The Defence of the Realm (56 page)

The second MI5 monthly report, submitted to Churchill on 1 May, contained further exciting news of ZIGZAG. After arriving in Lisbon to begin a lengthy period abroad working for the Abwehr, he had been given an explosive device camouflaged as a large lump of coal with instructions to place it in the bunkers of a British ship.
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Instead ZIGZAG handed it to the captain and MI5 later staged an incident designed to demonstrate that ZIGZAG had carried out his sabotage mission.
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Duff Cooper sent for a full copy of ZIGZAG's MI5 file which he discussed ‘at some length with the Prime Minister, who', he told Dick White, ‘is showing considerable interest in the case'.
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Some of Churchill's ‘considerable interest' was probably aroused by ZIGZAG's plan to assassinate Hitler when he visited Berlin while working for the Abwehr. Improbable though his plan appeared, ZIGZAG's case officer, Ronnie Reed, did not dismiss the possibility that he might succeed. ZIGZAG claimed that, having convinced his Abwehr case officer that he was an enthusiastic pro-Nazi, he had been promised a seat near the podium at a rally addressed by Hitler. According to Reed, ZIGZAG knew that the assassination attempt would cost him his life but liked the idea of going out in a blaze of glory: ‘He can think of no better way of leaving this life than to have his name prominently featured throughout the world's press, and to be immortalised in history books for all time – this would crown his final gesture.' There is no evidence that B1a encouraged or even welcomed ZIGZAG's plan. Tar Robertson told him: ‘. . . I am most anxious for you not to undertake any wild sabotage enterprises.'
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But he probably suspected that, if the opportunity arose, ZIGZAG might go ahead with the assassination plan. The only
surviving report to Churchill on ZIGZAG's plan, submitted to him over a year later, describes it as ‘his own proposal' and, rather obscurely, as ‘a parergon' – in other words, as subsidiary to his main aim of operating as a B1a double agent within the Abwehr.
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Following HARLEQUIN's decision to cease co-operation with MI5 and the beginning of a lengthy period during which ZIGZAG was out of contact, the Security Service judged – no doubt correctly – that the double agent most likely to capture Churchill's imagination was GARBO.
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Service reports to the Prime Minister emphasized the extraordinary creativity and productivity of GARBO, his case officer Tomás Harris and their MI5 support team, who were able to convince the Abwehr that GARBO had a network of highly productive sub-agents, eventually numbering twentyeight, mostly in the UK but some as far afield as North America and Ceylon:
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Apart from the work of those of our officers who forge the letters of the sub-agents and from the work of the case officer, who spends his entire time in controlling, organising and developing the case, living GARBO's life and thinking GARBO's thoughts, GARBO himself works on average from six to eight hours a day – drafting secret letters, enciphering, composing cover texts, writing them and planning for the future. Fortunately he has a facile and lurid style, great ingenuity and a passionate and quixotic zeal for his task. This last quality has indeed caused an outburst of jealousy on the part of his wife, who, considering herself neglected, was with difficulty persuaded not to ruin the whole undertaking by a public disclosure.
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As well as feeling neglected, Mrs Pujol (known to B1a as Mrs GARBO or Mrs G) was also extremely homesick. ‘Her one desire', noted Liddell, ‘is to go back to her home country,' where she was thought likely to reveal all and thus sabotage the entire Double-Cross System:

We have . . . thought of warning the Spanish embassy here anonymously that a woman of Mrs G's description is anxious to assassinate the ambassador. This would, we hope, ensure her being flung out if she attempted to go to the Embassy. It would however result in the police being called in, which would be a bore.

That scheme, however, was abandoned in favour of a cruel charade devised by GARBO himself. A senior Scotland Yard officer called on Mrs G on 22 June to say that her husband had been arrested after deciding to end his career as a double agent because of his wife's objections and threatening to ‘give the whole show away'. Later that day GARBO's radio operator, Charles Haines, found Mrs G in a room full of coal gas. Though Haines suspected that this was ‘a bit of play-acting', Tommy Harris's wife spent the night trying to ‘calm her down'. Next day, 23 June, after a tearful interview with Tar Robertson, she signed a statement ‘saying that the whole of the incident was due to her fault and that on no account would she behave badly in future', and was then taken to see her husband who was masquerading as a prisoner in a cell in Camp 020. On the 24th the Security Service's Legal Adviser, Edward Cussen, explained to Mrs G in what Liddell considered ‘masterly style' that she had escaped arrest only by ‘a hair's breadth', and that, if there were any repetition, she and her husband would be interned for the remainder of the war. GARBO returned home, somewhat shaken by the deception practised on his wife, but resumed his career as a double agent with undiminished enthusiasm.
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All agents except ‘J' (GARBO himself) were figments of his and his case officer's fertile imaginations. The principal sub-agents, 3 (a Venezuelan ‘of independent means' normally resident in Glasgow but currently in London), 4 (a Gibraltarian working for the NAAFI in Chislehurst), 5 (the brother of 3, currently in Canada) and 7 (a retired Welsh seaman), ran fictitious sub-networks, all of whom deceived the Abwehr.

What Churchill learned about GARBO and the double agents during 1943 left him with the conviction that, ‘In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.' No military operation in British history has ever been so successfully protected by deception as OVERLORD, the Allied invasion of occupied northern France in 1944. Late in 1943 conferences of the British and American Combined Chiefs of Staff in Cairo and Tehran took the decision to launch the invasion in May 1944 (a date later deferred until the D-Day landings on 6 June). Colonel Bevan of the LCS was instructed to prepare the deception plans for OVERLORD. The key aims of the deception were:

a.   To induce the German Command to believe that the main assault and follow up will be in or east of the Pas de Calais area, thereby encouraging the enemy to maintain or increase the strength of his air and ground forces and his fortifications there at the expense of other areas, particularly of the Caen area [in Normandy].

b.   To keep the enemy in doubt as to the date and time of the actual assault.

c.   During and after the main assault, to contain the largest possible German land and air forces in or east of the Pas de Calais for at least fourteen days.
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All three aims were achieved.

