The Lisbon Route

by Ronald Weber

  Eventually it was learned to American satisfaction that the Japanese concluded there had been no lapse of security in Lisbon and consequently no need for changing codes. When the dust finally settled on the trashcan affair, Donovan had been weakened, but OSS Lisbon was still in business. The OSS’s Iberian operations, however, were curbed to the extent that agents were ordered to stay clear of cipher material and to pool information with American military intelligence groups at work on the peninsula. At the time of the Normandy landings in 1944, the OSS had forty-four agents operating in Spain, Portugal, the Azores, and Madeira, and its Secret Intelligence Branch at work in Portugal had a staff of seven together with three hundred subagents.

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  The top rung on the spy ladder belonged to double agents, the bold specialists who were capable of working both sides of the intelligence street and sustaining the appearance of leading two entirely separate lives. Of those who performed the perilous feat in or through Lisbon, none did so better, longer, or with more imaginative zest than Garbo. J. C. Masterman, who was well positioned to know, believed him “something of a genius.” And added: “Connoisseurs of double cross have always regard the Garbo case as the most highly developed example of their art.”

  Known to the Germans under the code name Arabel and to the British as Garbo, the double agent was Juan Pujol, a Spaniard from Barcelona who during the civil war had, in a foreshadowing of his future spy career, participated on both sides. One day in January 1941 he appeared at Britain’s embassy in Madrid and let it be known he was a fervent anti-Nazi and immediately available as a British secret agent. After he was turned away, he decided more preparation for spy work was in order before contacting the British again, and so he offered his services at the German embassy in Madrid.

  Here he met with some success. An interview process began with an Abwehr officer, but while it was still under way Pujol took another tack. He developed a story that his father had funds in Britain and necessary documents for them were in a safe deposit box in Portugal. With the Spanish government badly in need of foreign funds, Pujol was granted a passport and a visa for Portugal and left for Lisbon. He took a room in a hotel and registered with the Spanish consulate as a resident living permanently abroad. He was trying for a visa for Britain when his plans took yet another turn. Staying in his hotel was a fellow Galician who showed Pujol an imposing document said to be a special Spanish diplomatic visa to Argentina, where he planned to go as soon as he got a ticket for South America aboard a Clipper. After several evenings out on the town as his compatriot’s guest, Pujol took him to a hotel in Monte-Estoril for a gambling venture at the nearby casino, ostensibly to repay him for his generosity but also to photograph the visa, which he did with a borrowed camera after complaining of stomach problems and returning alone from the casino to the hotel.

  Back in Lisbon, Pujol had the photo enlarged, an engraving plate made, and a printer ran off copies. His hazy scheme was to use the printed visas, in doctored form, to impress the Abwehr about his ability to leave Portugal for Britain. After his return to Madrid, his talks with the German agent dragged on until Pujol spun a story that he had been asked by a section of the Spanish police to go to Britain to look into a currency racket involving Spanish pesetas and Portuguese escudos. After allowing the agent a glimpse of one of his printed visas—Pujol’s name now filled in and his diplomatic assignment shown as London—he was equipped by the Abwehr with a bottle of invisible ink, a code book, three thousand dollars, a Madrid address for his reports, and was dispatched to England as an agent with the code name Arabel.

  He went no farther than Lisbon. He meant to again contact the British, reasoning that the ink and codes the Germans had given him would clearly demonstrate his capacity for work as an agent. Still, his efforts to reach the British failed, leaving him mystified why the country he wanted to serve was aloof while the Nazis were welcoming. His best option, so he concluded, was to add to his clandestine résumé by setting up as a freelance operative.

