Spies Who Never Were by Hervie Haufler

Author:Hervie Haufler
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2006-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

FOR OPERATION TORCH, STRATEGIC DECEPTIONS

With the Middle East double agents having played a key role in Bernard Montgomery's victory at El Alamein, the next act in the show fell mainly to the tricksters in Britain. Garbo and his colleagues had begun to exploit their credibility with their spymasters by carrying out minor deceptions. Early agents such as Snow and Tate had subtly exaggerated Britain's readiness to withstand an invasion. Coastal defenses were stronger, the number of trained troops higher and the production of aircraft and warships greater than they actually were. By understating the range of British radar, the agents had led German bomber crews to believe they were safely outside the limits when, in fact, they were being tracked for action by RAF pilots and antiaircraft batteries. The morale and fighting spirit of the British people were represented as having only been strengthened by the Blitz.

The double agents had met a special request by Britain's Air Ministry. Concerned about the casualties and destruction resulting from the Luftwaffe's bombing of the cities, the ministry asked the Twenty Committee to advise the Germans that their bombers would have greater effect if they switched to attacking RAF airfields, since these were less well protected than the urban areas. The truth, of course, was the obverse. The ministry also sought, by this change, to increase the attrition rate of German planes. Goering's bombers did make the switch, and more of them came tumbling down.

While these were all gratifying achievements, the double-cross system by the summer of 1942 was ready for a diet of redder meat.

Tar Robertson felt driven, on July 15, 1942, to write an appeal to the military services to make better use of this remarkable instrument—this "powerful weapon"—that was now at their disposal. It was time, he wrote, for the services to go beyond the two hours a week that their representatives spent on monitoring the information the Twenty Committee proposed to transmit. Something more was needed if the German files were to be filled with the information the Allies would like to see there.

Robertson’s timing was fortuitous. As historian Michael Howard has put it: "During the last weeks of July the whole aspect of the war had changed." Anglo-American leaders had come to the decision to launch an Allied invasion of North Africa. This meant that the time of defensive operations was past; the Allies were going on the offensive. And as everyone acknowledged, deceptions were more possible and more likely to succeed when the operational plan was forward and aggressive rather than passive.

Archibald Wavell, that great advocate of deception, weighed in. By this time he had been transferred eastward to take charge of the war against the Japanese in India and Burma and had duly established a Far East deception unit. He wired Churchill with a new thought. Isolated deception plans such as those he was initiating in his new command, Wavell wrote, could only be "local and ephemeral" unless they were part of a "general deception plan on a wide scale.

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