The two main deception plans which became an integral part of OVERLORD were FORTITUDE SOUTH and FORTITUDE NORTH. FORTITUDE SOUTH was intended to reinforce the belief of most German commanders that the Calais region was the logical place for the Allied attack. As well as requiring the shortest sea crossing, the Pas de Calais was also the best landing point from which to advance on the German industrial heartland in the Ruhr. FORTITUDE NORTH was designed to play on Hitler's obsession with Norway as his ‘Zone of Destiny' and persuade him
and his high command that the Allies were planning a major diversionary attack on Norway that would require them to keep large forces there which might otherwise be redeployed to meet the Allied attack on northern France. Many elements went into the deception plans: among them bogus radio messages from non-existent army units which the Germans were intended to intercept, disinformation abroad spread by British diplomats and agents, and dummy military installations. Shepperton Studios built a huge fake oil-storage complex near Dover, designed by Basil Spence (later one of Britain's leading architects), which received official visits from King George VI, General Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces for OVERLORD, and Montgomery, commander of land forces.
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The role of B1a's double agents was crucial.

The double agent who contributed most to the success of the FORTITUDE deceptions was, once again, GARBO. During the first six months of 1944, working with Tomás Harris, he sent more than 500 messages to the Abwehr station in Madrid, which, as German intercepts revealed, passed them to Berlin, many marked ‘Urgent'. Right up to D-Day, however, B1a was acutely aware that the Germans might discover that they were being deceived. The greatest threat of discovery appeared to come from Johann Jebsen, the Abwehr case officer of the double agent TRICYCLE. After seeing his case officer in Lisbon in the autumn of 1943, TRICYCLE was ‘absolutely sure' that Jebsen knew he was working for the British. However, he also reported that Jebsen had anti-Nazi sympathies and had discussed with him the possibility of taking refuge in Britain. Late in September, Jebsen was recruited as a double agent and given the codename ARTIST. In January 1944 ARTIST confronted B1a and the Twenty Committee with a difficult dilemma when he revealed the names of some of the agents being run against Britain by the Abwehr's Lisbon station. At the top of his list was GARBO (known to the Abwehr as ARABEL). If the British authorities took no action against GARBO, ARTIST might well realize that he was a double agent. And even if ARTIST did not tell his Abwehr colleagues about GARBO, what would happen if he was interrogated by the Gestapo, which was known to be suspicious of him? Tomás Harris was so concerned at the risk posed by ARTIST to the whole Double-Cross System that at the end of February he recommended that GARBO should no longer be used for deception operations.
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The Twenty Committee even considered, but rejected, the possibility of asking SIS to arrange ARTIST's assassination.
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A Security Service report to Churchill on 7 March 1944 concluded, however, that the problem could probably be managed:

[ARTIST's] zeal and ability . . . has verged upon the embarrassing. He has begun to provide us with information about the networks maintained by the Germans in this country. Of these it appears that the principal one is the GARBO organisation of which it is clearly undesirable that he should make us too fully aware. We are engaged at the moment in the delicate operation of diverting this valuable agent's attention elsewhere. There is good promise of success.
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The attempt to divert ARTIST's attention failed. By mid-April he was in no doubt that GARBO was a double agent working for the British.
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GARBO and his fictitious agent network were so highly rated by both B1a and the Twenty Committee, however, that, despite the risk that ARTIST would expose them, they were allowed to retain their key role in the FORTITUDE deceptions.

The next most important double agent in the FORTITUDE deceptions was the former Polish fighter-pilot Roman Garby-Czerniawski (codenamed BRUTUS), who had been captured by the Germans while running an agent network, the Reséau Interallié, in occupied France in 1941. The head of Abwehr counter-intelligence in Paris, Colonel Oscar Reile, recruited Garby-Czerniawski as a German agent (or so he believed) by playing on his hostility to Communism and the Soviet Union, and by promising that, if he worked as an Abwehr agent in Britain, no members of his network would be harmed.
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Soon after he arrived in England in October 1942, he turned himself in and asked to work as a double agent for the British. Though his MI5 interrogators found Garby-Czerniawski ‘intensely dramatic and egotistical', they eventually recommended he be taken on. Masterman, however, argued that the risks were too great. BRUTUS's primary loyalty was to Poland; the Germans might well suspect that he had decided to work for the British rather than the Abwehr; and the Russians were intensely suspicious of the British use of Polish agents.
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BRUTUS was the cause of probably the biggest dispute between Masterman and B1a case officers in the history of the Double-Cross System. Whereas Masterman was initially preoccupied by the risks, the young Turks of B1a were determined not to waste the deception opportunities which BRUTUS offered. BRUTUS's first case officer, Christopher Harmer, claimed later that ‘old JC' (Masterman) was ‘hell bent on chopping him and intrigued behind my back'. On 5 March 1943, the day before his wedding Harmer found time to send Masterman ‘one of the rudest letters I have ever written . . . it took some time to heal the breach.' The breach was healed because Masterman knew B1a had to be adventurous and B1a realized Masterman had to be cautious. ‘I loved the old boy,'
Harmer wrote later, ‘and I suppose he was only doing his job – of exercising a wise and mature restraint on the irresponsibilities of the hot-headed youngsters of those days.'
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