Glory Years
`In wartime,' said Winston Churchill, `truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.' Heeding the advice, spies have used deceit to win wars--and to prevent them.
June 9, 1944. D-Day plus 3. The most important wireless message of World War II came into the German High Command at 12:07 a.m. and continued until 2:09. Germany's top spy in England signaled that the Allies had planned the Normandy invasion as "a diversionary maneuver designed to draw off enemy reserves in order then to make a decisive attack in another place." The spy, code-named Cato, based his opinion on "the strong troop concentrations in Southeast and Eastern England which are not taking part in the present operations." His assessment was buttressed by earlier reports that the Allies had shipped to that region large numbers of vomit bags, life belts, C rations, condoms, and landing craft. Thus, Cato predicted a second massive landing at one of the shortest points across the English Channel, the Pas de Calais.
A senior Nazi intelligence officer read the message and underlined "diversionary maneuver." The operational chief of the German armed forces took it to Adolf Hitler, who was already inclined to believe it. Buoyed by Cato's handiwork, the Fuhrer countermanded his generals: The German 15th Army would stay in Calais rather than reinforce the Normandy front.
Bogus armies. The decision would be fatal, for the German Cato was also the English Garbo, a double agent code-named after the legendary actress. His line about "troop concentrations" was nothing but a figment of the British imagination. In fact, the Allies had 25 fewer divisions in England than Garbo suggested. A bogus American Army group in Southeast England was keeping 22 Nazi divisions out of the battle. If those divisions had shown up in June at the Normandy bridgehead, the Germans "might possibly have defeated us by sheer weight of numbers," Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower later wrote, concluding, "Lack of infantry was the most important cause of the enemy's defeat in Normandy."
Garbo's remarkable D-Day stratagems played but one vital role in the intricate pageant of deception by British intelligence services known as the Double-Cross System. At the beginning of the war, the British broke the machine codes used by the Abwehr--the German intelligence service--and learned about the German spies who alighted in England. They offered those captured a choice: Double-cross--work for the Allies--or face execution. Most accepted the former.
Through the course of the war, the British enrolled about 120 double-crossers in their secret service. They included agents such as "Bronx," the daughter of a South American diplomat who helped convince the Germans that gas warfare would favor the British; "Brutus," a Polish military officer who gave the Germans an exaggerated sense of the strength of Allied forces; and "Mutt and Jeff," two Norwegians who helped the British stage explosions to convince the Germans they were capable of sabotage. "By means of the double-agent system," wrote MI-5 official J. C. Masterman, "we actively ran and controlled the German espionage system in this country."
Playboy. Nowhere are the rewards and pitfalls of double-crossing clearer than in the case of Dusko Popov, a Yugoslav nationalist and international playboy from Dubrovnik. His story is detailed in thousands of pages of records, which were declassified last year and made available at London's Public Record Office. In 1940, Popov convinced the Germans that through his social connections he could provide valuable information on the British. The Nazis sent him to London, but Popov, who actually despised the Germans, promptly betrayed them by offering his services to the British. One British case officer quickly sized up Popov's motivation: "He is an adventurer who is very partial to the fleshpots of the world, and he realizes that a person of his type can enjoy the fleshpots better under democratic than under totalitarian conditions."
After deciding that Popov was legitimate, British counterintelligence dispatched him to Lisbon, Portugal, in 1940-1941. There, he fed the Germans fictitious reports about minefields along England's eastern coast. In his spare time, he had an affair with a divorced French marquise. It was hardly his first: His plucky British minders eventually changed Popov's code name to Tricycle, because he boasted about bringing two women to bed at the same time.
Sexual exploits aside, Tricycle's German controllers were impressed enough with his work to send him to the United States in 1941 to set up an espionage ring there. In a questionnaire, concealed in a microdot, they wanted specific details about the naval installation at Pearl Harbor. Tricycle gave the questionnaire to the FBI and British intelligence; later, military intelligence agencies would come up with "chicken food," innocuous answers to feed the Germans. At the time, however, no one seems to have grasped the significance of the Pearl Harbor questions--that they could signal an impending assault on Hawaii. Only in the aftermath of the December 7 attack did an MI-5 official order his officers to scrub the files for information relating to the attack. "Tricycle's questionnaire," the official, Guy Liddell, wrote on Dec. 17, 1941, ". . . shows quite clearly that in August last the Germans were very anxious to get as full particulars as possible about Pearl Harbor."
