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It took the German Blitzkrieg only six weeks in the spring and early summer of 1940 to overwhelm France. As Churchill famously said to the House of Commons after its capitulation, ‘The Battle of France is over… the Battle of Britain is about to begin.’
The Germans had not paid much attention to the military in Britain before this point of the war, but now were in desperate need of high-grade intelligence about the state of the nation’s defences. German military intelligence, the Abwehr, only had one agent in Britain at the time: Arthur Owens, a hard-drinking Welshman who had worked on various Admiralty contracts before the war. Unknown to the Abwehr, however, Owens had confessed his German links to the British Secret Intelligence Service, who decided to keep him on as a German agent but wrote the reports he sent to Berlin, feeding the Germans with disinformation they wanted to get to the enemy.
In the summer of 1940, several new agents were quickly recruited by the Abwehr, and even more quickly trained in the crafts of spying and sent to Britain. Some dropped by parachute, others came by boat, others entered as refugees. Most had an introduction to Owens, so were rapidly picked up by MI5. Others were so poorly prepared they were easy to spot. One Dutchman came to Britain by boat, but had not been told about British licensing laws – so on arrival he went to the local pub at 9am, and demanded a glass of cider. The landlady reported him to the police, who immediately arrested him.
After they were rounded up, these agents were given a choice. Either they could be charged with treason and executed. Or they could agree to ‘turn’ and work for British Intelligence. A few hard-line Nazis refused and faced their fate – but a majority of the 25 agents who had been apprehended agreed to work for MI5, and started sending messages back to the Abwehr that had been written for them by their MI5 minders. So began a large deception operation that soon came under the control of a top secret MI5 group: the XX Committee – with XX standing for double cross!
The section of MI5 that actually ran the agents was led by Lieutenant-Colonel Tommy Argyll Robertson, universally known as ‘Tar’ after his initials. He was a larger-than-life character, personable and charming, and clearly identifiable as he always wore the tartan trousers of his former unit, the Seaforth Highlanders. ‘Tar’ and the team who worked with him had to provide the Germans, via the men they thought were their agents, with some accurate and reliable information in order to give them credibility. This was known as ‘chickenfeed’. Along with this, they would also feed German Intelligence with lies and deception in order to mislead them as to the intentions of the Allies.
The decision about precisely what accurate information could be revealed came from the XX Committee. This group met every Thursday afternoon, at MI5 headquarters, 58 St James’s Street in London’s West End. The day-to-day controlling of the double agents came from Tar and his team, who had to invent jobs that the agents could supposedly have, in which they could credibly gain useful information, like waiting on tables at a senior officers’ mess where they could overhear conversations, or working in the Ministry of Information where they could pick up details about the Home Front and military strategies. They needed consistency in style and content for the reports they wrote, so each agent would express his own character in the messages he sent to the Abwehr. It was a complex and sophisticated system which took a couple of years to get functioning. By 1942, however, it was working well, as several new agents arrived to add to the repertory.
Codename Brutus
One of the most remarkable was Roman Czerniawski, an ex-Polish Intelligence officer, who had fled to France after the fall of Poland. As a Polish patriot, he hated both Germans and Russians with great intensity. In France, he formed a French Resistance group known as the Interallié. It soon contained about 50 agents, including railway workers, policemen, ex-French army officers, and housewives. Reports were smuggled to the Polish government in exile in London about German troop deployments and the location of radio and radar installations in France.
In November 1941, an informer passed on details of the Interallié to the Gestapo. Czerniawski and most of his agents were arrested and imprisoned. Czerniawski himself was held in captivity for more than eight months before he did a deal with the local Abwehr chief. He would be freed and sent secretly to Britain as long as he agreed to spy for the Germans. In October 1942, he arrived in Britain and reported to the Polish military, who eventually handed him over to MI5. Here, he agreed to act as a double agent and send false reports back to the Abwehr.
Initially, MI5 were suspicious of Czerniawski – but, after several long interrogations, they agreed to take him on. He was given the codename Brutus, after one of the great betrayers of ancient Rome, who had been the last to stab his commander Julius Caesar. Clearly, by giving him this codename, MI5 were still suspicious of Czerniawski’s reliability. However, the gamble paid off.
As a Polish officer, Czerniawski had the ideal cover to act as a liaison officer with several British and American military units. From these supposedly high-level meetings, he was able to send back reports to the Abwehr that were a mixture of accurate chickenfeed, along with a mass of military detail that was nothing but make-believe and deception. And, despite MI5’s initial reservations, Brutus went on to become a vital player in feeding the Germans with disinformation in the run-up to and the aftermath of D-Day. Czerniawski could credibly claim to have visited military formations in Scotland and along the south coast. His reports were regularly read by General Alfred Jodl at OKW (the German Armed Forces High Command) and even by Hitler himself, who took every word as truth. But, all along, Czerniawski never left the MI5 office in London.
After the war, he chose not to return to Poland, which had been occupied by the Soviet Union. He settled instead in west London and became a printer. At home, he proudly kept a large number of cats. He died in 1985, aged 75, with his neighbours and friends having no knowledge of his wartime achievements. He was known simply as a charming East European gentleman who loved pets.
Agent Garbo
Perhaps the most extraordinary of all of the war’s double-agent stories began in January 1941, when a young Catalan chicken farmer presented himself at the British embassy in Madrid and offered to spy for Britain. Such ‘walk-ins’, as they were called, were notoriously unreliable, as it was so easy for them to be enemy plants. As a result, no one showed any interest in the farmer, whose name was Juan Pujol García. But Pujol had developed a hatred of the Nazis and what he saw as their oppressive, thuggish regime, and was determined to help Britain in its seemingly unequal struggle.
