Agent Garbo (34 page)

Two weeks after the Normandy invasion, there were actually more Axis forces in the Pas de Calais than there had been before the attack. A month after,
a total of twenty-two Calais divisions stood on alert, ready to repel the invaders that would never come. In a top-secret interview conducted the following year in Nuremberg, an interrogator asked Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Germany’s equivalent of a war minister, why the panzers ordered to Normandy had turned around at the last moment. He pointed to Garbo’s June 9 report. “You can accept it as 99 percent certain
that this message was the immediate cause of the counter order.” General Eisenhower was just as certain:

Lack of infantry was the most important cause
of the enemy’s defeat in Normandy, and his failure to remedy this weakness was due primarily to the success of the Allied threats leveled against the Pas de Calais . . . I cannot over-emphasize the decisive value of this most successful threat, which paid enormous dividends, both at the time of the assault and during the operations of the two succeeding months. The German Fifteenth Army, which, if committed to battle in June or July, might possibly have defeated us by sheer weight of numbers, remained inoperative throughout the critical period of the campaign.

Before he committed suicide by cyanide on October 14, 1944, Field Marshal Rommel made a curious confession to his son. It had been “a decisive mistake,” he said, “to leave the German troops in the Pas de Calais.”

As Pujol and Harris walked unsteadily through the streets of London, Operation Fortitude’s mastermind, the irrepressible David Strangeways, was battling his way through France. Strangeways was at the head of R Force, a unique unit composed of both deception technicians and infantry soldiers. The unit was tricking the Germans into sending their panzers and troops into what were called “notional areas”—that is, empty fields or deserted farms—by using the full battery of physical deception: fake wireless traffic, “night lighting exercises”
that could simulate everything from airstrips to large convoys, false division HQs, flash simulators to mimic artillery guns, battle noise simulators to suggest the landing of paratroopers,
misleading signposts,
phony tanks, fake bomb craters
and a host of operations cooked up on the march. The unit’s technicians even mocked up some very convincing “dummy sniper heads,”
which were so successful in drawing out enemy sharpshooters that one officer went to the studio of a local artist, Monsieur Deleroulk, and asked if he could mass-produce 500 of them. (He could, for 200 francs each.
) They churned out rumor after rumor and spread them across the French countryside. R Force, with David Strangeways at its head, was like a traveling carnival, drawing rabbits out of their hats.

By late summer of 1944, his R Force was pushing toward the Rhine. On August 31, Strangeways led his soldiers toward the French city of Rouen from the south. As usual, his daring surprised and infuriated his superiors. The brigadier of one infantry group was “horrified to learn that R Force is lying so far forward and recommends that it is withdrawn at once.” Strangeways and his men eventually took the city, after which he departed to give a lecture on the elegant art of deception at the Palais des Beaux Arts. “It is fair to say,”
concluded one report on R Force’s work in this period, “that no major attack has taken place which has not to some degree gained surprise.”

Strangeways passed wide of Le Postel, the town far to the south of Rouen that had been obliterated as part of the failed Operation Cockade. One late afternoon in September, as R Force was heading north toward Germany, a small milestone was marked in the coastal town. The last German garrison in the area around Le Postel had surrendered. But there was no one around to celebrate; no townspeople rushed into the streets and waved the tricolor or offered wine to advancing troops. Le Postel was empty. It had never recovered
from the bombing that was intended to cover Cockade.

The man who could have destroyed Garbo, Johann Jebsen, spent D-Day in Sachsenhausen, one of the oldest concentration camps in the Third Reich, earmarked for political prisoners and enemies of the state. Sachsenhausen was a model camp, surrounded by electric wire and a high stone wall, as well as a “death strip” of pale gravel that the inmates were forbidden to step on. Anyone who did was shot by the guards. A man who’d occupied the cell next to Jebsen’s later reported that, after the spymaster had been dragged back to his cell following a brutal beating, he called out to the guards, “I trust I shall be provided
with a clean shirt.” Another prisoner met Jebsen in September 1944 and found him lying on his bed, his ribs broken. It was the last sighting of the tragic spy.

