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Aug. 25, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
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Edition 479 - Nigel West
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Well, the heat wave is over.
Storms as I record these words, and apologies for a bit of disruption in the podcast schedule, simply because, and I mentioned this on my Facebook page, I managed to acquire an ear infection, and they think it's something called otitis externa.
Basically swells up and closes your ear, and it's, well, unpleasant, I think, is a mild word to use for it.
So I've spent, right up until now, in fact, I'm still like that, essentially deaf to varying amounts in one ear, which makes recording and broadcasting challenging, shall we say.
But I'd just like to thank the two hospitals that I went to this week and also my doctor, Dr. Chung, who I went to this week, who were tremendously sympathetic and very helpful.
And at the moment, I'm still on antibiotics and dealing with this thing.
And hopefully my ear will clear and I'll be able to, you know, hear my broadcast better.
But that's what's delayed me this week.
So hopefully we're getting back on track.
Thank you very much for all of the emails.
I have been looking at them throughout the week.
And it's very kind of you.
If you want to get in touch with me, please go to the website theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can send me a message from there.
Thank you to Adam, my webmaster, for his hard work.
And thank you as ever to Haley for booking the guests.
On this edition, this is a changed version, slightly longer version of my conversation on radio with the spy writer Nigel West.
We're going to talk about intrigue and espionage and Operation Overlord, which was the one part of World War II that swung things in the Allies' way.
It was essentially the way that the Germans were deceived into believing that we were going to invade in one place when in fact we invaded in quite another.
It involved a network of agents and double agents.
It involved a lot of people on the ground keeping their mouths shut and doing unusual and different things, as you will hear.
So it's Nigel West, the spy writer, will talk about espionage and World War II on this edition.
It's a subject that fascinates me.
And all my life, I think it's probably because of the generation that I was born into, I was fascinated by and have been fascinated by World War II.
And it's interesting that the younger generation now maintain that interest in how the world could get itself into a situation like that.
And let's hope that never happens again.
So thank you very much for all of the emails and all of the support this week.
Let's get now to Kent and to famous spy writer Nigel West and the story of Operation Overlord and the secrecy and the double dealings behind it.
Nigel, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
Hello, pleasure.
Now, I made a point there at the beginning of all of this that many people are fascinated and intrigued by World War II in an ongoing way.
And people who wouldn't have been alive then and maybe haven't even got relatives who are alive then.
What do you think is the fascination of that period?
I think there are several.
The first is that this is the first major conflict of the era, or maybe the last conflict of the era, where there was a clear-cut issue, that this was good against evil.
This was the Allies against the Nazis.
This was freedom against oppression and tyranny.
And I think that the political issues were so clear-cut that that in some ways is quite comforting when you think of the compromises that are made in foreign policy issues.
I mean, if the world was all black and white and the issues to be decided by politicians were very straightforward, then life would be much easier.
But of course, we live, particularly today, in a rather grey area where the choices very often are between bad decisions in foreign policy and really bad decisions.
Who would want to be in government?
But that, I think, is what we look back on the Second World War principally, thinking that this was a conflict where the issues were very clear-cut.
They were.
I mean, it was the fascism versus freedom, I guess, was the way that you could boil it down.
And that's why it was the conflict that it was.
And that's why the firestorm that was World War II engulfed the world, including the Asia-Pacific region, which a lot of people forget that war, but British people paid a heavy price in that.
So we're talking about this from an espionage and a spying perspective, which is a fascinating thing to do.
What is it that made you want to look at that aspect of World War II?
Well, when I was still at school, I read a book by a man called Sigismund Pen Best, who wrote an extraordinary autobiographical account of his own experiences in the Second World War.
And he was a British secret intelligence service officer who was abducted on the Dutch border at Venlo in November 1939.
And he spent the whole of the war incarcerated in Nazi Germany.
But he wrote this extraordinary book detailing his work in Holland before his abduction, the circumstances in which he was kidnapped just outside the town of Venlo.
And this was such an extraordinary book.
But what irritated me particularly about the book was that it was all about Colonel X and Major Y and Captain Z. He wasn't prepared to use real names.
And I thought, wow, if we could have the full story with the real names of the people concerned, wouldn't that be extraordinary?
