Operation Garbo (15 page)

The last two notional agents to be recruited in 1943 were both seamen, in an attempt to improve
GARBO
's marine
observations
. The first was a Greek deserter, who materialised on 19 December. The rich Venezuelan,
BENEDICT
, described how he had met the Greek, who had turned out to be a communist. Ever resourceful,
GARBO
's deputy had told him that he was a
Soviet spy on the lookout for new, trustworthy members of his ring. The Greek had promptly offered his services and had promised to submit regular reports from Scottish ports. The Germans were delighted by this, so Harris entered him in
GARBO
's growing logbook as 3(3).

The second former seaman came via
DAGOBERT
, the Welsh mercenary from Swansea, who had joined up with the leader of a small group of political dissidents.
GARBO
reported to Madrid:

DAGOBERT
claimed that the brothers in the Aryan World Order occupied themselves by compiling lists of political and racial undesirables (mainly Jews and communists) who were to be assassinated when they seized power. After receiving Madrid's approval, the ex-seaman was code-named
DONNY
and taken onto
DAGOBERT
's strength. Tommy Harris marked him down as 7(2) and arranged for him to take up residence in Dover. After further consultation early in the new year of 1944, the Indian fanatic was code-named
DICK
. MI5 designated him 7(4) and sent him to Brighton.

The Abwehr seemed so pleased with
DAGOBERT
's progress that
GARBO
and Harris decided to take full advantage of the
situation and suggested the recruitment of the rest of the brothers. Because
DAGOBERT
himself was being paid a salary, this expansion would inevitably require further expenditure and, therefore, a greater commitment from Madrid. As well as the financial motive for the proposal, which might have seemed a little overambitious so soon after
COCKADE
, there was also a further, equally important, motive. By the end of 1943 the Twenty Committee was fully aware of the implications of
OVERLORD
and had been given advance warning of a ban which was to be imposed on people visiting certain coastal areas. The whole point of
DAGOBERT
's self-contained spy ring was its access to shipping. But if the entire network remained bottled up in South Wales there would be little chance of presenting a comprehensive deception plan. A good geographical spread was essential to any campaign, so
DAGOBERT
's sources had to be accepted into the network and dispersed to their chosen
observation
points before the ban was officially announced. If their recruitment was handled quickly, each could execute the move without delay and obtain the necessary residential qualification before applying for the much-valued permit to live in a coastal area. Naturally, none of this was spelt out to the Abwehr, and luckily it did not take long before the German consent arrived. As a result, four more brothers were promptly enrolled. One alleged dissident, designated 7(3), was
DICK
's secretary and mistress, who had recently been called up for the Women's Royal Naval Service. She had been ordered to report for war duty at a Wren depot at Mill Hill and, after her preliminary training, was to be posted to a camp near Newbury to sit a language examination.
DAGOBERT
was later to explain that she spoke fluent Hindustani, and this had led to her eventual
transfer
to South-East Asia Command's headquarters in Ceylon. In reality, her role was taken on by Peter Fleming, the deception expert on Lord Louis Mountbatten's staff, who proceeded to fabricate a series of letters which
GARBO
forwarded to Lisbon.
ISOS
decrypts later showed that these letters eventually
ended up with the Japanese military attaché in Berlin, who had them transmitted to Tokyo. This ‘barium meal' gave the code breakers at Bletchley Park valuable clues to the Japanese diplomatic cipher.

The other brothers brought into
DAGOBERT
's ring in December 1943 were three Welsh fascists:
DRAKE
, who was portrayed as one of
DONNY
's relations and instructed to go and live in Southampton; 7(6), who was due to move to Exeter; and
DORICK
, who was notionally placed in Harwich. These
arrangements
were later changed early in 1944 when the Twenty Committee decreed that it was too dangerous to allow
DRAKE
to go to Southampton as there were too many sensitive military and naval installations for him to observe. So
GARBO
remarked on 18 February 1944, in his sixteenth letter to Lisbon (which, incidentally, was deposited at the Espírito Santo bank concealed in a tin of curry powder), that
DRAKE
had gone to Exeter and that 7(6), who had originally intended to go there, had stayed in South Wales instead.

