Agent Garbo (32 page)

Everyone in that room at MI5 headquarters was under enormous pressure. But Harris had his own hidden burdens. The half-Jewish MI5 officer was secretly privy to information about the pogroms and the mass murders happening inside Germany and elsewhere. He had many Jewish friends in London who’d escaped the horrors of Germany before the borders were closed, and they openly discussed with him their reasons for fleeing. He’d even hired a refugee to work in his art gallery. “They told him about what had happened
in Germany,” says his biographer, Andreu Jaume.

Harris’s drinking was getting worse, and the nervous, vaguely Van Gogh–like line of the few paintings he worked on during the war were becoming more hectic—
atormentado,
tormented,
is the word Harris’s nephew uses. It couldn’t have helped that the character he was helping to create, Garbo, was more than a casual anti-Semite: at one point Garbo, in a letter to Kühlenthal, signed off by writing that he was giving him the Nazi salute.
The rhetoric provided excellent cover for Garbo, made him appear to be what Guy Liddell once called “a hot Nazi.” But Harris knew that the Third Reich was acting on its hatreds and murdering his fellow Jews. When Garbo wrote of the Allies that “I am not certain whether I am being carried away
by my impulse and desires to see these people exterminated,” it must have pained Harris.

Ironically, Pujol was unaware that the man he sat next to every day for three years was half-Jewish. “His mother was Spanish and Gypsy,”
Pujol later said, “and his father was British, a man of strong social position in London.” As close as the two men had become, Harris had kept his secret from his partner.

Now, because of Jebsen, Harris saw the Garbo operation falling apart. And he was terrified.

Liddell and the others heard Tommy Harris out, then argued for pushing forward. If the XX Committee shut down its star agent, the Germans might ask why Garbo had disappeared. And if they closed down Tricycle completely, that might tip off the enemy. As the four men examined the tangled case, studied every permutation from every possible angle, at the center of each equation sat a number of variables whose value couldn’t be determined on that particular May evening: why the Germans had arrested Jebsen, what he was telling them, what the Abwehr’s level of confidence in Garbo and Tricycle was. “Whichever way you look at this case,” Liddell sighed, “it is full of imponderables.”

The four men finally agreed they should hold the course. Churchill was told about the Jebsen case three days before D-Day. The Garbo operation was still alive.

20. The Hours

T
OMMY HARRIS WANTED
his agent to be the one to carry the game to its final hour. He lobbied for Garbo to be given the honor of announcing D-Day to the Germans, and the XX Committee agreed. The coup would boost Garbo’s star even higher, and he could use his influence to stop the Germans from committing their reserves. Keeping the panzers away from Normandy meant both fooling the Germans about Calais and, a much tougher trick, persuading them to ignore Normandy even
after
the landings, on D-Day plus one, D-Day plus two—and as many additional days as possible.

But first, Garbo had to maneuver the enemy into position.

Agent No. 4, the waiter from Gibraltar, was pushing the Norway theme, watching destroyers and assault craft practicing maneuvers in Loch Fyne in Scotland; he could “see” the sailors on deck wearing arctic gear. Garbo sent the news on May 14. Madrid radioed back: “I am particularly interested to know
urgently whether the 52nd Division is still in the camps in the Glasgow area.” Garbo called another Scotland-based agent—“a Greek seaman”—down to London to get the latest. “He says that the 52nd Division is at present in camps
in the areas Saltcoats-Kilmarnock-Preswick and Ayr.” Garbo gave the Greek a code word to send when the ships on the river Clyde departed.

On June 3, a startling development from his “agent” in Harwich: “Sign, not previously seen, of a yellow shield with three blue mountain peaks outlined in white. This newly arrived division from USA.” New assault forces were now arriving from America, which indicated the invasion was close. The information was true, except the Americans weren’t in Harwich, they were farther south. A day later, the illusory Greek seaman reported the “landing in Scotland of a large contingent of troops coming from Ireland . . . Insignia is the red rose on a white ground. He believes it to be the 55th English Division.” When the Greek supposedly returned to Glasgow, the streets were choked with “vehicles and men in full equipment in large numbers.”