  With money the Germans had supplied him, Pujol bought a map of Great Britain, a Blue Guide to England, a Portuguese publication about the British fleet, and an English-French vocabulary of military terms and began studying them along with British magazines and reference books he located in Lisbon libraries. In October 1941, while living in a room in a fisherman’s house in Cascais, he felt himself sufficiently armed to begin sending Arabel’s invisible-ink reports to Madrid via an imaginative mechanism in which a KLM employee, paid to serve as a courier on flights between London and Lisbon, delivered his London-written letters to an Abwehr address in Lisbon and collected replies from a safe deposit box at the Espírito Santo Bank, which Pujol had rented under what he hoped was the thoroughly British name of Mr. Joseph Smith Jones. Despite the large limiting facts that Pujol had never been to England and spoke no English, the entirely fictional scheme worked to perfection. The Abwehr was convinced it was dealing with a secret agent diligently at work in Britain.

  In subsequent reports Pujol spun increasingly notional—in the language of spycraft—stories of being offered a job by the BBC in London, of a convoy of ships that had left Liverpool for Malta, of recruiting subagents throughout England. When the Abwehr sent requests for specific information about troop movements, military installations, and British morale, he was quick to respond with lengthy detail—and an often wildly inaccurate grasp of English life and locations (about Glasgow: “There are people here who would do anything for a litre of wine”), which the Germans seemed not to notice or passed off as the Spaniard’s natural naiveté in his new location. Yet after a time Pujol began to wonder if he could continue keeping all his balloons in the air. He considered giving up the spy game and leaving Europe, but only after another attempt to double-cross the Germans.

  In early 1942, the United States now in the war, Pujol went to the American legation in Lisbon and asked to speak to a military or naval attaché. After being searched by a Marine on duty, he was brought to the naval attaché, Kenneth Demorest, and told in broad terms his full story, beginning with his initial rebuff by the British in Madrid. Intrigued, the attaché asked for some proof, which Pujol supplied, then asked for time to look further into his story—and gain time to inform his British colleagues of an alleged German operative astonishingly willing to turn over invisible ink and a code book given him by the Abwehr.

  The British subsequently contacted Pujol and a meeting was arranged with an MI6 officer, Eugene Risso-Gill, a Briton with important connections in Portugal. When they got together in a seaside villa of Risso-Gill’s family midway between Lisbon and Estoril, the agent was polite, affable, and apparently wholly at ease with Pujol’s story. Almost at once he began plotting to remove him from Lisbon—it seemed miraculous to the British that Pujol had evaded detection as long as he had—without alerting German informants or the Portuguese secret police. Meanwhile, Pujol was to hand over the ink and code book to Risso-Gill, who in turn would forward them to London, and prepare to leave Portugal immediately.

  What Pujol could not know was that he had long been a figure of interest to the British. Due to the genius of Bletchley Park and the Ultra system in decoding German messages, his reports to the Abwehr in Madrid and forwarded by wireless to Berlin had been read in England, prompting questions about Arabel’s identity and how he had gotten into the country. Among the officers of MI5 (the British Security Service operating within the United Kingdom) searching for answers was Tomás Harris, the son of a British father and Spanish mother, an accomplished artist who had studied as the Slade School of Fine Art, and a successful art dealer before the war. To Harris and those working with him, it eventually became clear that Arabel, rather than an agent in Britain as the Germans believed, was a Spaniard in Portugal. Then it appeared clear that Arabel and the Spaniard who had offered his services to the British embassies in Madrid and Lisbon, Juan Pujol, were one and the same. Although MI5 also understood that the information the agent supplied the Abwehr was wholly fabricated
and contained obvious blunders (as well as intelligence that, incredibly, was nearly on target), it had been accepted without question. Ultra intercepts confirmed that Arabel was seen by the Germans as a major asset.

  Left unanswered was whether he should be recruited as the double agent he claimed he wanted to be and brought to Britain. Leaving him in Lisbon was unwise since physically monitoring him would be difficult, while in Britain, with his evident credibility with the Germans, he would be invaluable. On the other hand, if he was a German plant, as a triple agent he could put at risk Britain’s already highly successful counterespionage program.

