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00:00On a spring morning in 1944, a glamorous young woman, dressed to kill and wearing too much
00:09make-up, cycled through the country lanes of southern England on a mission from her
00:15German spy master.
00:19Her mission was to report on the build-up of Allied forces for the coming invasion of
00:24Europe, D-Day.
00:28She was building a detailed picture that, in the hands of the enemy, could destroy the
00:33Allied chances of a successful assault on occupied France.
00:38Her German spy master was delighted with her reports, congratulating her on her sterling
00:43work for the Third Reich.
00:45In fact, this German spy was not what she seemed.
00:50Every word she sent was false.
00:56Her lies were part of a web of espionage that drove the biggest deception in military
01:01history, and helped ensure Allied victory on the beaches of Normandy.
01:09A complete world of military fiction was created.
01:13There were events which never took place.
01:18I went a few dozen of times to meet the Germans.
01:22I never felt absolutely certain that I should come back.
01:29He was really entering the lines then.
01:32He could have been betrayed at any time.
01:35I think it was overwhelmingly exciting, because it were playing with fire.
01:53On the morning of June 6th, 1944, 150,000 Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy
02:02and broke into Nazi-occupied France.
02:10Today we think of D-Day as a great military victory, but it was not just the heroic action
02:16of the brave soldiers that won the day.
02:19Alongside the Allied troops that day was another unseen force.
02:24They fought not with guns, bombs and bullets, but with subterfuge and stealth, and a web
02:30of espionage spun from a thousand little lies.
02:37Five spies whose mission was to do nothing less than invade and control the mind of the
02:42man at the very top of the Third Reich.
02:47Adolf Hitler.
02:54Each of them had begun their careers working for the Germans, and their stories would culminate
03:00in a tale of triumph and tragedy that nobody would have believed at the time, and barely
03:05seems believable now.
03:17Throughout the war, Hitler believed he had a fully functioning, highly efficient network
03:26of spies reporting on the British war effort.
03:29In fact, every one of those spies was acting as a double agent under British control.
03:36Not some, not most, but all of them.
03:43Since the breaking of the German Enigma Code in 1940, the British had been able to decipher
03:49German radio traffic, and that included spy traffic, information that would allow them
03:56to know when and where every spy sent by Hitler was due to arrive in Britain.
04:03The penalty for spying was death.
04:07But there was another option.
04:10The majority of agents gave themselves up, or reported immediately, because they wanted
04:17to work for us, and so it seemed sensible, when we got an agent, to at least pretend
04:23that he was operating freely, and this opened the possibility of using them for deception.
04:34Those who chose to work against the Führer now came under the control of Department B1A,
04:41the division of MI5 responsible for running double agents.
04:47The unit's presiding genius was Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Argyle-Robertson, known to his friends
04:53by his initials, Tar.
04:56His nickname was Passion Pants, on account of his tartan trousers and flirtatious manner.
05:03He was a natural gambler, with a ruthless streak, and an uncanny knack for seeing into
05:08the darker corners of the human mind.
05:17We were able to tell when an agent was coming over, and was being prepared to be sent to
05:22this country as a spy, so that you could welcome him.
05:26So that we could welcome him, which we did in no uncertain terms, I can assure you.
05:29We generally knew where he was going to arrive, and where he was going to arrive.
05:33He was a lovely man, he was frightfully good-looking, he sorted into the office in his tartan trous,
05:41and was always very friendly with everybody, and had a great sparkle in his eye.
05:51I don't think he was a scholar, particularly, but I think he had a certain sort of special
05:57brain, that was able to see round corners and invent things that would become believable
06:07if they were put across in a certain way.
06:10Tar Robertson planned espionage with the Top Secret 20, or Double Cross Committee.
06:17Churchill himself had assembled this group of men who could see around corners, because
06:22he knew that Hitler and his military tended to think in straight lines.
06:27The Germans' ruthless efficiency made them more vulnerable to deception.
06:32They were so proud of the fact that they'd got these agents in this country.
06:38Therefore, they're sort of more gullible.
06:41The 20 Committee now planned to gamble this pack of double agents on one great deception,
06:48even if this meant they could never be used again.
06:51D-Day was that opportunity.
06:57Hitler's war had become the bloodiest in history.
07:07The Holocaust was raging, and millions were dying in Russia and on the Eastern Front.
07:15The Allied commanders knew that the war could only be won by invading France
07:20and driving the Germans all the way back to Berlin.
07:24But Hitler had constructed a zone of death to defend the coast, the Atlantic Wall.
07:31And his forces greatly outnumbered the Allies.
07:35Churchill knew he couldn't win by brute strength alone.
07:39Everyone knew the invasion was coming.
07:42The vital question was where.
07:46Hitler believed an attack would come in Calais, the nearest French port to Britain,
07:52and here he massed a huge defensive force.
07:56It was the obvious target, and therefore the British decided not to attack it.
08:03Normandy was further away, but it had gently sloping beaches,
08:08ideal for landing thousands of troops.
08:11It was also less heavily defended than Calais.
