Agent Garbo (28 page)

As Pujol and Harris worked fourteen-hour days sending information—which slowly changed from all true to completely false—the Allies produced an incredible variety of devices to trick the senses before and during the invasion: flame and smoke flares dropped by aircraft onto the water, which would produce the illusion of a torpedo boat on fire; drone boats that could simulate the explosion of an assault craft; naval prosthetics—massive wood-and-canvas movie-set shells—that could turn a modest frigate into a
Colorado
-class battleship, or a sub chaser into an escort carrier. The result of the last invention
was called a “Swiss Navy,” a collection of fairly harmless vessels that appeared to be a significant attack force. Battle sounds were recorded on magnetic wire
or sound film, simulating the noises of ironworkers building a bridge or the engine of a landing craft turning over or the roar of onrushing tanks. The Allies’ library of sensory diversions could simulate raging fire, a six-hour platoon engagement, poison gas (the chemical burned the skin like mustard gas but didn’t kill), the smell of cordite, an entire naval convoy (by the use of “window,” strips of paper coated with aluminum foil on one side that appeared on radar to be massive ships), a fleet of aircraft (achieved by “spoof vans,” trucks carrying transmitters that played the sound of engines thousands of feet above) and much more. Even the London
Times
was shanghaied into the effort: special editions were printed and left in conspicuous places, featuring altered photos that showed battleships in the Firth of Forth in Scotland.

England was sealed up tight, becoming an island fortress hostile to any foreign intruder. Coastal areas from Land’s End
to the northwest border of East Anglia, and from Arbroath to Dunbar in Scotland, were declared off-limits to visitors within ten miles of the shoreline. A dazzling array of physical deceptions were readied: machines for making tank tracks, dummy paratroopers that would explode when they hit the ground and torpedoes called “water heaters” that, when fired, propelled themselves to an assigned point, waited, then at the correct time ascended to the surface and played recorded sound effects. There were the “Bunsen burners,”
invented by the Americans, that consisted of a radio receiver attached to a loudspeaker; when dropped by parachute onto a battlefield, they flooded the area with voices or battle noises, then self-destructed after four hours. There were devices called “pintails” that stuck in the ground on impact and sent off a “Verey light” exactly like the flare that paratroop officers used to signal their troops; not to mention radios that could simulate the noise of war, chemical concoctions that could re-create the smell of war, phonographs that played snatches of soldiers’ conversations or the din of entire squadrons of fake soldiers. Then there were “black propaganda” campaigns: leaflets dropped over enemy territory and subversive messages broadcast by clandestine radio stations. A series of rumors—called a “sibs campaign,” after the Latin word
sibilare,
to hiss—was planted as far away as Rio de Janeiro. War gossip and false leads were spread in neutral embassies in Lisbon and elsewhere, and foreign diplomats in London were given “tips” on what was really happening with the invasion plans. Prisoners of war in German concentration camps
received letters spiced with chatter intended for the eyes of the German censors.

Insignia were invented for Garbo’s phantom armies
: for the First Army Group it was a black Roman numeral I on a blue pentagon. Some persnickety clerk in the quartermaster general’s office protested the design, saying that “the placing of black on blue violates the law of visibility,” but the colors were kept. Four signal groups were set up in different parts of England to simulate the traffic of both the ghost army and the real divisions. A single wireless truck impersonated
the communications of an entire divisional headquarters, sending messages to its various brigades. The Americans brought over their own specially trained unit, the 3103rd Signal Service Battalion, to roam the English countryside and coordinate the movements of the forces that “belonged” to Garbo. When Garbo “spotted” a large number of shoulder patches indicating that some troops had moved camp, trucks would emit bursts of traffic sounds from the new location.

All the while Colonel Roenne watched, and the Allies intercepted his reports to gauge the deception’s impact. When the estimated number of Allied divisions rose in his intelligence reports, the planners smiled. As Garbo fed the Germans
FUSAG
sightings and Strangeways created Allied facsimiles out of canvas and rumors, those numbers started to increase. In January 1944, Roenne estimated
that there were 55 divisions in the United Kingdom. The actual number was 37.

