Ike's Spies (13 page)

Fortunately, Clark stayed, rescued by the Allied naval and air forces. Eisenhower put every bomber in the Mediterranean to work pounding the German forces at Salerno, and brought in the British Navy to bombard the German positions with their big naval guns.
³⁴
Meanwhile, Monty's Eighth Army was coming up from the toe of
Italy after an unopposed crossing from Sicily to Italy over the Straits of Messina, a crossing supported by an all-out artillery barrage that was comic-opera stuff. The only casualty was an escaped lion from the Reggio zoo.
³⁵
Kesselring reluctantly decided that his attempt to throw the Allies back into the sea had failed, and he signaled Hitler—
ULTRA
picked it up—that he was withdrawing to a line just north of Naples. Hitler approved—he was much impressed by Kesselring's resistance to date—and Eisenhower breathed a sigh of relief.

In the campaign in Italy that followed,
ULTRA
continued to provide the Allied commanders with high-grade information. Why, then, did the campaign go so badly? The major reason was the Germans themselves, who fought skillfully and fanatically in mountainous terrain ideally suited to their defensive genius. Another factor of considerable importance was that the Allied divisions were being steadily withdrawn from the Mediterranean to go to England to prepare for the 1944 invasion of France. A third factor was incompetent Allied, especially American, generalship.

Nowhere did this incompetence show more clearly than in the Anzio landings of January 1944. Briefly, the idea was to get an American corps behind Kesselring's lines in order to cut his communications with Rome and thus force him to retreat to northern Italy. Churchill said he wanted to hurl a wildcat ashore; what he got instead, he later complained, was a stranded whale. The Americans sat at Anzio while the Germans pounded them day after day, week after week. In the end, far from forcing Kesselring to pull back, the troops at Anzio had to be rescued by Allied forces coming up from the south.

Who was to blame? Mark Clark pointed to
ULTRA
. He said that his forces would have moved inland on the first day, thus effectively cutting Kesselring's supply line, but
ULTRA
information indicated that the Germans were moving major units into the region and that therefore his men had to dig in to await the assault. This claim has made various British writers furious, and rightly so. Lewin shows conclusively that the
ULTRA
information was absolutely sound, that it did indicate a German buildup against the beachhead, but that it also showed that it would take two or three days for the Germans to get to the scene. Meanwhile, Clark's men sat and the campaign was lost before it got started.
³⁶

By then, Ike had left the Mediterranean. Roosevelt had selected
him to be the Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Forces—one of the most coveted commands in the history of warfare. In England, he would have available to him for the cross-Channel attack the resources of the two great democracies, including thousands of war planes and ships and millions of fighting men.

By no means the least of the resources under his command were the secret ones, which had been built with such skill and patience by the British (and later the Americans) for the moment when the democracies would hurl their armed might across the Channel. These secret resources included guerrilla forces in France, sabotage units, British and American spies, turned German spies in Britain,
ULTRA
, and countless deception devices. Success in
OVERLORD
would depend not only on how well Ike used his ships, planes, and fighting men, but also on how well he managed his secret forces.

IT PUTS TOO GRAND A FACE ON IT
to say that the future of Western civilization was at stake, but that is not far wrong.
OVERLORD
was a tremendous gamble. Britain and America were putting everything they could into it in a display of unity of purpose not seen before or since in either country. The bet was that the whole of this effort could be concentrated on one operation, and that the operation would be decisive. Failure in
OVERLORD
would mean the loss of the bet, and the size of the bet was stupendous, a fortune in men and matériel carefully built up by the British and Americans over the past two years.

Eisenhower and Hitler both knew what was at stake. In one of his first messages to the Combined Chiefs in his capacity as Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force, Eisenhower declared, “This operation marks the crisis of the European war. Every obstacle must be overcome, every inconvenience suffered
and every risk run to ensure that our blow is decisive. We cannot afford to fail.”
¹

At about the same time, Hitler was saying, “The destruction of the enemy's landing attempt means more than a purely local decision on the Western Front. It is the sole decisive factor in the whole conduct of the war.”
²

EVERY COMMANDER
hopes to surprise his enemy, but in Ike's case surprise was crucial, because he was on the offensive with forces that were numerically woefully inferior. Ike's one great material advantage was Allied air superiority. On the ground, the Germans had fifty-nine divisions in France, while the initial Allied assault would be only seven divisions strong. By no means were those German divisions contemptible garrison troops—they were armed with the latest weapons, including tanks, and their morale was high. Many were veterans of the Eastern front. The Allies therefore needed to do better than simply surprise the enemy—they had to induce Hitler to move the best of his units, especially the panzer divisions, away from the invasion site, and keep them away.

To accomplish this seemingly impossible objective, Ike was fortunate to have working for him the best spies in the world, the men and women of the British Secret Service. While the American factories produced landing craft to carry the troops across the Channel, the British intelligentsia completely fooled the Germans as to where those landing craft would come ashore. British brains and American brawn made
OVERLORD
a smashing success. How it was done makes a remarkable story.

