Codebreakers Victory (17 page)

He also knew, however, that his troops would have to defend the island without air support. Crete's paltry force of thirty-six RAF aircraft had been evacuated to Egypt the day before the attack began.

The Germans' first objective was to capture at least one of the three airstrips on Crete. That would enable them to pour in heavy armor, artillery and supplies. Knowing what he did, Freyberg should have concentrated his forces at those three sites, and he did assign considerable strength to ward off the airborne landings. But he was also wary of the sea convoys and gave what critics later felt was undue priority to the seaborne operation. This disposition of the British troops was especially unfortunate, since the Royal Navy attacked the support convoys and prevented either of them from reaching the island. The only Germans to land on Crete from the sea were forty-nine soldiers in life rafts.

Even so, the carnage among the parachutists and glider forces was tremendous. The equipment for paratroopers was still at a formative stage. For example, they had little control over their chutes; they just drifted down like "beautiful kicking dolls," as a British officer described them, and were shot en masse while still in the air. Many of those who managed to come down alive were injured in landing on the rocky terrain, which also smashed a high percentage of the gliders. The New Zealand gunners quickly mopped up survivors.

The defenders came close to staving off the attack. At the critical moment, however, the British commander in charge of preventing the seizure of the airstrip at Maleme inexplicably withdrew his troops to the hills in stead of keeping them in place at the landing site. Once the Germans were in control of the landing field the battle was effectively over. Although the German general in charge of the operation had used up even his reserves of paratroops, he was able to crash-land a mountain rifle regiment and to reinforce them with a flood of equipment. To the consternation and dismay of the codebreakers at Bletchley, the Germans succeeded in taking Crete and forcing another evacuation of defeated British troops.

It was a victory the Germans were not to repeat. Faced with accountings of the massacre of his paratroopers, Hitler ruled airborne assault out of his military repertoire. "Crete," he told his parachute general, "proved that the days of paratroops are over." The depleted parachute corps was never rebuilt.

Hitler had secured his southeastern flank and eliminated the threat of Crete. The costs were great. They were to continue: German divisions were bogged down in the Balkans by the need to battle the guerrilla forces that sprang up following the defeats of the regular armies. In Yugoslavia particularly, Germans found themselves locked in vicious fighting against the underground forces led by Draza Mihailovic, and later the Communist partisans under Tito.

Hitler had originally hoped to launch Barbarossa on May 15. It has been pointed out that this was an unrealistic scheduling. A late spring thaw turned the Russian frontier into a quagmire that would have rendered the passage of panzers impossible until well into June. But the Allied schemers could not have anticipated the weather as an ally. In any case, Barbarossa did not start until June 22. Despite all his efforts to avoid a Russian winter, Hitler had gained only two days on the date when Napoleon embarked upon his Russian adventure.

Churchill had no doubt as to the success of the delaying tactics. He believed they slowed the invasion by five weeks. In his war memoir he wrote, "It is reasonable to believe that Moscow was saved thereby."

 

 

 

7

 

The Spies Who Never Were

 

 

Did the benefits of secret intelligence flow only one way? Certainly the Germans did not think so. One of the important rebuttals that the Abwehr secret service would have offered was the network of spies they had established in Britain. These spies sent back such valuable information that the Germans awarded several of them the Iron Cross in recognition of their contributions.

At the war's outset, one of the agents the Abwehr would have cited was an electrical engineer code-named Snow. His firm did work for the British Admiralty, and Snow was also assigned to seek German customers. During his trips to Germany he let it be known that he was a Welsh nationalist bitterly opposed to the British. Recognizing that he could be a resource for useful information about the Royal Navy, the Germans had, in 1936, recruited him as an agent.

When war broke out, he quickly made himself the hub of an organization with a dozen or more Anglophobic agents throughout Britain. He trained them in the radio codes of the Abwehr, and his network became highly regarded by his spymaster for the information it transmitted about ship movements and deliveries of materials from the U.S. When, in 1940, Snow collapsed from the strain of his double life, his spy work was taken over by one of the subordinates he had so carefully trained.