08:19But for the invasion to succeed, the Allies had to ensure
08:23that the huge numbers of German troops around Calais stayed where they were.
08:29Because if they moved south and reinforced Normandy,
08:32then the breakthrough would not happen.
08:35And D-Day might end in a bloodbath.
08:41At Tehran in November 1943, the Allied leaders secretly agreed
08:46that Normandy would be the invasion target.
08:49Churchill turned to Stalin and remarked,
08:52the truth is so precious she must be protected by a bodyguard of lies.
08:58Thus was born the code name for the great D-Day deception, Operation Bodyguard.
09:05And Tarr's spies would form the bodyguard of lies to protect the Normandy invasion.
09:11It did occur to me we could give them true information
09:15laced with a certain amount of false information.
09:18And we were also able to build that up
09:23and introduce a certain amount of strategic deception.
09:28With his team of double agents, Tarr Robertson now went on the offensive.
09:33He realised he could take Hitler's prized espionage weapons and use them against him.
09:40From his stable of double agents, Tarr had selected the five spies
09:44he knew were most trusted by the Germans.
09:48They would each deliver to Hitler separate pieces of the jigsaw
09:52to create the picture they wanted him to see.
09:55An imminent attack on Calais of epic proportions.
10:00If Robertson's gamble paid off, the prize was victory.
10:05But if it failed and the plot was rumbled, then disaster loomed.
10:16If just one of his double agents should prove a triple agent,
10:21then instead of deceiving the Germans, Robertson would be leading the enemy to the truth
10:27and sending thousands of Allied troops to their deaths.
10:34In February 1944, the arch gambler Churchill gave the go-ahead.
10:40With three months to go until D-Day, the quintet went to war.
10:45One of Tarr Robertson's intelligence officers observed,
10:48I can't believe we'll ever get away with it.
10:58First out on the road was Agent Treasure.
11:05Her job was to cycle from town to town, collecting chicken feed.
11:10A mixture of truths, half-truths and downright lies
11:14delivered piecemeal to her German spymaster.
11:18I transmit a hodgepodge of badges, vehicles, tanks, planes and airfields
11:23garnished with conversations overheard,
11:26from which the Germans cannot fail to derive the correct conclusions.
11:32Her name was Lily Sergeyev.
11:35A Frenchwoman of Russian origin, her story begins two years earlier in a Paris cafe.
11:43As always, she was beautifully dressed and accompanied by her beloved pet,
11:47a terrier called Babs.
11:51Facing her was Major Emil Kleemann,
11:54a senior officer in German military intelligence.
11:58Vain and excitable, Kleemann was enchanted by Lily.
12:02She told him she wanted to spy for Germany,
12:05and when he asked her why, her answer was enigmatic.
12:09I could tell you that I love Germany or I hate the British,
12:13but if I was here to spy on you, do you think my answer would be any different?
12:18Kleemann was intrigued and gave her the job.
12:22He would send her to spy in Britain, travelling via neutral Spain.
12:26But if he had read the diary she was secretly keeping,
12:30Kleemann would have discovered that she was an unstable woman
12:33whose only loyalty was to her pet dog.
12:41Babs lifts up his shaggy, truffle-like nose and looks at me inquiringly,
12:45and I say in his pink ear,
12:48it's a grand game, but if we lose, we lose our lives.
12:55Once in Madrid, Lily knocked on the door of the British embassy
12:59and immediately offered her services to the Allies as a spy.
13:05She claimed her hold over Kleemann would make her an ideal double agent
13:09once she got to Britain.
13:12But there was a catch.
13:14Treasure insisted that Babs must come too.
13:20You probably think I'm ridiculous.
13:22To you, it's just a dog, but to me, it's Babs
13:26and worth more than a million pounds.
13:29The demand ran slap into one of the most cherished institutions
13:33of British bureaucracy, the quarantine laws.
13:36Babs would have to stay behind.
13:40Lily threw a tantrum, but in the end, a compromise was reached.
13:47Babs would be held in quarantine in British Gibraltar,
13:51with the promise that the dog would join Lily later in England.
13:56She handed him over to a British official,
13:59said her goodbyes and boarded the plane for England.
14:03Robertson knew that Lily might be a recipe for trouble,
14:07but an agent with a direct link to a senior German intelligence officer
14:11could be priceless.
14:13But what was Lily up to?
14:15Had she always intended to work for the British when she became a German spy?
14:19Where did her true allegiance lie, and might she switch sides again?
14:25Tarr Robertson said to me,
14:27I think there is no doubt that the German intelligence people
14:30have complete confidence in you.
14:34We can pull off what is known in the trade as an intoxication,
14:38the sort of thing intelligence men dream about.
14:41Lily had expected life as a spy to be glamorous and exciting.
14:45Tarr Robertson quickly turned to the German intelligence people
14:49and said,
14:52Tarr Robertson quickly put her straight.
14:55He installed her here, in a quiet block of flats in West London,
14:59and he appointed MI5's only woman case officer to keep an eye on her.
