Ike's Spies (17 page)

One was air superiority. From dawn to dusk, Allied airmen bombed and shot up every enemy column, whether on the roads or on the rails, that was spotted trying to move into Normandy. Eisenhower's second weapon was the French underground, working in close coordination with
SHAEF
, against targets designated by Ike, to harass the German columns, blow bridges, create roadblocks, and in countless other ways slow the rate of German movement.

Ike's third weapon in the battle of the buildup was the cheapest, in terms of men and matériel, and the most successful in terms of keeping German troops away from the battle area. It was a continuation of
FORTITUDE
, this time with one of the most brazen operations of the war.

On D-Day plus three, June 9, Garbo sent a message to his spy master with a request that it be submitted urgently to the German High Command. “The present operation, though a large-scale assault, is diversionary in character,” Garbo stated flatly. “Its object is to establish a strong bridgehead in order to draw the maximum
of our reserves into the area of the assault and to retain them there so as to leave another area exposed where the enemy could then attack with some prospect of success.”

Citing the Allied order of battle, Garbo said that Eisenhower had committed only a small portion of his seventy-five divisions (Ike's actual total was fifty). He pointed out that no
FUSAG
unit had taken part in the Normandy attack, nor was Patton there. Further, “The constant aerial bombardment which the sector of the Pas de Calais has been undergoing and the disposition of the enemy forces would indicate the imminence of the assault in this region which offers the shortest route to the final objective of the Anglo-American illusions: Berlin.”
⁴

Within half a day, Garbo's message was in Hitler's hands. On the basis of it, the Führer made a momentous decision. Rundstedt had wanted to commit his best division, the 1st SS Panzer Division, together with the 116th Panzer Division, to the battle in Normandy, where Rommel desperately needed reinforcements. They had started for Caen, but now Hitler ordered the armored units back to the Pas de Calais to help the Fifteenth Army defend against the main invasion. He also awarded an Iron Cross, Second Class, to Garbo.
⁵

The Double-Cross System orchestra was now playing at full volume, with every instrument involved. The Germans had great confidence not only in Garbo but in all their spies. Whenever troops of real formations reached France, they were always troops who had been identified and reported on by the agents. As a consequence of finding the reports to be accurate, the Germans naturally believed the reports which concerned the imaginary troops supposedly still stationed in England, poised to hit the Pas de Calais. It was relatively easy to convince the Germans that the real divisions that were coming into Normandy had been shifted from
FUSAG
to Normandy because of the Allies' unexpected difficulties in breaking out of the beachhead.

The deception went on. On June 13, an agent warned that another attack would take place in two or three days around Dieppe or Abbeville, near the Pas de Calais. Another agent reported that airborne divisions (wholly fictitious) would drop around Amiens, halfway between Paris and the Pas de Calais.

In late June, agent Tate reported. Masterman had convinced the Germans that he was a man with a genius for making friends in
high places—he was the spy who reported Eisenhower's arrival in London in January—so the Abwehr was not surprised when Tate claimed to have obtained the railway schedule for moving the
FUSAG
forces from their concentration areas to the embarkation ports, thus reinforcing from a new angle the imminence of the threat to the Pas de Calais. Tate's report was considered so important by one Abwehr officer that he gave it as his opinion that it could “even decide the outcome of the war.” He was not far wrong.

FORTITUDE
had remarkable durability. As Masterman notes, “In German eyes, the threat to the Pas de Calais was as great and dangerous in July as it had been in May. In fact, and beyond the wildest hopes of those responsible, the threat held until the autumn.”
⁶

One of Ike's greatest pleasures during the first two months of the campaign was to read the weekly intelligence summaries (or, more often, hear Strong's oral report) on “German appreciation of Allied intentions in the West,” the principle source being
ULTRA
. Each summary was brief and to the point.

The summary of June 19 read, “The Germans still believe the Allies capable of launching another amphibious operation. The Pas de Calais remains an expected area for attack. Fears of landings in Norway have been maintained. Enemy naval and ground forces have remained unaltered since D-Day.”

On July 10: “So far the enemy's fear of large scale landings between the Seine and the Pas de Calais has not diminished. The second half of July is given as the probable time for this operation.” Not so good was the report that “German fears of a landing in Southern Norway continue to diminish.”

By July 24, Ike had almost thirty divisions in Normandy and had by then won the battle of the buildup. On that date, the summary was again welcome reading: “The Germans have identified in Normandy some units that they believe to have been part of the army held in readiness for a second major landing between the Seine and the Franco-Belgian frontier. But there has been no considerable transfer of German forces from the Pas de Calais, which remains strongly garrisoned.” The summary did note that one division was moving out of the Pas de Calais, and another from Belgium, both presumably headed for the battle area in Normandy.

The next summary, on July 31, noted that the two divisions had shown up in Normandy “and the last remaining armoured division
North of the Seine has now arrived in the battle area. It is likely that these movements have been forced on the enemy by the increasing urgency of battle requirements despite his fears of an Allied landing north of the Seine. Though the enemy now regards such a landing as rather less imminent, these fears still remain.”
⁷

By August 3, when Patton came onto the Continent with his U. S. Third Army, most German officers realized that Normandy was the real thing. By then, of course, it was too late. The Germans had kept hundreds of their best tanks and thousands of their finest fighting men (a total of fifteen divisions) out of this crucial battle of the war in order to meet a threat that was always imaginary. Equally remarkable, as Masterman noted, was “that no single case was compromised by the grand deception for
OVERLORD
, but that, on the contrary, those agents who took a leading part in it were more highly regarded by the Germans after it than before.”
⁸

On October 25, 1944, Colonel John Bevan, the Controlling Officer of Deception and Masterman's boss, wrote his immediate superior, “When the history of this war is written, I believe it will be found that the German High Command was, largely through the medium of
BI-A
channels, induced to make faulty dispositions, in particular during the vital post-
OVERLORD
D-Day period.”
⁹
It was British understatement on a grand scale. To paraphrase Churchill, never had so many been immobilized by so few.