His friend Dusko Popov, Agent Tricycle, feeling both guilty and enraged about Jebsen’s fate, drove through the ruins of postwar Germany searching for the man he held responsible for his colleague’s death. His name was Walter Selzer, and he was a minor functionary who’d carried out Jebsen’s execution. After weeks of detective work, Popov found Selzer in the German city of Minden. Popov abducted him and drove him to a lonely forest to kill him. But Selzer proved so meek and pathetic that Popov found himself unable to pull the trigger. He left Selzer cowering in the trees and consoled himself by rescuing Jebsen’s wife; Popov even knocked on the doors
of theater directors in Berlin’s British zone, trying to get her work as an actress. It was an act of atonement for the man he felt he’d failed.

Jebsen apparently never told his interrogators what he knew about Garbo.

As summer turned into fall, the planners and the generals finally had time to look back on the deception operation and Garbo’s part in it. The praise began to roll in. “Connoisseurs of the double cross,”
J. C. Masterman would later say, “have always regarded the Garbo case as the most highly developed example of their art.” Anthony Blount called Garbo’s coup “the greatest double cross operation
of the war.” The deception planner and historian Roger Fleetwood-Hesketh put it most succinctly: “His contribution to D-day was indeed stranger
than any fiction . . . It could not have been done without him . . . It was Garbo’s message . . . which changed the course of the battle in Normandy.” When Eisenhower had the chance to meet Tommy Harris (he never spoke to Pujol himself), at the ceremony honoring the spy-runner’s OBE, or Order of the British Empire, the American general stood up and reached out his hand. “Your work with Mr. Pujol
most probably amounts to the equivalent of a whole army division,” he said as the two men shook hands. “You have saved a lot of lives, Mr. Harris.”

Though German reinforcements had begun moving toward Normandy in late August, by then it was too late to crush the second front. When the Allies captured German intelligence maps,
they showed Garbo’s phantom divisions in the exact spots the spy had said they were. On Roenne’s big map of the Western Front,
the flag of the imaginary
FUSAG
remained pinned in place until October.

When the war diarist
for the German High Command, Professor Percy Schramm, was being interrogated by the Allies after V-E Day, an odd and telling moment occurred. Schramm was a historian of medieval ritual; his specialty was the study of how the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire projected their power through images and symbols. During the war, he’d had unfettered access to the leaders of the German military.

In the middle of the interrogation, a question suddenly popped into the historian’s mind. He interrupted the conversation and asked it.

“All this Patton business wasn’t a trick, was it?” he asked the Allied officer suspiciously.

“What do you mean by that?”

“What I mean is this,” Schramm said. “Were all those divisions sent to south-east England simply to hold our forces in the Pas de Calais?”

The interrogator paused, then gave a rather nuanced reply. The forces were there to reinforce Monty in Normandy, he claimed, and would have only invaded Calais if the Germans had abandoned it.

“Ah,” Schramm said, relieved. “That is what we always thought.”

The war had been over for months, but the German expert on imagery still believed that
FUSAG
had been real. Garbo’s fiction lived on.

21. The Weapon

G
ARBO HAD TRIUMPHED,
but two lingering threats—to England and to his marriage—required immediate attention. The national crisis came first.

In the summer of 1943,
rumors had swept London that Hitler was developing a superweapon. MI6’s sources had heard that it was to be some kind of enormous rocket, weighing between ten and fifteen tons, which would travel through the stratosphere loaded with high explosives, a weapon that couldn’t be shot out of the sky or defended against with existing technologies. MI5 wanted Garbo to see if he could find out what this dream weapon was. On June 10, he wrote Madrid: “I must now discuss another matter
connected with the report of a Swedish journalist called Gunnar T. Pihl who . . . spoke of an enormous rocket gun which is installed on the French coast to bombard London as a reprisal . . . The result of this was that my wife became panicky and wants at all costs to leave England . . . [I] promised her that if it were true I would send her to the country out of the range of this weapon.” So, was it true? Madrid brushed him off, saying only that “there is no cause to alarm yourself.”