15:07Mary Shearer was solid, unromantic and resolutely English,
15:12everything that Lily was not.
15:16Mary always had a rather stern expression,
15:20and she would stare at you in a very meaningful way.
15:26One of her favourite expressions was,
15:29Stupid man!
15:33Mary always had a dog,
15:35so she would very much have been sympathetic to Lily's position,
15:40but I would say otherwise they were probably fairly diametrically opposed.
15:47I still cannot quite place her.
15:50Is she my jailer or nursery governess or what?
15:54I don't even know what she feels about me,
15:56though I suppose this doesn't matter very much.
15:59If only I could have my babs here.
16:02I have a feeling that everything will turn out all right.
16:05I think it's disgraceful the way they have behaved.
16:10Agent Treasure was just one element
16:13in the grand deception now being laid out across the country.
16:17The Germans needed to be convinced
16:19that the Allied spearhead was pointing at Calais.
16:28In order to create the deception,
16:30a vast American army was assembled in Kent,
16:35poised to attack Calais across the Straits of Dover.
16:44Had any spy planes been watching Kent,
16:47they would have seen a formidable invasion force gathering.
16:53From a distance, it would look strong enough
16:55to break through the Atlantic wall.
17:03But close up, it was a different story.
17:07To bolster the illusion of strength,
17:10large numbers of inflatable tanks and dummy aircraft
17:14were assembled in the Kent countryside,
17:17which would look like the real thing to German reconnaissance planes.
17:37We created an imaginary army
17:40and we gave the Germans the impression
17:43that we had available almost twice the number of troops
17:46that were in fact in existence.
17:48To lead this bogus army, a real general was appointed,
17:52the legendary pistol-toting victor of the Sicilian campaign,
17:56George Patton.
17:58An inspired choice because Hitler regarded the American general
18:02as his most formidable adversary.
18:06One of the lessons one learns in putting over a deception plan
18:10is not to explain it to the Germans, not to detail it,
18:15but to give them a mass of information
18:17from apparently different sources,
18:19which enables them to put the jigsaw puzzle together
18:22and draw their own conclusions.
18:28One of Tarr's agents was a Spaniard,
18:31a master of invention with an army of spies at his command.
18:36Juan Pujol had a diploma in chicken farming,
18:39an overactive imagination and a deep-seated hatred for Hitler.
18:46A natural performer and a man of many guises,
18:49Tarr Robertson codenamed him Garbo.
18:53He launched his campaign from an anonymous semi-detached house
18:57in the northern suburbs of London.
19:01Astonishingly, he had convinced the Germans
19:04that he was a committed Nazi
19:06with access to high-level British intelligence.
19:12And he did not act alone.
19:14Garbo recruited no less than 27 sub-agents.
19:19These included an army sergeant,
19:23an English secretary,
19:25a waiter from Gibraltar,
19:27a travelling salesman,
19:29two Venezuelan students
19:31and a disgruntled seaman from Swansea.
19:36But perhaps the most extraordinary part of the Garbo network
19:39was the Brothers of the Aryan World Order,
19:43a group of fanatical anti-Nazis
19:47Needless to say, none of these people existed.
19:51All 27 had been invented by Garbo.
19:59Garbo, on behalf of his 27 fake sub-agents,
20:03sent more than 500 wireless messages,
20:06each one reinforcing the fiction of a violent Nazi.
20:10Garbo sent more than 500 wireless messages,
20:14each one reinforcing the fiction
20:16of a vast American army assembling in Kent.
20:22His imaginary network spanned the country,
20:25the lies from each agent reinforcing the lies from the others.
20:30An illusion made all the more convincing
20:33after one agent who knew too much
20:35was suddenly eliminated from the spy ring.
20:38It was a massive undertaking
20:40and the stakes could not have been higher.
20:42One slip and the entire network would be revealed
20:45for the sham that it was.
20:49Unknown to Garbo or any of Robertson's double agents,
20:53the German response to every message sent
20:56was being monitored by the Allies' biggest secret,
20:59the codebreakers of Bletchley Park.
21:02German signals decoded at Bletchley
21:04revealed that many of Garbo's messages
21:06were being passed on word for word all the way to Berlin.
21:09In German minds, the Welsh fascists
21:12and all the rest of Garbo's network were entirely reliable
21:15and their reports were swallowed whole.
21:26German reinforcements poured into Calais
21:29to prepare for an invasion.
21:37MUSIC PLAYS
21:45The ruins of Hitler's Atlantic Wall
21:47still litter the landscape around Calais.
21:54A system of almost impregnable concrete casements
21:58that once bristled with guns.
22:01They were built by forced labour
22:03for a regime that believed it would last 1,000 years.
22:20The bunkers were a warren lived in by hundreds of men
22:24and deep inside these fortresses
22:27can be found a testament to the Nazis' belief
22:30in their invulnerability.
22:34Down here in the bunker, there's lots of graffiti
22:37showing just how confident the Germans were.
22:40There's one here that's addressed to WC, Winston Churchill.