Before describing how MI5 mobilised all these characters into the most successful deception campaign ever, it would be well to retrace our steps briefly and catch up with
BENEDICT
's brother,
MOONBEAM
, who had been obliged to beat a hasty retreat to Canada in the summer of 1943 and had started
GARBO
's North American network.

The ‘Canadian connection' really dated back to 10 December 1942, when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) had arrested their first important, genuine German spy of the war. The agent, who carried clumsily forged papers identifying himself as ‘Mr Braunter', a radio salesman from Toronto, had been spotted in the small town of New Carlisle passing out-
of-date
Canadian currency. Virtually everyone in Quebec's Gaspé Peninsula had been warned about possible landings by Nazi spies, and this particular stranger could hardly have been more conspicuous, arriving in a tourist area out of season. The RCMP
had been alerted swiftly and a local constable had challenged him on a train bound for Montreal. He had quickly admitted his true identity – that of a German naval officer named Janowsky attached to the Abwehr – and had claimed to have been landed the previous evening by a submarine in Chaleur Bay; he was then allowed to show the RCMP the spot on the beach where he had buried his captain's uniform. After a brief interrogation he volunteered to be a double-agent and work his transmitter back to Hamburg under the RCMP's control.

Although, at that time, intelligence work was relatively unknown to the RCMP, which boasted just one full-time
intelligence
officer whose main function was liaison with London, they did have the use of an experienced former British Secret Intelligence Service agent named Gottfried Treviranus, who was then living in Montreal. Treviranus had been a veteran spy who had been obliged to flee Germany before the war when the Gestapo had discovered some of his covert
activities
. SIS had given him a new identity and had smuggled him to Mount Royal, Montreal, where he had lived quietly under the RCMP's protection. Treviranus had served in U-boats during the First World War and gradually built up a rapport with the spy, so much so that he persuaded the RCMP officer in charge of the case, Cliff Harvison, to contact MI5. Was the Security Service interested in running a double agent? After some discussion by the Twenty Committee, it was agreed that Cyril Mills, accompanied by a B1(a) secretary, Pixie Verrall, should travel to Ottawa to investigate further, and while he was there he would represent
GARBO
's
MOONBEAM
, who was becoming a liability in England.

Mills was met in Canada by the RCMP commissioner, Stuart Wood, and invited to run the spy. Once Mills was satisfied that the agent had truly turned (which was established when he disclosed his wireless security check: his secret signal that he had been caught and was operating under the enemy's control), he was dubbed
WATCHDOG
and was placed under guard in a
three-roomed basement apartment under Treviranus's home. The RCMP built a fifty-foot aerial in the back garden and, with the aid of a powerful Canadian army transmitter (which proved more reliable than the ineffective radio provided by the Abwehr), successfully opened communications with Hamburg.

Meanwhile,
MOONBEAM
reported his own safe arrival and, with the collaboration of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, recruited a cousin who was resident just over the American border in Buffalo.
MOONBEAM
's messages, which were relayed to the Abwehr via
GARBO
, caused some amusement in London and Berlin because of the agent's mercenary nature. Every tiny item of expenditure was carefully recorded and claimed for. On one occasion, the Germans queried a small sum spent from petty cash for paying a labourer to clear snow from the path to his home,
MOONBEAM
responded by demanding to know how he could be expected to collect information if he couldn't get out of the house! The Abwehr promptly radioed their approval.

WATCHDOG
himself came to an end late in the summer of 1943, when he ran out of funds, and he was transferred to MI5's custody in England. Nevertheless, Mills continued with
MOONBEAM
and his cousin in upstate New York, and offered a safe refuge to those of
GARBO
's network who suddenly had to flee Britain.
CHAMILLUS
, for example, the wretched Gibraltarian, eventually deserted from his post in the NAAFI in October 1944 and made his way to Canada, where he was employed as
MOONBEAM
's wireless operator. This final act proved to be extremely useful because
CHAMILLUS
was entrusted with a new, high-grade cipher, a copy of which was delivered by MI5 straight to GHQ at Bletchley.

