"Very good, Alfred. But how?"
"Walker Hardegen was a wealthy banker and business-man, ultraconservative, anticommunist, and probably a little anti-Semitic. He was Ivy League, and he knew half the people in Washington. Went to school with them. The Americans aren't so unlike us in that respect. His business regularly took him to Berlin. When men like Hardegen went to Berlin, they attended embassy dinners and parties. They dined with the heads of Germany's biggest companies and with Nazi officials from the party and the ministries. Hardegen spoke perfect German. He probably admired some of the things the Nazis were doing. He believed Hitler and the Nazis were an important buffer between the Bolsheviks and the rest of Europe. I'd say during one of his visits he came to the attention of the Abwehr or the SD."
"Bravo, Alfred. It was the Abwehr, actually, and the man whose attention he captured was Paul Muller, head of Abwehr operations in America."
"Okay, Muller recruited him. Oh, I suppose he probably soft-pedaled it. Said Hardegen wouldn't really be working for the Nazis. He'd be helping in the struggle against international communism. He asked Hardegen for information on American industrial production, the mood in Washington, things like that. Hardegen said yes and became an agent. I have one question. Was Hardegen already an American agent at this point?"
"No," Boothby said, and smiled. "Remember, this is very early in the game, 1937. The Americans weren't terribly sophisticated then. They did know, however, that the Abwehr was active in the United States, especially in New York. The year before, the plans for the Nor-den bombsight walked out of the country in the briefcase of an Abwehr spy named Nikolaus Ritter. Roosevelt had ordered Hoover to crack down. In 1939, Hardegen was photographed meeting in New York with a known Abwehr agent. Two months later, they saw him again, meeting with another Abwehr agent in Panama City. Hoover wanted to arrest him and put him on trial. God, but the Americans were such plods at the game. Luckily, MI-Six had set up its office in New York by then. They stepped in and convinced Hoover that Hardegen was more use to us still in the game than sitting in some prison cell."
"So who ran him, us or the Americans?"
"It was a joint project really. We fed the Germans a steady stream of excellent material through Hardegen, top-grade stuff. Hardegen's stock soared in Berlin. In the meantime, every aspect of Walker Hardegen's life was placed under a microscope, including his relationship with the Lauterbach family and with a brilliant engineer named Peter Jordan."
"So in 1943, when the decision was made to stage the cross-channel attack at Normandy with the help of an artificial harbor, British and American intelligence approached Peter Jordan and asked him to go to work for us."
"Yes. October 1943, to be precise."
"He was perfect," Vicary said. "He was exactly the type of engineer needed for the project, and he was well known and well respected in his field. All the Nazis had to do was go to the library to read about his accomplishments. The death of his wife also made him personally vulnerable. So late in 1943, you had Hardegen meet with his Abwehr control officer and tell him all about Peter Jordan. How much did you tell them then?"
"Only that Jordan was working on a large construction project connected with the invasion. We also hinted about his vulnerability, as you put it. The Abwehr bit. Muller sold it to Canaris, and Canaris passed it on to Vogel."
"So the entire thing was an elaborate ruse to foist false documents on the Abwehr. And Peter Jordan was the proverbial tethered goat."
"Exactly. The first documents were ambiguous by design. They were open to interpretation and debate. The Phoenix units could be components of an artificial harbor or they could be an antiaircraft complex. We wanted them to fight, to squabble, to tear themselves to bits. Remember your Sun-tzu?"
" 'Undermine your enemy, subvert him, sow discord among his leaders.' "
"Exactly. We wanted to encourage the friction between the SD and the Abwehr. We also didn't want to make it too easy for them. Gradually, the Kettledrum documents painted a clear picture, and that picture was passed directly to Hitler."
"But why go to so much trouble? Why not just use one of the agents that had already been turned? Or one of the fictitious agents? Why use a live engineer? Why not just create one out of whole cloth?"
"Two reasons," Boothby said. "Number one, that's too easy. We wanted to make them work for it. We wanted to influence their thinking subtly. We wanted them to think they were the ones making the decision to target Jordan. Remember the mantra of a Double Cross officer: Intelligence easily obtained is easily discarded. There was a long chain of evidence, so to speak: Hardegen to Muller, Muller to Canaris, Canaris to Vogel, and Vogel to Catherine Blake."