Agent Garbo (26 page)

David Strangeways was one of Clarke’s best students. After studying at the feet of the master, he was dispatched to Tunisia, where he dreamed up a series of cunning and successful plots to outwit the best German commander, Erwin Rommel.

One of the keys to the success of the Allied spy operation was a certain double capacity in the men who worked inside it. Juan Pujol could have become one of the world’s great swindlers had he chosen to, a Ponzi schemer or a gigolo, but instead he yearned to do good. Those qualities rarely go together: con men do not want to save humanity, and starry-eyed humanists could not fake their way past the best minds in the German intelligence service. David Strangeways had Pujol’s kind of doubleness: he was a brilliant strategist who was lethal in battle. In other words, he was a tough ground-level commander who had thought deeply about deception and how it could be woven into a kinetic war.

Strangeways did it all, in Tunisia and elsewhere: he formulated the plans, picked the operatives to carry it out, oversaw the signals and physical deception, watched the Germans respond in real time and even fought in the battles that resulted. He’d done deception from beginning to end. No one in the European theater had the same experience. The Middle East was like a laboratory of deception where Strangeways could experiment and work out his theories to the end.

The battle for Tunis
exemplified this. In the winter of 1942, the British First Army and the American II Corps were closing in on the capital from the west. Strangeways directed the Germans’ attention to the south by passing traffic through a fake Abwehr agent code-named Cheese, supposedly a Syrian of Slavic heritage who was in reality an enterprising British lieutenant colonel named William Kenyon-Jones, who, against the express wishes of the British signal corps, had an amateur wireless set built from spare parts in Cairo and had won the trust of the Abwehr’s Athens station with his weirdly accurate reports. With Cheese sending out fake updates and with a few dummy tanks positioned in the south next to real ones, giving the Luftwaffe the illusion of a major armored movement, Strangeways hoodwinked the Desert Fox, Rommel, into believing the Allied armies were where they weren’t.

But the capital, Tunis, still hadn’t been taken. Strangeways jumped into an armored car and dashed off to the smoking city, still echoing with the machine guns of the last of Rommel’s holdouts. When Strangeways arrived at German headquarters, he shot his way in, blew open the safe and confiscated the secret codes, confidential documents and cipher machines before the Germans could dispose of them, then rounded up the remains of the French colonial police and restored order in the city. Wheatley, putting on his novelist’s hat, claimed that Strangeways was “the first man into Tunis” that day. While that might have been an exaggeration, the Allied infantry did march into the city the next morning and found “the capital virtually under [his] control.” The notoriously difficult Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was so impressed with the dashing young officer that, when Monty was called back to England to take part in D-Day, he brought Strangeways with him to head up his deception outfit.

Strangeways arrived in London around Christmas 1943. Wheatley remembered his first sight of this odd, brilliant man. “He was . . . so beautifully turned out
that, even in battledress, he looked as if he had stepped straight out of a bandbox.” But the European theater he’d just entered was different from the Middle East: sprawling, enormous and very political. Plans took months to be approved and implemented. Each agency had its own bureaucracy. If you needed the Royal Navy in on a scheme, you had to spend weeks just getting to the right person. The power relationships were as complex as any government’s, and Strangeways was outranked by almost everyone he needed for Fortitude.

But Strangeways didn’t care how many stripes you wore on your sleeve; he was notorious for trampling in people’s private domains and overruling people he had no right to overrule. In fact, he seemed to enjoy needling his superiors. “He thought he
was
Monty,” said one officer.

Operation Fortitude had taken the best minds in London months and thousands of man-hours to put together. Everyone had signed off on it. But Strangeways, the newcomer, took one look at the scheme and decided it was complete rubbish. “Put it this way.
The plan had been made by people who had been in England and had never been out doing any practical deception work. That is, deception work which was combined with military activity.” Strangeways could practically see a well-lubricated Dennis Wheatley coming back from a heavy lunch in his silk-lined jacket and working this thing up before his afternoon nap. It was a plan conceived in an office without windows. It wouldn’t do.

At a famous meeting of intelligence heads, Strangeways stood and held up a copy of the Fortitude plan. He announced the plan was useless and proceeded to slowly tear it up in front of the men who’d written it. “It gave maximum offense,”
reported one officer. “What was said about Strangeways hardly bears repeating.”