By February 1944
GARBO
and Tommy Harris had completed the final sector of
DAGOBERT
's ring and had laid the foundations for a truly integrated deception operation. Twenty-four subagents and sources were spread evenly throughout the country and the entire machine had been cranked up ready for action. Early
in the month
GARBO
himself went on a tour of the south and south-west of the country and handed Charles Haines a brief message, which was transmitted from Crespigny Road at 8.10 in the evening of 17 February:

This typically bland appraisal was to mark the beginning of
GARBO
's active involvement in
OVERLORD
's cover plan,
code-named
FORTITUDE
. The only unforeseen hitch, which meant little at the time of its receipt, was a curious signal, dated 15 December 1943, warning
GARBO
to leave London as soon as possible. It was only six months later, after the first buzz bombs had fallen on the capital, that the significance of the message was fully realised. But by that time
FORTITUDE
was in full swing.

W
hile Operation
OVERLORD
was being planned, the Allied chiefs of staff became increasingly aware of two crucial
problems
: that establishing a beachhead in the midst of the enemy’s defence was one thing; maintaining it in the face of a swift counter-attack would be quite another. Three separate needs were therefore identified. Firstly, a requirement to persuade the enemy to position his forces as far away as possible from the intended target area. This was done in the large scale by formulating a scheme to keep Axis troops committed in
nonessential
regions, such as the Balkans and the Mediterranean. In Europe itself the requirement was translated into providing plausible evidence that the coming invasion, which was
recognised
as virtually impossible to disguise, would be headed by a two-pronged attack on Norway and the Pas-de-Calais area. Secondly, the enemy had to be misled about the exact timing of the assault; and thirdly, the Germans had to be convinced that any landings along the French coast, apart from those in the Pas-de-Calais, were diversionary in nature. In other words, even after troops had begun to move ashore in Normandy, the Germans must be made to believe that this initial operation was but a feint designed to draw their forces away from the real target area, which was further north. To bring off this last trick was the tall order presented to the deception planners at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). Their eventual solution, known as
FORTITUDE
, was described by the historian Charles Cruikshank in his history of
Deception in World War II
(Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 170) as ‘the
largest, most elaborate, most carefully planned, most vital and most successful of all the Allied deceptive operations’.

Assembling the largest invasion fleet in history could not be achieved overnight, and the concentrations of landing craft and other essential equipment would be difficult to hide from German reconnaissance aircraft, quite apart from the 5,000 ships estimated to be involved, so the decision was taken to execute a variety of reasonable security measures to prevent unauthorised leakages. As
GARBO
had anticipated (and circumvented), a ban on visitors was placed on a zone ten miles deep along the coast from Cornwall to Lincolnshire and, in an unprecedented proposal, the Foreign Office discussed the imposition of a total ban on all uncensored communications to and from neutral diplomats in London, from a date yet to be decided in mid-April 1944.

The SHAEF planners, huddled over their maps in Norfolk House, St James’s Square, knew they had two useful advantages they could exploit. The Allied chiefs of staff had decided not to try and capture a Channel port intact, which was the most straightforward answer to the logistical problem of supplying such a huge body of men and armour. Instead, they had opted for prefabricated harbours, consisting of huge concrete
caissons
, which were to be floated into position off the beaches. Once the caissons had been constructed, they were to be left submerged in the Solent and elsewhere until the moment came for them to be towed across the Channel. Provided the Germans remained ignorant of the true purpose of the floating harbours, code-named
MULBERRY
, there was a good chance that the Abwehr would recommend a concentration of defences around the Channel ports between Ostend and Brest. The second advantage lay in the Twenty Committee’s confidence that every enemy agent in Britain was working under MI5’s control. Although other double agents were to be employed in
FORTITUDE
, much of the burden would fall on
GARBO
and his network because the
ISOS
intercepts had demonstrated that he enjoyed the highest standing in Berlin.