As the days counted down, as the camps in southern England —not eastern—filled to the bursting point with GIs, and as the harbors turned gray with navy convoys, all of Garbo’s work was very nearly undone by a series of blunders. London parties, in particular, turned out to be highly dangerous affairs. The combination of alcohol and the desire to impress was fatal to more than one officer. One U.S. Army Air Force general—a West Point classmate of General Eisenhower’s—listened to a group of women complain how bad the dessert was. The general informed the guests that the supply ships were all carrying war materiel and they could expect the pastries to improve dramatically after June 15. He was stripped of his rank
and sent packing back to the States. In May, an American naval officer got plastered and stood in the middle of a party and gave a sozzled lecture on the real D-Day, down to the embarkation areas and the all-important date. “I could cheerfully shoot the offender myself,”
Eisenhower wrote. A young British officer told his parents
when the invasion would happen, and they promptly turned him in to Allied counterintelligence.

A gust of wind on a blustery London day caused another scare. The breeze blew open a window at the War Office and twelve copies of the invasion plan went fluttering out onto the wet pavement below. Staff members raced down to the street and swiftly scooped up eleven of the documents. After a frantic search for the last copy, it was finally found at a sentry station on the other side of Whitehall. A man wearing thick glasses had handed it over, saying the print was so small that it was very hard to read. The War Office tried to track down the man, but he was never found.

Another copy of the D-Day plan was found in a briefcase left on a British train. A quick-thinking conductor found it and locked it away until security officials could pick it up. And when the planners opened
the
Daily Telegraph
on May 2, they nearly fainted: the crossword clue for 17 across was “one of the US.” The correct answer was “Utah,” one of the target beaches. The next day, the clue for 3 down was “Red Indian on the Missouri,” and the answer was “Omaha.” From then on, MI5 kept a careful eye on the
Telegraph.
On May 22, a seemingly innocent crossword clue turned up: “But some big-wig like this has stolen some of it at times.” On May 30 and June 1, two more appeared: “This bush is a center of nursery revolutions” and “Britannia and he hold to the same thing.” The answers all came on June 2: “Overlord,” the code name for the invasion, “Mulberry,” the secret name of the man-made harbors to be used during the assault, and “Neptune,” the code word for the Normandy landings themselves. MI5 had had enough. Two of its officers knocked on the puzzle creator’s door and demanded to know if he was sending messages to the Abwehr. The man answered that the puzzles had been composed months before. It had been a simple—and incredible—coincidence.

On June 4, a bored teletype operator for the Associated Press in London was practicing her technique. As part of her drill, she typed out the sample text:
URGENT AP NYK FLASH EISENHOWER'S HW ANNOUNCED ALLIED LANDINGS IN FRANCE.
When her supervisor handed her a Russian communiqué to be sent to America, the operator accidentally sent out the invasion message along with it. The AP rushed to retract it and got a correction out twenty-three minutes later, but Radio Berlin and Radio Moscow had already flashed the message to their listeners.

Garbo was rushed in to calm the waters. “Surprised by the news in the papers
about the girl who communicated the false alarm of the opening of an offensive,” he radioed Madrid at 2027 hours. “I went this morning to the Ministry hoping to be able to learn there exactly what had taken place. The impression I obtained, though it seems very strange, is that what was published in the papers is the truth . . . There may be a target deception . . . in case of what might happen I shall give priority to the reply which I receive from Agent 3 (3).” He’d turned the mistake into a preview of his coming announcement about Normandy.

The “appalling slip-up”
of the telegram set everyone’s nerves further on edge. “I hope to God
I know what I’m doing,” Eisenhower said as June 6 approached. If Overlord failed, he wanted to be ready. The general wrote his famous message announcing that the mission had misfired, stating plainly that “if any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.” He then put it in his wallet, to have it ready at a moment’s notice.

When the stress of the approaching invasion became too much, Pujol would sneak off for a solitary walk in one of London’s still glorious parks. He recalled, “From the moment I set foot in England
. . . I gained great pleasure from the beauty of the countryside, from the lush greenness of London’s gardens.” But the happiness was mixed with darker emotions. There were dozens of soldiers on the same paths, either alone or with their sweethearts, enjoying one last stroll together before the troops headed for their embarkation points. And Pujol knew he had a secret connection to them that they had no idea existed. He was their deeply worried guardian angel.