22:44Whoever is bad must be punished
22:47and now you must pay for the bad thing you have started.
22:51And then there's another one over here
22:53which is a sort of two-faced caricature of Churchill himself.
22:57On the left, he's looking sort of very smug
22:59and out of his mouth is coming the word, victory,
23:02but then on the right, he's looking terrified
23:04and the cigar has dropped out of his mouth
23:06and he's saying, SOS, the international distress signal.
23:17Several hundred miles to the north of Calais,
23:20another deception was underway.
23:23While Garbo was busy inventing one army,
23:26another was being created up on the east coast of Scotland.
23:31This was the work of the third of Robertson's spies,
23:35Agent Brutus.
23:42Roman Chernafsky was a deeply patriotic Polish fighter pilot.
23:47A professional soldier who had devoted himself to becoming an expert spy.
24:18Thousands of signposts were put all around,
24:22but really there were no troops here,
24:26no units in this beautiful, quiet countryside like it's today.
24:37His espionage career began when Poland was invaded.
24:43He then fled to France and began working for the resistance
24:46and spying for the British.
24:49My father would casually walk down the street
24:52wearing his French beret and overcoat,
24:55clutching a stick of French bread,
24:58and in his right hand pocket he had a little stubby pencil and a notepad
25:04and he was very, very carefully noting down the insignia on German uniforms.
25:11He would scurry home to his flat
25:13and then radio back to London what he was seeing.
25:17But he and his network were betrayed and captured.
25:21The Germans then offered Chernafsky a stark choice.
25:25Spy for them on the British or see his comrades executed.
25:32There was a very powerful moral code
25:35that drove what he considered to be right or wrong conduct.
25:39In those crucial few months when he was negotiating
25:44and bargaining for his own freedom and the freedom of his agents,
25:48he believed overwhelmingly that what he was doing was right
25:52and good and in the interests of the country that he loved.
25:59To save the other members of his network,
26:02Chernafsky agreed to become a double agent against the British.
26:07But he had another trick up his sleeve.
26:12When the Germans faked his escape and sent him to Britain,
26:15he immediately turned himself in and began working as a triple agent.
26:22Tarr named him after the ancient Roman turncoat, Brutus,
26:26and appointed Hugh Astor as his case officer.
26:29We decided that Brutus could be a principal channel for deception.
26:36As a cover, he took a job working with the Polish army exiled in Britain.
26:43Occasionally I'd send him out on an espionage mission
26:46to see what he could pick up.
26:48In the space of two or three days,
26:50he'd come back with the most extraordinary amount of information.
26:56He'd draw a map showing where all the different units were stationed,
27:01identification signs, very often the commanding officer's name,
27:05and then I would use that as the basis of a report to send to the Germans,
27:09but changing the identity of the various units which he'd identified.
27:17As a professional soldier, Brutus's reports carried weight in Berlin.
27:23The army he now invented in Scotland
27:25was intended to do precisely the same thing as the fake army in Kent.
27:30By threatening an invasion of Norway,
27:32it might keep the occupying troops bottled up there
27:35and away from the real battlefields in Normandy.
27:41Brutus did not always send the messages himself.
27:44He had his own Polish operator who would transmit for him.
27:49A radio operator is always known as a pianist,
27:51and so his radio operator was codenamed Chopin,
27:55which seemed appropriate for a Polish pianist.
28:03Transmitting telegraphies is very much like handwriting.
28:06It can be identified.
28:08I would follow, as far as possible, his procedures,
28:12but substituting imaginary units for the real ones.
28:17So now two fake armies had been conjured into existence,
28:21one in Scotland and the other in Kent.
28:25Meanwhile, the real invasion army was beginning to mobilise in southern England
28:31for the biggest amphibious assault in history.
28:42150,000 Allied troops were secretly heading south towards Southampton.
28:51The entire Allied force was to be risked in one all-out assault on France,
28:57which would be led by the Supreme Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower.
29:01The stage is being set for the beginning of a great and crucial test all over the world.
29:07I am completely confident that the soldiers, sailors and airmen
29:13will demonstrate once and for all
29:16that an aroused democracy is the most formidable fighting machine that can be devised.
29:21I don't think we had a mental image of an enemy.
29:25We had a mental image of the Nazi party and what they were doing.
29:33They were the enemy. They were terribly bad people.
29:38And somebody had got to stop them.
29:40As part of Operation Bodyguard, Lady Dundas worked at General Eisenhower's headquarters.
29:46The goal was clear.
29:48But the D-Day secret was so precious,
29:51even those risking their lives knew where the invasion would take place.
29:58Only the top brass could know the whole truth.
30:02To provide Hitler with convincing information
30:05apparently gleaned from the highest quarters,
30:08Robertson played the most unlikely card in his hand,
30:12a bisexual Peruvian playgirl with the unimprovable name
30:16of Elvira Concepcion Josefina de la Fuente Chaudoir,
30:20the daughter of a guano magnate from Lima.
30:25An international party girl with a penchant for gambling and the high life,
30:29Elvira was slow to make her mark when recruited by British intelligence
30:33who had sent her on a mission to charm her way into the German secret service.