And wouldn't they all have amazing stories to tell?
And so that's really what was the incentive for me to undertake research into what I guess you'd call the clandestine world during that particular conflict.
But those operations were, by definition, Secret.
And even though a lot of things that were classified, of course, after the war were declassified so that historians could investigate them, I guess you must still have discovered a lot of blank space.
Oh, the challenge was enormous.
And when I started researching the Second World War and secret operations, there was no such word as declassification.
The idea of material being declassified and deposited into what was then the public record office was a fantasy.
So it was an issue about doing the right thing at the right time, because you'll recall that it wasn't until 1972 that we learned about double agents run by MI5, the British Security Service,
and it wasn't until 1974 that the revisionists had the opportunity to effectively rewrite the history of the conflict by disclosing details of ULTRA, the decryption and the solving of so many cipher systems used by the enemy during the Second World War.
Then there was a period of exaggeration.
The war was won by secret intelligence.
And now we're getting back to a balance with access to many of the original documents that have been released to what is now the National Archives at Kew, that I promise you are a most extraordinary treasure trove of information.
If you know what to look for.
Even if you don't know what to look for, I stumbled across documents in a file that turned out to be the only monthly reports from MI5 to the Prime Minister during the Second World War.
They were badly labelled.
They were disorganized.
They were all in the wrong order.
It wasn't obvious what they were.
And I found myself looking at the original reports because no copies were made.
None were taken by the Prime Minister.
There were no copies retained by the Cabinet Office or 10 Downing Street.
So the papers that I had in my hand at Kew included the very distinctive handwriting of Winston Churchill asking for more details of particular secret operations.
I mean, really, this was holding history in one's hand, literally.
And Churchill himself, the operations that we're going to talk about and the machinations that we're about to talk about, would he have known about and signed off on all of them?
No, he signed off on a limited amount of them.
He was consulted.
He liked the product.
He would be brought every day by Stuart Ming is the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, individual intercepts that Minges thought would attract Churchill's attention.
But what was, I found, really quite remarkable, that it wasn't until 1942 that Duff Cooper had a very remarkable encounter one Sunday afternoon with the Prime Minister.
And after lunch, I'm paraphrasing what took place, but Churchill turned to Duff Cooper, who was his minister without portfolio in the cabinet, and said, Duff, what are you doing these days?
And Duff Cooper said, well, I'm your Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Prime Minister, being a little surprised by the question.
And Churchill then said, yes, Duff, but what do you actually do?
And Cooper replied, well, Prime Minister, as a matter of fact, I run MI5.
I'm responsible for the security service and all its operations.
And then there was another long silence, and Churchill said, but what does MI5 do?
And that became the beginning of the monthly reports.
Duff Cooper went back to MI5's headquarters on Monday morning and called in the Director General, Sir David Petri, and the head of B-Branch counter-espionage, a man called Guy Liddell, and said, the Prime Minister has no idea what we're doing.
I think that we should provide him with a monthly report.
I think that's going to astonish so many people that the Prime Minister If the Prime Minister isn't apprised of all of that, I think people outside would find that a shock.
Well, it is surprising when you consider that the Prime Minister had a long history of involvement with intelligence, had actually signed off on the very first telephone intercepts way back at the turn of the century when he was Home Secretary.
So I think that he was pulling Duff Cooper's leg a little bit.
Genuinely, the idea that Churchill had an intimate knowledge of all the various different secret organizations and their activities and participation in individual operations is, I'm afraid, completely fanciful.
He was fascinated, and that is clear from the monthly reports that MI5 submitted to the Prime Minister.
And he asked for more information, and he was very keen to know about the double agents and their true identities.
And those people, it goes without saying, risk their lives.
Those people who went across into enemy territory appeared to be something that they weren't, maybe helped the resistance, I guess, in some cases, but in other cases, they were there to divine vital information to pass back.
They were risking their lives, but of course, after the war, for a good period, they would have been unsung heroes.
Perhaps many of them still are.
That's certainly true.
The secret operations, sorry, the special operations executive remained a secret organization until the late 1940s when people started to write about their activities.