In an attempt to be taken seriously by the British, Pujol decided it would be better if he were already spying for Germany and could offer to become a double agent. So he turned to the Abwehr office in Madrid and offered to spy for Germany. Again, the Abwehr showed little interest initially in his offer to spy for them. But Pujol was persis-tent and persuaded the Abwehr officials that he had a visa to travel to London as a Spanish diplomat, and could spy for them in Britain. At last, they decided to take him on, giving him instructions in the use of invisible ink and setting up a system for getting letters from him back via Lisbon. They gave him the codename Arabel and instructed him to report back from London.
But Pujol had no visa for England: he had simply invented this as a ruse so that he would be accepted as a German spy. Instead, while he pretended to be in Britain, in reality he was sending letters to the Abwehr from a flat outside Lisbon. Armed with a Baedeker’s tourist guide, Bradshaw’s railway timetables, and a copy of a Portuguese book about the Royal Navy, he wrote long, wordy descriptions that he thought were the sort of thing a spy in a foreign country would come up with. Pretending to be travelling around the country, he reported from his tourist guide on the locations of imaginary military camps, and from his naval book he described the coming and going of ships from British ports. From information he found in a library book about pre-war British industry, he listed the locations he claimed to have discovered of various war factories. Sometimes, however, his fertile imagination ran away with him. In one remarkable letter, he claimed that he had made friends with a group of Glaswegian workers, whom he obviously thought were just like Spanish workers, as he reported that they would ‘do anything for a litre of wine’!
Finally, MI6 in Madrid were persuaded to take Pujol more seriously as a potential double agent. In April 1942, he was smuggled via Gibraltar to Britain, where he was interviewed by MI5 to assess his loyalty. He was taken on and set up in a safe house in north London, and was given the codename Garbo. It had taken about 17 months for Pujol (who was known in Britain by his other surname as Juan García) to be taken on. But he had finally made it.
Essential to the success of Garbo as a double agent was his case officer, Tomàs Harris. Harris had a Spanish mother, from whom he had learned fluent Spanish – a vital requirement because Garbo’s English was poor at first – and a father who was an art dealer specialising in Spanish art. In 1940, Harris was recruited to MI5, where he cut a raffish figure with a neatly trimmed beard, who was constantly smoking hand-rolled black tobacco cigarettes. He and Garbo would meet almost daily in a room above a shopping arcade off Piccadilly, composing long letters that Garbo would write out in invisible ink to send to the Abwehr. Harris soon created a convincing identity for Garbo, supplying the Germans with both useful chickenfeed and a mass of deceptions.
The Abwehr not only began to rely on Garbo himself, but they also asked him to recruit a network of additional spies around Britain to supply him with reports from Glasgow, Swansea, and the south coast. Harris invented a small army of recruits, who could feed in more information than Garbo himself could credibly have gathered.
The most important period of Garbo’s activity was in the months before and after D-Day. The principal Allied deception plans around D-Day were known as Operation Fortitude North and Fortitude South. Fortitude North consisted of inventing an army in Scotland that was supposedly going to attack Norway. Fortitude South was even more ambitious, and involved creating a phoney army in south-east England that was going to invade France across the narrowest strip of channel, at the Pas de Calais. This became the so-called First US Army Group, and in April 1944 General George S Patton was put in command of this hoax formation.
As a great showman, Patton played the role perfectly, giving speeches and being photographed as he toured the imaginary positions of his pretend unit. Garbo sent repeated messages to the Abwehr explaining that a vast army was gathering in Kent and Essex, and his sub-agents reported many details of the troops, armour, and landing craft that were being assembled.
After the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944, Garbo’s role became in many ways even more important. He had to convince the Abwehr that the landings in Normandy were only a feint, and that the real invasion was still to come in the Pas de Calais. This Garbo – and, behind him, Harris – did with genius. On 8 June, Garbo sent a long note with details of all the units that had landed in Normandy. This was all correct chickenfeed, which the Germans could and did verify on the ground. It increased their trust in what Garbo was telling them. On the following day, he sent probably his most important message of the war. ‘I am of the opinion,’ he wrote, that the Normandy landings were a ‘large- scale diversionary operation’ with the purpose of ‘drawing the maximum of German reserves to the area of operation in order to make an attack at another place… in the Pas de Calais area.’ This report went right up to the German High Command, the OKW, and was later discovered also to have been shown to Hitler.
Partially as a result of this communication, the German Fifteenth Army was kept in the Pas de Calais with its 19 infantry and two armoured divisions. While these units twiddled their thumbs in north-east France, the decisive battles of the war were being fought out 200 miles away in Normandy.
After the war, Pujol chose to return to obscurity. MI5 put out a fake story that he had died while they helped set him up in a new life in Venezuela as a bookseller. In the early 1980s, Rupert Allason, the Conservative Party politician who also wrote under the pen name Nigel West, finally succeeded in tracking him down. Allason persuaded Pujol to return in 1984 for a reunion with some of his wartime colleagues in London, where he was also presented with an MBE by the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace. Having returned to Venezuela, he died three years later, aged 76, in anonymity. It was not exactly a fitting end for the man who has been described as ‘the greatest double agent of the Second World War’.
Taylor Downing’s new book The Army that Never Was – D-Day and the Great Deception is published by Icon Books in April.
In the next issue of MHM: D-Day: the full story of the Allied deception plans.
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