A second agent, code-named Tate, was a sturdy young German fluent in English and trained in espionage. He parachuted into Britain equipped with special radio equipment that he used to receive orders from his controllers and to transmit back answers to their questions. Active to the war's end, he sent hundreds of messages about what he observed and was able to learn in Britain. He was one of those granted the Iron Cross, First and Second Class.

Zigzag was the code name given to a criminal imprisoned by the British on the Channel Island of Jersey. When the Germans occupied the island, he offered his service in a spirit of vengeance against his former captors. The Germans trained him as a demolition expert and dropped him by parachute on the mainland. His primary mission was to sabotage the De Havilland factory where Mosquito light bombers were being produced. He was promised fifteen thousand pounds if he did the job. On January 29, 1943, he was able to report his success. An explosion had done extensive damage to the plant, as British newspapers indignantly reported and aerial reconnaissance could verify.

Tricycle was the code name of a youth from a wealthy Yugoslav family. Through his family's business he had high-level contacts in many countries—for example, he had once squired the Duke of York around during the duke's visit to Belgrade. Before the war he had gone to Germany's University of Freiburg to study law. When the war began, one of his German friends who worked for the Abwehr asked Tricycle to become a Nazi agent in Britain. The friend explained that while the Abwehr had many spies there, they wanted someone who could move in the upper strata of English society and help determine who would best cooperate in the coming invasion of Britain. To provide cover for his presence in England, he could carry on his business interests. The Germans knew he was a high liver and an inveterate womanizer, but they were willing to pay him well for his services. He gained his code name from the three-person spy agency he established—an agency the Germans relied on heavily for insights into the thinking of Britain's elite. When U.S. entry into the war began to seem inevitable, the Germans sent him to New York to begin structuring an American spy network.

The star of their show was the agent code-named Garbo—a Spaniard who presented himself at the German embassy in Madrid as one who so strongly hated Communism that he was willing to become a spy for German Fascism. Before sending him to Lisbon for his flight on to London, his German spymasters equipped him for his mission; he took with him a questionnaire covering information they most wanted to receive, along with secret ink, money and an address to which he could mail his findings. The Germans were delighted by his long, colorful, insightful reports from Britain, especially after he lined up a network of agents reporting to him from advantageous spots all over the island. The Abwehr also respected the care he expressed for his helpers, as when his agent in Liverpool sickened and died. In response to the obituary notice Garbo posted to them, his spy-masters wished him to extend their deepest sympathies to the agent's widow. He, too, was awarded the Iron Cross.

With these highly effective spies in place, along with a scattering of lesser agents, the Germans were content that their needs for special intelligence from Britain were being fully met. They soon saw no further necessity of dropping in new agents from the air or landing them from U-boats.

For the Allies, the most delicious irony of the war was that all of this complex infrastructure of German espionage was a chimera. Every one of some 120 agents and subagents the Nazis thought they had in their pockets was, in fact, a double agent, working under British control.

Snow, whose real name was Arthur Owens, made a practice during his prewar journeys back and forth to Germany of supplying snippets of information to the Nazis while also collecting facts that could prove useful to British authorities. As soon as war broke out, he immediately offered his services to Britain's Secret Intelligence Service. SIS chiefs were doubtful about him at first and actually locked him in a prison cell. But Snow proved his loyalty and became an enormous asset. His organization of a dozen agents was entirely imaginary. His reports to the Abwehr via radio included accurate tidbits mixed in with subtle misinformation. The reason for his end as a German agent was not that job pressures had caused him to collapse but that he had become an alcoholic and was no longer trustworthy. The British phased him out and had one of his "subordinates" take charge.

Tate really was a German who parachuted into Britain. Quickly captured, he was presented with the choice of being hanged or agreeing to be "turned" to work for the British. He chose life and underwent what was described as "an almost religious conversion to the Allied cause." Tate became one of the most trusted members of the British team, showing great resourcefulness in seeming to meet the demands of his Hamburg spymaster while larding his largely innocuous responses with carefully skewed data.