The double agents were completely banned from making any kind of a disclosure really until 1970 when it turned out that John Masterman, who had been in MI5 and chaired the coordinating committee that supplied information to the enemy.
He had taught at Oxford both the Prime Minister Ted Heath and the Foreign Secretary, Alec Douglas Hume.
And he bullied both of them into giving him permission to publishing a copy of a report that he had written in 1945 about MI5 double agent operations.
And that was the first time that anybody really outside the organization had the slightest idea of the scale of the double agents.
And then the issue was, well, what did the double agents do?
And then that opened the Pandora's box of strategic deception.
The idea that the Germans had been misled, for example, about the landings on D-Day, that they had expected the landings to be in the Pas de Calais.
Of course, we know now about the Battle of Normandy.
So the sequence of double agents, strategic deception, and then being able to exploit the disadvantage of the enemy and take control of the Axis intelligence organizations was really an extraordinary achievement, but didn't become known to the public really until the 1970s.
And before we tell this story, let's just ask this, and this will end this segment, but it's important that we do.
Who were the spy masters?
Who were the people who were in charge?
Both on the British and the American side, who were the people who were pulling the strings?
They were people mainly with experience from the First World War.
There is a very distinct thread of experience dating back to the First World War, where you have people like Stuart Minges, Guy Liddell, on the American side, Alan Dulles, who had participated to some extent in clandestine operations or had military experience, and they applied that experience in the Second World War.
So many of the lessons from the First World War were applied in the Second, and that included double agents, it included networks in enemy-occupied territory, the so-called train watchers of the First World War, the beginnings of signals intelligence, the interception of enemy traffic, the prediction of where the Zeppelins and the Kaiser Marine were going to deploy warships into the North Sea.
All of this kind of information was exploited in its infancy in the First World War, and then it became much more sophisticated in the second.
But it was the same personalities involved.
And you give an account, and there's a narrative there that I wasn't expecting, of the efficiency of the other side.
We tend to think of ourselves as being much better at all of these things.
But the Germans were pretty good themselves.
The Germans had a very efficient security and intelligence apparatus.
They ran very good double agent operations.
They effectively penetrated and actually administered most of the SOE networks in France, in occupied France during the Second World War.
And when it came to code breaking, there were about 60,000 people employed by the Germans in cryptographic operations.
And incidentally, I know you read so much nonsense about code breaking during the Second World War.
And people say that the Enigma machine was unbreakable or it was broken by the first programmable analog computer.
I'm afraid the Germans knew perfectly well the shortcomings of Enigma and they actually broke the Enigma cipher system used by the Swiss during the Second World War.
What they didn't anticipate was how quickly the Allies could read the traffic.
They thought that it would take months, if not years, to be able to read the traffic and that Enigma was therefore quite safe.
Although they made some miscalculations, there is, I'm afraid, an awful lot of disinformation that has been published about clandestine operations during the Second World War.
Well, it's a real revelation to know that the Germans knew that Enigma would be broken at some point.
All of the movies give you the impression that they had the feeling that this was a completely unbreakable system, unbeatable system.
And they knew that every code eventually has somebody that will break it.
It's just a matter of time.
And they overestimated that amount of time.
We're talking with spy writer Nigel West, and we're talking about the crucial, game-changing, pivotal action of World War II.
Operation Overlord was the code name.
Nigel, I think we need to explain first then, what was the genesis of Operation Overlord?
Who came up with the idea and why did they come up with that idea?
It was the deception planners who came up with the idea of misleading the enemy about where there was going to be an invasion.
An invasion was inevitable.
Everybody knew that the Allies were going to have to establish a toehold back on Nazi-occupied Europe.
The issue was really exactly where the invasion was going to take place and when.
And what is remarkable looking back, particularly with the benefit of the declassified documents that we know now, we can probably say that the origins of Overlord lay in deception operations that were conducted in the Middle East.
So up until really the beginning of 1943, various intelligent successes in the Mediterranean theater had given the idea and the opportunity for strategic deception to take place in northern France.
I mean, let me give you an example.
The Allies were very anxious, particularly in 1941 and 1942, to mislead the enemy about the strength, or rather, the relative weakness of empire forces right across the Middle East.
And there was a determination to mislead the enemy about Allied intentions, strengths, and of course, weaknesses.
