The Spy with 29 Names (25 page)

News of the documents, and the intelligence they contained, moved higher up the chain of command and arrived at La Roche-Guyon early on the morning of 8 June. Rommel was delighted. Finally he had what he needed to get Hitler to release the Panzer divisions that he had been holding back the day before. This was it – Normandy was the real Second Front. There was just time to hit the Allies hard with everything the Wehrmacht had available.

Von Rundstedt agreed, and quickly got on the phone to High Command in Berchtesgaden.

There were doubters: General Blumentritt, von Rundstedt’s chief of staff, wondered if the documents might not be a plant. What if the Allies had deliberately left the papers on the officers for the Germans to find, in order to confuse them? It would not have been the first time they had carried out such a stunt . . .

Rommel was adamant, though. The Normandy landings were strategic, no mere diversion. There was not a moment to lose.

High Command took von Rundstedt’s request to Hitler, who by now had seen copies of the documents found on the US officers. He did not reply immediately, but when the call came back the news was good: the Führer agreed.

The Panzer divisions were now in Rommel and von Rundstedt’s hands. They wasted no time.

As Allied soldiers on the ground were painfully discovering, the 21st Panzer, Panzer Lehr and 12th SS Panzer Hitler Youth divisions were already in Normandy, doing all they could to halt their advance. To their number were now to be added 2nd Panzer, 116 Panzer, and the 2nd SS Panzer Division, driving up from their base in Toulouse.

Not only that, Hitler had ordered that his best fighting unit, the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler (LAH), which was now stationed in Belgium, should attack as well.

It was known as ‘Case Three’ – the Allies’ nightmare scenario in which all the Germans’ available armoured reserves were sent into Normandy to crush the invasion. This was now happening. Almost as soon as it had begun, Operation Overlord was in danger of being snuffed out.

In Hasselt, northern Flanders, the waiting was over. After months of refitting, training his new recruits and rebuilding his Panzer regiment into a fearsome fighting unit, Jochen Peiper was ready to go. The nights spent reading quietly in quasi-monastic abstinence while his fellow officers went out drinking and cavorting with the local girls had ended.

The LAH was put on alert, and during the night of 8–9 June the SS men prepared for the order to move out at first light, readying their combat and supply vehicles for the journey across northern France to the battle zone.

The division itself now numbered around 20,000 men, of whom 12,000 were considered to be ‘bayonet’, or combat, forces. Peiper’s regiment had already been equipped with over sixty tanks – including the deadly Panthers – and more were on the way. Under the command
of Teddy Wisch, the LAH was a crack force, battle-hardened from its brutal experiences on the Eastern Front.

As dawn broke on 9 June, the first tanks and armoured cars fired up, and the LAH started moving out.

Jochen Peiper was on his way to Normandy.

‘We must be practical. The important bee to deceive is the Queen Bee. Can you see which is the Queen Bee from down there?’

A.A. Milne,
Winnie-the-Pooh

IT WAS HARRIS’S
idea to wait until the Germans had actually started sending their armoured reserves into Normandy before making a move. That way, he argued, if they could be made to turn around, German High Command was less likely to change its mind again in a hurry, and as a result they would keep the dangerous SS Panzer divisions away from the Allied troops for longer.

It was a good theory. But would it work?

Some of the deception planners in MI5, SHAEF and the London Controlling Section had their doubts. What if the Germans did not fall for the idea of a second landing in the Pas-de-Calais? What if, once the tanks and heavy weaponry had set off on their journey towards Normandy, they could not be stopped? Surely it would be better to prevent them from moving out in the first place?

It was a huge risk, and everything hung in the balance. Sufficient evidence to give Harris’s plan the green light eventually came from an unusual source, however.

On 27 May, the Japanese Ambassador to Berlin, Baron Hiroshi
Ō
shima, had met Hitler at Berchtesgaden. A fluent German speaker,
Ō
shima was a lieutenant-general in the Japanese Imperial Army and had become a confidant of the Führer over the course of his postings to the Third Reich.
Ō
shima was an avid supporter of Nazism, and he diligently reported back to Tokyo every conversation and observation as he toured Germany and the occupied countries.
Thanks to his keen military eye, these even included troop positions and movements. What
Ō
shima did not know – and up to his death in 1975 he remained ignorant of this – was that his communications with the Japanese government were being tapped and deciphered by the Americans in a project known as ‘Magic’. So good was the intelligence that he unwittingly passed over to the enemy that US General George C. Marshall declared after the war that
Ō
shima had been ‘our main basis of information regarding Hitler’s intentions in Europe’.

The US decrypts were being shared with the British, and it was thanks to the reported conversation that
Ō
shima had with Hitler just over a week before the Allied invasion of France that the deceivers in London were able to see with their own eyes that Harris’s idea had a chance of success.

The seeds of Fortitude, it appeared, had fallen on fertile ground.

Speaking of the Second Front,
[
Ō
shima told Tokyo in his 27 May report]
Hitler said that he, himself, thought that sooner or later operations for the invasion of Europe would be undertaken. He thought that about eighty divisions had already been assembled in England . . .

There were in fact only forty-seven.

Ō
shima continued:

I then asked him in what form he thought the Second Front would materialise, and he told me that at the moment what he himself thought was most probable was that after having carried out diversionary operations in Norway, Denmark and the southern part of the west coast of France and the French Mediterranean coast, they would establish a bridgehead in Normandy or Brittany, and after seeing how things went would then embark upon the establishment of the real Second Front in the channel.

Hitler was thinking what the Allies wanted him to think. He had successfully fallen into the trap of assuming that Normandy (or Brittany) would itself be a diversion before a bigger assault at the narrowest stretch of the Channel – from Dover to Calais.

