Agent Garbo (33 page)

At 7:29 P.M., an incoming message began tapping out in Charles Haines’s black headphones. It was routine traffic from Madrid. On the eve of the invasion, it was clear the Abwehr’s low-level men had no idea what was happening. It was just another night in the long war.

At 1 a.m., Haines adjusted his headset and listened to the scratchy sound of the ether, ringing with electricity and static, flood into the earpieces. He tapped out Garbo’s call sign. The men around him tensed. Would the Germans take the bait? Would they hold their forces away from the beaches and towns where thousands of Allied soldiers would soon be exposed?

The men listened anxiously, waiting for the moment when Haines would start sending Garbo’s message. But again and again they heard the operator tap out the call sign. His finger lay still on the button.

The unthinkable had happened. The Germans weren’t listening.

The men huddled around the wireless were gutted. All that work, only to have a radio operator let them down. Finally, at 8 a.m. the Abwehr operator tapped back and Garbo blasted a response. “I am very disgusted
as, in this struggle for life and death, I cannot accept excuses or negligence,” he snarled before sending a slightly altered text saying that Agent No. 4 had made contact:

He arrived after a difficult journey created by the steps he took to slip through the local vigilance. He told me that three days ago cold rations and vomit bags had again been distributed to troops of the 3rd Canadian Division and that the division had now left the camp, its place now taken by the Americans. The American troops which are now in the camp belong to the First US Army.

The only conclusion that the Germans could draw was that the invasion was under way—yet if
FUSAG
was still in camp, Normandy had to be a feint. The radar indications of thousands of “airplanes” approaching Calais must be part of a complex deception.

Now the deceivers waited.

At the same time that Haines’s Morse key was sounding in the ether, an American GI named William Funkhouser
was crawling up Omaha Beach with a 60-mm mortar strapped to his back. He was with the 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One. Moments before he’d stepped off a landing barge and struggled ashore, ripping off his life preserver as he went. A German machine gun was sending tracers inches above his head. “I was so scared that if I never moved again from that place, that would be all right.” As his fingers dug into the wet sand and he willed himself down into the earth, Funkhouser saw a “white explosion” go off to his left in the murky light. Oddly, he felt no concussion wave travel through his body, just the flash of white. Ahead of him when Funkhouser looked up, spread in a radius from the center of the explosion, was a collection of randomly distributed pieces of flesh—not limbs but chunks of flesh, the largest the size of a man’s fist, all of them “just as white as snow.” A soldier named Speckler had been carrying a load of TNT to blow up German pillboxes, and it had exploded too soon. Funkhouser stared at a single piece of flesh that had come to rest in his path. In the midst of the noise and concussions, it held his attention as if it were some kind of talisman. “I can’t crawl through that,” he said to himself. He tried to stand but his legs gave out. He felt for the 60-mm mortar on his back and threw it aside. The lost weight seemed to give his body strength. He stood and began to run, armed only with a .45.

Before D-Day, Funkhouser had believed, or been led to believe, that the Germans would surrender as soon as the American troops came trudging up the beach. Instead, every officer in his company was either dead or wounded, or would soon be dead or wounded. Now bodies were rolling in the surf, back and forth, three and four deep. “My company was just more or less eliminated as a fighting unit.”

It was men like Funkhouser whom Garbo had been assigned to protect in the next seventy-two hours. Sitting in the house on Crespigny Road, Pujol could only imagine the scene at Omaha Beach. “I remember thinking that the American beaches
were in danger of being turned into a bloody fiasco. They were suffering terrible casualties and it was up to us to prevent a massacre.”

Harris had other things to worry about. Was Jebsen talking? Was Garbo’s last message being read in reverse and the panzer divisions already rolling toward the Normandy beaches?

