The Dark Game

by Paul B. Janeczko

  For her diligent and productive work in France, Virginia Hall was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the U.S. military’s second most revered honor. She was the first woman to be so honored. Wild Bill Donovan thought her work deserved personal recognition from the president, so he asked Harry Truman to make the presentation himself. However, when Virginia got wind of Donovan’s invitation, she asked him to reconsider involving the president. She didn’t want any publicity. As she put it, she was “still operational and most anxious to get busy.”

  Virginia Hall continued to work in the intelligence community with the CIA, until 1966, when she retired at age sixty. She and her husband — a former OSS agent — settled on a Maryland farm, where she created much the same type of environment she had experienced as a child. She planted “thousands of bulbs” and enjoyed tending to her animals and watching birds. She also made an excellent goat cheese in the French tradition.

  FOR SPIES TO BE SUCCESSFUL, they need lots of support from people and equipment. False documentation and legitimate currency were two of the issues that concerned the Research and Development Section of the OSS. Agents needed authentic personal effects. To get these, the OSS created the I Cash Clothes Project. An OSS agent with a fabricated story that hid his true identity met European immigrants when their ships docked in New York Harbor. He then began his work, trading new clothes, handkerchiefs, watches, eyeglasses, key rings, and suitcases for the same items that the immigrants carried with them. (We can only imagine what the immigrants thought about America, where their old, worn possessions were replaced by new ones.) Some of the items that the OSS gathered through this project were immediately supplied to spies ready to leave for their assignments in France. Others were brought to the Research and Development Section, where they served as models for creating reproductions.

  You probably wouldn’t think that an agent’s teeth could present a problem, but they could, if an agent had any fillings. Just as there was a difference between the quality of British clothes and French clothes, the same could be said for dental work. As a result of this disparity, the dental work of American agents needed to be altered in such a way that it looked like the work of a French dentist.

  Before a new OSS agent was ready to board a plane and parachute behind enemy lines, he had to be thoroughly searched to make sure that he carried no items, no matter how innocent they seemed, that could give him away. A stick of gum, a book of matches, a picture of a sweetheart could prove to be a spy’s undoing if discovered by a thorough border guard or nosy local policeman. The OSS veterans knew that the line between life and death in enemy territory was very thin indeed.

  If you’ve watched a James Bond movie, you were probably amazed by the wild spy gadgets and gizmos that 007 has at his disposal. There was a branch of MI6 and a counterpart in the OSS that created such items for its spies. Among other things, they created a .22 caliber pistol that was silenced and emitted no muzzle flash when fired.

  They also created a highly explosive powder called Aunt Jemima, because it looked like pancake mix. Blended with water or milk, the Aunt Jemima could be fashioned into bread dough that could be baked and then used to blow up a building! The R & D Section also created a highly explosive compound that looked and felt like coal. As you can imagine, these lumps of “coal” could be easily smuggled aboard an idle steam locomotive, where they were eventually shoveled into the firebox of a locomotive as it traveled with its load of ammunition or supplies. Like the Germans in World War I who created “cigar” time bombs to sabotage Allied ships, the OSS created a barometric bomb that exploded aboard an airplane when the craft reached a specified altitude.

  Since spies often need to make copies of crucial documents or take pictures of foreign agents, miniature cameras have a long history as essential pieces of spy gear. The sliding box camera is believed to be the first subminiature spy camera, from about 1865 in France.

  The Super Camera was developed in the 1870s. It measures two inches wide by nearly three inches long and three inches deep.

  During the latter part of the nineteenth century it was common for men to carry pocket watches. Spies and private detectives who were looking for a camera that they could easily carry and conceal were taken by the Ticka and Expo watch cameras, designed by Swedish engineer Magnus Neill. They were very popular in the early 1900s.

  The Ansco Memo miniature camera was introduced in 1927. It was the only camera at the time that could take fifty pictures on one roll of film. The Memo camera, as it was called, was only about an inch and a half wide, four inches long, and two inches deep. This camera was known for taking good pictures of action and speed.

