No, there was none.
‘He knows the dates and the contents of the messages,’ Bristow said. Pujol could recite almost word for word the reports he had written in secret ink in the letters forwarded to the Abwehr spymaster in Madrid.
‘And I don’t think he is a German agent,’ he added. ‘It seems as though he has invented himself out of some romantic notion about spying, or else just for the money. Apparently the Germans were paying him quite well.’
Everything pointed to Pujol being who he said he was: a Spaniard, pretending to work for the Germans, who really wanted to work for the British.
For the following few days, Bristow continued his new routine of heading down to Hendon in the mornings. Cyril Mills was always there, but he did not speak a word of Spanish and could not make anything of the man. Too pompous by half, Bristow thought; it was not the best of arrangements.
And then, on 1 May, as he turned up for another day’s interviewing and debriefing, a different, happier face opened the Hendon door to him.
There was someone else in MI5 much better suited to the job of running this potential new agent, a Spanish speaker, a good friend of Philby and the man who had been with Mills to pick Pujol up at Plymouth: Tomás Harris.
Bristow had met Harris a couple of times before, the first a few months previously when Philby had invited him down to London for dinner. Driving in the dark after the headlights on Philby’s Vauxhall car fused, they had arrived at Harris’s Mayfair home. Tommy and his wife Hilda – an attractive and impulsive woman who became renowned among their friends for her cooking skills – were wealthy, and the food and wine they served were of a quality that was becoming increasingly rare in wartime. Philby had spoken openly about service matters in front of them, which had perplexed Bristow until it was explained that Harris was in MI5. His mother was from Seville, and he had spent a good deal of time in Spain collecting works of art. Much of the collection was in the Mayfair house. Bristow ended up staying the night, sleeping in a room with a seventeenth-century Spanish wardrobe, brass-studded latticework decorating the doors. Much of the furniture on the landings seemed to have come straight from a museum.
He liked Harris; he was a talented and charming man. Like Philby, Harris shared a love of Spain, which felt so far away as the snow began to fall on London and Philby drove Bristow back to St Albans.
Now, though, a little part of Spain – a curious Spaniard – had come to them. Bristow was delighted that Mills had stepped aside. Harris would be the perfect case officer.
At Hendon, the two men greeted each other warmly. Bristow had heard most of it already, but Harris needed to listen to Pujol’s story in full.
Pujol was in the back room, waiting. After drinking some of Mrs Titoff’s coffee, Harris and Bristow went through, and the interview began. Pujol was cold, unused to the British climate, and Mrs Titoff made sure the fire was lit. He was enjoying her English breakfasts: he had not eaten bacon for years.
It took several days. Bristow and Harris were in and out of Crespigny Road for over a week, going over the story time and again. Harris was soon convinced that Pujol was indeed who he said he was, that he was, at least in the Germans’ eyes, a genuine agent.
‘Desmond,’ he told Bristow after his first day with Pujol, ‘he is obviously Arabel, but I do find it hard to believe such an outwardly simple man still has the Germans fooled and had us worried for so long. He is such a dreamer, and so willing, he is going to be a marvellous double agent to operate with as long as the Germans continue to swallow his communications.’
The MI5 man and his Section V colleague were convinced. The job now was to persuade those above them that Pujol was worth adding to the double-cross team. Bristow was asked to report first, joining the Thursday afternoon meetings of the Twenty Committee at MI5 headquarters on St James’s Street. Later, on his recommendation, Harris came along as well, soon becoming a regular member. Bristow would leave shortly after to become MI6’s man in Gibraltar.
The room where the meetings were held was ‘square, bare and cold’. The chair was held by John Masterman, with John Marriot, a former solicitor, as secretary. Tar Robertson was present, as head of MI5’s B1A section, as were various representatives of MI5 and MI6, directors of intelligence for the Army, Navy and Air Force, and delegates from the Home Forces and Home Defence.
Harris and Bristow had heard Pujol’s long and involved tale: they also studied the copies of the letters that he had brought with him from Lisbon, replicas of the messages he had been sending over the previous months to the Germans. Thanks to the Bletchley intercepts, they were able to cross-check what Pujol showed them with what the Abwehr in Madrid were reporting back to Berlin about Arabel. The texts matched.
There was a letter missing from Pujol’s collection, however, the one about the Malta convoy. When it was mentioned to him, Pujol wrote out the letter again, matching the original almost word for word. This was proof, as far as Harris was concerned, that he really was who he claimed to be. Later, the original letter emerged – it had been mislaid by MI6 when they transferred Pujol and his materials from Portugal.
The question was whether Harris and Bristow could convince the members of the Twenty Committee of Pujol’s usefulness. They would be the ones to decide to take him on or not for double-cross work. The problem was that not everyone on the committee had access to the Bletchley decoded transcripts, or were even aware of their existence. The Twenty Committee may have been one of the secret services’ most secret organisations – the ‘club’, as Masterman called it – but secrets were being kept from at least some of its members; not least the fact that the British had cracked a good number of the German Enigma codes, including that used by the Abwehr.