Pujol wasn’t inclined to abstract thought; Harris and the others perhaps saw the war’s political and ideological big picture more clearly. But on his walks, Pujol was presented with the thing that mattered most to him in the Garbo project: the lives of these anonymous soldiers. They were the potential victims or benefactors of his work, and they were all around him on the warm nights of early June.

As the hours counted down to June 5, Garbo sent messages that ticked to a staccato drumbeat: “The Division is destined for an attack
on the south Atlantic French coast in cooperation with a large army which will come direct from America to the French coast . . . In addition to the defense troops seen in the town I saw the following troops: Large numbers First Army and SOS [services of supply] . . .” At 2000 hours, the German propaganda broadcaster
known as Axis Sally came on the air and told the Allied troops: “Good evening 82nd Airborne Division. Tomorrow morning the blood from your guts will grease the bogey wheels of our tanks.” That night, General George Patton addressed the men of the real Third Army: “We want this war over with. The quickest way to get it over with is to go get the bastards who started it. The quicker they get whipped, the quicker we can go home . . . And when we get to Berlin, I am personally going to shoot that paper-hanging son-of-a-bitch Hitler.” A “very depressed”
Eisenhower headed to Wiltshire to talk to the men of the 101st Airborne Division. When the last of their planes left the ground, he turned, tears in his eyes, and walked slowly back to his jeep. At the Berghof, his retreat high in the Bavarian Alps, Hitler went to sleep.

Hours before the armada launched, Garbo flashed a message to Madrid: “I have just received a telegram from Agent 3 (3)”—the Greek seaman—“to say that he will be arriving in London tonight at eleven. Something must have happened which cannot be explained in the code which had been agreed between us for announcing the sailing of the Clyde Fleet. Therefore you should be listening tonight at 0300 GMT.” The Abwehr usually signed off at 11:30 p.m., so Garbo wanted to make sure an operator was available when he broadcast his invasion announcement, which Eisenhower had personally approved for 3 a.m., three and a half hours before the first soldiers hit the beaches. Agent No. 4, Garbo’s trusty Gibraltarian waiter, was also on the way from Hampshire with two American deserters, promising big news, Garbo claimed.

That night, Pujol, Tommy Harris and Tar Robertson gathered at Harris’s magnificent home for a “modest but beautifully prepared meal.”
They eyed their watches as they ate. When the time came, the men jumped into a British-made Humber owned by the War Office and drove to 35 Crespigny Road. Charles Haines, the radio operator, was already working the transmitter, the vacuum tubes glowing beneath the radio’s black metal vents. Harris and Pujol finalized the text of the announcement and Pujol himself translated it into Spanish and enciphered it.

At that moment, 6,483 ships were cutting through chop in the English Channel on the way to the silvery beaches of Normandy: ocean liners, battleships, destroyers and thousands of landing craft. Thirteen thousand fighter planes and bombers were being fueled and loaded with bombs destined for German pillboxes and panzers, and 20,000 vehicles were strapped onto transports. But the number that most concerned Garbo were the 120,000 men—first in the wave of 2 million that would join in the invasion—that were peering ahead into the inky darkness or vomiting their guts out in the landing craft as the swells grew in the English Channel. Pujol, as a student of history, would probably summarize his fears in one word: Verdun, the World War I battle that, as he said, “lasted so long and caused so many deaths.” If his message wasn’t believed in Berlin—if he failed to convince Roenne and Hitler that he was the one true oracle of the invasion—then thousands of men would die.

Along with the real destroyers, two different and much smaller armadas were under way that night. Each contained a handful of launches equipped with a device called a Moonshine, which could absorb the electronic signals from German radar stations, magnify them, then bounce them back. The tiny launches would then appear on the enemy’s screens as 10,000-ton destroyers. The craft also carried amplifiers that could blare out the sounds—recorded at the invasion of Salerno the year before—of shouted commands, bosuns’ pipes, bugle calls, the rattling of anchor chains and other nautical noises. These few boats were impersonating two convoys: one approaching Calais, the other Boulogne. Above them were RAF bombers shoving bundles of aluminum foil—which would appear on radar screens as airplanes—into the night sky. These false “echoes” would give the terrified radar operators
the impression that thousands of planes were heading their way. They were the final representatives of the Allies’ huge gamble on a phantom army.