So the Allies needed a conduit to mislead the enemy and indicate strength where the Allies were weak and give false information indicating weakness where the Allies intended to be strong.
And the principal conduit for that deception campaign, or a series of campaigns across the Middle East and in the Mediterranean, involving particularly Malta and the invasion of Sicily, was a single spy.
His name was Renato Levi, and he was a British passport holder, but he was an Italian playboy, and he had been educated in Switzerland during the First World War, spoke French, lived in northern Italy.
His parents were well off.
His mother was a film star.
His father was a boat builder.
And he worked for the French, the Germans, the Italians, and the British as a double agent.
And what was so extraordinary about this individual was that he went to Cairo and maintained a radio link with the Germans throughout most of the war.
He was the longest serving double agent of the Second World War, and he persuaded the enemy that the true objective of the Allies was to attack Greece.
He exaggerated the strengths of the Allies in Egypt, and of course he played a key role in the Battle of El Alamein.
So were the Germans blindsided by this man because he was well off and he might have seemed to them the kind of chap who couldn't be double-crossing you?
Renato Levy was Jewish, so that should have been a clue for the Germans.
But because he performed so well initially in 1940 as a German spy in Paris, cooperating with the Dezien Bureau, the Germans accepted him.
And when he went back to Italy after his first mission in France, he was considered something of a hero, and that's why he was entrusted with the mission to Cairo.
But when he got to Cairo, he needed a wireless link to the Germans.
And so he recruited a deputy who was a radio operator.
And because his British case officer, a man called Evan Simpson, had a highly developed sense of humor, he was a contributor to the spectator, as it happens, in a bit of a theatrical impresario, he, when asked his identity, told the Germans through Renato Levy, he said, my name is Paul Nikozoff.
And the Germans believed this and asked Renato Levy, where did you get Mr. Nikozoff from?
Who is he?
And Renato Levy replied that he is a Syrian of Russian extraction.
Now, of course, really, there was no such person as Paul Nikozov.
And the Germans never got the joke.
No.
Perhaps if it had been Knickers, they might have got it.
But isn't that extraordinary?
You would think that people who are so intelligent and so skilled in the art of subterfuge as the German side would have been would have picked up on those things.
But it seems to me, and perhaps some of this will become obvious in the Overlord story, that the bigger the lie, the more likely it is to pass.
Well, I think also there is a part of a German character, it's a part of the German character that they don't really have a highly developed sense of humor, and they had no concept of strategic intelligence or strategic deception.
They found it very hard to imagine that grown-up people would spend their time inventing military units, creating components of sophisticated orders of battle, and go to very elaborate lengths to deceive.
And they found that absolutely incredible.
And from the British perspective, the success of Renato Levy, who was codenamed Cheese on the British side, the success of the Cheese operation indicated to the deception planners and those who were taking the gamble in Normandy that there was a real opportunity here to exploit what had been achieved in the Middle East by Renato Levy and
apply the cheese principles to the invasion of northern France.
And that is precisely what happened.
The staff who had managed cheese in Cairo were brought back to England and set to work to deal with just a handful of double agents who were entrusted with providing the similarly misleading messages as pioneered by Renato Levey.
And we have to say that the climate that he was working in, the location that he was working in, would have been the most tricky and difficult for somebody doing that kind of thing because the Middle East at that time, one of my favorite books is The Key to Rebecca by Ken Follett.
And that talks about, you know, Alexandria in those days and various other places in Egypt and the fact that everybody was present, the Germans were present, the Americans were present, the Egyptians were present, the British were present, everybody was present, but everybody was working for everybody else and a lot of people had divided loyalties.
Oh, yes.
And Renato Levy was there to exploit many of these contexts.
So he not only had Paul Nikozoff as his principal assistant, he also recruited a network of people, including somebody who was codenamed BGM.
I could never work out what the initials BGM stood for, but it turned out that she was a Cretan woman sleeping with, seemed to me to be about half the Greek navy and army based in Egypt.
And eventually I found a message which said BGM's reputation is greatly exaggerated.
She didn't kill her last lover.
She simply threw him off the top of their apartment block.
And BGM stood for blonde gunbole.
