Operation Garbo (14 page)

The mechanics of channelling bogus information to the Axis has already been described, as has the elaborate system developed to coordinate the activities of the various parties involved in the manipulation of the double agents. It now remains to sketch how, at the planning level, the overall cover operations were formulated. As it progressed, it became clear that deception had become a weapon of strategic importance, but the essence of an effective deception policy was good coordination, with all the services playing their parts. Acting in concert, it was perfectly possible to mount a truly
ambitious
scheme and convey it to the enemy. Experience indicated that such operations could not be mounted piecemeal if they were to have any hope of success. More specialised,
influential
bodies were required to supervise deception policy, so in June a new, highly secret unit, the London Controlling Section (LCS), was created under the auspices of the chief of staff to the supreme allied commander (COS SAC) and, in the autumn, General Eisenhower established SHAEF Ops B, of which more will be heard later, to concentrate on preparing for D-Day.

After the Allied chiefs of staff had agreed on their
objectives
for the future, their staffs proposed a number of
alternative
cover plans. Some of these were of sufficient merit to be of possible use when the real invasion took place; these were shelved in case they might be needed and become a reality. Others were considered suitable for the feints of
COCKADE
and
FORFAR
. Once the chiefs of staff had made their minds up and decided the priorities, the issue of cover plans was passed to the London Controlling Section for implementation. Basically, LCS had three weapons at its disposal: physical deception (with camouflage and dummy equipment); signals (to imitate the presence of a large body of troops); and the conduit discreetly referred to as ‘special means.' In fact, this last category (which, incidentally, proved the most potent) consisted of controlled leakages of information, either to ‘neutral' diplomats in London
(who would promptly report the latest rumours in the capital) or via MI5's stable of double agents. And among MI5's double agents
GARBO
had quickly established a formidable reputation. It was therefore to him and his network that the LCS turned in February 1943. The head of LCS was Colonel John Bevan, and it was one of his senior assistants, Colonel Harold Peteval, who presented the
COCKADE
project to the Twenty Committee at one of their regular Wednesday afternoon meetings. A plan had been drawn up involving a number of imaginary troop formations. Would
GARBO
's network report a few plausible sightings to persuade the Germans that the south coast of England was teeming with men from a non-existent Sixth Army, formerly based in Luton, which was about to cross the Channel? Although he may have regretted his decision later, Tommy Harris committed
GARBO
's network to relaying the deception to the Abwehr.

By later standards,
COCKADE
was far from sophisticated, and got off to a bad start. Of the fourteen
FORFAR
raids planned, only eight were mounted, and only one actually made contact with the enemy. The combined operations team was spotted by a German trawler on his way ashore so the entire plan was abandoned. Of the forty-two aerial operations planned in support of
STARKEY
, only fifteen were completed in full, mainly thanks to the vile weather, which also delayed the actual mock invasion twenty-four hours. This was eventually carried out on 9 September 1943, and although no less than twenty-one ships congregated ten miles off Boulogne, the Germans appeared not to notice. Even at the sight of such a tempting target the German coastal batteries remained quiet. When no enemy aircraft ventured over the fleet to investigate it turned around and steamed back to port.

STARKEY
's failure was mirrored by the enemy's lack of
interest
in either
TINDALL
or
WADHAM
. Some half-hearted efforts had been made in Scotland to simulate the preparations of an airborne raid on Stavanger but the RAF could only spare a few
dummy gliders. Such measures that were taken – for example, the creation of a notional Fourth Army at Edinburgh – failed to provoke the expected German reconnaissance flights. The only consolation from these two failures was the knowledge that the Germans had been told that
WADHAM
, the American assault in Brittany, was only scheduled to go ahead if
STARKEY
had succeeded in achieving a beachhead. Since
STARKEY
's puny invasion force had not even been fired on it was agreed that
WADHAM
, which had been intended for the Bay of Biscay, could be abandoned without further ado. Instead, a couple of Canadian wireless vans cruised along the south coast,
simulating
the signals traffic of convoys of landing craft returning to their dispersal areas, which the Germans monitored through their high-frequency direction-finding apparatus.

The
COCKADE
fiasco taught the deception planners many lessons, not the least of which was the importance of involving the three services at an early stage in a campaign.
STARKEY
had collapsed because the navy had refused to use any major ships as decoys, and the RAF had condemned
TINDALL
as ‘play-acting'. Nevertheless, the whole deception plan had had some useful repercussions. A short newsreel had been made of American personnel practising amphibious landings ‘somewhere in England' and had been released to certain neutral distributors. The film depicted an exercise with what were claimed to be combat-trained units, and apparently demonstrated that the Allies were really far further advanced in their preparations than they actually were. The film was only completed in August 1943 but, according to a calendar carelessly left in sight on an office wall, the exercise had taken place months before, in the early spring of 1943. Trees in the film were carefully pruned to give the impression that they had not yet come into leaf. These somewhat amateur ploys were to be the basis of the ambitious fabrications that were to follow.