  The Petal camera is another camera that was very popular with spies and undercover operatives. About the size of a quarter, it is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as being the smallest commercial camera ever produced.

  Perhaps the most unusual spy camera was the Steineck ABC wristwatch camera, which was sold in the United States in the late 1940s and 1950s. Oddly, despite its name, this gizmo is not a functioning watch, but it did afford agents with a camera that was reasonably easy to conceal.

  While all of these miniature cameras have come and gone, the Minox became the camera of choice for spies from the 1940s, when it was introduced, to the 1960s. But its popularity with spies didn’t end then. In fact, John A. Walker Jr., a Soviet spy who breached United States security by photographing countless pages of secret documents and ciphers, used a newer version of the Minox. Walker’s camera came with an eighteen-inch measuring chain that allowed him to easily photograph 8 x 10 inch photos and standard sheets of paper.

  One historian called Juan Pujol “the greatest, most remarkable double agent of World War II.” He was remembered this way because he was enormously creative and successful. He was also stubbornly insistent on becoming a spy — and was very nearly passed over. Pujol was a hotel manager in his native Spain when the Nazis invaded Poland. About thirty years old at the time, Pujol was a short man, with dark receding hair that he usually wore slicked back in the style of the times. As the Nazis began their conquest of Europe, Pujol came to despise Hitler and his army of thugs. Some say that it was Hitler’s treatment of the Jews that drove Pujol to make a life-changing decision to spy on the Nazis for England.

  Although Pujol wanted to put his life on the line as a spy, he was too shy to offer his services at the British embassy in Madrid. Instead, he sent his wife to make the offer for him. Not surprisingly, the British rejected the offer. They were understandably leery of a walk-in — a person who volunteers his or her services as a spy — let alone one who sends his wife to offer his services.

  Juan Pujol was not deterred by this rejection. If the British didn’t want him as a spy, he would offer his services to Germany, hoping that if he could get the Nazis to accept his services, he would show himself to be a valuable asset for the British. He read whatever he could about the Nazis, all the better, as he wrote in his autobiography, to act as a “rabid Nazi supporter.” Once again, however, his offer was rejected. Still, he persisted, continuing his act. “I began to use my gift of gab,” he wrote, “and ranted away as befitted a staunch Nazi.”

  Perhaps worn down by Pujol’s persistence, the Nazis agreed to send him to England as a spy. They gave him a crash course in espionage, which included superficial instructions on how to write his reports in invisible ink. He was handed a stack of British paper money, as well as an address for a mail drop where he was to send his reports. He was also given a questionnaire, a common part of a spy’s travel kit, which is a list of areas of interest in England that Germany wanted Pujol to explore and report on. Finally, he was given his code name: Arabel. He left Spain in July 1941.

  Then an odd thing happened. Pujol stopped in Lisbon, Portugal, once again walked into the British embassy, and once again volunteered himself as a spy. Even though he was now armed with evidence that he was working for the Germans, the British still showed no interest in his offer. So Pujol decided
to stay in Lisbon and fake it. He would pretend to send his reports to the Abwehr, the office of German military intelligence, from England. His reports had to be mailed because he was not given a radio or even instructions on how to operate one. So, how could Arabel expect his Nazi handlers to believe that he was in England if his letters were postmarked Lisbon? Arabel concocted a story that he’d run into a pilot with Nazi loyalties who had agreed to mail his letters for him from Lisbon. For a small fee, of course.

  With that part of his story in place, Arabel began gathering the props he’d need to convince the Abwehr that he was in England. First, he bought a secondhand copy of a guidebook of the U.K. and a large map of the British Isles. He also got his hands on an outdated British railway schedule. He spent many hours reading in the Lisbon library and watching current-event newsreels at a local movie theater. Beyond using such research tools, Pujol relied on his imagination.