  When a German invasion of Britain seemed certain following the fall of France, the Abwehr had increased its number of agents in England. MI5 had captured and turned nearly all of them—some coming over voluntarily, others under threats—and developed an extensive ring of double agents operating under the direction of the XX or Twenty Committee. From his formal position as the committee chair, J. C. Masterman—a tall, spare history don at Christ Church, Oxford, who wrote mystery stories and was a skilled cricket player—coordinated the work of what came to be known as the Double-Cross System. The overall head of the operation was Guy Liddell, MI5’s director of counterespionage throughout the war. From 1943 onward, the committee had a Yale University literature professor now attached to OSS London’s counterintelligence or X-2 Branch, Norman Holmes Pearson, as an American delegate at its weekly meetings and privy to all its secrets. (Pearson would later salute the British as “masters [of the double-cross game] and whatever Americans did similarly in the European and Mediterranean theaters stemmed from British direction and example.”) While Masterman’s group oversaw the work of the double agents and provided, through liaisons with governmental agencies, the accurate or partly accurate information they could transmit to the enemy, individual MI5 case officers guided their operations. (Masterman may have never actually met any of the double agents since there was no necessity to do so.) Over time, Britain came to believe that through the efforts of the Twenty Committee they effectively controlled the entire German espionage system within the British Isles.

  What helped swing the debate inside British intelligence in favor of recruiting Juan Pujol was his notional report about the British convoy bound for Malta. Messages decoded by Bletchley Park indicated that the German military, operating on the information, intended a coordinated attack in the Mediterranean using U-boats and Italian warplanes. When the convoy failed to appear, no blame was directed to the Abwehr or to Arabel. If such self-generated invention could so manipulate the Germans, the British reasoned that Pujol could do far greater damage as part of an artfully scripted deception effort.

  Just at the time London decided that MI6’s Eugene Risso-Gill should locate Pujol and persuade him to switch from a freelancer in Lisbon to a controlled double agent in Britain, he had revealed himself at the American legation. The British in Lisbon operated a secret fishing-boat shuttle to Gibraltar, but having Pujol use it to begin his journey to London might end the service if, after all, he turned out to be a German plant. Finally he was smuggled aboard a merchant ship going to the Mediterranean and taken as far as Gibraltar.

  At the Rock he was led through passport control by a British agent, taken for a large English breakfast in a restaurant, given money to purchase new clothes, and put up in a room from which he could come and go as he pleased. Shortly thereafter Donald Darling, the MI9 agent in Gibraltar working with evaders and escapees, got him space on a military flight to Britain. Since Darling had not been given a code name for Pujol, he chose one himself: Bovril. When he stepped off the British plane in Plymouth, finally in the country he had notionally been working in from July 1941 to April 1942, Pujol was met by two MI5 officers. One of them, Tomás Harris, spoke perfect Spanish.

  After an intense debriefing, which finally satisfied everyone concerned about Pujol’s credentials, he went to work with the equally inventive and industrious Harris in a close relationship that would last for the rest of the war. He was given cover as a translator for the BBC; his wife and young son were brought from Portugal to England; and his code name was changed from Bovril to Garbo, a reflection in British eyes of his ability as a top-notch actor. Since Pujol had already recruited a network of subagents in England, Harris decided to continue the notional operation with added agents—creating notional networks put together by the notional agents—while enriching the deception steadily fed through them with bits and pieces of accurate information. At its height, Garbo’s spy ring numbered some twenty-seven imaginary sources—among the lot, a Greek seaman, a Royal Air Force pilot, an American sergeant, an employee in the Ministry of Information, a Welsh nationalist, a South African in the War Office, a German-Swiss businessman, a Portuguese commercial traveler, a Venezuelan living in Glasgow, and a seaman who carried documents and espionage material to Lisbon that, in reality, arrived in a British diplomatic bag. “The one-man band of Lisbon developed into an orchestra,” J. C. Masterman wrote of Pujol’s expanded efforts, “and an orchestra which played a more and more ambitious programme.”