The Twenty Committee, therefore, resolved to convey the elements deemed essential to
OVERLORD
’s success: that the invasion could not be launched until at least July 1944; that it would be preceded by an attack on Norway; and that the eventual thrust into France would centre on the Pas-de-Calais, after some initial feints elsewhere. It was learned after the war that this strategy fitted neatly into current German
thinking
, which took a characteristically rational approach to their dilemma. Field Marshal von Rundstedt, for example, took four major factors into consideration when he decided that the Allies would opt for the shortest route across the Channel: the Allies would need at least one major port; they would require constant protection from the air, so the nearer the beachhead the better; Calais offered the most direct path to Germany; and the capture of the V-weapon launch sites would become an important political consideration once the bombardment of London had begun. In fact, the projected V-1 offensive did not occur until after D-Day, so SHAEF was never in a
position
to waste time debating the last factor. SHAEF never knew that
FORTITUDE
was actually confirming the conclusions that German high command had already reached, albeit tentatively.

The cover deception plan itself was divided into
FORTITUDE
NORTH
, which concentrated on the notional build-up of troops in Scotland for the attack on Norway, and
FORTITUDE
SOUTH
, which promoted the ‘shortest route’ assault. Just as the fictitious British Fourth Army was to play a vital part in
FORTITUDE NORTH
, it was Roger Hesketh’s creation of an entirely bogus First United States Army Group (FUSAG) which was to be the key to
FORTITUDE
SOUTH
. But in February 1944, just when SHAEF and the Twenty Committee had settled the final details of the operation, Tommy Harris suddenly stepped in with a bombshell:
GARBO
and his network should be withdrawn immediately.

The last-minute crisis was precipitated by another double agent code-named
ARTIST
. In fact,
ARTIST
was a young Abwehr officer stationed in Lisbon named Johann Jebsen who, since the
summer of 1943, had been actively collaborating with a network of Yugoslav double agents. Jebsen, who was supposed to be virulently anti-Nazi, cut a colourful figure in wartime Portugal, driving between Lisbon and his villa in Estoril in a Rolls-Royce. He claimed to be an Anglophile, and his first link with the British came via two Yugoslav brothers, Dusko and Ivo Popov, who were code-named
TRICYCLE
and
DREADNOUGHT
respectively by MI5. Jebsen’s excuse for his contact with the Popovs was that he was negotiating an underground escape route through Europe for evading Yugoslav airmen. At the end of January Dusko Popov returned to London, after a two-month stay in Portugal where he had held several meetings with Jebsen, and gave the Twenty Committee a lengthy summary of his
conversations
. Popov had known Jebsen for some years and trusted him implicitly, but Tommy Harris was aghast by one particular section of Popov’s report, in which Jebsen attempted to prove his bona fides to the Allies by naming some of the Abwehr’s chief agents run from Lisbon. Heading the list was the name of Juan Pujol, code-named
ARABEL
.

Harris accepted that Popov’s judgement of Jebsen was probably the correct one and that he could be trusted, but he pointed out that the implication of not taking action against any of the spies on Jebsen’s list was the equivalent of
providing
him with confirmation that they were all being run by the Allies. If Jebsen came to this conclusion, which was
inescapable
, he would inevitably realise that most of the intelligence they were supplying was nothing more than a clever fabrication. This information might indeed be safe with Jebsen, but
supposing
his circumstances changed: would his loyalties also change again? Another cause for concern was Jebsen’s admission that his contacts with the Allies had the approval of the Abwehr controller in Lisbon, who had told him to develop some cover as a discontented German out of favour with the regime. On the present showing, argued Harris,
OVERLORD
’s fate was held in the hands of a single man who happened to be an enemy
intelligence officer. If Jebsen knew
GARBO
was controlled by MI5, he would guess that
FORTITUDE
was a fake and so
jeopardise
OVERLORD
. It was not the kind of news any self-respecting security official cared to tell an Allied supreme commander.

