Editor's note: Tim Naftali is a CNN presidential historian and a senior fellow at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. The opinions expressed here are Naftali's own. Read more opinions on CNN. The CNN original series “Secrets & Spies: A Nuclear Game” airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET/PT.
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As we remember and celebrate the heroism of Allied soldiers on D-Day 80 years ago, it's worth mentioning that many more soldiers probably would have lost their lives had it not been for a group of spies operating on behalf of the Allied forces.
New York University
Tim Naftali
D-Day's chances of success were not slim. Approximately 50,000 Nazi soldiers defended the five beaches from which the Allied forces attacked on D-Day. Ultimately, 160,000 Allied troops entered France from the five beachheads that day, but the first soldiers to reach the beaches were vastly outnumbered and outgunned. But penetrating the initial Nazi defenses, protected by bunkers and other fortifications of the so-called Atlantic Wall, was only the first hurdle.
Second, what would happen once the Germans realized that the invasion of France had begun? Hitler's 15th Army was stationed at the Pas de Calais, where the English Channel is at its narrowest, with tank divisions in reserve in northern France and Belgium, ready to crush any Allied forces that breached the Atlantic Wall. To improve their chances of success, Allied leaders turned to the inhabitants of the secret world.
These were unusual spies. First of all, their main job was not to steal Nazi secrets, but to provide false information to Adolf Hitler. And secondly, some of these spies didn't actually exist. They were completely fictitious characters invented by British intelligence. They were the forerunners of fake Facebook and Instagram accounts, half a century before the widespread use of the Internet.
These spies were known in British and US intelligence as the Double Cross network: they were agents hired by the Nazis and either surrendered themselves to Britain or were captured by the British during the first years of World War II.
Counterespionage is one of the most esoteric of the dark arts. In its simplest form, it is how governments protect secrets by investigating the activities of foreign governments that want those secrets. But World War II saw a dramatic expansion in the offensive use of counterespionage, not just to keep an enemy in the dark, but to actively deceive an enemy through disinformation. So-called strategic deception was used many times during World War II, but the most dramatic and significant example was as part of the planning for D-Day.
The British used members of the Double Cross network back in Berlin to deceive Hitler's military intelligence by using radio communications from Britain and letters sent from neutral capitals to tell it when and where the Allies planned to launch their expected invasion of occupied France.
The central figure in this deception operation was Juan Pujol Garcia, a Spaniard codenamed Garbo after the great actress Greta Garbo. Once it became clear that the Germans not only believed Garbo but also considered him unusually competent, the British began creating fictitious sub-agents for him. With the help of his British handlers, Garbo spread disinformation about the British government and completely fictitious agents supposedly stationed at US military bases in Britain. The British worked with the US military and its Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to bolster the disinformation Garbo fed to Berlin. This included transmitting radio signals from non-existent US military units in Britain and creating “ghost armies,” complete with inflatable tanks, fake radio communications, and sound effects, to fool German aerial reconnaissance and distract attention from the activities of real units.
Keith Waldegrave/ANL/Shutterstock
Juan Pujol Garcia, known as Garbo during World War II, photographed outside Buckingham Palace in 1984.
Beginning in January 1944, Garbo and his “agents” began to paint a false picture in the German mind of D-Day occurring in July 1944 in the Pas de Calais. According to false information created and disseminated by the double-cross network, a major invasion would be preceded by one or more feints, or smaller-scale incursions, designed to divert German attention. To make this two-punch scenario plausible, Allied deceptionists tried to make the Germans believe that large Allied forces were gathering in Britain, preparing to pounce on the Third Reich, including a completely fake “ghost army” commanded by the real General George Patton from across the Pas de Calais.
The main purpose of this deception was to convince Hitler to keep the 15th Army and Panzer Divisions in reserve and away from the Normandy beaches for as long as possible to give the Allied soldiers a fighting chance to secure a bridgehead. The Double Cross network, led by Garbo, was unanimous in its support of this idea.
As the actual D-Day approached, the Allies realized that the deception was working. Hitler was unusually chatty with the Japanese ambassador in Berlin. Code telegrams sent to Tokyo were regularly decoded and translated by U.S. intelligence. Hitler told the Japanese that the Allies planned to attack the English Channel twice in the summer of 1944, and that they would not be fooled by the first attack.