The FBI may not have taken Tricycle seriously enough because his antics offended the puritans in J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. His behavior was one part James Bond, one part Royal Tenenbaum. He checked into the posh Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, dated the actress Simone Simon, skied in Idaho's Sun Valley, tanned in Florida, and rang up $86,000 in debt. Not amused, the FBI was willing to expose Tricycle in an attempt to arrest a courier who was supposed to deliver Abwehr money to him. The courier never came, but Tricycle's British case officer was appalled that the FBI had so little regard for "preserving Tricycle's position in German eyes." Eventually, the FBI stopped giving Tricycle any information. That jeopardized his standing with the Germans, who stopped paying him.
In a desperate effort to rehabilitate him, the British agreed to return Tricycle to Lisbon for a session with his Abwehr officers. Tricycle brought silk stockings for his handler's secretary and some neatly rehearsed excuses for his failures. He blamed the Germans for cutting off his funding, saying he needed money to entice knowledgeable people to confide in him. For example, he said, he persuaded one influential businessman to open up by lending him money to entertain a chorus girl. The Germans accepted Tricycle's explanation, gave him $25,000, and sent him back to England. There, his British minders dramatically improved the number and specificity of the reports that he was sending to the Germans, which helped him regain favor.
While in England, Tricycle dreamed up an ingenious cover story that would enable him to make regular trips to Lisbon. With the support of the Yugoslav government in exile, Tricycle set up an escape route in the Portuguese city for Yugoslav officers who had been interned in Switzerland. Because Tricycle now had an excuse for regular and direct access to the Abwehr, the British decided he would figure prominently in the Allied plans to trick the Germans about coming invasions.
In March 1944, Tricycle gave the Germans what he claimed was an order of battle for the coming landings in France--the basic building block of the D-Day deception campaign. The Abwehr was delighted. One of Tricycle's German controllers, Johnny Jebsen, wrote him on April 21: "I want to congratulate you on being my beloved Fuhrer's best agent, who is genuine `without any doubt.' " The comment was mischievously sarcastic, because Jebsen had also become a British double agent. A few days after the message, the Gestapo arrested Jebsen in an unrelated financial deal. Worried that Jebsen would expose Tricycle, the British decided to shut Tricycle down.
Garrulous Garbo. With Tricycle out of action, Garbo--the British double agent the Germans called Cato--had to take a more prominent role in the D-Day deception. The Germans thought highly of Garbo because he had hidden from the left-wing Republicans in his native Spain. But Garbo actually hated the fascists and the communists who had laid waste to his country. So when he volunteered to help the Germans, it was with an eye toward double-crossing them. Acting as a freelancer, he convinced the Germans that he could nudge the Spanish to send him on a diplomatic mission to England. He left Madrid with secret ink, money, and cover addresses but, unbeknownst to the Germans, he went only as far as Lisbon. There, he fabricated reports for the Abwehr on conditions in England. His sources were a map, a travel guide, and the Lisbon library.
The British read with amazement the captured Abwehr radio traffic as the Germans praised Garbo's outlandish stories about convoys leaving Liverpool for Malta. "The information is so grossly inaccurate as to be completely valueless," Liddell complained in his diary. Soon thereafter, the British agreed to bring Garbo to London as an official double-crosser. Under their supervision, Garbo became a star. Through wireless transmissions to the Germans, he created imaginary subagents like "7," an ex-seaman and "thoroughly undesirable character" who lived across the water from Calais. By August 1944 the Garbo network had delivered to Germany some 400 secret letters and 2,000 wireless messages--the essentials of what Germany thought it knew about Allied intentions.
After Garbo's dramatic message warning of a diversion, the Germans were effusive in their praise; they even recommended the agent for the Iron Cross. Garbo, the Germans wrote in a message intercepted by the British, "has rendered services of great importance in the war . . . at the constant risk of his life. We consider immediate award necessary to maintain his morale." The Nazi prize never came, but in December 1944, another one did. The British made Garbo a member of the British Empire. At the end of the war, Tricycle received a similar honor. Fittingly, he was presented with it in the bar at the Ritz Hotel.
This story appears in the January 27, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.