This was in February 1944. D-Day was scheduled for May 1. The men who’d planned Fortitude weren’t amused. “Everybody was furious.
This bumptious so-and-so, who does he think he is?” But because Strangeways had the backing of Monty, Britain’s most powerful military commander, the deception planners had to at least listen to his ideas. Then they hoped to bury them.

Major Roger Fleetwood Hesketh was the sole intelligence officer of Ops (B), the deception operation embedded within
SHAEF,
Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, and he numbered among the minds who’d formulated Bodyguard. He was a former barrister and a gentleman, “the beau ideal of an English country squire,”
whose twelfth-century manor, Meols, was regarded as the most haunted house in the country, while also boasting “one of the best claret cellars in England.”
One could hardly have found a more confident and well-entrenched member of the British establishment. As Strangeways was set to deliver his new deception plan in early February, Hesketh assured his officers that the scheme would be no more than warmed-over Bodyguard, with “a few new ideas” thrown in to save face.
In the battle to create the deception plan for D-Day, the old guard, not this arrogant ponce, would prevail.

One day soon after his pronouncement,
the revised document arrived at Hesketh’s office. He read it through silently, then handed it to an MI5 officer and liaison, Christopher Harmer.

“What do you think?”

Harmer paged through the plan, reading with mounting astonishment. “It was a revelation,” he would later say.

He looked up at Hesketh and gave his verdict.

“I can’t believe we will ever get away with this.”

16. The Ghost Army

M
ANY ALLIED OFFICERS
believed that D-Day could not be “covered.” It simply defied logic. The thing was too big and too visible. The British general J.F.M. Whiteley, who’d helped plan D-Day, told his friends he wouldn’t wager a pound sterling on the success of the early version of Fortitude. One American intelligence officer, Ralph Ingersoll, called the idea of misleading Hitler like “putting a hooped skirt
and ruffled pants on an elephant to make it look like a crinoline girl.” When a member of the London Controlling Section went in front of one key group of high-ranking officers to present Bodyguard, his audience “flatly refused to believe
that it would be possible to deceive the enemy” before D-Day. Then there were those who simply didn’t
understand
what was being presented to them. When a staffer laid out the plan for Calais, one brigadier general protested, “But we are not
going
to land
in the Pas de Calais.”

Instead of scaling down the plan in the face of these doubts, Strangeways went in the opposite direction. He envisioned a much larger and riskier deception. The colonel proposed creating an imaginary army—the First United States Army Group, or
FUSAG
—of one million men where none existed, and sending it on an imaginary invasion where none was planned, at Calais. The new plan’s aim was to trick the Nazis into believing that Normandy was a feint and that a huge, almost totally hidden army was waiting to stage the real attack. No one had so much as contemplated such an audacious gambit.

Strangeways wanted Garbo and the others to create an army of specters, while the Allies gave it a seething, audible, diesel-fumed life of its own, using specially trained regiments of soldiers and technicians, dozens of British navy ships and hundreds of the Eighth Air Force’s fighter planes and bombers. Strangeways and his men would focus on the double agents and fake wireless traffic, and other units, under Operation Bodyguard, would create an amy of special effects—taped sounds, fake explosions, fake everything, to look and feel like an actual invasion.

The scheme was fresh and bold, miles away from the attacks on humble Nissen huts that the XX Committee had been engaged in only two years before. “After the initial shock,
I think everyone was a bit shamefaced that they hadn’t thought of it themselves,” said the intelligence officer Christopher Harmer. A British historian would later describe Strangeways’s approach as “true to the tradition of English eccentricity
; the sort of thing that Captain Hornblower or [Sherlock] Holmes in fiction, or Admiral Cochrane or Chinese Gordon in fact, would have gone in for had they been faced with a similar challenge.”

Creating this army out of thin air would normally take weeks if not months of committee meetings and strategic papers and negotiations between the army group and the signal corps, what Strangeways called “awful, ghastly staff procedures.”
He was having none of it: “All I did was to go to the Chief Signal Officer and say, ‘Can you do this?’ He said, ‘Of course we can.’ I knew him well, he knew what I did, and we never discussed anything about ‘Why.’”
Why
was not a welcome question in the lieutenant colonel’s world;
why
was the exclusive domain and property of David Strangeways. His men soon learned not to ask it. “We got away with murder,”
Strangeways recalled wistfully. “But it was all for the cause.”