As for Zigzag and his destruction of the De Havilland factory, that was all neatly arranged by the British. Camouflage experts created a fake extension to the plant that could be blown up without hindering production at the real facility. The press, ignorant of what had actually happened, ran lurid accounts of the sabotage, which Zigzag could triumphantly report in order to collect his fifteen thousand pounds.

Tricycle's real name was Dusko Popov. During his studies in Germany he formed some close friendships but also, secretly, developed a fierce hatred of Nazism. Consequently, when Johann "Johnny" Jebsen, one of his friends, came to Belgrade to recruit him as a spy for German intelligence, Popov sought the advice of the British consul. He was told to go ahead and pretend to work for them. Settling in London, Popov lived well—largely at the Nazis' expense. He rented luxurious accommodations and enjoyed numerous romances. His reports of weekends spent at the country estates of the rich and powerful made good reading for his German overlords while misleading them as to the true situation in Britain. To the end the Germans considered him one of their ablest agents and regarded the reports that he and his support net sent from London as among the most valuable intelligence they received. In England, Popov worked with Ian Fleming and is thought to be one of the models Fleming used in creating James Bond.

In his way, Garbo—whose real name was Juan Pujol—was as creative as Fleming. Son of a father who instilled in him the desire to fight tyranny, he set out to do as much destruction to the Nazi cause as he could manage. Instead of going from Madrid to Britain, as his spymaster thought he'd done, he holed up in Lisbon and for nine months prepared a series of letters that he purported to write in England and convey by courier to be mailed to the Germans from Portugal. He had never been to Britain, and all he had to work with now was a tourist guide to England, an out-of-date railway timetable, a large map of the islands and whatever he could glean from bookstalls. He also had his imagination. His letters pictured him reporting from London while his first subagents fed him useful information from the West Country, Glasgow and Liverpool. It was all fiction, but the Germans were royally duped.

Twice Garbo approached the British to serve as an agent for them and twice he was rebuffed. He finally gained their approval in an unexpected way. Bletchley Park's codebreakers had found that the Germans were marshaling their forces to intercept a large convoy that was supposed to have left Liverpool bound for Malta. It was puzzling—there was no such convoy. The British took a different view toward Garbo when they discovered that the expedition, on which the Germans expended a huge waste of effort, was his invention. He was smuggled into Britain in April 1942 and given his code name in recognition of his chameleonlike ability to assume varied roles.

In London, Garbo blossomed. He expanded his network to six agents, all of them imaginary. From his facile pen flowed reports from all six, each revealing an individual style. The stream of information—always with a top spin of misinformation—he sent to his masters was so bounteous that when gathered together after the war his reports totaled some fifty volumes.

The Liverpool agent, who had reported that nonexistent Malta convoy, came to be seen as a problem. With German aircraft closing the Thames as a convoy destination, Liverpool became the main convoy harbor. An agent there would be expected to see more than the Germans needed to know. Garbo's solution was simply to kill him off. The accounts he transmitted of the agent's declining health and subsequent death, together with the newspaper obituary he sent along, were all fakery. The Germans paid their respects to a widow who existed only in Garbo's imagination.

The most impressive indicator of the trust the Germans placed in Garbo is that they informed him of the code used by the Abwehr intelligence service in their station-to-station communications. When the code was changed, they sent him the new one—saving a great deal of work for Bletchley Park!

Garbo-Pujol's story had a glorious ending. After V-E Day, he honored his pledge to secrecy and slipped away to Venezuela. "I wanted to be forgotten," he said, "to pass unnoticed and to be untraceable." And so he remained for thirty-six years. But then, when the stories of the double agents became public knowledge, writer Nigel West tracked him down. Pujol returned to England to a hero's welcome, received a personal thanks from the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace, and told his story in collaboration with West in their popular book
Operation Garbo.