Daniel Silva - The Unlikely Spy

Vicary blinked rapidly, trying to digest the extraordinary information he was being given. Imagine creating an army of a million men, completely out of thin air. Boothby was right-it was a ruse de guerre of unimaginable proportions. It made the Trojan horse of Odysseus look like a college escapade.

"Hitler's no fool, and neither are his generals," he said. "They're well schooled in the lessons of Clausewitz, and Clausewitz offered valuable advice about wartime intelligence: 'A great part of the information obtained in war is contradictory, a still greater part is false, and by far the greatest part is doubtful.' The Germans aren't going to believe there's an army of a million men camped in the Kent countryside just because we tell them it's so."

Boothby smiled, reached into the briefcase, and withdrew another folder. "True, Alfred. Which is why we came up with this: Quicksilver. The goal of Quicksilver is to put flesh and bones on our little army of ghosts. In the coming weeks, as the phantom forces of FUSAG begin arriving in Britain, we're going to flood the airwaves with wireless traffic-some of it in codes we know the Germans have already broken, some of it en clair. Everything has to be perfect, just the way it would be if we were putting a real army of a million men in Kent. Quartermasters complaining about the lack of tents. Mess units griping about shortages of food and silver. Radio chatter during exercises. Between now and the invasion, we're going to bombard their listening posts in northern France with close to a million messages. Some of those messages will provide the Germans a small clue, a tidbit of information about the location of the forces or their disposition. Obviously, we want the Germans to find those clues and latch onto them."

"A million wireless messages? How is that possible?"

"The U.S. 3103 Signals Service Battalion. They're bringing quite a crew with them-Broadway actors, radio stars, voice specialists. Men who can imitate the accent of a Jew from Brooklyn one minute and the bloody awful drawl of a Texas farmhand the next. They'll record the false messages in a studio on sixteen-inch records and then broadcast them from trucks circulating through the Kent countryside."

"Unbelievable," Vicary said, beneath his breath.

"Yes, quite. And that's only a small part of it. Quicksilver accounts for what the Germans will hear over the air. But we also have to take into account what they'll see from the air. We have to make it look as though a massive army is staging a slow and methodical buildup in the southeast corner of the country. Enough tents to house a force of a million men, a massive armada of aircraft, tanks, landing craft. We're going to widen the roads. We're even going to build a bloody oil depot in Dover."

Vicary said, "But surely, Sir Basil, we don't have enough planes, tanks, and landing craft to waste on a deception."

"Of course not. We're going to build models out of plywood and canvas. From the ground, they'll look like what they are-crude, hastily prepared fakes. But from the air, through the lens of a Luftwaffe surveillance camera, they'll look like the real thing."

"How do we know the surveillance planes will get through?"

Boothby smiled broadly, finished the rest of his drink, and deliberately lit a cigarette. "Now you're getting it, Alfred. We know they're going to get through because we're going to let them through. Not all of them, of course. They'd smell a rat if we did that. RAF and American aircraft will constantly patrol the skies over our phantom FUSAG, and they'll chase away most of the intruders. But some of them-only those flying over thirty thousand feet, I should add-will be allowed through. If all goes according to the script, Hitler's aerial surveillance analysts will tell him the same thing his eavesdroppers in northern France are telling him: that there is a massive Allied force poised off the Pas de Calais."

Vicary was shaking his head. "Wireless signals, aerial photographs-two of the ways the Germans can gather intelligence about our intentions. The third way, of course, is through spies."

But were there really any spies left? In September 1939, the day war broke out, MI5 and Scotland Yard engaged in a massive roundup. All suspected spies were jailed, turned into double agents, or hanged. In May 1940, when Vicary arrived, MI5 was in the process of capturing the new spies Canaris was sending to England to collect intelligence for the coming invasion. Those new spies suffered the same fate as the previous wave.

Spycatcher was not an appropriate word to describe what Vicary did at MI5. He was technically a Double Cross officer. It was his job to make sure the Abwehr believed its spies were still in place, still gathering intelligence, and still sending it back to their case officers in Berlin. Keeping the agents alive in the minds of the Abwehr had obvious advantages. MI5 had been able to manipulate the Germans from the very outset of the war by controlling the flow of intelligence from the British Isles. It also kept the Abwehr from sending new agents into Britain because Canaris and his control officers believed most of their spies were still on the job.

"Exactly, Alfred. Hitler's third source of intelligence about the invasion is his spies. Canaris's spies, I should say. And we know how effective they are. The German agents under our control will make a vital contribution to Bodyguard by confirming for Hitler much of what he can see from the skies and hear over the airwaves. In fact, one of our doubles, Tate, has already been brought into the game."

Tate earned his code name because of his uncanny resemblance to the popular music hall comedian Harry Tate. His real name was Wulf Schmidt, an Abwehr agent who parachuted from a Heinkel 111 into the Cambridgeshire countryside on the night of September 19, 1940. Vicary, though not assigned to the Tate case, knew the basics. Having spent the night in the open, he buried his parachute and wireless and walked into a nearby village. His first stop was Wilfred Searle's barbershop, where he purchased a pocket watch to replace the wristwatch he smashed leaping from the Heinkel. Next he purchased a copy of the Times from Mrs. Field, the newsagent, washed his swollen ankle at the village pump, and took his breakfast in a small cafe. Finally, at ten a.m., he was taken into custody by Private Tom Cousins of the local Home Guard. The following day he was driven to MI5's interrogation facility in Ham Common, Surrey, and there, after thirteen days of questioning, Tate agreed to work as a double agent and send Double Cross messages back to Hamburg over his wireless.

"Eisenhower is in London, by the way. Only a select few on our side have been made aware of that. Canaris knows it, however. And now, so does Hitler. In fact, the Germans knew Eisenhower was here before he settled down for his first night at Hayes Lodge. They knew he was here because Tate told them he was here. It was perfect, of course-a seemingly important yet completely harmless piece of intelligence. Now the Abwehr believes Tate has an important and credible source inside SHAEF. That source will be critical as the invasion draws nearer. Tate will be given an important lie to transmit. And with any luck, the Abwehr will believe that too.

"In the coming weeks, Canaris's spies will begin to see signs of a massive buildup of men and materiel in southeast England. They'll see American and Canadian troops. They'll see encampments and staging areas. They'll hear horror stories from the British public about the terrible inconvenience of having so many soldiers crammed in so small a place. They'll see General Patton careening through the villages of East Anglia with his polished boots and ivory-handled revolver. The good ones will even learn the names of this army's top commanders, and they'll send those names back to Berlin. Your own Double Cross network will play a critical role."