FORTITUDE
and the Double-Cross System held the Fifteenth Army in place at the Pas de Calais, but the Germans had other formations in France to draw upon in the battle of the buildup. Again, the role of the air forces in immobilizing these troops cannot be overemphasized, but that story is not part of the secret side of
OVERLORD
. An equally important role was played by the French underground, and that story is a part of any account of Eisenhower and the intelligence community, for it was in this area that the
OSS
made its contribution to a successful
OVERLORD
.

“Ah, those first
OSS
arrivals in London! How well I remember them,” wrote the British humorist Malcolm Muggeridge, “arriving like
jeune filles en fleur
straight from a finishing school, all fresh and innocent, to start work in our frowsty old intelligence brothel. All too soon they were ravished and corrupted, becoming indistinguishable from seasoned pros who had been in the game for a quarter century or more.”
¹⁰

Donovan insisted that the
OSS
had to have a major role in
OVERLORD
, one at least equal to that of its British counterpart, Special Operations Executive (
SOE
), which had been controlling all Allied relations with the French Resistance since 1941. In Donovan's view,
SOE
did not think or act on a big enough scale. Its operations were geared to a spy here, a clandestine radio operator there, or sporadic contact with underground cells, all reflecting the time when the British were fighting the war alone, on a shoestring. But by 1944, things were different—the Allies could draw on the seemingly unlimited production of the United States. Donovan wanted to do much more, beginning with a program of supplying arms on a large scale to the Maquis.

The British disagreed. They wanted to limit the amount of supplies sent to France because of their belief that rival resistance groups would use the weapons to fight each other instead of the Germans, and that after liberation the Communists would use the arms to take political power. Donovan ignored the threat. He had Communists in the
OSS
and was sure he knew how to control them—besides, they were fighting Germans, were they not? In place of small, secret, self-contained cells directed from London by radio, Donovan wanted nothing less than a French Army, albeit on paramilitary lines, with the French sharing leadership equally with Americans and Englishmen on the spot. To hell with the political consequences—he wanted as many well-armed Frenchmen as possible taking part in the national uprising against the Nazis.
¹¹

So, in the spring of 1944, Donovan advocated a substantial increase in the quantity of arms, ammunition, and other supplies sent to France in order to increase participation in the Maquis and to assure maximum military effectiveness of the Resistance on D-Day.

Again the British, more accustomed to fighting the Germans with brains than with brawn, were hesitant. Compounding that problem, the British had a monopoly on relations with the Maquis through
SOE
, and those few supplies that were air-dropped to the French came from the British. Ike tried to explain to Frenchmen who complained about American stinginess that the supplies the British were dropping had come from America in the first place, but it made little impression.

After D-Day, when the Maquis began to prove its worth, Eisenhower—acting at Donovan's request—greatly increased the rate of supply, using as many as three hundred bombers on one operation
to parachute supplies to the French. Donovan gleefully reported to Marshall, “It is now possible to publicize our aid to the French Resistance and thus to cultivate for the U.S. the good will of the French people.”
¹²

As the supply controversy indicates, there was profound mistrust between the Allies. Some Anglophobic Frenchmen, including de Gaulle, suspected that the British were trying to reestablish the old English kingdom of Aquitaine in France. Others charged that the British were willing to “fight to the last Frenchman.”

The British, for their part, continued to fear that communism would take over when the Germans left France and they were irritated at Donovan's bull-in-the-china-shop methods and his lack of political sophistication. The Americans just wanted to kill Germans, as quickly and efficiently as possible. Under the circumstances, the British would not trust the French; the
OSS
would not trust the British; the French would not trust anyone.

How then to use the potential of the Maquis? The answer was a brilliant compromise, a remarkable international secret service plan code-named
JEDBURGH
(the name came from the training quarters at Jedburgh on the Jed River in Scotland). The
JED
teams, as they were called, were three-man groups—one Frenchman, one Englishman, one American. Starting on D-Day, the
JEDS
were to parachute in uniform to areas known to have heavy concentrations of Maquis, where they would act as liaison with the underground, arm and train the guerrilla forces, and coordinate activity with
SHAEF
. Altogether, between D-Day and the liberation of France, 91
JED
teams were parachuted into France.
¹³

Initially, control of the
JEDS
was supposed to remain with the two secret services,
SOE
and
OSS
. But Ike was hardly the man to allow an activity so closely connected to
OVERLORD
to go on under someone else's command. On March 23, 1944, he assumed control of all secret service activity connected with
OVERLORD
. The joint special operations unit formed by
OSS
and
SOE
was divorced entirely from its parent organizations and renamed Special Force Headquarters, reporting directly to
SHAEF
.
¹⁴
This naturally displeased de Gaulle (who had set up his own government, the French Committee of National Liberation, in Algiers) because the Maquis was, he felt, his army—but he could not supply it, did not command it, and could only barely communicate with it as the radio contacts were controlled by
SHAEF
.

Ike had not lived through the night of November 8–9, 1942, arguing with Giraud for nothing. He was keenly sensitive to de Gaulle's complaint and, as will be seen, he was much more willing to meet de Gaulle's demands—and thus get de Gaulle's cooperation—than any other highly placed Anglo-American leader. He went to great lengths to keep de Gaulle's people in Algiers informed, to ask their opinion, to coordinate activity with them.