“GARBO proved to be the most successful double agent of all time.”

By Nigel West

IN APRIL OF 1943, the British Security Service (MI5) agreed to begin briefing the Prime Minister on its most classified operations.

Churchill was always fascinated by espionage and counter-intelligence, and occasionally he demanded more details about specific cases that caught his attention.

Here are some of the files that stood out.

Harlequin

Major Richard Wurmann, codenamed HARLEQUIN, was a German intelligence officer who was captured by Allied troops in North Africa in November 1942. While purporting to be a member of Germany’s Armistice Commission, Wurmann was in fact a senior military intelligence officer stationed in Algiers.

He was brought to London in January of 1943. After becoming convinced of the inevitability of Germany’s defeat, he offered to cooperate with his interrogators. Wurmann would go on to reveal a trove of intelligence to the Allies, including details of his work on previous assignments in Biarritz, Paris and Berlin. Specifically, he described the entire Abwehr establishment and detailed the staff and operations of the agency’s Kriegs Organisation in Madrid, where some 300 officers were engaged in espionage against the Allies.

Having been promised British citizenship, Wurmann adopted the identity of a Baltic nobleman, Count Heinrich Steinbock, but would later ask to become a regular prisoner-of-war. He was issued a regular Wehrmacht uniform and sent to a camp in the United States for the remainder of hostilities.

The Case of Charles Bedaux

One of the German spies compromised by HARLEQUIN was Charles Bedaux. A French industrialist and Nazi sympathizer, Bedaux had been especially close to Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII. Indeed, the one-time monarch had married at the tycoon’s sumptuous country home in France, the Chateau de Candé, in June 1937. Bedaux was eventually arrested by U.S. troops in Algiers and imprisoned in Florida where the FBI investigated and charged him with collaborating with the Nazis. It was revealed that under the sponsorship of the German occupation forces in Paris, he ran his extensive European business. It was also reported that he even intended to undertake a secret mission to West Africa. He died of a drug overdose in February 1944. Although Bedaux escaped criminal prosecution by way of his own suicide, he remains a controversial figure, closely associated with the Abwehr.

Codenamed Columbine

Further information about German intelligence was supplied to the Allies by one of the most important defectors of the war, Hans-Walter Zech-Nenntwich, codenamed COLOMBINE. Churchill had been intrigued by the SS obersturmfuhrer who switched sides in Stockholm after he allegedly had escaped from a Gestapo prison in Poland.

Zech-Nenntwich claimed to have served with Waffen SS units in Eastern Europe, but claimed that the atrocities he had witnessed horrified him. He conveniently omitted to mention his own role in the 22^nd SS Cavalry’s massacre of 3,00 Jews in Pinsk.

Having made contact with the British embassy in Sweden, COLUMBINE was interrogated in London and then, under the alias of “Dr. Sven Nansen,” participated in a series of clandestine “black radio” broadcasts to Germany transmitted from Woburn Abbey by the Political Warfare Executive. COLUMBINE ended the war as an interrogator and returned to Rhine-Westphalia in November 1945.

Zech-Nenntwich’s subsequent history became quite an embarrassment to the British authorities. He was convicted of corruption in 1950 and then in April 1964 was tried on war crime charges. Having been sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, he escaped to Egypt. He eventually surrendered and upon his release from custody lived out his days in Remagen, calling himself the Count Zech-Nenntwich.

The Mulberry Leak

Perhaps the most awkward moment of MI5’s reports to Churchill was an account in March 1944 of a security breach that threatened to jeopardize the Allies’ plans to launch the Normandy invasion. At the heart of Operation Overlord was the construction of two huge offshore harbours, codenamed MULBERRY, which would ensure the resupply of the 160,000 troops with food, ammunition, armour and other essential materiel. In the absence of any suitable deep water ports available on the heavily-defended French coastline, General Eisenhower arranged for hundreds of prefabricated concrete caissons to be towed across the English Channel from Weymouth. The components, codenamed PHOENIX, were built in river estuaries in England under conditions of the greatest secrecy. But one trade union official, unaware of their significance, had circulated a report about the project to his union colleagues, some of whom were based in neutral Ireland. Altogether 265 copies of the offending document were traced and destroyed, but the indiscretion could have alerted German spies known to be operating freely in the Irish Republic, which in turn might have compromised the entire D-Day plan. Churchill was outraged when MI5 reported the incident, but he was eventually placated when the Trade Union Congress promised to exercise greater security.

The Spy Who Saved D-Day

The operative who really fascinated Churchill was a Spanish officer working for Franco’s fascist regime who had secretly volunteered to MI5 as a double agent. With an unusually fertile imagination, Juan Pujol Garcia, codenamed GARBO, established himself in Portugal, where he set about fabricating wild tales for his Abwehr controller in Madrid. Eventually, the operative convinced his German handler that he had recruited an entire spy network in London. In reality, GARBO’s organization of 24 sub-agents existed only in his head, and with MI5’s support he concocted reports detailing their observations of military concentrations in the south-east of England, in anticipation of an Allied invasion of Europe. GARBO’s information about an imminent cross-Channel amphibious operation in the summer of 1944 was exactly what the Axis analysts had anticipated. The revelations served to persuade the German High Command that the D-Day landings in Normandy were nothing more than a diversionary feint designed to distract the enemy from the real invasion area, in the Pas-de-Calais. GARBO proved to be the most successful double agent of all time and the Allied exploitation of strategic deception ensured the success of D-Day, thereby earning him Churchill’s admiration.

Nigel West is the author of Churchill’s Spy Files. He specializes in security, intelligence, secret service and espionage issues. and is the European Editor of the World Intelligence Review, published in Washington DC. Churchill’s Spy Files is published by The History Press. Visit his website at: www.nigelwest.com