30:39She ended up on her natural playground in the south of France
30:43and then felt rather embarrassed and guilty that she hadn't done more work
30:49and she was rather enjoying sunning herself.
30:52And she was a great gambler and a very good card player.
30:55She was a great poker player.
30:58She was approached by a German who she'd befriended, I think, in the casinos
31:03and he asked whether she'd be willing to work for him in England
31:07and after a good deal of thought she said, yes, she would.
31:13Back in Britain, her task was to haunt the cocktail parties and casinos of high society London
31:24and send back to Germany an intoxicating mixture of invented secrets and gossip,
31:30reporting conversations she had never had with people she had never met.
31:36Churchill had ordered that no code name should give a hint at an agent's true identity.
31:42A rule that the double-crossed team cheerfully and consistently ignored.
31:48Treasure was valuable, Garbo a great actor.
31:52And Elvira, the good time girl, was given the code name Bronx,
31:57the name of a particularly lethal cocktail.
32:04Bronx sent her messages not by wireless but by post,
32:09writing to her German spymaster between the lines of ordinary letters
32:14using a matchstick impregnated with secret ink.
32:22Using the impregnated match, secret invisible messages could be written over ordinary correspondence.
32:31Once in enemy hands, the ink would be chemically developed to reveal the key information.
32:38Samples of Bronx's letters have been released to the National Archives in Kew.
32:44Tell me what we have here in this file.
32:47Well, this is the file of Bronx, one of the double agents,
32:51and it includes a whole range of documents relating to the way she was controlled in the United Kingdom,
32:57but also some of the texts of some of the secret messages that she sent to her German controllers.
33:02What is this, Mark?
33:03Yeah, this is a photograph taken by MI5 of the secret message,
33:08which was written underneath a cover message.
33:12In capital letters, she's written,
33:15Last week I saw a man unload a lorry full of foodstuffs into an old empty house next to the church at Roehampton.
33:22It's not exactly going to change the war, is it?
33:24No, well, I mean, you're not going to give all of your best stuff at once either,
33:28and it's a way of stringing people along.
33:30There's a bit of a boys' own paper ring to the idea of secret ink.
33:34Was it important in the Second World War?
33:37Yeah, and it had been since the First World War,
33:39but the point about this sort of means of communication is it just took an awfully long time,
33:44because it's going to take the best part of two weeks to get there, probably.
33:47So it's a kind of cumulative effect, her traffic?
33:50Yeah, and it's also making the best of what you've got,
33:52because if you don't have wireless communications, how are you going to do it?
33:55No mobile phones in that time.
34:01As the days counted down to D-Day,
34:04Bronx would need a way to get messages to her German spymaster much faster.
34:09We intercepted a movement order to a German panzer division,
34:14which at that time was stationed near Bordeaux,
34:17to move to the Normandy area, which was exactly what we didn't want.
34:23And really, without very much of hope of success,
34:29I said that I would try and use Bronx to prevent the division moving.
34:37The tanks would be in Normandy within days,
34:40unless Bronx could convince her spymasters that they were needed more urgently elsewhere.
34:46Now, secret ink was not Bronx's only way of communicating with her handler, was it?
34:52No, there were sort of crash messages, if you like, that were conveying an innocuous...
34:57So a telegram, for example, conveying an innocuous message,
35:00had a pre-arranged significance to her controller,
35:05and therefore you could get a certain degree of immediacy to it,
35:08but again, you had to be very, very careful about what you did and didn't say.
35:11It says,
35:12Envoyez vite 50 livres, j'ai besoin pour mon dentiste.
35:16Send quickly 50 pounds, I need it for my dentist.
35:19But that actually meant...
35:21It actually warns that there's going to be an invasion in the Bay of Biscay.
35:25I must confess, I was astonished, within hours,
35:29seeing this message relayed to Berlin.
35:34Within 24 hours, an order cancelling the movement order for the...
35:38I think it was the Panzer Division.
35:40I think it was the 13th Panzer Division that had done the job.
35:43And so nobody was more surprised than myself, I must confess.
35:48Back in England,
35:50Allied troops were making final preparations for the invasion.
35:56To further convince the Germans that Calais was the target,
35:59bombing raids on the area were stepped up.
36:05And Tarr Robertson was feeling a deep satisfaction
36:08with the work of his spies.
36:11The elaborate hoax seemed to be working.
36:14The elaborate hoax seemed to be working.
36:17Operation Bodyguard was on course.
36:22He now felt confident enough to send a message to Churchill,
36:26pointing out,
36:28my double agents have, at a critical moment, acquired a value
36:31it is scarcely possible to overestimate.
36:34But to drive home the D-Day lie,
36:37Robertson needed an agent brave enough
36:40to make direct, personal contact with the enemy.
36:45Anybody who goes into the field is courageous.
36:48And the Germans were very rough on these people when they caught them.
36:53The risk of being caught was quite high.
36:56Lisbon, in neutral Porto,
36:58was the place to go.
