The Unlikely Spy

PREFACE

In April 1944, six weeks before the Allied invasion of France, the Nazi propagandist William Joyce-better known as Lord Haw-Haw-made a chilling radio broadcast directed at Britain.

According to Joyce, Germany knew the Allies were at work on large concrete structures in the south of England. Germany also knew those structures were to be towed across the English Channel during the coming invasion and sunk off the coast of France. Joyce declared, "Well, we are going to help you boys. When you come to get them under way, we're going to sink them for you."

Alarm klaxons sounded inside British Intelligence and the Allied high command. The concrete structures referred to by Joyce were actually components of a giant artificial harbor complex bound for Normandy code-named Operation Mulberry. If Hitler's spies truly understood the purpose of Mulberry, they might very well know the most important secret of the war-the time and place of the Allied invasion of France.

Several anxious days later those fears were put to rest, when U.S. intelligence intercepted a coded message from Japan's ambassador to Berlin, Lieutenant General Hiroshi Baron Oshima, to his superiors in Tokyo. Oshima received regular briefings from his German allies on preparations for the looming invasion. According to the intercepted message, German intelligence believed the concrete structures were part of a massive antiaircraft complex-not an artificial harbor.

But how did German intelligence make such a crucial miscalculation? Did it simply misread its own intelligence? Or had it been deceived?