COCKADE
's failure created one major problem for
GARBO
. His network had been responsible for transmitting most of
STARKEY
, and the caves at Chislehurst had been transformed (according to the NAAFI waiter and his friendly guard) into a huge depot for small arms and a communications centre. If the Germans believed for one moment that Chislehurst was to control the invasion they gave no sign of it. The chief victims were Agents
ONE
and
SIX
:
ONE
was required to resign in November and was heard no more of; Agent
SIX
, an NCO in the Field Security Police, was reported transferred and then killed in North Africa. By making these two subagents take the blame for
STARKEY
,
GARBO
himself survived intact, ready to take a more important role. While the Twenty Committee and the LCS had been wrestling with the problems of
COCKADE
, the chiefs of staff had been adding the finishing touches to a new plan, code-named
OVERLORD
.

The
COCKADE
post-mortem identified any number of
short-comings
which had served to undermine the operation's
credibility
. Analysis of the
ULTRA
decrypts showed that the Germans had never been taken in, and had even reduced their strengths in Brittany, the target area for
WADHAM
. One armoured panzer division and two infantry divisions had actually been withdrawn in the period leading up to the alleged ‘invasion'. Perhaps, more seriously, the expectations of many underground Resistance fighters in occupied France had been heightened, and it was feared that some lives might have been jeopdised. Another concern was the reputation of the BBC, which had speculated about the
STARKEY
invasion in several broadcasts.

The conclusion reached by Tommy Harris was simply this: there was no point in exaggerating the Allies' strength unless there was some genuine military build-up. He was convinced that
GARBO
still had an important role to play, provided the deception planners could persuade the service chiefs to take deception seriously and recognise its advantages. Fortunately, the creation of SHAEF Ops B heralded new opportunity and apparently offered a guarantee of cooperation from the
departments
that had so effectively undermined
COCKADE
. SHAEF
(the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) was also to benefit from the transfer of a number of experienced deception specialists from the Middle East, who had achieved some notable successes in the desert campaign. They were optimistic about their chances of building a workable system to exploit
GARBO
's network which, in spite of the loss of Agents
ONE, TWO
and
SIX
, had acquired several new sources.

Agent
TWO
had been the Bootle man who had been
eliminated
to safeguard the embarkation of the Allied force destined for
TORCH
, the invasion of North Africa. On 10 March 1943
GARBO
reported that his widow, Mrs Gerbers, had volunteered to take his place.

Another, more important source was the woman designated J(5), whose existence was first revealed on 4 September 1943.
GARBO
reported that she

In an internal Security Service memo dated February 1944, J(5) was described by Tommy Harris as

It is possible that
GARBO
and Harris may have had Sarah Bishop in mind when they invented J(5), since she had indeed once worked as a secretary in the office of the War Cabinet. But
there the resemblance ends, for Sarah Bishop was neither dowdy nor in her thirties. Apparently playing the ‘sex card' was sufficiently controversial to provoke a discussion on the merits of such Mata Hari tactics. The American representative on the Twenty Committee, Norman Holmes Pearson, actually warned Harris that he was straying into dangerous territory and might even force the Abwehr to make unwarranted demands on her, which would lead to her demise, like Agent
TWO
. Pearson was a delegate from the American Office of Strategic Services; a professor of literature at Yale, he had been granted the unique privilege of sharing Masterman's office in St James's Street and was, therefore, privy to all the Twenty Committee's secrets.

Another important unconscious source, who was reported on in a message from the Welsh seaman
DAGOBERT
, dated 16 September 1943, just a week after the
STARKEY
fiasco, was 7(1), a soldier in the notional British 9th Armoured Division. This particular unit had been disbanded, but for deception purposes it was kept ‘alive' with the aid of an ingenious device which enabled a single wireless set to simulate the transmissions of six. As we shall see, this project gradually turned the imaginary 9th Armoured Division into the entire Fourth Army,
notionally
stationed at Currie, near Edinburgh, which created enough wireless traffic for it and two army corps, the 7th British Corps at Dundee and the 2nd British Corps at Stirling, all apparently under the control of Scottish Command. The 2nd British Corps had actually once existed and had participated in the evacuation from Dunkirk. The Germans had taken so many prisoners from these corps that it was bound to be well known to them. The SHAEF planners had simply resurrected it on the assumption that the enemy were unlikely to have discovered that it had actually been disbanded in 1940. In reality, there were only a handful of signallers moving round the Scottish Highlands in radio vans to give life to the ‘ghost' units.

According to
BENEDICT
,
GARBO
's deputy, he had made a useful contact while travelling on the same train as a young
army lieutenant. This officer, who was serving in the 49th British Infantry Division in Scotland, apparently had no idea that
BENEDICT
was an enemy agent and was somewhat
indiscreet
about the assault training he had undergone. The purpose behind this exercise was the development of specialist unit which might be expected to take part in any major amphibious landing. If the lieutenant and his division was still reported in Scotland after D-Day, the Germans might reasonably deduce that a further attack was scheduled. MI5 designated the officer as 3(2).

Early the following month, the network was expanded further by
CHAMILLUS
, the NAAFI waiter. On 4 November 1943, he reported having met a garrulous American sergeant,
GARBO
described the sergeant as

As well as being ‘sociable, jocular and fairly talkative', the sergeant worked as a clerk in some unspecified United States army headquarters in London and, therefore, had access to important military documents that someone of this rank would not normally see. Both
GARBO
and
CHAMILLUS
were sure that this imprudent serviceman would prove a useful, if unconscious, source of valuable intelligence. Harris designated him 4(3) and assigned to him the role of building up the American
contribution
to SHAEF's deception campaign.