So there was humor, there was levity in the most serious of situations.
Well, I think looking back on it, it's clear that Evan Simpson didn't really understand what he was getting involved with and got in slightly over his head.
And he wouldn't have taken the risk of the Paul Nikosoff joke if he had realized the gravity of the situation.
But the deception planners were so successful across the Middle East.
It was so impressive.
And they had such an impact on the success of military operations, particularly at El Almein, that this became a key component of the operation in Normandy.
But what you can't do is look at the Normandy operation and the D-Day landings in isolation without first understanding the way that Renato Levy had pioneered strategic deception right across the Middle East.
Now, some nations, if they were planning a pivotal move in a war, which Overlord was, and the invasion of Normandy was, we had to invade at some time, and we had to invade somewhere.
But some people and some nations would not necessarily feel that subterfuge and lying about it had to be a part of it.
Why is it that it became a cornerstone of this operation for the British, the Allies?
Well, the reason I think you'd say is because of the size of the gamble.
I mean, just try and imagine the risk of establishing 160,000 troops in good order, fighting fit, on the beaches of northern France, having crossed one of the most difficult areas of water in the world.
They had to be in a condition delivered to the combat area where they would be able to fight.
And that in itself was a considerable risk.
Secondly, the opportunities to cross the channel on such a scale undetected were next to nothing.
So the Allies looked at the problem and came up with a very ingenious solution.
They looked at the problem from a German military analyst standpoint and said it is perfectly clear that you want to bring those men across the channel over the shortest possible distance.
That means that they are at sea getting seasick for a minimum amount of time.
It means that they have maximum amount of air cover.
That aircraft will spend most of their time flying over the combat zone, giving ground support to the troops.
Don't forget that Spitfire had less than 20 seconds worth of firepower.
So a large amount of its time over the combat zone would be spent refueling and rearming and flying back and forth from their air bases.
So all of this mitigated towards one single solution, and that was taking the troops across the shortest part of the channel, which was to the Pas de Calais.
And that's the calculation that the Germans made.
And they were right to think that it would be folly, or at least a huge gamble, to risk an invasion across any other route.
There were lots of other considerations.
They knew, for example, that in June 1944, the secret weapon, the V-1 doodlebug, would start bombarding London.
And they intended to flatten London.
And only the Germans knew of the date when they were going to commence operations.
And they believed that the launch sites in the Pas de Calais area would become of enormous political significance in London, that the population would demand the government try and remove and occupy northern France so as to stop the doodlebug attack.
So that was another consideration.
And then frankly, if your military objective is to drive a dagger through the heart of Nazi Germany, and you draw a line from London to Berlin, it goes through the Pas de Calais.
That's the shortest route to your enemy.
So anything else, a battle in Normandy, would be, to the German strategic analysts, just a diversion, a waste of time.
And so it was that miscalculation that the Allies were able to exploit.
And they exploited it with the kind of deception that we're familiar with, the camouflage, the fake radio signals, the double agent messages, and all the other various components that made up the jigsaw of intelligence that the German analysts put together and came up with the wrong answer.
And Nigel, you say in the book MI5, sustained an expanding stable of captured spies, willing volunteers, and enthusiastic mercenaries to such an extent that it effectively came to manipulate all the secret messages transmitted to the Abwehr, the Germans basically handlers, either in the mail or by radio.
That's an astonishing feat.
Well, there were a very limited number.
There were just three radio spies in England at that time.
The most important was a Spaniard.
His name was Juan Pujol, but his code name was Garbo because he was the best actor in the world.
And he controlled a network of about 24 sub-agents, sub-sources spread right across the country.
And he was in direct radio contact every night from his wireless transmitter in London, transmitting to his Abwehr controller in Madrid up to three hours a night.
The Germans had perfected a technique of effectively concealing the nature of his traffic by making it appear to be British military traffic.
And so the Garbo case was very successful because of the length of time that he was able to transmit.
And the Germans felt confident in the network that they knew as Arabel.
And this was an organization that they could deploy across the United Kingdom.
So they could send an agent to Essex, they could have somebody report from Norwich, they could send somebody up to Edinburgh, they could make observations in Glasgow.
They had a network that they came to rely on.