Not having access to this material meant that, on hearing Pujol’s story, many committee members refused to believe it. It was, quite simply, preposterous. How on earth could they take such a man seriously? Surely he was a fantasist, or a German plant. It would be impossible to use him as a double agent.
Only a handful of members – those from the Admiralty and MI6 – knew, thanks to Dilly Knox and Mavis Lever’s decoding work at Bletchley, that almost everything that Pujol said could be confirmed by what German intelligence was reporting about him in its internal communiqués.
The situation became untenable. The Twenty Committee was close to rejecting a man who had the potential to become an invaluable double agent. Members from MI5 had some knowledge, at least, of Bletchley, but representatives from the Services were in the dark, and if they could not believe in Pujol it would be impossible to come up with false or misleading material for him to pass on to the Germans. Finally, in desperation, Masterman wrote to MI6 chief Sir Stewart Menzies explaining the situation. A few days later Menzies wrote back, reluctantly clearing all members of the committee to receive Bletchley material relevant to the work of double-cross. The doubters could finally see the proof: Pujol was genuine.
Now word quickly came back from the Twenty Committee: yes, they would take the Spaniard on as a double agent.
At long last, under Harris’s guidance, Pujol’s work as Garbo could begin.
10
London, Spring–Summer 1942
GARBO IS COMMONLY thought of as one man – Juan Pujol. ‘Garbo’ was the code name MI5 gave Pujol and that was how he was referred to in official documents – always in the singular. Yet in reality the double agent was a double act: the character of Garbo was forged by two men. Putting Pujol and Harris together might have appeared the obvious thing to do, given the Spanish connection, but it was an inspired decision by ‘Tar’ Robinson.
‘Harris and Pujol worked very well together,’ said Sarah Bishop, who later acted as their assistant.
The little Catalan and the brilliant, half-Spanish half-Jewish artist were an ideal, Quixotic match, with echoes of Cervantes’s duo in both of them. Hands-on and highly creative, Harris had the flair to mould the raw material of Pujol into what Garbo would eventually become. And both of
them were keen storytellers.
Yet their relationship was not built simply on the fact that they spoke Spanish. They also shared a common language of mischief. Pícaro is a common word in Spain, often used to describe someone who is both sharp-witted and a troublemaker. It is morally neutral – you may criticise the person one minute and admire them the next. There tends to be something slippery about them, hard to nail down, almost as though they were obeying some other code of conduct or morality – one which is invisible or unknown to ordinary society. The ‘bandidos’ of the Spanish sierras, colourfully depicted by writers such as Mérimée in Carmen, belong to a similar tradition.
In Spanish literature, ‘picaresque’ novels were stories published during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, inspired by the classic Maqamat tales of ‘rogues’ in medieval Arabic literature. The writer Gerald Brenan summed up the picaresque genre:
These novels depict as a rule a child growing up under sordid conditions and making his way through the world where everything is hostile and dangerous. He has no arms but his mother wit: by using it he becomes a criminal, but essentially he is innocent and well intentioned and it is the wickedness of the world that corrupts him.
They are satirical and funny, commonly episodical and depicting a realistic view of the harshness of everyday life. Hypocrisy is a frequent target, while fate and chance act as a permanent backdrop. Most striking, though, is the insistence on the need for cunning, a sense that only a fool takes the world at face value, playing by its rules and following its logic. Be smart and be light, the stories seem to tell us – almost as though imparting a teaching – otherwise the world will lock you in its jaws.
‘Garbo’ may have worn a suit and spent most of his time in central London offices rather than begging on the streets of Toledo, but there is a parallel. Pujol and Harris could not have created their character had it not been for a shared world view born from Lazarillo de Tormes or El Buscón – classics of the picaresque genre.
Pujol was no mere ‘front man’ for Harris. In the official account of the Garbo operation that he later wrote for MI5, Harris was at pains to point out that Pujol was hard-working and imaginative, and was vital to the functioning of the Garbo operation. In no way did he act ‘purely as a scribe’, as many of the other double agents did. ‘On the contrary, his entire existence remained wrapped up in the successful continuation of the work which he had so skilfully initiated.’
Nor did Pujol sit back or slow down once he arrived in London. His workload increased now that he was officially employed by the British. Over the course of the next three years he would write 315 letters, some of which were up to 8,000 words long. Each one of these letters not only contained writing in secret ink, but a plausible cover letter as well – two texts on the same page.
‘There was a lot of work,’ Sarah Bishop remembered. ‘There were so many things to do – writing letters to the Germans. Garbo would change them and write them in his own style. Then they had to be written out again.’
Later, his communications with Madrid included wireless messages, and he produced the final version of around 1,200 of these, dressing the dry communiqués in his own unique style. Were anything to be sent in his name with a different voice, questions might be raised at the other end and his cover blown.
‘He jealously examined the development of the work lest we should choose to pass material to the enemy through his medium which should result in discrediting the channel with which he had supplied us,’ Harris wrote.
In addition there were bureaucratic tasks to perform, such as sending his accounts every month to Kühlenthal, and keeping a diary of the movements of each of his imaginary agents.