The unexpected, however, could never be eliminated. In Plan Gotham, merchant ships carried scores of landing craft on their decks as they sailed into the Strait of Gibraltar. The purpose was to show the Germans—who watched all traffic in and out of the strait from a dozen lookout posts along the shore—that assets were not being drawn away from the Mediterranean toward England. That would keep Hitler worried about Norway. And the landing craft were actually large inflatable decoys. All went well on one Liverpool shipment until the wind picked up, at which point any German observers gazing through their binoculars would have seen these multi-ton craft bouncing crazily on the ship’s deck like so many birthday balloons.

Some of the plans never made it off the drawing board, or proved to be a dud in the field. In Operation Leyburn, intelligence officers discreetly asked authorities in neutral countries about how to protect great works of art that were stored in the Low Countries. The idea was to hint that the invasion was headed toward Holland, but the Germans didn’t get it. The Americans contributed
the “truly bizarre idea” of trying a Dunkirk in reverse: hundreds of small fishing smacks and other boats would gather in the ports of southeastern England as if they were preparing to bring two million men to Calais. The plan was dropped: Why on earth would the Allies use fishing boats? Other schemes worked brilliantly. To bulk up Fortitude North, the phony invasion of Norway, the Royal Air Force flew dummy aircraft
from fields in Suffolk to eastern Scotland, enough to give the impression that four heavy bomber divisions were being transferred closer to Scandinavia. The British minister to Sweden innocently asked his counterparts if he could gather weather data in Stockholm and even put up sophisticated air navigation equipment. The only reason one would do such a thing was to prepare for a fleet of landing craft streaming north.

Operation Graffham quickly ramped up the pressure on Sweden. The same minister asked if the country would permit Allied aircraft to land at Swedish airfields, and demanded that “British transport experts” be allowed into the country to plan for a German withdrawal from Norway. He also requested that Allied planes be allowed to fly reconnaissance missions over the country. A commodore was sent to Sweden to meet with the commander in chief of the nation’s air force. If the Allies invaded Norway, the commodore asked, would the Swedes send their troops to stop the certain mass murder of Norwegians in the internment camps? At the same time, wireless operators sent messages from Garbo’s phantom divisions. A typical one read, “80 Div. request 1,800 pairs of crampons,
1,800 pairs of ski bindings.”

The Germans were spooked: “Reliably reported soundings
by high-ranking English Air Force officers in Sweden which aimed at the handing over of Swedish air bases for invasion purposes, may be regarded as an indication of a
small operation
in the Scandinavian area.” Hitler decided to keep 250,000 badly needed troops
in Norway and Denmark, when British analysts estimated only 100,000 were needed to keep the peace. That was 150,000 extra troops that wouldn’t be fighting in Normandy.

Operation Copperhead was taken right from a Hollywood screenplay. On a visit south of Naples, the deception mastermind Dudley Clarke took a break from his punishing schedule to see
Five Graves to Cairo,
a Billy Wilder spy flick that incorporated actual footage from the Battle of El Alamein in its closing scenes. Starring as Rommel was the Austrian star Erich von Stroheim, who designed his own costume and studied photographs of the famous German general for hours on end. Wilder was in awe of the actor: “Standing with his stiff fat neck
in the foreground, he could express with his face more than almost any other actor.”

Sitting in the audience, Clarke watched in fascination. The impersonation, as over-the-top as it was, and the appearance of a British actor who resembled General Montgomery, gave him an idea. If von Stroheim could play Rommel in the film, why couldn’t a British actor play the real Monty—in the real war?

Clarke knew the Abwehr maintained an observation post on Gibraltar, perched over the airfield so it could observe through a telescope every passenger arriving on the daily flights. If Monty suddenly appeared, it would mean that the British general was reconnoitering launch bases for the phony attack on the western French Mediterranean. The phony attack was called Operation Vendetta, and for months it had been critically short of assets: there were hardly any real soldiers attached to Vendetta, and hardly any attack vessels. A visit by Monty would work wonders. The hero of El Alamein was wild about the scheme, which was fairly predictable, as Guy Liddell drily noted in his diary, because it turned “on the theory that the Second Front
cannot possibly start without him.”

