Ike's Spies (11 page)

On March 14, after Rommel had been driven back both at Kasserine and then at the Mareth Line (and had consequently left Africa), Ike wrote Brooke again about Mockler-Ferryman. He said that his G-2's performance, up to Kasserine, had been outstanding, pointing out specifically that “his forecast of the extent of French opposition proved in the event to be more accurate than that of any other authority.” Ike wanted Mockler-Ferryman's relief to be “without prejudice.” Then he added, “In his successor, I now look for a little more inquisitiveness and greater attention to checking and cross-checking reports from various sources.”
¹¹

The Battle of Kasserine Pass has often been pointed to as the contest where the American Army of World War II came of age. Green troops became veterans; new commanders gained badly needed combat experience; over-cocky Americans learned what a tough opponent they were up against. The man who learned the most was the commander himself, Dwight Eisenhower, and one of the most important lessons he learned was that no one source of information, no matter how sensational, is ever by itself sufficient. Mockler-Ferryman had been so confident of
ULTRA'S
insight and trustworthiness that he had neglected other, more traditional sources. As Butcher noted in his diary, “Ike insists we need a G.2 who is never satisfied with his information, who procures it with spies, reconnaissance, and any means available.”
¹²

In the aftermath of Kasserine, Ike also learned from interrogation of German prisoners that the enemy was “easily and constantly” breaking the low-level codes used by the 1st Armored Division. He decided that the Germans were probably as enamored with this information as Mockler-Ferryman, and that he could take advantage of them. He told Patton, “We should obviously but clumsily change the code at frequent intervals, so that the Hun will not suspect a plant, but never enough so that it will be impossible for him to break them quickly. As long as nothing is hurt the orders given in this way should be faithfully executed (unimportant patrols, etc.). But when the time comes for real surprise, use an erroneous order in order to support your other measures of deception. This effort should not be difficult to make—and it might work!”
¹³
The innocent American was learning quickly.

DESPITE ITS RELATIVE FAILURE
at Kasserine Pass,
ULTRA
was Ike's single most effective spy throughout the war. It proved itself in every campaign from 1943 onward, beginning with Operation
HUSKY
, the invasion of Sicily, Ike's second amphibious assault. Well before
HUSKY
was launched in July 1943, thanks to
ULTRA
, Eisenhower had a complete picture of the enemy's order of battle on Sicily and in Italy. Equally valuable,
ULTRA
allowed him to penetrate the German mind and judge how successful Allied deception measures had been.

The major attempt at deception for
HUSKY
showed the British Secret Service at the top of its form. In an imaginative subterfuge, the British managed to convince the Germans that Eisenhower's troops would land either on Sardinia or in Greece, rather than Sicily. This sophisticated deception scheme was potentially decisive, because the Germans had more than enough troops scattered throughout Italy and the Mediterranean to reinforce Sicily sufficiently to produce another Gallipoli.

The story is well known—it was superbly told by Ewen Montagu in his 1954 book,
The Man Who Never Was
—and needs only a brief summary here. A British Secret Service team searched the London morgues to find a suitable body—they needed a once fairly healthy, fairly young, and completely unknown man. Once found, they used odds and ends to give him an identity, a biography, a history. He became “Captain (acting Major) William Martin, 09560,
Royal Marines.” His pockets and his briefcase were stuffed with documents, matches, loose change, love letters, a bill or two, a bank statement, a photo of “mom,” all prepared with exquisite care to prove that Major Martin was authentic.

Major Martin was a courier. His briefcase was attached to his wrist by handcuffs. In it were various travel orders and other documents, some labeled “Most Secret.” The planted material consisted of two private letters, one from the vice chief of staff to General Harold Alexander, the overall ground commander in the Mediterranean, under Ike, and the other from Lord Louis Mountbatten to Admiral Cunningham. Each letter hinted that the next operations would strike at Sardinia and Greece.

At dawn, April 30, 1943, Major Martin was dumped overboard from a British submarine off Huelva on the Spanish coast. (At the last minute in London, there had been an anxious discussion about what would happen if the tide failed to sweep him to shore. Churchill gave his verdict: “You will have to get him back and give him another swim.”) The Spanish picked him up, opened the briefcase, gave the documents to a German intelligence agent (who photographed them and sent the film on to Berlin), replaced the documents in the briefcase, then gave it to the British vice-consul in Huelva. Major Martin was interred and his documents returned to London in the freshly sealed briefcase.

Had the Germans taken the bait?
ULTRA
showed that they had. From the War Cabinet Office to Churchill, then in Washington, the signal flashed, “Martin swallowed rod, line and sinker by the right people and from best information they look like acting on it.” The phrase “best information” meant
ULTRA
.
¹⁴
Between early May and July 10, the date of the invasion,
ULTRA
provided mounting evidence of the successful deception, primarily through order of battle information, the area in which
ULTRA
was always at its strongest and most reliable.
ULTRA
reported that the Germans had moved the 1st Panzer Division from France to Greece, that they had moved units from Russia into Greece, that reinforcements from Germany were sent into Sardinia, and so on. In May, the Luftwaffe had had 415 aircraft in Sicily with 125 in Greece; by July there were 305 in Greece and only 290 in Sicily.
¹⁵

ULTRA
was precise about the opposition Ike's forces would face on Sicily. Field Marshal Kesselring gave Berlin a complete rundown
on his dispositions. He had the Hermann Göring Panzer Division on Sicily, along with the German 15th Panzer Division and some Italian troops (who were without transportation and badly equipped). Part of the 15th Panzer was in Palermo, on the north coast; the remainder, along with the Hermann Göring Panzer Division, was in the center of the island, ready to move in any direction. This was priceless information, as was Ike's knowledge that via
ULTRA
he would be able to listen in on the German reaction to the landings.
¹⁶

