name Starkey or knew that they were bombing in service of a phantom.

It was a warm night in the French fishing town of Le Portel. The air raid siren in the town hall in Rue Carnot took up the alarm that was spreading up and down the coast and sent its forlorn notes out through the narrow cobblestone streets. The first planes appeared overhead in late afternoon, American Marauders, and the residents heard the unmistakable high-pitched screech of 1,000-pound bombs spinning toward the earth before they smashed into the brightly colored houses. At first the Portelois thought it was an isolated incident—bombs had gone astray before and killed a few neighbors in the close-knit town of 5,500 people. But soon the darkening sky was drumming with the sounds of engines, and planes were dropping one bomb every eight seconds.
As the townspeople ran to their cellars, that interval compressed until it seemed as if the world around them were exploding without end.

The streets of Le Portel turned into an abattoir. Buildings shattered, sending out clouds of choking dust, and bodies were blown apart by the high explosives. Survivors pulled the dead and wounded onto crude stretchers—shutter blinds and tabletops—and stumbled through the streets looking for a doctor as pieces of hot metal shrieked past in the night. The ground shook with each detonation, knocking people off their feet. A bomb exploded near a group of fourteen people and thirteen of them fell dead from the shock of the blast or the shrapnel; the lone survivor was found amid
the corpses, catatonic, unable to move. The local priest, l’Abbé Boidin, crawled into cellars to pray with families huddled in the darkness, smoke from fires and the dust from exploded masonry making the air hard to breathe. Hours later he would return on his rounds and find the same house collapsed under a direct hit. Homeward-bound air crews as far away as the Thames could look back to France and see the flames of the burning town.

The people of Le Portel were pinned under collapsed girders and roofs; rescuers formed human chains to get them out, only to be felled by a new wave of explosives. One woman who’d been nursing a baby was uncovered under a pile of rubble. She was dead but the baby was crying in her arms. “We [were] waiting to die because this is inevitable,”
remembered one Portelois.

Ninety-three percent of the small French town was destroyed. Three hundred and seventy-six men, women and children were killed in one night. If there was one ray of hope in the cellars, as the Portelois listened to the high explosives splitting the air, it was that the townspeople could comfort each other with the thought that the bombs signaled the long-awaited invasion and the end of the Nazi occupation. What else could these waves of planes blotting out the moon mean if not freedom? As morning dawned fine and warm, they peered through the jigsaw mounds of rubble and black smoke toward the serene blue of the English Channel.

September 9 was a beautiful day for an invasion. A special train was engaged to bring British and American generals and top officers from London to the beaches at Kent, where they could see the thirty-ship convoy that had departed from Dungeness steam toward France, while the second prong of the attack, Churchill’s twenty ships, made its way to the chalk cliffs of Beachy Head on the south coast. Chugging alongside the destroyers were Thames barges that had been roped into the invasion, as well as tourist steamers that would normally have been ferrying visitors around the waterways of London. It didn’t matter that they were pleasure craft; it was mass that mattered, not armaments. From shore, you couldn’t tell that the boats were empty except for their crews.

The ground underneath the generals’ feet vibrated as an armada of Allied fighters thundered overhead, pointed toward the beaches at Calais. By 9 a.m., this potent invasion force was ten miles from the shore, but no Luftwaffe counterattack appeared and no enemy ship tried to intercept it. “It was an inspiring sight to see everybody
doing his stuff to perfection,” sighed General Morgan, commander of the entire operation, “except, unfortunately, the Germans.”

When at 9 a.m. the code word Backchat came over the ships’ radios, the convoys laid down a smoke cover and quickly turned tail, heading back the way they came. The planes cut slow 180-degree arcs in the brilliant sky. Operation Cockade was over.

Garbo had to explain why the invasion had never come, or risk losing the Germans forever. This was called “the breakoff.” When the BBC began reporting that Cockade was only a practice run, Garbo immediately got on the radio and denied this. “I can definitely prove the lie
of the ridiculous Press and Radio official news,” he told Madrid. He reported that the troops who’d been turned back from the Calais shore were “surprised and disappointed” at the change in plans. To cover himself, Garbo hinted to Madrid that the invasion had been real but was called off at the last moment because of the Allies’ armistice with Italy, which had been announced on September 8. The new alliance had made the war planners reconsider their second-front strategy. Other double agents were tapping out messages implying that the German defenses had simply been judged too strong and that the Allies had decided to pound Germany from the air instead of confronting the panzers on the ground. Garbo wrote: “I do not think that the British High Command
have sufficient sense of humor to take their troops for an outing on the sea nor that they have such a surplus of petrol and bomb as to amuse themselves.” Some nefarious plot was unfolding: “extravagant rumors” were sweeping London about what had really happened behind the scenes.

Garbo’s message was a counterattack and a smokescreen all in one, but could it hide the fact that Madrid’s super spy had been wrong? In their Jermyn Street office, Pujol and Harris held their breath, waiting to see if they’d damaged Garbo irretrievably. On September 13, the spy sent a packet of newspaper clippings supporting his case, and he continued to work his sources furiously. Finally, responses started flowing in from Madrid.

Garbo was safe. “Their confidence in me
was absolute.”

Apparently the whole charade had been minor news in Berlin. The top German war planners never believed the invasion was coming, so why get upset about a few wrong-headed reports? To his handlers, Garbo was now seemingly untouchable. “Your activity and that of your informants gave us a perfect idea
of what is taking place over there,” Federico gushed. “These reports, as you can imagine, have an incalculable value and for this reason I beg of you to proceed with the greatest care so as not to endanger in these momentous times either yourself or your organization.” Kühlenthal backed up his star agent. Not only did the Madrid head cable the full explanation of the canceled invasion to Berlin, he also added his own emphasis. Garbo’s report that the troops had been “surprised and disappointed” was strengthened to “the measure caused disgust amongst the troops.” Yet if Hitler’s top brass weighed the available evidence correctly and ignored Garbo’s reports in the future, how would he protect the real D-Day to come?

Harris was handed new messages from Berlin to Madrid that evaluated Garbo’s work: “Both reports are first class.
Between 9/1 and 9/3 English minesweepers were observed in Channel off Boulogne . . . Please get the V-Mann to keep an eye on all troop movements and preparations, and also any possible embarkations, especially in eastern and south eastern England. Speedy reports on this subject are urgently desired.” Garbo’s reports were deemed “particularly valuable,” and his messages on troop movements “of extreme importance.” Even Colonel Roenne, the gray-eyed genius of Zossen, was now susceptible to Garbo’s charms. The double agent had so crossed up the Abwehr that it approved a 50 percent raise for all his operatives, plus a bonus on top of that for those involved with Cockade.