The actor who played Monty in
Five Graves to Cairo
was much taller than the real general, which made him less than ideal, and a backup imposter had broken his leg in an automobile crash. Clarke had to look outside the acting profession. After a search of the British ranks, he found the perfect double in the offices of the Royal Army Pay Corps: Lieutenant M. E. Clifton James, who could have passed for Monty’s twin. James had imitated Monty once before, when a British war rally was floundering. James stepped onstage, pretending to be the famous general, and the crowd had gone wild.

James was now flown to meet Monty, to study how he walked, talked and moved his hands when he spoke; the impersonator was told to give up drinking and smoking (Monty did neither), and a prosthetic was attached to the stub of his middle right finger, which James had lost in World War I. Then, on May 26, 1944, he was flown to Gibraltar on Churchill’s private plane. During the flight, James sneaked to the back of the plane and drank gin from a hidden flask, to the horror of his minders. At twenty thousand feet, the imposter was “slapped, massaged . . . and doused with cold water” to sober him up.

When the plane landed, the fake Monty was whisked off to a reception, where he dropped hints about something called Plan 303 for the invasion of France (there was, of course, no such thing). One of the invited guests was Ignacio Molina Pérez, a Spanish liaison officer and Abwehr spy. Pérez’s eyes nearly popped out of his head at the sight of the resplendent general. “Eagerly he turned to the Colonial Secretary
for further news while the latter with feigned embarrassment was forced to admit that the Commander-in-Chief was on his way to Algiers.” Pérez left the party and was seen jumping into his car and speeding off to the town of La Línea, where he called his Abwehr contact. Finally, the fake Monty was brought to Algiers and paraded around, drawing the Germans’ attention to the Middle Eastern theater, before being stashed in Cairo until D-Day launched.

The Allies also used basic economics to fool the Nazis. When they had wanted the Germans
to believe an invasion of Greece was coming in 1943, the paymaster of GHQ Middle East had begun buying up drachmas by the barrel-load. The deception planners wanted to try a slightly different tack for Operation Bodyguard. They asked the British treasury to print pound notes with “British Army of Occupation in France” stamped across the front. British operatives stuck a few in their wallets, and when presented with a restaurant or hotel bill, they would pull out one of the marked notes. “Then, having allowed the person to look
at it, we hurriedly snatched it back and handed them an ordinary pound note.” This simple trick helped to spread rumors about the forthcoming invasion around London.

The Americans tried a subtler scheme. They’d realized earlier that sending partisans out to the railyards south of Paris to check on the effects of Allied bombing raids was costing too many lives and exposing the French resistance to the Gestapo. Now they simply checked the weekly price of oranges in Les Halles, the huge wholesale marketplace where merchants came to buy produce. If the price went up, it meant that trains were not getting through and that the bombs were hitting their marks. If the price went down, it meant that the bombardiers had to adjust their tactics. In the lead-up to D-Day, the deception planners also looked into
the international fire insurance market in certain areas of occupied France. The hope was that equally sophisticated German thinkers were keeping an eye on the market for clues as to where the Allies were planning on dropping incendiary bombs, believing they would insure their targets before they struck. In February 1944, one double agent, a businessman working with British intelligence, notified the Abwehr that he’d landed a job with the Fire Office Committee, a British group that tracked insurance policies around the world. He reported that a curious thing had happened: an unnamed government agency was making inquiries about Norway, Belgium and northern France. Could it be . . . ?

Even some of the Allied agents and operatives who were creating these apparitions were half convinced they were real. “The world of make-believe
in which we lived . . . was apt to engender a strange mental attitude,” said Colonel Roderick Macleod, who spent months working on the Norway feint. “As time went on we found it harder to separate the real from the imaginary.” Pujol felt the same way about his phantom soldiers. “I created them. They were my children.”

By the early spring of 1944, the tapestry was weaving itself together from a thousand strands. The ingenious plots hatched by the deception planners were the background scenery that made the double agents’ work feel authentic. But Garbo and the others were still the point of the spear, the people whom the Germans were listening to most closely. Without the Germans’ confidence in Garbo, even the most ingenious plot would have been irrelevant.