The Twenty Committee deliberated over the
ARTIST
crisis and considered all the alternatives. The easiest option, which was to pull Jebsen out of Portugal, thus isolating him from the Abwehr, was ruled out because if the Germans learned that he had defected, they would automatically assume that all the agents that Jebsen had had access to would be compromised. Another possibility was asking the Secret Intelligence Station in Lisbon to assassinate Jebsen, but it was pointed out that such a move would be bound to attract a major German investigation into all the circumstances surrounding the incident, and that too might uncover Jebsen’s illicit contacts with the British. Eventually, the Twenty Committee reached the only possible decision: they would do nothing, but ask SIS to keep an eye on him.

Understandably, Tommy Harris was greatly agitated about this decision, and it later seemed that his worst fears were about to be realised. But before describing the dramatic events of May 1944, we should return to the first stages of
FORTITUDE
, which were proceeding with
GARBO
’s help in spite of Harris’s objections.

The initial part was the pretence that the Allies were not yet in a position to launch a major offensive across the Channel and had, therefore, postponed their original invasion plans until much later in the year.

In the middle of February 1944
GARBO
pretended to have undertaken a tour of the south coast of England. On 19 February, from Portland in Dorset,
GARBO
posted his fifteenth letter and mentioned having spotted some American soldiers in the neighbourhood of the town. He also described their
shoulder
flashes: ‘the number “1” in red on a khaki ground’. This was a calculated reference to a genuine unit, the 1st US Infantry Division, which had in fact been brought back to England from
the Italian front some months earlier, but SHAEF was anxious to conceal the return of these battle-seasoned troops until the last possible moment before the real invasion.
GARBO
’s
intervention
was designed to win him credit for passing on some legitimate news. It had been argued that so many Africa Star campaign medals were being worn on uniforms in England, with its distinctive red and yellow ribbon, that it would be impossible to keep the division’s arrival secret for much longer. Other agents supported
GARBO
’s observation by stating that these hardened troops were engaged in training other troops, thereby promoting the idea that Allied preparations for the invasion were not particularly advanced.

GARBO
explained that ‘balanced forces are being held in readiness in England to occupy any part of north-west Europe against the contingency of a German withdrawal or collapse’. In his first message concerning SHAEF’s strategy, which
effectively
marked the opening of Operation
FORTITUDE, GARBO
remarked that ‘it does not require a very wise man to deduce that should the way be left free they would not hesitate to take advantage of it’. As additional evidence of the Allies’ plan, he described how he had seen a pile of newly printed leaflets in the office of his contact in the Ministry of Information and had purloined a copy. Entitled
Avis à la Population
, it was despatched to Lisbon. The forgery, the only one of its kind ever printed, was marked for distribution to French civilians following a German withdrawal and urged them to cooperate with their new
occupiers
. As a foundation for
FORTITUDE NORTH, GARBO
reported that he had ordered his Glasgow-based deputy,
BENEDICT
, to
monitor
the growing number of naval exercises in the Clyde, and the Greek deserter had been instructed to find lodgings at Methil, on the east coast of Scotland. This he did on 1 April 1944, booking a room for the next six weeks. As confirmation that the British Fourth Army was still operational (and, indeed, the key to the northern campaign),
BENEDICT
reported to
GARBO
on 28 March 1944 that he had just returned from a trip to Dundee,
where he had spotted the 52nd Lowland Division and a unit bearing shoulder flashes of a shell on a dark background. When relaying this message in a four-minute wireless transmission at 1920 hours that evening,
GARBO
commented: ‘This insignia is completely unknown to me.’ This was not entirely surprising, considering that Roger Hesketh had only just invented it!

Meanwhile,
GARBO
himself had been on a tour to check on some of
DAGOBERT
’s informants. During a transmission at six in the evening of 7 March, he reported:

In the same message he also authenticated messages received from
DAGOBERT
’s other agents, including
DICK
the Indian fanatic: ‘With regard to the military report, it is completely accurate so that we can catalogue this collaborator as being good.’

On 13 April he sent a radio message giving a good opinion of
DORICK
, one of the Welsh Fascists, who had reported seeing ‘a lot of troops and vehicles of the ninth Division’ passing through Norwich: ‘I consider this first report of this
collaborator
fairly good as he tries to get details, from which one is able to appreciate the interest he takes in explaining what he has seen.’