  A notably bravura performance by the team of Pujol and Harris came when it was necessary to remove from duty the notional subagent who lived near Liverpool (and had reported the Malta convoy) since he was in position to observe the genuine convoys assembled in the Mersey estuary for the invasion of North Africa. If he failed to report them, the Germans—in retrospect—would surely question his usefulness and possibly his existence. So to take him out of the picture he was stricken with cancer and simply ceased sending in material. But Garbo took the matter further by notionally hurrying to Liverpool to discover, as he informed the Germans, that the agent had died. An obituary notice was duly placed in the Liverpool Daily Post and passed to the Germans, who responded with an expression of sympathy to the widow. To tie up the story all the more, the notional widow, short of funds, asked to work for Garbo and, as Widow, was brought to London to assist with his hefty burden of work.

  In actuality, Pujol’s days were spent commuting to Harris’s office in London’s Jermyn Street and drafting his uniquely ornate and long-winded cover letters with wide gaps between the lines for insertions in invisible ink, the work always carried on under tight security measures guarding what he could do and know. (Obviously crucial was that Pujol be kept wholly in the dark about the existence of the deciphering system that allowed the British to monitor German reaction to his messages.) While notionally continuing to reach the Germans through a courier on the London-Lisbon air route, the letters were now carried by diplomatic bag to Lisbon and posted by MI6 to cover addresses in the city, from where they were sent on by the Germans to Arabel’s case officer in Madrid, an Abwehr official named Karl-Erich Kühlenthal. Replies and generous payments for Arabel and his network from their satisfied employer were collected by MI6 from the safe deposit box in the Lisbon bank and turned over to MI5 in London. In time, some German payment came directly to Garbo through a complex method of bank transfers of pesetas from Madrid that were exchanged for British pounds in London. By agreement with MI5, Pujol was allowed to keep 25 percent of his payment from the Germans; from the British came a monthly salary of a hundred pounds and occasional bonuses.

  Beyond his scores of letters sent to Madrid, eventually a system was created whereby Pujol could contact the Germans by wireless through coded messages sent to Madrid. These were transmitted, so the Germans believed, by a leftist radio enthusiast who had built his own set and thought the messages were from Spanish exiles to their colleagues in Spain. Over the course of his work in England, Pujol would send the Germans some two thousand wireless reports.

  Pujol’s activity by letter and wireless took on added importance with Operation Fortitude, the massive deception campaign about the place and timing of the cross-Channel invasion. In late July 1944, just after the landings in Normandy, Madrid informed Arabel that he had been awarded an Iron Cross Class II, the Germans thereby certifying their confidence in him as a star perform
er despite recent intelligence lapses. As it happened—and the British learned through intercepts—the award was never presented due to bureaucratic objection raised in Berlin about the agent’s Spanish citizenship. This was no obstacle for the British, who shortly before Christmas 1944 bestowed on Pujol an honorary award of Membership of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). For obvious reasons the honor was not made public at the time, though the medal was presented at a private luncheon attended by some MI5 members who knew of Garbo’s work. (In June 1984, the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, Pujol wore the medal at Buckingham Palace when the Duke of Edinburgh thanked him for his wartime contributions.)

  With the war’s end, MI5 arranged Pujol’s “escape” from England for a new life in South America. But before he vanished from view he made a journey back to Madrid at the behest of the British to meet Arabel’s handlers, this in an effort to detect any postwar German planning. Pujol’s guise for returning to Spain was the possibility of starting a new spy ring to penetrate the Soviet Union. He found Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, a figure he had never met and knew only under an alias, cowering in Avila in fear of the Allies repatriating him to Germany. They spent some three hours together, the emotional case officer indicating his undiminished trust in the agent while bemoaning his own fate. Finally Pujol announced that if he could no longer be of service to the Germans he would leave Spain for Portugal and eventually for South America. Perhaps pondering a move to Portugal himself, Kühlenthal inquired how he planned to cross the border from Spain. “Clandestinely,” said Pujol, playing the role of Arabel to the end. In truth he crossed the border openly and with no difficulty, and after he reached Lisbon he flew to London to report to MI5 on his Spanish visit, his final act as Garbo.