As the Americans shot their way ashore at Omaha, the phone rang in Rommel’s headquarters at the château in La Roche-Guyon, forty miles west of Paris. Rommel himself was home, in Herrlingen, Germany; he’d spent part of the previous day picking a bouquet of wildflowers for his wife’s birthday. On the other end of the phone was Colonel Roenne, in his bunker at Zossen, just outside Berlin. The invasion was under way, the slim aristocrat told Rommel’s second-in-command, but Roenne’s analysis indicated that a second, much more powerful blow was being readied for Calais. “Not a single unit
of the 1st US Army Group, which comprises around 25 large formations north and south of the Thames, has so far been committed . . . This suggests that the enemy is planning a further large-scale operation in the Channel area, which one would expect to be aimed at a coastal sector in the Pas de Calais area.” He emphasized that no forces were to be withdrawn from Calais to reinforce Normandy. It was a victory for Garbo and the XX Committee, but the higher-ups still had to decide on a final strategy.

Rommel’s chief of staff nodded. He’d already been informed that some of the paratroopers who had landed near St. Valéry behind the German lines had turned out to be fakes. In fact, they were another of Operation Bodyguard’s stratagems: four live paratroopers from the SAS had jumped in with two hundred dummies, a number of gramophones to play battle sounds and cries for help, along with chemical bombs that gave off the odor of cordite. The diversion helped convince the chief of staff
that the whole invasion was a ploy.

At General Rundstedt’s headquarters, a clerk remembers, “D- Day . . . was marked by a ‘let’s not get excited’ attitude . . . This was regarded as just another feint.” But Rundstedt’s chief of staff was worried. He called Berlin and requested the release of the strategic reserve of panzers to smash into the divisions that were rolling up from Omaha and Utah beaches.

Now the decision lay with General Jodl in Berlin. He pondered the request and declined to send in the tanks. The invasion was a sham, he believed, and the real blow was coming at Calais. He refused to wake Hitler. The German Seventh Army, positioned in Normandy but being held away from the action, slumbered through the darkness and failed to emerge from their barracks when the American troops poured ashore. Jodl’s deputy chief of staff would later admit, “On 5 June 1944
. . . German Supreme Headquarters had not the slightest idea that the decisive event of the war was upon them.” It wasn’t until Hitler awoke and ordered the Panzer Lehr and 12th SS divisions to the battle—at 4 p.m., hours after the invasion had begun—that the High Command reacted. The order was too late to affect the first day’s action.

The foothold had been established—but the Allied generals had planned on that. The question was, would the illusion last? And would the German divisions guarding Calais break out of their camps and head toward Normandy? “We feared a massive counter-attack
every minute,” Pujol said. D-Day plus one and D-Day plus two passed without any more significant German reinforcements. How much longer would the illusion last?

On June 9 beginning at 1:44 a.m., Garbo sent his most important message of the war. He announced that he’d met with his four key operatives—Agent No. 7 (2), the Welsh seaman from London; 7 (4), the Indian poet from Brighton; 7 (7), the Aryan fascist from Harwich; and No. 4, the Gibraltarian waiter from Scotland. It was a gathering of Garbo’s supposed brain trust, and he confirmed their conclusions with a visit to his “source” at the Ministry of Information. Garbo no longer fed the Germans bits and pieces of the Calais plot; that time had passed. He now presented them with the whole conspiracy, gathered from his dazzling array of sources.

I today lunched
with 4 (3) and obtained from him an interesting bit of information. He told me that
FUSAG
had not entered into the present operation . . . being carried out in the greater part by troops who have come from the Med, reinforced mainly by Canadian and American troops. From the reports mentioned it is perfectly clear that the present attack is a large scale operation but diversionary in character for the purpose 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 a blow somewhere else with ensured success . . . The constant bombings that the area of the Pas de Calais is suffering and the strategic situation of these forces make me suspect an attack on that French region, which is also the shortest route to their prized final objective, that is, Berlin.

For nearly two hours and two minutes, Haines’s right index finger tapped out the encrypted message, the climax of Garbo’s role as the great soothsayer of Allied war plans, the role he’d been crafting for three long years. He wasn’t just feeding the Germans information, he was drawing conclusions and trying to convince Hitler that he, above all others, knew what the Allies were planning to do.