37:00The risk of being caught was quite high.
37:03Lisbon, in neutral Portugal,
37:05was a hotbed of wartime espionage
37:08and a regular haunt of Dusko Popov,
37:12a flamboyant international dealmaker from Dubrovnik.
37:16But his business was simply a cover.
37:19He was a British double agent, codenamed Tricycle,
37:22working directly for Tarr Robertson.
37:25Tricycle was just the man to inject the Great Deception
37:29into the heart of German intelligence.
37:33When I was with the Germans,
37:35I tried to play the part that I'm a real German spy,
37:39because in that kind of work,
37:41you are allowed one mistake,
37:43and that's the last one you ever make.
37:46He was really entering the lines then
37:49on every occasion that he travelled back to Lisbon.
37:53He could have been betrayed at any time,
37:55since he had to deliver information first-hand
37:58rather than use the wireless.
38:00He... I mean, charm came into this.
38:03He had a lot of self-confidence
38:05and he was a very charismatic person.
38:09He had trust in his ability to convince the Germans
38:13that he was loyal to them.
38:18He was taking a huge gamble, but it was a calculated one,
38:23because his German spymaster was also a British double agent.
38:29Johnny Jebson was a senior German intelligence officer,
38:33and at the start of the war,
38:35he had recruited his friend Popov to spy on the British.
38:39They shared a taste for parties and women,
38:42and indulged this to the full whenever they met up in Lisbon.
38:46But secretly, Jebson also shared Popov's hatred for the Nazis.
38:51Jebson was probably very similar to Dusko
38:54in his way to gamble with life.
38:57They were best of friends since university days,
39:00so I think that friendship was really key.
39:03But the close friendship between Popov and his German controller Jebson
39:08was starting to worry MI5.
39:11It became apparent that his German controller
39:14knew that he was working for us,
39:16and this created a new dimension to the game.
39:20I was rather gung-ho at that time
39:22and felt that we ought to eliminate his controller,
39:25but wiser counsel prevailed and we didn't.
39:28Instead, Popov told MI5 that Jebson was anti-Nazi
39:32and should be brought in as another double agent.
39:35Jebson was recruited as agent artist.
39:38Johnny was their best source of information
39:41in the German secret service.
39:45He was also able to protect Dusko.
39:49At one point, they became so important,
39:52if either of them was uncovered,
39:55it could mean the whole deception plan would be lost.
40:00As Popov flew back and forth between London and Lisbon,
40:04Jebson was able to provide him and the British
40:07with a wealth of information,
40:09secured from his position deep within the German war machine.
40:13Secret weapons, military production
40:16and the innermost workings of German intelligence.
40:19And he did more.
40:21He also revealed the identities of Germany's top spies
40:25operating in Britain,
40:27information that would enable the British to catch them.
40:32The problem was that these were the very spies
40:35under Robertson's command,
40:38each responsible for a part of the deception.
40:42Only a small number of people knew the whole detail.
40:45I mean, some would know the place, others would know the date,
40:48others would know the composition of the invading force,
40:51but very few people knew the whole story.
40:54Since Robertson's spies continued to report
40:57to their German spymasters without being arrested,
41:00Jebson came to the obvious conclusion.
41:03They were all double agents
41:05and the Germans were being deceived on a massive scale.
41:09Jebson was now in on the secret and MI5 knew it.
41:13They were very much worried about Jebson.
41:16Jebson could have betrayed the whole deception plan.
41:19If he had been caught, all the others would fall.
41:24Bletchley Park intercepts also revealed that Berlin was suspicious.
41:28Jebson was asking too many questions and was now under investigation.
41:32MI5 had every reason to be alarmed.
41:35Agent Artis knew the D-Day secret
41:39and now the Gestapo were closing in on him.
41:43SIREN WAILS
41:48Which left Tarr Robertson with an appalling dilemma.
41:53If he extracted Jebson from Lisbon and brought him to the safety of Britain,
41:58the Germans might realise their messages were being read.
42:02The secret of the Bletchley Park codebreakers
42:05had to be protected at all costs.
42:09But if Robertson left Agent Artis to his fate,
42:12there was a real risk the Gestapo would arrest him.
42:17Once he was in their hands, how long would he hold out
42:21before he cracked and exposed the entire D-Day deception?
42:27But then another problem appeared, in the shape of a small dog.
42:33For months, Agent Treasure had badgered MI5 to fulfil their promise
42:37and bring her pet dog to Britain.
42:40But Babs remained in quarantine in Gibralty.
42:44Increasingly angry, Treasure demanded that the Royal Navy
42:48send a special mission to Britain.
42:52Increasingly angry, Treasure demanded that the Royal Navy
42:55send a submarine to pick up her dog.
42:59I admired them. I trusted them.
43:02I had faith in British fair play.
43:05So they promised me a Madrid, but once they got me to London, they refused.
43:13And then, just when it seemed that relations between MI5 and Treasure
43:17couldn't get any worse, news arrived that Babs had been run over by a truck.