  Once he was established in his fake spy business, sending reports in invisible ink to the mail drop, Arabel found himself quite busy. So busy, in fact, that he needed other fake agents to assist him. He recruited notional — or imaginary — agents to appear to help him gather intelligence for the Fatherland. Arabel and his notional agents worked hard from late summer of 1941 into the new year. Because Germany had not been very successful establishing a spy network in the British Isles, they could not easily verify any of Arabel’s reports. And even though he made some errors in his reports, the Abwehr considered him an authority on intelligence in England. On occasion, he would supply Berlin with false information that would cause them to waste valuable resources hunting for something that didn’t exist. In fact, it was just such a wild goose chase that led to Arabel being “caught” by the British.

  In February 1942, the British code breakers at Bletchley Park near London intercepted a message that referred to intelligence gathered by Arabel in Liverpool, England. The message mentioned a British convoy sailing from Liverpool: “fifteen ships including nine freighters, course BASTA [Gibraltar] and probably going on to Malta, possible intermediate port LISA [Lisbon].” The deciphered message caused panic in MI5. Their first thought was deeply disturbing: there was an unaccounted-for agent in the U.K. sending intelligence to Berlin. When a Bletchley agent tried to verify the convoy movement, he made a startling discovery: there was no such convoy. Yet as they tried to make sense of this intelligence, they intercepted another message from Berlin issuing an attack order to find and sink the convoy! So the Germans were spending time and fuel looking for a fifteen-ship convoy that didn’t exist.

  Investigators from MI5, the counterintelligence and security agency arm of the SIS, came to believe that this rogue “spy” was none other than that slender Spaniard who had offered his services at their embassies in Spain and Portugal. But how could they find him? Luck was on their side. Arabel was tiring of his phony spy game, and, fearful that his family would get caught in the madness of war, he decided to leave Europe while he could. However, before he could put his move to Brazil into action, he made one more attempt to find a country that would welcome a new spy to its intelligence operation. This time he visited the American embassy in Lisbon, where his offer was taken more seriously. Although the Americans didn’t accept his offer, they did contact the British embassy. Juan Pujol was finally on his way to being a real spy.

  After a thorough investigation and a long interrogation, the British were satisfied that Pujol was Arabel. They smuggled him to England on a British steamer. Once at a safe house in the suburbs of London, Pujol was given the code name Bouril, and Tomás Harris became his case officer. The pair spent long days together for the duration of the war, continuing Bouril’s work with the Nazis. Harris was pleased with Pujol’s experience. “He came to us as a fully fledged double agent with all the growing pains over,” the agent later wrote. “We only had to operate and develop the system that he had already set up.” And develop the system they did. By the end of the war, Bouril controlled twenty-seven agents and subagents — those who work for the agents — all imaginary. In fact, Bouril did such a thorough and creative job with his agents that his code name was changed to Garbo, after one of the most popular and revered actresses of the time, Greta Garbo.

  Being a top-notch double agent takes more than merely inventing characters for a play. Garbo needed to give his agents personalities, complete with character flaws. One of his notional agents, for instance, was Moonbeam, who supposedly operated in Canada and was quite the cheapskate. To make this point with the Germans, he told them that Moonbeam expected to be reimbursed for his payments to the person who shoveled snow from his front walk.

  In another case, Garbo and Harris were worried that if Two, another of Garbo’s agents, did not report on shipping in the Liverpool area, the Nazis might grow suspicious when their aerial reconnaissance reported shipping activity. What to do? Garbo wrote to his handlers that he was worried that he hadn’t heard from Two in some time. He told them that he was going to investigate. Shortly after he “arrived” in Liverpool, he learned — or so he reported — that his agent had unexpectedly died. Garbo went so far as to plant a fake obituary in the Liverpool Daily Post:

  GERBERS — Nov. 19 at Bootle, after a long illness, aged 52 years, William Maximillian. Private funeral. No flowers please.

  Garbo even included this bogus announcement in one of his reports to Berlin. He asked for and received from the Germans a small compensation to the “widow Mrs. Gerbers.”

