Agent Garbo (30 page)

Garbo flashed sightings from his subagents,
who spotted
FUSAG
insignias—the black Roman numeral I on the blue pentagon he’d planted in the Germans’ minds weeks before—in towns near the coastline. Plotting the reports onto a map, the Germans saw the forces were heading toward the ports around Dover. On May 29, a massive convoy of actual fighter aircraft, composed of 66 airborne squadrons, took off from airfields in Hampshire, in the south of England. One of Garbo’s invented subagents watched them go, but reported they were really leaving from fields around Kent and Sussex, which pointed the finger away from Normandy. The planes dropped their bombs on Calais, and the Luftwaffe confirmed the raid.

As D-Day drew closer, Garbo’s 80-watt radio glowed hot. May 25: “Through an American contact in the 28th Division I have learnt that Churchill, Smuts, Eisenhower and Patton were on the 12th May at the demonstration of a secret weapon . . .” (It was a device for blowing up concrete fortifications like the ones dotting Omaha Beach.) May 31: “Sutton Common North east Sutton Shottisham Road has been churned by tanks and is obviously tank exercising and testing ground.” Garbo’s network was now so large that he could feed the Abwehr production information from the United States: “Present aircraft production 300 per month.
Military transport vehicles about 15000 per month. Priority now given to aircraft and signals equipment. Canada sending to England 1 million tons flour, 1/2 million tons bacon and pork, 43000 tons canned fish, 64000 tons cheese, 480 million eggs.”

The spy even tried a classic reversal technique. On May 22, Garbo told Madrid that J (3), his Ministry of Information contact, had invited him to work for the Political War Executive (PWE), the masters of black propaganda. Madrid leapt at the chance, giving its approval the next day. The purpose of Garbo’s scheme was to supply the Germans with propaganda leaflets that they would read in reverse: if the PWE said Normandy was the target, then the Germans could be certain that the Allies were headed for Calais. “What I was clearly able to get out
of it,” wrote Garbo after studying the PWE’s work, “and what I consider to be of the maximum importance is the intention to hide the facts in order to trick us.”

This was the flowering of Garbo’s longest game, begun back in the wild old days of Lisbon. He was playing analyst again, doing what no other spy did. Garbo wasn’t just aiming to outwit people like Roenne. He wanted to, in a sense, replace them.

As the days counted down, conflicts arose. The XX Committee ordered Harris and Pujol to pass traffic about a proposed invasion of Bordeaux, a feint called Operation Ironside, which would be launched with two divisions on “D plus 10”—that is, ten days after D-Day. The two men didn’t think much of the plan: Bordeaux wasn’t on the Germans’ radar as a target, and just how many feints were the Nazis expected to believe anyway? Two second-tier agents— Tate and a young Peruvian beauty code-named Bronx—did as ordered and hinted about a coming invasion. Bronx had been given special codes by the Germans, each of which indicated a different target. A telegram reading, “I need 175 pounds for dental work,” meant the attack was coming in the Balkans, and a request for 200 pounds meant Greece. Bronx now sent a message to the Abwehr that her dental work would cost 125 pounds. It was the signal for Bordeaux.

But Garbo held out. He would eventually send a message on June 5, but then he qualified the report by saying he doubted its accuracy. Pujol and Harris weren’t about to sacrifice their hard-won reputation over a trifle like Ironside.

Even between agents, tempers flared. When Garbo and Agent Brutus passed almost identical messages relating to Patton, Brutus’s case officer blew up: “It seems to me preposterous,”
he wrote to his MI5 superiors, “that two agents should have obtained such exactly similar material on so important and secret a matter.” Identical messages pointed to a script—which could indicate to the Germans that the two agents were under Allied control. Luckily, the Abwehr saw Garbo’s report not as exposing Brutus’s information, but as confirming it. The Allies’ luck was holding.

As Garbo moved his army group east toward its imaginary jumping-off point, Allied Bomber Command joined the effort. Their planes dropped high explosives on forty-nine enemy airfields, hitting twice as many in Calais as in Normandy. Nineteen railroad junctions were bombed in Calais, none in Normandy. Pilots flew sorties and blew out the bridges
over the rivers Seine, Oise and Meuse and the Albert Canal, snapping the telephone and telegraph wires that led out of Calais. But they had done the same for Cockade, and everyone knew what the result had been. Were the Germans watching? Were they putting the pieces together correctly?