43:36Treasure was heartbroken and furious.
43:39She immediately accused Robertson and MI5 of murdering her pet dog.
43:44And perhaps she was right.
43:46A clue may lie in her MI5 case files.
43:52Losing Babs I find very hard to accept.
43:56I am alone. Absolutely alone.
44:02The index contained no less than nine separate items relating to Babs.
44:08Letter to Treasure from Gibraltar about the welfare of her dog.
44:13Note on quarantine regulations with regard to Treasure's dog.
44:18Every single one has been removed from the files and destroyed.
44:23The mystery of Babs' death may never be solved,
44:27but its consequences were potentially catastrophic.
44:32I can destroy the work of three years.
44:35Just a double dash and the Germans will know that I work under the control of the intelligence service.
44:40Treasure had kept one vital secret from her British handlers.
44:46Emil Kleemann, her German spymaster, had instructed her to insert a coded warning into her radio messages if she was caught,
44:55to alert him that she was being controlled by the British.
45:01This is my revenge.
45:03They made me a promise and they didn't keep it.
45:06Now I shall have them in my power.
45:11In Lisbon, meanwhile, events were moving with terrifying speed.
45:19Johnny Jebsen, agent artist, was summoned to the offices of German counterintelligence in Lisbon
45:26to receive a medal for his services to the Third Reich.
45:31But there his luck ran out.
45:37He was ambushed, drugged and smuggled out of Portugal.
45:47Jebsen was driven across the border to France and then on to Berlin.
45:53He was held at the Gestapo torture chambers and interrogated there.
46:07I wouldn't have wanted to be captured by the Germans.
46:11I think they were very rough.
46:15The number of agents who died in German hands and tortured.
46:26Back in London, Tarr received a three-word message from Lisbon.
46:31It was the message he had been dreading.
46:33Johnny has disappeared.
46:37MI5 was swept by near panic.
46:41Tarr Robertson called a crisis meeting.
46:44Should they shut down the entire double-cross operation
46:48or could they continue as if nothing had happened?
46:52It was no longer safe for Popov to act as a double agent.
46:57I don't think at that point he was wondering or worrying about the deception plan at all.
47:03I think here was his best friend being abducted by the Gestapo.
47:10Most people didn't think that Johnny would be able to resist interrogation.
47:16They all thought he would crack under physical torture.
47:20People would have thought, you know, that's it, the game is ended.
47:27The fate of Johnny Jebsen and the destiny of thousands of Allied soldiers
47:32weighed heavily on Tarr's shoulders.
47:35And then the ghost of Babs the dog came back to haunt him.
47:42And now, at the worst possible moment,
47:45Agent Treasure threatened to blow the entire double agent system.
47:50Treasure finally admitted that she had agreed a secret signal
47:54with her German spymaster to be inserted into her messages should she ever be caught.
47:59She confessed that her motive was revenge for the death of Babs.
48:05But she refused to say what the secret signal was or whether she'd already sent it.
48:18Robertson confronted Lilly and demanded to know what was going on.
48:22He made it very clear that if she had betrayed the cause,
48:26he would take the most severe action.
48:30Agent Treasure was shut down immediately, but it was too late to stop the invasion.
48:36The troops were ready to go.
48:39The date was set. The target was fixed.
48:43All Tarr and his team could do was continue to drive home the deception
48:48and pray that Jebsen didn't crack too soon.
48:56Day and night, Bletchley Park's codebreakers anxiously scanned hundreds of intercepted signals
49:02for any scrap of information that might reveal whether the Germans had found out the truth.
49:09The other agents flooded the Nazis with messages confirming an imminent attack on Calais.
49:15The days leading up to Overlord were very, very tense.
49:20We were all working a sort of 24-hour day,
49:23and wondering what questions the Germans were going to ask next, how we were going to answer them.
49:28Would they be believed, would our agents become very inspirited?
49:32It was quite tense.
49:36But was Hitler listening?
49:39Hitler's absolute control over his armed forces
49:43meant that his was the only decision that really mattered.
49:47Whether or not he believed the D-Day lie would make or break the Allied invasion.
49:54Just before D-Day, Hitler met the Japanese ambassador, Baron Hiroshi Oshima.
50:00The Fuhrer was keen to talk about the invasion and his knowledge of Allied plans.
50:04Impressed, Oshima immediately radioed back a report of his conversation to Tokyo.
50:11Two days later, the report, decoded and translated, landed on Robertson's desk.
50:17Hitler was adamant.
50:19They will come forward all out across the Straits of Dover.
50:24The target was Calais.
50:35On June 6th, 1944, the Allied troops under the command of General Eisenhower stormed the Normandy beaches
50:43and took the Germans completely by surprise.
50:51Over 10,000 Allied troops fell on the first day of the invasion.
50:57It was a high and bloody price to pay,
50:59but a fraction of the casualties there would have been had the Germans been ready.
51:06By the end of the day, the Allies had their first foothold in France, but the job was not yet over.
51:13As the Allies pushed on into France, the unseen force of the D-Day spies fought alongside them.