  If the Germans sound gullible, that’s because, to a large degree, they were. So much of the intelligence from Garbo proved accurate — though not damaging to the Allies — that they believed what he reported. To avoid looking too perfect, Garbo would on occasion forward intelligence that proved inaccurate. One of his most successful tactics was to mail accurate intelligence at such a time that it would arrive after an event detailed in the report took place. One example of this technique is the information Garbo sent to divert Berlin’s attention from Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa.

  Late in 1942 the Allies were planning a massive landing in North Africa to take on the German troops commanded by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the legendary “Desert Fox.” The element of surprise was crucial for the success of the landing, and Garbo played a large part in carrying out the deception. He was to send false information to the Nazis that would lead them to believe that the Allied attack would occur at a different place. Two fake operations were created to cover plans for Operation Torch. Solo 1 was a fake plan to invade Norway. Operation Overthrow featured plans for the Allies to invade the north coast of France, the same area, as it turned out, of Operation Overlord, the D-day invasion two years later.

  Garbo reported fabricated information that “proved” that the Allies were ready to invade Norway. For example, he wrote that Allied command had ordered 20,000 shoulder patches with Norge embroidered on them. They were to be delivered to resistance fighters in Norway. He reported other “facts” that pointed to action in a cold country: that the Allies had ordered large amounts of anti-freeze and snow chains for their invasion vehicles, that they were investigating the availability of Norwegian currency at large banks, and that they were requiring junior officers to take a class in mountain warfare.

  With intelligence like this provided by one of their best agents, the Germans had no reason for doubt. As a result of such information, the Germans shifted troops and equipment from Africa to Norway and northern France, exactly what the Allies had hoped for. The diverted troops could not return to North Africa in time to help their comrades.

  To make sure that Germany continued to think highly of Garbo’s intelligence, he mailed a report that included the details of Operation Torch. However, he timed the letter to arrive after the northern Africa invasion had begun. Garbo and his handlers knew that his letter would arrive too late to help the Germans or compromise the invasion yet would still show Berlin that Garbo had in the end been able to obtain accurate information. The Germans seemed satisf
ied, even though the final, correct information had arrived too late to be actionable.

  The Germans finally allowed Garbo to transmit his information on a radio, which cut out much of the tedium of writing a report in invisible ink. Nonetheless, Garbo and Harris continued to spend many hours making sure that their messages said just what they wanted them to say. In the three years of his work with MI5, Garbo worked like a man possessed. In his book The Deceivers, Thaddeus Holt describes a typical day for Garbo this way: “Harris and GARBO would meet each day, devising false information, composing messages, inventing new imaginary subagents, breaking occasionally for lunch or dinner . . . and beyond question having the times of their lives.”

  BECAUSE THE U.S. HAD NO TRAINING FACILITIES for spies at the start of World War II, it took some months before training camps were ready in this country. Training, however, could not wait, so early OSS agents were trained at Camp X, not too far from Toronto, Canada. This camp, the first secret-agent training camp in North America, was established by the British to assist their American allies. Eventually eight training bases were established in the United States, all near Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. One facility, in fact, at an abandoned boys camp, later became Camp David, a retreat for U.S. presidents.

  OSS agents-in-training worked in the various camps, which specialized in aspects of espionage, before going to something of a finishing school for spies at “The Farm,” a sprawling one-hundred-acre estate in Maryland, about twenty miles south of Washington. On the Farm they learned the skills they would need to stay alive behind enemy lines. Agents learned how to use weapons and were trained in close-up and hand-to-hand combat — a combination of jujitsu and what the instructor called “Gutter Fighting.” One agent recalled that he learned how to dislocate someone’s arm while holding a knife under his ribs. He told his students: “You’re interested only in disabling or killing your enemy. . . . There’s no fair play; no rules except one: kill or be killed.” The instructor’s favorite weapon was a razor-sharp stiletto, “a silent, deadly weapon. . . . Never mind the blood. Just take care of it quickly.”