In May, the German general Hans von Cramer, a veteran of Rommel’s Afrika Korps, was released from an Allied POW camp because of ill health. As a high-ranking officer, before leaving he’d been treated to a dinner with the legendary General Patton, who was described throughout the meal as the commander of
FUSAG.
Patton charmed General von Cramer, and no expense was spared on the food and wine. The conversation drifted now and then to the delights of the French regions, in particular Calais.

Von Cramer left the dinner and was taken to a Red Cross ship that sailed across the English Channel to occupied France. After arriving,
von Cramer rushed to the High Command in Berlin and told them about the amazing things he’d seen and heard: on the way to the ship, he’d managed to sneak several peeks out of the transport window. The roads were packed with American and British troops, thousands upon thousands of them, clearly getting ready to embark for an invasion. The harbor he was taken to was thick with assault craft of every description. And the two officers who’d escorted him to the ship had let slip where they were: near Dover, straight across the Channel from Calais.

The members of the High Command listened with growing astonishment. Von Cramer was the only German eyewitness to the D-Day preparations. The veil had slipped. They packed von Cramer into a car and sent him to Hitler’s headquarters, where he repeated his story to the Führer.

Of course, von Cramer’s route to the Red Cross ship had been carefully planned to show him as many troops as possible. From the car he’d had a clear view of the regiments marching along the road. The two British officers who’d gossiped about their whereabouts were actually intelligence officers. The roads von Cramer had been traveling on were in southwestern England, not the southeast. And the harbor where the ship was waiting had been Portsmouth, the natural launching point for an attack on Normandy.

Hitler remained suspicious about Normandy, yet Garbo and the XX Committee were making progress. Churchill was reading reports of Garbo’s successes.
Heinrich Himmler sent
a personal note of congratulations to Kühlenthal in Madrid on his finding such a valuable gem—and asked Garbo to keep a sharp eye out. “The object of further reconnaissance [that is, Garbo’s espionage] must be to ascertain in good time when embarkation began and the destination of the groups of forces in south east England.” Colonel Roenne even quoted Garbo in a report on enemy intentions, pasting a snippet of conversation between Garbo and his friend at the Ministry of Information into his own evaluation. Tommy Harris marveled: “It is a unique case of an agent’s report
being quoted verbatim in an official report of so high a level.”

MI5 also noticed a subtle change in the incoming questionnaires: not only was the Abwehr asking about Garbo’s phantom divisions, indicating that the fake
FUSAG
had turned real in the German mind, but the questionnaires were no longer originating in Madrid. They were coming directly from Berlin.

With twenty-three days left until D-Day, Garbo began the overture for the last part of the caper. He met with his phony paramour at the Ministry of War and “learned” that the invasion would open with a diversion, to draw Hitler’s reserves away from the still unknown target area. True to Strangeways’s maxim, Garbo never mentioned Calais or Normandy, but the implication was clear. The first attack would be a feint, and the Germans must hold their forces back until the real invasion began. Eight days later, it was the Ministry of Information’s turn: Garbo was asked to help write pamphlets on the second front, based on actual military reports, which would be sent to Latin America. It was through a Ministry of Information leak that Garbo had predicted the invasion of North Africa, the news of which had tragically reached the Germans one day too late to be of any use. This time, he would send the warning by wireless, so there would be no delay. He would reveal the truth about D-Day as it happened.

It was impossible to keep Normandy completely off Hitler’s radar. It held too many advantages for an invading force. So as the clock ticked closer to the final hour, the trick was to make Hitler believe that what he would soon witness wasn’t entirely real. Though you are seeing troops at Normandy, Garbo was saying, you are not
really
seeing troops at Normandy. They are fakes, imposters, bugaboos. Ignore them.