All of this was controlled by Garbo, who of course was actually a British double agent.
So that was very effective.
There was a second not-so-reliable radio source who was a Polish officer called Roman Garbo-Zhenewski, and his codename was Brutus.
And he supposedly worked for the 1st United States Army Group as a liaison officer, preparing leaflets for the invasion.
And he was quite useful, but he couldn't be on the radio every single day.
And then finally, there was a German spy, a very interesting character called Wolf Schmidt, who had parachuted into Cambridgeshire in September 1940.
And he had been ostensibly at liberty.
He was working on a farm in Kent, and he was able to make personal observations about the railway traffic passing down the railway lines near where he lived.
And he was the third major source for the Germans.
So you can see that of those three radio spies, the Germans needed information instantaneously.
And their best of three options was Garbo.
And of course, Garbo was arguably the most sophisticated, the most successful double agent operation of all time, not just the Second World War.
But in order for us to be able to make this happen and deceive the Germans, we had to use an awful lot of people, presumably in this country, who would themselves unwittingly be fed with false information that they would pass on to Garbo.
Well, wouldn't you think so?
But of course, the reason why Garbo was considered to be such a great actor was that all his sub-agents existed only in his head.
They weren't real people.
His deputy, who he claimed was a Venezuelan student at Glasgow University, was actually Gabo.
The Indian nationalist based in Dover was actually Garbo.
His girlfriend, who worked in the cabinet office, was also part of Garbo's imagination.
And he created this network out of whole cloth.
They simply didn't exist.
They were on a box of cards and a card index, and there was no internal contradiction in their traffic.
And every single message was received by Gabo, rewritten by him, processed, and then transmitted to Madrid.
And he could respond to the German requests for particular agent operations at various locations around the United Kingdom.
He could report on the shoulder flashes seen on troops with uniforms in Shropshire.
They could report on the insignia on a tank seen in Southampton.
All of this was figments of Garbo's imagination.
They simply didn't exist.
What an astonishing operation.
In the next segment, I think, Nigel, we're going to talk about the way that this worked, partly through that Spanish dimension, which is very important, but also, of course, how we brought this to fruition, how we were able to fool the Germans into thinking that we really were going to cross and invade in Calais, when in fact the plan was to go to Normandy, as we remember, and succeed there.
A highly daring thing to do.
Spain is very important in this story.
Why is that?
Well, remarkably, Spain, during the Second World War, was effectively the gateway to the West and to the United Kingdom.
If you were based at the Abwehr headquarters in Berlin and you wanted to send an agent to South America or to the United States or to London, your best route was through Spain.
That was your direct access.
So the overwhelming number of agents who were deployed to those various different targets were deployed through Spain.
And so Spain was a relatively low-cost route and the logistics of deploying a spy through Spain and then to Portugal was far less complex than the alternatives, which might have been through the Middle East or might have been through Stockholm and Scandinavia.
So the route was well established and it was exploited by the Germans.
And of course, the Germans had a substantial staff in Madrid: 400 intelligence officers and intelligence personnel based in Madrid with outstations at 17 different consulates and other buildings around Spain.
So it was a very impressive network supported, of course, by substations in Portugal and in other ports around Seine.
So it was a very substantial investment by the Germans and a very worthwhile one.
We have to say, just for the benefit maybe of our younger listeners who haven't watched as many war movies as you or I have watched, the Abwehr is the German military intelligence.
So we tend to assume that people know what Luftwaffe is, various other terms, but the Abwehr was the military intelligence.
So they were the people who were in charge of all of this.
In Spain, a whole cast of characters were involved in this.
One of them, you quote, is a Madame Ruth, a baroness.
Yes, the Germans had all sorts of advantages.
They had, for example, support not just of their own staff, and their staff, by the way, were very sophisticated, including the lady that you mentioned.
So many of them were married into Spanish families, had strong Spanish connections, spoke Spanish fluently, and had been in support of Franco since the Spanish Civil War.
A surprising number of the German intelligence personnel in Spain had experience with the Condor Legion.
That was the Luftwater support, air support, for Franco's forces during the Spanish Civil War.
So they were very well established.
But you're not just talking about the Germans, because of course it covered the whole Axis.