The initial assault went according to plan. On the morning of D-Day, from his advance headquarters on Malta, Eisenhower sent a cable to the Combined Chiefs: “Fragmentary information obtained mostly from intercept of messages indicates that leading waves of British 5th, 51st and Canadian Divisions are ashore and advancing.”
¹⁷
ULTRA
, in other words, was giving him not only the German reaction—which was slow and confused—but was also his best source on the immediate tactical dispositions of his own troops. The following day, July 11, was the critical one in the campaign, as German armor from the Hermann Göring Division counterattacked against American forces at Gela.
ULTRA
had provided an alert, and the Americans were ready with a combination of superb naval gunfire, artillery, infantry action, and tanks. The Germans were repulsed with heavy loss.
¹⁸

The operation in Sicily did reveal
ULTRA'S
inescapable limitations. The Allies dared not act on
ULTRA
information that stood alone—i.e., there had to be some explanation other than a code break as to how they found out this or that, or the Germans would realize what had happened and change their code. Churchill and Menzies insisted that those “in the know” had to promise never to use
ULTRA
information until it was possible to point to some other source.

For example, parachutists, under the command of General James Gavin, dropped onto Sicily on the eve of the invasion, could not be told that the Hermann Göring Division was in their drop zone for fear of revealing the
ULTRA
secret. The men were not told they would encounter German tanks. They were also
not
given antitank weapons. They were told that there were some German “technicians” in the area and “nothing more.” In 1979, General Gavin commented, “From the viewpoint of protecting Ultra, I
think that this was the proper course for the high command to take,
provided
they equipped us with adequate antitank weapons.”
¹⁹

IF THE SECURITY OF ULTRA
was a first objective, the question arises, how was
ULTRA
information relayed to the field commanders safely and swiftly? The British had worked out a system of Special Liaison Units (
SLUS
) to speed the intercepted messages from Bletchley Park (
BP
), where the decoding and translating took place, to Churchill and the generals. In 1943 the United States began to create its own
SLUS
. The result was a huge success and an extraordinary achievement, showing Americans at their best.

The Army's selection process was superb. It managed to locate precisely the two dozen or so officers who were perfect for the job. They had to be young and healthy, because the
SLUS
worked long, taxing hours on intricate problems and because the
SLUS
had to be junior officers, usually captains or majors, so that they would not attract attention by their rank. They had to be diplomatic enough not to offend the senior generals to whom they reported, but firm enough to make sure the generals heard what they had to say (not always as easy as it might seem, especially when Patton or Clark were the recipients). Men who are absolutely trustworthy, mentally quick, tireless, and self-effacing (they knew there would be no battlefield promotions for them in this war, nor any opportunity to lead men into combat) are few in number—but America had enough of them, and the Army found them. To a man, they did an outstanding job during the war; to a man, they kept their trust, not one of them ever revealing the
ULTRA
secret or his part in the war.
^*
It may not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the
ULTRA
system, from
BP
to the
SLUS
, was a triumph of the Western democracies nearly on a par with the creation of the atomic bomb.

TELFORD TAYLOR
headed the American
SLU
effort. His later career, as was true of all the
SLUS
, was marked by success after success.
Taylor was the prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials and later a distinguished author and professor of law at Columbia University. His young men, selected for brains and ability rather than rank or background, included William Bundy, who became Assistant Secretary of State; Alfred Friendly, who became managing editor of the Washington
Post;
John Oakes, who became an editor of the New York
Times;
Langdon van Norden, a businessman who became chairman of the Metropolitan Opera Association; Curt Zimansky, a noted philologist; Yorke Allen, of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; Stuyvesant Wainwright II, four-term congressman; Lewis Powell, Associate Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court; Josiah Macy, vice president of Pan American Airways; and Adolph Rosengarten, who was a little older than the others but still had a successful postwar career, first as a director of the Fidelity Philadelphia Trust Company, then—in 1975, at age seventy—earning his Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania. Clearly the
SLUS
were outstanding junior officers.
²⁰

The
SLUS
served in a new Army organization, Special Branch of the Military Intelligence Service. In defining their responsibilities, General Marshall insisted, without any question of misinterpretation, that these officers were in a special category and that the generals in command must allow them (no matter how young or unmilitary) the necessary scope and authority.

Marshall gave his
SLUS
more latitude, and demanded of them a great deal more, than their British counterparts. In the British system, the
SLUS
were only glorified messengers who handed on the complete
ULTRA
intercepts to their superiors. Under the system that Marshall and Taylor created, the American
SLUS
synthesized, summarized, and interpreted the intercepts. As Marshall put it, “Their primary responsibility will be to evaluate Ultra intelligence, present it in usable form to the Commanding officer, assist in fusing Ultra with intelligence derived from other sources, and give advice in connection with making operational use of Ultra intelligence in such fashion that the security of the source is not endangered.”
²¹
As Lewin notes, “This directive was so comprehensive and permissive that it allowed and indeed encouraged the representative to think of himself as a kind of private intelligence center.”
²²
As the
SLUS
were, in fact, for in the field each had his own tent, van, or trailer as an office—under continuous guard—in
which his safe contained
ULTRA
papers plus a great deal more information.

To train these men, Taylor first of all sent them to
BP
, where they saw 10,000 of the most valuable people in the British Empire at work. They were deeply impressed. The exposure of the
SLUS
to the inner workings of
BP
meant that they understood the magnitude and significance of what
ULTRA
offered in a way that few field commanders could.