51:21We were able, up to a point, to persuade them that the Normandy landings, when they started,
51:27were a diversionary attack.
51:30That the main force was still in East Anglia, waiting to go across the Channel to Denmark.
51:37We rather assumed that by D plus 10, the Germans would have realised that they were having their leg pulled.
51:44In the event, things went much better than we'd expected.
51:5023 days after D-Day, Garbo received a startling message.
51:55The Führer had decided that in recognition of his heroic efforts in the service of the Third Reich,
52:01Garbo should be awarded the Iron Cross, Germany's highest military honour.
52:06Unbelievably, the D-Day lie was still holding.
52:14As late as July, more than a month after D-Day,
52:17no fewer than 22 German divisions, almost a quarter of a million men,
52:23were still held back in the Calais area.
52:27In Norway, German sentries anxiously scanned the horizon,
52:31waiting for the attack from Scotland, that also never came.
52:36The hoax had been more successful than anyone would have dared predict.
52:40The liberation would be slow and costly, but after the landings of June 6th,
52:45victory was in sight.
52:53Amid the celebrations on VE Day in May 1945,
52:58few people raised a glass to Tal Robertson and the spies of B1A.
53:02The work of the double-crossed team would remain secret for years after the war.
53:08But recently declassified files revealed the full impact of the deception operation.
53:14This captured German map showed where the Nazis believed Allied forces were positioned immediately before D-Day.
53:22The map corresponds precisely with the lies fed to German intelligence by the D-Day spies.
53:29The German spies were not aware that the German intelligence was being used against them.
53:34The deception attempt saved many thousands of lives
53:38and was the equivalent to quite a large additional army force.
53:43Their counterparts in German intelligence never guessed the massive hoax
53:48Tarr and his team had pulled off.
53:52Or maybe some of them did, and just chose to ignore it.
53:58Let us put ourselves in the position of a German controller
54:01with an agent in England.
54:04Would you go to Hitler and say,
54:07I've been spending millions of Deutschmarks maintaining this organisation in England
54:11and they're all a lot of dummies.
54:14I mean, very difficult for him to do.
54:17Hugh Astor carried on his work for MI5 in the Middle East.
54:23But Tarr Robertson left in 1949 and became a sheep farmer.
54:32Some of the D-Day spies were recognised for their contribution
54:36and awarded medals in strictest secrecy.
54:40Garbo was awarded an MBE,
54:43an unusual honour for a man who had already received the Iron Cross.
54:49Long after his fake agents had been laid to rest, Garbo visited the Normandy war graves.
54:57I did all the things that I could.
55:01To save men, I couldn't do it.
55:04I couldn't save these men here.
55:08It's very sad for me to see it now.
55:11Thousands more would lie in cemeteries like this
55:14had it not been for the work of Garbo and the other D-Day spies.
55:19Agent Treasure had not gone through with her threat to expose the deception plan.
55:25Perhaps she had only ever intended to torment MI5 at a critical moment.
55:31And that was a revenge for Babs.
55:36She lived out her days in the suburbs of Detroit, surrounded by dogs.
55:42Bronx, the bisexual Peruvian party girl, opened a souvenir shop in the south of France.
55:50Brutus remained in England, but his love for Poland never dimmed.
55:55He became active in Polish politics,
55:57but it was not until old age that he spoke openly about his wartime activities.
56:03I grew up with the stories of him skiing and him being a pilot
56:09and anecdotes of him being parachuted into occupied France.
56:15It's exciting to know that the stories that I grew up with were actually true
56:21and that those stories were part of a much bigger story in which he was central.
56:25And that does make me proud.
56:28Dusko Popov, Agent Tricycle, returned to business,
56:33eventually retiring to a house in the south of France, where he wrote his memoirs.
56:38I went a few dozen of times to meet the Germans.
56:45I never felt absolutely certain that I shall come back.
56:50And it would be lying now to tell you that I wasn't afraid.
56:55I was actually terrorised from the first day to the last.
56:59His house is still the family home.
57:02Popov died in 1981, wondering to the end just what had happened to his friend Johnny Jebsen.
57:10These men did extraordinary things during the war
57:13and I think the war called for them to rise to that event.
57:16And they took chances probably people wouldn't take during peacetime.
57:22But the times called for it. It was war.
57:28The fate of Johnny Jebsen, agent artist, is shrouded in mystery.
57:36In early 1945, he was moved to one of the most notorious concentration camps in Germany.
57:43And two months before that camp was liberated, the Gestapo came to collect him.
57:49He was never seen again.
57:54Johnny Jebsen could have turned history in a different direction and survived.
58:00But he chose not to.
58:02Like many ordinary flawed people, he didn't know his own courage until war revealed it.
58:08Agent artist Johnny Jebsen was not a conventional D-Day hero.
58:14But he was a hero nonetheless.
58:39It was a day that changed the course of history.
58:42Veterans share powerful stories through first-hand testimony of D-Day
58:47in We Were There, an 80th anniversary commemoration on BBC iPlayer.