The Bulgarians, the Hungarians, the Italians, the Vichy French, all of them were engaged in intelligence operations in Spain and in Portugal in support of the Germans.
So the Allies were actually really very isolated indeed.
The British, which, for example, in Lisbon had a very small secret intelligence service staff of about eight people altogether, were surrounded by about 800 Axis intelligence adversaries.
So this was a very one-sided battle.
It is an astonishing story.
And to read that ultimately, the Führer became positively convinced that the enemy will commence the invasion by the end of May and convinced that it would be in the place where actually it wasn't going to happen.
That is astonishing.
So you have to be seeding the other side, the Germans, with false information at every turn.
That's an amazing operation in scale, isn't it?
It is.
But you have to accept that the Germans were predisposed to believe that the Pas de Calais was the obvious military option and that a gamble anywhere else would amount to sheer madness.
So all we needed to supply them with is reinforcement for what they believed already.
Precisely.
The idea of invading northern France without capturing a major port for the logistical supply of the troops was insane.
The idea of being able to support an invasion without sufficient fuel was a recipe for disaster.
The reality is, and we now know, that the Allies built their own ports off the beaches of Normandy.
They never captured a major port intact.
And as a consequence of that, we floated across the English Channel the Mulberry Harbours, which was building pre-constructed, prefabricated caissons and creating these two massive harbours off the beaches.
Now that was sheer genius to do that, but it goes further than that.
What about Pluto?
In order to be able to supply the Allies with the fuel that was required, the Allies invented a brilliant piece of kit, which was a steel pipeline that could be uncoiled.
And it had a very sophisticated code name, Pipeline Under the Ocean, Pluto.
And that extended from Knighton, right on the southern tip of the Isle of Wight.
That extended a fuel supply from Knighton right the way across to the Normandy beaches.
So again, this was the longest route across the English Channel, and no wonder the Germans weren't expecting it.
So they were able to put the pipeline down without the Germans suspecting it, because the Germans weren't expecting that such a thing could happen.
Well, first of all, technologically, it was impossible to coil, or it was thought to be impossible to coil a pipeline, but that was accomplished.
Secondly, there was the issue of a major port.
The idea of prefabricated ports and towing them across the channel was utterly fanciful.
Where would you hide the components?
Well, they were hidden underwater in the Solent and off the south coast of Kent and Sussex.
So again, how extraordinary to take these components out into the ocean and submerge them and then Produce them at the right moment and tow them across to Normandy.
All very high-risk gambles, but they paid off.
And on top of all of that, there was a German misunderstanding of the scale of the Allied forces in the UK.
And secondly, their deployment.
Now, this is really important, because when the invasion started in Normandy, the Germans were told by Garbo that this was a mere diversionary feint and that they should wait two weeks for the real invasion in the Paducah, which of course fitted in with the German assessment of what Allied intentions were.
But more importantly, the Germans became convinced of this because they knew of the existence of an entire army concentrated in the southeast of England called the First United States Army Group, Fusag.
And what again makes this part of the story so extraordinary is that when the first troops landed in Normandy and were captured by the Germans, they realized on questioning those prisoners of war that none of them came from units that were part of the order of battle of the 1st United States Army Group,
which served to confirm to the Germans that the Allies were holding back an entire army in the southeast of England ready to launch across the English Channel.
And of all of the double dealing, of all of the double agency, of all of the spy operations on either side that made this happen, that made this possible, which do you think is the greatest act of audacity and bravery on either side?
Well, I think in terms of strategic deception, the field is very limited because there were only three radio spies directly involved.
There was another lady who was sending letters, but of course, by definition, there was a considerable delay between her posting a letter in London and it being received three weeks later in Portugal by the Germans.
So you're really down to three people, and one of them, I think, is arguably one of the most remarkable spies of the Second World War, Wolf Schmidt, whose codename was Tate because he looked so much like the music hall comedian of that time, Harry Tate.
And Wolf Schmidt was the German spy who landed in Cambridgeshire in September 1940.
And he was a committed Nazi.
But when he was driven to his MI5 interrogation center in Richmond, right the way through the center of London, he realized that he had been lied to.
He had been told that the Luftwaffe had effectively flattened London, and London was on the brink of collapse.