It was enough for Harris to be given the permission he needed: he could go ahead with his plan. The SS tanks could set off for Normandy first before Garbo attempted to have them sent back.

On 8 June, two days after the landings had begun, the news the
Allies dreaded came through. German armoured reserves, including the 1st SS Panzer Division LAH, had been ordered to Normandy. ‘Case Three’ was a reality. RAF Typhoons, bombing the German columns as they travelled along French roads by day, could slow them down to some extent, but the Panthers and Tigers could move relatively easily by night. It was a question of hours, days at most, before these hardened Nazi troops would be attacking Allied soldiers on the ground.

It was at this very moment, as Jochen Peiper and his men began to move out from their positions in Belgium, that Garbo sent Kühlenthal ‘the most important report of his career’.

The message went out, as usual, from the radio set in Hendon. But just to be certain that the Germans would be listening, Garbo sent them a taster earlier in the evening.

I have had an extremely agitated day today. But I have the satisfaction of being able to give you the most important reports of my work. As I have not got all the messages ready I hope you will be listening tonight.

The last line was a clear reference to the German no-show of three nights before. This time there could be no excuses: for the Allies, this was a message that Kühlenthal absolutely must read.

Garbo came back on air with his news a few hours later, at seven minutes past midnight. It was now 9 June.

Everything – the outcome of the Second Front, the outcome of the war itself – depended on how the Germans reacted to what he had to say. The months of preparation, the lessons learned from the mistakes of Operation Cockade, and the painstaking and detailed work that had gone into creating Garbo – from the fear and anxiety of Pujol sweating over his false reports from Lisbon, to the great network of fictional sub-agents and collaborators dreamed up with Harris from a cramped office off Piccadilly – now focused on this one moment, this one message. And to be absolutely clear, so that there could be no doubt in the Germans’ minds about what he was trying to tell them, he broke almost every rule in the spy’s guidebook.

He began slowly, almost low-key. But then Garbo was not only a master double agent, he was a master storyteller. Move in gently, and save the best for last.

There was, he told Kühlenthal, an argument brewing between
neutral embassies in London and the British government over lifting the ban on diplomatic communications that had been imposed in the run-up to D-Day. The information came from Garbo’s mistress, J(5), with whom he had spent the previous night. Why continue to prevent diplomats from reporting back to their respective governments now that the landings had actually taken place? went the argument. There was no need for any more security, any fear that the date and place for the invasion might inadvertently leak out now that operations had begun. But the word from the top came that the ban had to remain. The only logical conclusion was that there were more landings to come . . .

Stepping things up a little, Garbo then reported the lunch he had had that day with a friend of Fred the Gibraltarian. Agent 4(3) was a pro-Franco member of the US Service of Supply based in London who had been recruited to the Garbo network in late 1943. Now, just a couple of days after D-Day, he passed on ‘an interesting bit of information’.

He told me that FUSAG had not entered into the present operation.

General Patton’s First US Army Group (FUSAG) was the large fictional unit which Garbo had helped conjure up in the enemy’s mind. The fact that this powerful force was still in south-east England now that the invasion had begun was suspicious.

Charlie Haines had been transmitting for half an hour by this point, but the real meat of Garbo’s message was still to come.

Racheting up the tension, Garbo then moved to the detailed information that his sub-agents had brought in from various points on the south-east coast. It was here that the Brothers in the Aryan World Order came into their own: Sub-agent 7(2), David, the founder of the movement, now based in Dover, known to the Germans as ‘Donny’; Sub-agent 7(4), Rags, the Indian poet and lover of group secretary Theresa Jardine, based in Brighton, known to the Germans as ‘Dick’; and Sub-agent 7(7), group treasurer based in the Harwich and Ipswich area. Garbo never named him, but Kühlenthal referred to him as ‘Dorrick’.

These fanatical Nazis had passed on to Pedro, Garbo’s deputy, news about the various Allied divisions that were
still
stationed in their respective areas.

Garbo began forwarding long lists from each of the sub-agents detailing these units.

7(2) reports that the following divisions are to be found in his area without any indications that they are to embark for the moment: the 59th Division, the 43rd Division . . .

7(4) reports that the following divisions are to be found in his area without indication of embarking at present: South Eastern Command, 1st Canadian Army . . .

7(7) reports that the activity in his area has greatly increased, giving the following divisions stationed without indication of embarking for the moment: 28th US Division, 6th US Armored Division . . . He furthermore said that he had learned through a well-informed channel that there are more than a hundred tank transport barges capable of transporting about five hundred tanks.

Garbo had now been transmitting for over an hour and a half. If he had been a real German spy he almost certainly would have been caught by this point, as by staying on air for so long he would easily have been picked up by the Radio Security Service as they homed in on unauthorised signals and their source. As it was, Kühlenthal did not suspect anything: the information that his Arabal network was providing him was first class.

Garbo was about to break another rule, however, as he moved into the final and most important section of his message. Spies were meant to pass on hard information, not speculate or give their opinions. But Garbo was no ordinary spy; he was, in the Germans’ eyes, a spymaster, the head of a valuable and widespread ring of agents running around enemy territory. He was on the ground and could give them a much-needed eyewitness view of how things looked from the other side. As such he was a man whose opinions, they had learned over time, had to be listened to and respected.

And besides, experience had shown that trying to get the Germans to work things out for themselves was rarely successful. This time everything would be spelled out for them, in black and white.

It was 0144 hours. Time to move in for the kill.

Charlie Haines tapped out the most important part of his message.

From the reports mentioned it is perfectly clear that the present attack is a large scale operation but diversionary in character for the purposes of
establishing a strong bridgehead in order to draw the maximum of our reserves to the area of operation to retain them there so as to be able to strike the blow somewhere else with ensured success.

Garbo knew that he was crossing a line here, so his next sentence was carefully chosen.