IT BEGAN
, for Ike, with his arrival in London late on January 15, 1944, to assume command of the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (
SHAEF
). On Marshall's orders, he had left the Mediterranean two weeks earlier and taken a short vacation with his wife, Mamie, at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. His movements had been kept secret from the press and public, and a heavy security blanket had been laid on for his arrival in London. When he got there, fortunately, a London pea-souper took care of security. Two men had to lead the way for Ike's car and they got lost in the distance between curb, car, and the front door of 20 Grosvenor Square.
³

Eisenhower had returned to his old headquarters of the summer
of 1942. Only the most senior government and military officials in Britain knew that he was there, and it was nearly a week before a public announcement was made. But almost as soon as he arrived, a German spy, code name Tate, managed to send a radio report to his controller in Hamburg that the new supreme commander had taken up his duties in London. It was an intelligence coup of the first magnitude.
⁴

Tate received his information from General Stewart Menzies, head of the British Secret Service. A few days later Menzies explained to Eisenhower why it was that the Abwehr, the intelligence arm of the German General Staff, was told of his arrival and new command when the information was kept secret from the British and American people. Ike listened, incredulous, as Menzies outlined for him the activities of the London Controlling Section and the workings of the Double-Cross System.

Section
BI-A
, the counterespionage arm of
MI
-5, the British internal security agency, had located every German spy in the British Isles. Each had been evaluated by Sir John Masterman, former university don and avid cricketer, who served during the war as head of
BI-A
. If Masterman thought the man unsuitable for any reason, he was either executed or imprisoned. The rest were “turned,” that is, made into double-agents. They continued to report by radio to the Abwehr, but only under the direct supervision of their controllers, who were
BI-A
agents. The queries the spies received from Berlin, along with
ULTRA
intercepts, provided a constant feedback and check on how well the Double-Cross System was functioning. As Masterman later claimed, correctly, “For the greater part of the war we did much more than practise a large-scale deception through double agents: by means of the double-agent system we
actively ran and controlled the German espionage system in this country
.”
⁵

Tate was only one of more than a dozen double-agents under Masterman's control, but he was typical enough. He had landed by parachute in September 1940, been picked up almost immediately, broke down under interrogation, and agreed to work for the British (his alternative was a firing squad). He transmitted and received messages to and from Hamburg from October 1940 until the day the Allies overran Hamburg in May 1945. The Abwehr sent him large sums of money (he kept demanding more) and awarded him the Iron Cross, First and Second Class. Meanwhile he merged with
the British public, working as a newspaper photographer, and even managed to get himself on the voting rolls, which in 1945 gave him an opportunity of voting for or against Mr. Churchill. Regrettably, Masterman would not allow him to exercise that privilege.

Menzies told Ike that from the moment the Double-Cross System came into being, the British had decided to aim it exclusively toward that moment when the Allies returned to France. In the dark days of 1940, control of German spies and
ULTRA
were the two most precious possessions the British held, and they did not intend to squander them for short-term gains. Displaying impressive patience, the British had not used the spies for purposes of deceiving the Germans, only controlling what information they got. Even more impressive, the
BI-A
risked providing the Abwehr with authentic information via the spies, information that would not otherwise have been available to the enemy. The London Controlling Section (
LCS
), a branch of the Joint Planning Staff (of the British Chiefs of Staff), was responsible for the devising and coordinating strategic cover and deceptions schemes. It made the decision as to what information to give to the Germans.

It was a complex game. What the British told the Germans through the turned agents had to be authentic, new, and interesting, but either relatively unimportant or something that the Germans were bound to discover in any case. The idea was to make the agent trustworthy and valuable in the eyes of the Germans, so that when the supreme moment came, on D-Day, the agents could be used to deceive the enemy into thinking the attack was coming someplace other than the actual site. As Masterman wrote in 1972, in his book
The Double-Cross System
, “We always expected that at some one moment all the agents would be recklessly and gladly blown sky high in carrying out the grand deception, and that this one great coup would both repay us many times over for all the efforts of the previous years and bring our work to an end.”
⁶

Double-agents, even triple-agents, are as old as war itself, but never before had all the spies in one country been turned. Ike grinned as Menzies sketched out to him some of the possibilities for deception, and nodded his understanding as Menzies explained that the supersecurity surrounding Ike's movements the past couple of weeks, and Tate's message to his controller in Hamburg on Ike's appointment to the supreme command and his arrival in London, were an integral, although small, part of the scheme. Masterman
wanted Berlin to think that Tate had high-level contacts inside
SHAEF
itself, and giving Hamburg a scoop on Eisenhower's appearance in London was exactly the kind of information the British liked to give the Germans. It was exciting news, it made Tate (and his controller) look good, it gave the Germans something to gossip about, but it was, in the end, of no real military value.

So, when Eisenhower took up his post, he got not only the British Army, Navy, and Air Force to help him accomplish his objective, but the use of every German spy in Britain.

THE QUESTION WAS
, how to use this invaluable asset to deceive the Germans. Before this query could be answered, the Allies had first of all to decide where and when and in what strength they were going to land, what other means of deception were available to them, and how these means could be used.