And when he was driven from Cambridge to Richmond, he saw for himself that life was pretty close to normal right the way through the center.
That and he was threatened.
There was a very remarkable psychiatrist at Camp 020, which was the MI5 interrogation center, a man called Harold Dearden, who sat at the end of Tate's bed, gave him a bottle of whiskey and said, now listen, my boy, what are we going to do with you?
They're going to hang you tomorrow.
And that was enough to persuade Wolf Schmidt that it was time for him to get into the deception business.
So he became a double agent.
And how could we be sure that we could trust him?
Well, what was so extraordinary about Wolf Schmidt was that he was somebody who was transmitting from Kent and his signals were being picked up in Hamburg.
And under normal circumstances, so in the case of Brutus or in the case of Garbo, it was possible to monitor their wireless traffic.
And because we were reading the Abwehr's Enigma traffic, we were also able to see the German reaction to that traffic.
That didn't happen in the example of Tate, because the communication between the Abwehr receiving station in Hamburg and Abwehr headquarters in Berlin was by landline.
So uniquely, we couldn't monitor the German reaction to Tate.
And so that's why there was a great element of trust in Tate.
And he simply persuaded MI5 that he was trustworthy and that he wanted to remain in England, as indeed he did for the rest of his life.
Was he rewarded after the war?
Yes, he received a British passport.
MI5 was somewhat embarrassed in July 1945 when they discovered that before he'd even received British citizenship, he'd actually voted for Churchill in the general election.
But it wasn't until 1981 that I was able to track him down to his house in Watford and then accompany him a couple of years later to the very field where he landed, having been dropped by the Luftwaffe in Cambridgeshire.
And I was accompanied by his case officer, who was a man called Russell Lee.
And I was accompanied by the head of the double agent deception unit In MI5, a man called Tommy Robertson, and we had a very jolly lunch.
And it was as though these three men had been transported back to 1940.
Isn't that interesting?
And Tate, unfortunately, we're coming to the end of this, but you're an astute person who makes observations.
That's why you write books.
What was it about Tate that made him able to do this?
I'm kind of thinking of inner steel or a sense of disregard for your own safety.
What do you think it was?
I share ultimately it was a highly developed sense of self-preservation.
Really?
But he was actually, although he was of German origin, he came from a part of Streswig-Holstein, which was actually in Denmark.
And so he had divided loyalties at the beginning.
He had never particularly liked Germany, although he was a member of the Nazi party.
And he had gone to Cameroon in order to find living in a German colony.
And he didn't much like that.
So he was almost predisposed to, he was an adventurer at heart, but he was predisposed to be sympathetic to the British.
And then when he realized the way in which the Germans had lied to him about what he would find in England, that irritated him enormously.
And then just the sheer common decency, the way that he was treated by the British at his interrogation center and the influence that Harold Dearden, who is one of the great unsung heroes of the Second World War,
who supervised the interrogation of almost all the double agents, he was a very remarkable man, undertook the psychological assessments of the individual spies and decided who could be turned, who was beyond hope.
And I'm afraid that there were 13 altogether who were executed.
Really?
Do you think there are still double agents today?
Oh, I know that there are plenty of double agents today.
I was talking to one the day before yesterday who spent his entire career in the United States.
He's now an academic in Germany, but he had a completely different life undetected in the United States.
He worked as a computer engineer just outside Queens in New York, and he was never caught by the FBI.
He completed his mission for the KGB and went back to East Germany.
And his principal assistant was his wife.
How astonishing.
And all of this proves that the key factor in many of these things is human psychology and the ability of some people to accept a lie and the ability of other people to propound a lie.
It is an amazing story.
And really, we've only scratched the surface of the Overlord experience, Nigel.
And thank you for that.
The book is called Code Word Overlord.
And Nigel West, thank you for spending this time with me.
Thank you.
A pleasure.
Nigel West and the story of Operation Overlord.
The book that Nigel wrote is Code Word Overlord.
And it's one of his many books about espionage and spying that are among the best of their kind in the world.
That's why he is as acclaimed as he is.
And I thank him for making time for me.
More great guests in the pipeline here with The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for all of your nice emails and for your kind support recently.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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