Amazingly, as expected, the deception worked. The Nazis did not commit all their resources to Normandy because military intelligence continued to believe that catastrophe was still looming. As late as July 8, 1944, a month after D-Day, Hitler still believed Normandy was a diversionary operation, and so he refused his generals' urgings to go all out there. “The enemy has succeeded in landing in Normandy,” Hitler wrote to his commanders. “Despite the attendant risks, the enemy will probably attempt a second landing in the sector of the 15th Army…”
US National Archives/AFP/Getty Images
A photograph taken in Normandy on June 6, 1944, shows Allied soldiers taking part in the landings to battle the German Wehrmacht.
Decades ago, while working on what eventually became my doctoral dissertation, I had the good fortune to meet some of the surviving members of the British MI-5 who were in charge of these renegade agents. They were inventive, disciplined operatives who not only managed their captured agents in Britain, but also brilliantly mimicked the way Nazi case officers reported to them, devising ways to weave truth and lies into messages that were plausible to the ultimate intelligence consumers in Berlin.
I also met Roger Fleetwood Hesketh, the man who came up with the Normandy landings fake. He was an architect by training. He told me that the Normandy landings fake, codenamed “Fortitude South,” brought together a variety of talents. He grew up with one brother in a big house near Liverpool (where he still lived when I visited him in the 1980s). He and his sister made up for not having many friends their own age nearby by creating a fantasy world of playmates, a sandbox conspiracy that seemed very real to them, but which, of course, existed only in their minds.
Besides being creative, one of the keys to brilliant counterespionage in WWII was code breaking. This allowed the Allies to assess whether their efforts were working and to push further when it was clear that the Nazis had taken the bait. Not only could the US read what the Japanese were saying about how Hitler viewed the progress of the war in Europe, US and British code breakers could also read what German spies were saying to each other about the reliability of German spies in Britain. This was part of Ultra, a British-led intelligence project that intercepted all high-level communications of the Nazi military. Code breakers at the British facility Bletchley Park, led by computer and LGBTQ pioneer Alan Turing, routinely cracked codes and ciphers that Germany had used to disguise its most important messages but failed. From Ultra, Allied counterespionage learned that German intelligence was relying on a double agent disinformation operation about the invasion of France.
Although many of the counterespionage operations during World War II remained secret from the public for nearly three decades after June 6, 1944, these tactics were well known among intelligence officers and were widely used during the Cold War. The Soviets learned of the Double Cross network from two of their own leading spies: Anthony Blunt, a spy for MI5, and Kim Philby of MI6's counterespionage division, Section V or XB.
The exploits of D-Day set an extremely high bar for those who learned the art of counterespionage while fighting Hitler. Little did they know in 1944 that they would live in a golden age of counterespionage and strategic deception. As dramatized in CNN's new original series “Secrets & Spies: A Nuclear Game,” the Cold War would provide a more even — and therefore more challenging — environment for the game of spy-versus-spy.
It is always tedious and difficult to assess human intelligence. If you are a case officer, that is, the manager of a particular agent, it is very difficult to know if that agent is telling the truth or not. In other words, if you are dealing with double agents, it is virtually impossible to be sure of their ultimate loyalty.
With one major exception, for most of the decades-long conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, neither the Western powers nor the Soviets had any way of knowing with any certainty what their enemy's spies were up to.
During the Cold War, traitors became harder to find, making intelligence agencies more susceptible to fruitless “spy” hunts and the paranoia they naturally engendered. Real spies were also allowed to covertly influence mutual understanding between adversaries. Sometimes, as in the case of Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer working for the British, his timely warning to London and Washington about the Kremlin's nuclear paranoia contributed to world peace and stability.
But sometimes inadequate counterespionage made the world a more dangerous place. The top U.S. counterespionage officer who worked on Soviet targets in the U.S. for 20 years from 1979, FBI agent Robert Hanssen, was himself a Soviet agent, as was CIA counterintelligence officer Aldrich Ames, who managed security for CIA agents in the Soviet Union.
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The US counterespionage crisis in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, caused largely by the simultaneous activities of Hanssen and Ames, hindered Western efforts to monitor and fully understand the Soviet Union as it underwent a period of major reform and eventual collapse. Fortunately, Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985, did much of his most important work openly, seeking to signal to his own people as well as the West that he was different from other leaders.
Eighty years after the Normandy landings and 35 years after the end of the Cold War, false identities and disinformation are no longer a concern for counterespionage agents but have become a part of our daily online feeds. In a sense, each of us has become a disinformation counter-intelligence officer, trying to separate lies from truth. Strategies once perfected to save lives and topple perhaps the worst dictator the world has ever seen have become commonplace online, undermining trust in institutions and each other.