But months later, out of the blue, came this bulletin from the Abwehr: “Circumstances dictate that you should carry out
your proposition with regard to setting up your home outside the capital.” Not only that, a second radio transmitter was to be built “without regard to price” in case the first was destroyed. What was the “threatened action” Madrid referred to later in the message, this wondrous weapon that was so frightening it would drive Garbo out of London? He asked for a few days’ notice before the reprisals began, which would give the British Ministry of Home Security time to prepare for the mysterious attack. But Madrid steadfastly refused to give any more information. Meanwhile, Garbo moved Araceli and the children out to the country.

The Ultra intercepts showed that the project was so secret even Madrid didn’t know what was happening; the directives were coming directly from Berlin. The Abwehr headquarters told Madrid to expect a series of highly sensitive questionnaires for Garbo about the secret weapon, prefixed by the code name Stichling. The answers were to be forwarded immediately to Berlin with the same prefix. Madrid would not be allowed to decipher the messages before sending them.

Londoners watched the skies and waited for Hitler’s last chance to arrive. And Garbo waited for the Stichling messages. The weapon came first. On June 13, 1944, seven days after the Normandy invasion, a buzzing whine was heard in the sky over London and the first V-1 rocket dropped onto a railway bridge in the East End, killing six. Looking like a sleek unmanned plane, the V-1 was a remote-controlled flying bomb that carried a 2,200-pound warhead. The British called the V-1s “flying robots” and “doodlebugs.” Germans cheered them as the “omnipotent miracle weapon” that would save the country. “Day and night [the V-1] thunders down
with fiery blows on the city on the Thames,” crowed the German newspaper
Das Reich.
“There is a new wheel in the machinery of war.”

On June 16, Berlin sent the long-awaited message to Madrid: “Arras reports Stichling is beginning.” The Germans requested that Garbo mark the impact zones of the V-1s on a special London map. The reason was clear: the German engineers wanted to fine-tune the rockets’ guidance system to ensure strikes in central London, to kill as many people as possible.

Garbo stalled. If he and the other double agents who’d been given the Stichling message, Brutus and Tate, acted as scouts for the V-1 program, they’d be assisting in mass murder. Garbo passed along information only on a recent strike in the West End, believing that diplomats from neutral countries still living in London would report the attacks anyway. “8 dead and 13 wounded
. . . Square 10, grey section. Many houses damaged. Square 82 . . . Many victims in the street.” Hoping to dampen the enthusiasm for the V-1, Garbo then wrote Kühlenthal a long personal letter. Its theme was simple: “We are wasting our time.” The flying bomb was ineffective as an offensive weapon, he argued, and a disappointment as a psychological one. Londoners simply weren’t terrified enough.

But Garbo could delay only so long. If he didn’t send the coordinates and the impact times, he would lose standing with the Abwehr. A solution had to be found. Harris and Pujol came up with an idea: Why not run the same gambit on the Abwehr that they had on Araceli? It was a natural way out. One day when he was out looking at bomb damage, Garbo failed to return home. His “deputy,” No. 3, reported by wireless to Madrid that their chief was missing and that Araceli was frantic. All indications pointed to the likelihood that Garbo had been arrested.

In time the “details” came out. While looking at a bomb site in Bethnal Green, Garbo had attracted the notice of a plainclothes policeman. Garbo, to use a term from a later era, had been profiled. “[The policeman] started to insult me,”
Garbo claimed to Madrid, “saying that Spaniards were a lot of dogs and followed the footsteps of the greatest butcher ever recorded in history and that we should be treated as enemies.” Taken to the local station house, Garbo swallowed a piece of paper with suspicious writing on it before the bobbies could stop him. Luckily, his powerful friends in the Ministry of Information intervened on his behalf, and in a few days he was released, worried but still defiant. MI5 forged a letter of apology from the home secretary, which Garbo passed on to Madrid. His Abwehr handlers were shaken, and it was decided in Berlin that Garbo was far too valuable an asset to risk on the V-1 program. He was released from his bomb assessment duties—exactly what MI5 had wanted.