Juan Pujol never met David Strangeways, may never have heard his name. But he now had a planner whose vision was as fearless and broad-beamed as his own.

As the last-minute changes were made, five double agents took the lead. Brutus, the Polish airman, would be essential in passing to the enemy the false Order of Battle, the list of divisions readying for the invasion of France. Tate was a Danish spy,
real name Wulf Schmidt, who’d parachuted into England in September 1940, been caught, thrown in prison, turned, and given his code name because he resembled the popular music-hall comedian Harry Tate, famous for his tag line, “How’s your father?” He would pass information to the Germans on the American armies departing from the States for action in Europe. Treasure was a high-strung Frenchwoman who once double-crossed MI5 because she believed one of its operatives had killed her dog; she was put out to pasture, but the secret services kept broadcasting in her name. Treasure would inform the Abwehr that Monty had been named commander of
FUSAG
, conditioning the Germans to the idea of Brits leading Americans, and vice versa, which would play a large part in the phony army’s operations. Tricycle was the daring Serbian Dusko Popov, who would smuggle fake plans for the cross-Channel invasion into Lisbon and straight into German hands. Garbo was the first among equals. He would send countless “reports” from his network of “agents” spread far and wide.

To ramp up for Fortitude South, the fake attack on Calais, Garbo began sending his imaginary agents to the target cities and towns all over the south and southwest of England, the jumping-off point for the “attack” on Pas de Calais. In February, Agent 7 (2), the retired Welsh seaman, went to Dover; 7 (4), the Indian poet called Rags, was assigned to Brighton; the traveling businessman, 7 (5), was installed in Devon; and the treasurer of the fictitious Brothers in the Aryan World Order, known as 7 (7), made his way to Harwich. Agent No. 4, the waiter from Gibraltar who’d failed to lure Federico to the Chislehurst Caves, was sent to cover the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division in Hampshire. Agent No. 7 (3) journeyed to far-off India, but most of the phantom spies were lodged in possible embarkation points along the eastern and southeastern English coast. Garbo’s “sources” inside the Ministry of Information and Ministry of War were also waiting, ready to be exploited. As far as the Germans knew, Garbo could now not only capture battle orders where they originated—London—but also detect them in the movements of men and materiel where the orders met the realities of the field. The fake Allied Order of Battle became all-important. What army was threatening France, what divisions and regiments comprised it, who commanded it, and where was it moving? This was what the Germans wanted to know.

When the soldiers began hitting the shore at Normandy, the attack would inevitably cause a split in the German leadership: one group who believed it was the real cross-Channel invasion, and another, persuaded by Garbo and his comrades, who believed it was a feint and the real blow would come at Calais. If Garbo could convince a core of true believers, they would act like mini-agents themselves, pushing the plan invented in London. Garbo had to convert these men, then give them the tools to win the battle within the German war machine.

Contrary to popular perception, the days after the invasion of Normandy—the beaches that the Allies referred to as the “far shore”—would be just as critical as D-Day itself. Most armies attacking a thinly fortified coast are able to gain at least a foothold on the beach by the sheer magnitude of the forces they bring to bear; the American, Canadian and British troops would far outnumber the German defenders on that first day and should be able to claim the first few yards of territory. Colonel Roenne had confirmed this when he took his Mercedes for a five-day tour of the Atlantic Wall in late October and early November 1943. It was clear to him that the Allies could land an invasion force almost anywhere they chose away from the heavily fortified harbors. It was in the days
after
the landing, when the D-Day forces would be most vulnerable, that success or defeat would be decided. The Allies would try to bring hundreds of thousands of men, tanks and supply trucks, howitzers and first-aid kits ashore, while the Germans would mass their forces to try to pinch off and destroy the exposed position of the Allies. Even Rommel conceded the point: “The enemy will probably succeed
in creating bridgeheads at several different points and in achieving a major penetration of our coastal defenses. Once this has happened, it will only be by the rapid intervention of our operational reserves that he will be thrown back into the sea.”