On May 28, only nine days before D-Day, there was a sign that Garbo and Brutus were getting through to Hitler: the Allies had intercepted a message from the Japanese ambassador to his superiors in Tokyo that contained the record of a long conversation with the Fürher:

Speaking of the Second Front,
Hitler . . . thought that about eighty divisions had already been assembled in England . . . I accordingly asked the Führer if he thought that these British and American troops had completed their preparations for landing operations and he replied in the affirmative. I then asked him in what form he thought the Second Front would materialize, and he told me that at the moment what he himself thought was most probable was that after having carried out diversionary operations in Norway, Denmark and the southern part of the western coast of France and the French Mediterranean coast, they would establish a bridgehead in Normandy or Brittany, and after seeing how things went would then embark upon the establishment of a real Second Front in the Channel. Germany would like nothing better, he said, than to be given a chance of coming to blows with large forces of the enemy as soon as possible.

So Normandy would be followed by the “real Second Front.” The information, Hitler said, came from “relatively clear portents.” The portents were Garbo, Brutus and a few other trusted sources. They’d penetrated to the core of the German leadership.

It was excellent news. But a thousand miles away, in Lisbon, events were reaching a climax in a drama that would throw Garbo’s entire mission into doubt just as it seemed to be paying off. A month before, on April 29, a mysterious and conflicted man, a friend of P. G. Wodehouse’s, a spy-runner close to Hitler’s personal interpreter, described in his MI6 file as “a blond, monocle, very bad black teeth,
very clever,” had vanished from the spy capital of Europe. The Gestapo was suspected in his disappearance. And the missing man knew everything there was to know about Garbo.

19. The Prisoner

H
IS REAL NAME WAS
Johann “Johnny” Jebsen,
and like the clichés of an old-school German villain, he clamped a monocle over his right eye, but with a slight air of irony. The son of a wealthy Hamburg shipping mogul, he’d studied at the medieval German university at Freiburg. Jebsen played the part of a young shipping scion impeccably: fine suits, dazzlingly beautiful girlfriends, a supercharged Mercedes-Benz 540K convertible to roar through the shady depths of the Black Forest. In the early 1930s, the university was swarming with brownshirts (the Sturmabteilung, or storm troopers) and blackshirts (the SS), but Jebsen disdained them. He was a free spirit who hated Hitler and the book burners who patrolled the campus.

It was at Freiburg that Jebsen met the suave Dusko Popov, the future Allied double agent Tricycle, who was also studying at the university and casting a mocking eye at the local SS boys. The two became fast friends. In fact, Jebsen served as Popov’s second in a duel over a woman, in which the Serb had shocked the Freiburg student body by choosing pistols over the traditional sabers. The other duelist protested the choice, and Jebsen handled the complex negotiations, claiming that obscure Serbian cavalry honor codes obligated his friend to fight only with firearms. It was a white lie. Popov had chosen guns because he was a deadly shot; he’d won marksmanship contests back in Dubrovnik. The duel was soon called off.

Popov’s almost reckless daring showed in other ways. He railed against Hitler in student debates and was soon visited by four members of the Gestapo, interrogated for eight days and thrown into prison, where fellow inmates told him he was fated for the concentration camps. Many of Popov’s university friends turned on him, but Jebsen did the opposite, and worked to get him out. The Germans expelled the young Serb from the country with a passel of veiled threats and warnings not to return. When Popov got off the train in Basel, he found his German friend Jebsen waiting for him at the station, having driven the convertible at top speed across the Swiss border. This swirl of intimate connections—women, fast cars, mockery of the
lumpen
brownshirts and a certain taste for danger—bound the two young men together.

When the war came, the pair reunited in Belgrade. Popov found the dapper young man changed: disheveled, drinking heavily, smoking cigarette after cigarette, his teeth stained with tobacco—and working for the Abwehr. Why, Popov wondered, would a virulent anti-Nazi like Jebsen join the German intelligence service? But Popov owed his life to his old college friend, and he agreed to help him in his new career. He soon realized that Jebsen was no friend of his supposed bosses.

Months later, Popov found himself in Belgrade at a dinner with a “friend” of Jebsen’s named Müntzinger, who touted the inevitable German triumph and asked the Serb, none too subtly, if he’d like to join the side of the victors. Jebsen fidgeted and avoided Popov’s eyes as the pitch was made. “I can’t say I was shocked, or that I was surprised—subconsciously I must have been prepared for the offer—but I did feel a burst of adrenaline running through me.” Jebsen later admitted that the German was his boss at the Abwehr and that he himself had put Popov’s name forward as a possible spy.