As the message was being sent, General Rundstedt in Berlin was urgently requesting Hitler to give him the armored reserve in order to attack the invaders at their most vulnerable point, the Normandy coast. His Seventh Army had emerged from its barracks and was embroiled in a ferocious battle with the invading forces in the town squares and hedgerows. But was this the real invasion? “It is clear that Hitler and his entourage
were in a highly undecided frame of mind.”

Finally, Hitler gave in. He agreed to send
Rundstedt the 1st Panzer Corps, along with the 2nd Panzer and 21st Panzer divisions. The commanders on the ground received the order to move south to attack the American and British forces at Normandy. What Eisenhower had feared most was beginning to unfold. It was D-Day plus three.

At that moment, a condensed version of Garbo’s message was being flashed from Madrid to Berlin, arriving at 10:20 P.M. Hitler’s personal intelligence officer, Friedrich Adolf Krummacher, read the report and drew a pen stroke under the phrase “diversionary maneuver,” then added his own note: “Underlines the opinion already formed by us that a further attack is to be expected in another place. (Belgium?)” He rushed the message to Jodl, who drew his own line under the words “south-east and eastern England,” initialed it and put it on the Führer’s desk. Roenne wrote to Jodl to confirm Garbo’s analysis: “The main thrust must be expected
momentarily in the Pas de Calais.”

When Hitler spotted Garbo’s report sitting on his gleaming desk, he read it carefully and contemplated its message. Then he reached for his pen, dipped it in ink and signed it “erl,” for
erledigt
(“done,” or in this context, “seen”). Soon afterward, a message flashed out from the High Command: “As a consequence of certain information,
C in C West has declared a ‘state of alarm II’ for Fifteenth Army in Belgium and Northern France . . . The move of the 1st SS Panzer Division will therefore be halted.” The long lines of German panzers gunned their 300-horsepower Maybach engines and turned back toward Calais.

Ten armored divisions
in France and Belgium had been ready to reinforce Normandy, including the 85th Infantry and the 116th Panzer, the latter stationed just west of Paris. Now all but one returned to Calais or broke camp to head there, to prepare for Garbo’s spectral army. Only a single armored division, the 2nd Panzer, crossed the Seine and headed south toward Normandy.

Garbo had not only stopped the German army in its tracks, he’d forced it to reverse course.

The person who nearly undid all this good work was none other than Winston Churchill. On the morning of the invasion, he gave a speech in the House of Commons. The entire British government—its ministers and diplomats—had been ordered not to mention a second landing at Calais or anywhere else on the French coast, or even to imply one was on the way. If the attack really was coming, as Garbo was telling the Germans, then no one would dare talk about it. Except the prime minister did, in front of microphones broadcasting his speech to the world. “I have also to announce to the House that during the night and the early hours of this morning, the first of a series of landings in force upon the European continent has taken place.” The deception planners gasped.

Garbo rushed to his radio to explain the gaffe to the Germans: “In spite of recommendations made to Churchill,” he told Madrid, “that his speech should contain every possible reserve, he based it on the consideration that he was obliged, on account of his political position, to avoid distorting the facts and would not permit that his speeches should be discredited by coming events.” The Germans, amazingly, accepted the explanation. They wanted to believe their agent, even if it meant believing that Churchill had made a terrible blunder.

Pujol and Harris celebrated their world-altering coup
with a dinner at a tiny black-market restaurant in Soho owned by a Basque expatriate. Harris had asked the man to prepare an authentic Basque meal:
huevos escalfados bilbaína,
cold poached eggs served on a layer of chopped onions and tomatoes, substituted for impossible-to-get pimientos. The owner poured glass after glass of Basque wine, from a glass pitcher known as a
porrón,
as the two men moved on to
pollo de
Pamplona,
laughing and telling stories as they ate, until the proprietor was holding the
porrón
high above their heads and, cheered on by the other diners, pouring ropes of vino directly into their mouths as the Spanish and Basques do when celebrating a great event. Four
porrones
later, the two men stumbled giddily out into the London night.

It was the American GIs, British troops and Canadian aviators now moving toward Paris who would save Europe and the Western world. But it was these two mysterious and half-soused men who’d saved those soldiers.