Once Harris got the green light, he rented a tiny office for their joint use near the Piccadilly Arcade, on Jermyn Street. This was very close to the MI5 building at 58 St James’s Street, and Harris could cross from one to the other in a short time: at a brisk pace it takes just over a minute door to door.
The office had little natural light and just enough space for a couple of tables and some chairs, and a lamp that was almost always switched on. Pujol would tend to sit next to the wall, sandwiched between a desk and a filing cabinet where copies of his messages were kept.
Harris was not there all the time, but Pujol was kept company by an MI5 employee who became an integral part of the Garbo team. Sarah Bishop had worked previously in the War Cabinet before moving to the French section of MI5. She spoke fluent Spanish, and bumping into her on the stairs one day, Harris asked her to join him on the Garbo team. Soon she became Pujol’s translator, assistant and close friend.
It was clear that the best arrangement would be to have Pujol stay in London for the long term. Pujol willingly agreed, but on condition that his wife and son be brought over from Lisbon to join him. Araceli was now expecting their second child.
The couple had been communicating by letter over the previous weeks – always passing through the wartime censor first. Pujol was clearly anxious for news from his wife, and wrote in his usual style:
I am writing to you again today with the natural surprise caused by my not having yet received any letter from you in reply to mine, and my surprise is the greater since my letters asked you for particulars which I am particularly interested in receiving; I hope therefore that without further delay you will reply to this letter and will give me some more news about Juan Fernando and about yourself, I want to know how you are . . .
He told Araceli the arrangements for her leaving Lisbon: she was to tell her mother that she was travelling with Pujol to America; and she was to leave summer clothes behind – they would not be needing them in London.
Pujol clearly missed his wife and son, but the letters show how happy and relieved he was to have finally reached England:
I am feeling quite well and getting better acclimatised than I thought I would to the country in general, which to me is charming and smiling, and above all one breathes the real air of liberty, which I never thought or ever suspected would be possible. I promise you many pleasant surprises when you come and get to know the country.
For her part, Araceli wrote back telling him how their son’s first teeth were coming through, how the doctor had told her that her new pregnancy was going well, and assuring him that they were both well, but missing him too.
You cannot know, my dearest Juanito, how I long to be at your side. I cannot imagine life without your affection and attention. I would tell you so many things right now if Mr. Censor weren’t so curious . . . Just to say that before finishing the letter I will give the baby lots of kisses from you, and tell him that Daddy loves him and will see him soon, right?
And you be careful with the pretty girls over there. You know how much it would hurt your little wifey. I believe you to be a good man and you wouldn’t do anything like that for anything in the world. You just remember how much I adore you and concentrate on working like a madman against that gentleman in Central Europe, that no matter how much is done against him can never be enough.
Araceli clearly thought it wiser not to refer to Hitler by name. By the early summer of 1942, after some complications, the British authorities finally brought her and her son over to London to be with Pujol. Jorge was born in September 1942.
To allow Pujol to move freely in wartime London, Harris arranged some identity papers in the name of Juan García – Pujol’s second surname, that of his mother. He also arranged for him to have a nominal posting within the BBC as a translator, as well as a job in the Ministry of Information’s Spanish section.
Pujol’s mornings at this early stage were spent in the office, working on new letters and messages to be sent to his German controllers, then at lunchtime he and Harris would eat at a nearby restaurant – either Garibaldi’s on Jermyn Street, or Martínez, just across Piccadilly on Swallow Street, where they served Spanish food. The intense German bombing of the Blitz was over a year in the past now and air raids were less frequent, but damaged buildings in th
e area were a visual reminder of the war. Just across the street from the office, the crooner Al Bowlly, the world’s first ‘pop star’, had been killed when a German parachute mine blew up outside his flat. Some structures had been pulled down completely and vegetable patches – ‘Victory Gardens’ – planted in their place.
In the afternoons Pujol went to English classes at a nearby Berlitz school, before heading home to Hendon. The Crespigny Road address was soon swapped for another, very similar house a two-minute walk around the corner at 55 Elliot Road. Although a relatively safe part of London, the area had suffered some damage during the earlier part of the war, when high-explosive bombs had been dropped on nearby streets. It was a short stroll to Hendon Central Underground station, from where the Northern Line went straight down into central London. MI5 paid Pujol £100 a month for his services, which he considered more than enough – his rent cost £18 per month, while lunch in a restaurant cost around 6 shillings.
Harris and Pujol combined brilliantly, with Pujol’s imagination and eagerness sculpted by Harris’s intuitive brilliance and inside knowledge. Later, Pujol would commonly refer to Harris as ‘always smiling’ and his ‘best friend’. Harris was held in high regard by his colleagues: Masterman wrote that he was ‘the most remarkable’ of all the people he collaborated with during his time on the Twenty Committee.
But while they could communicate in Spanish and quickly developed a personal rapport, security measures still had to be enforced. Pujol was never a member of MI5, as a result of which much of what Harris knew – for example the existence of the Bletchley intercepts – could never be passed on to him. Trust in Pujol strengthened over time, but for the first five months in London he was accompanied twenty-four hours a day by an official, his personal phone was tapped and his letters back to family members in Spain were censored. It was never properly explained to him who he was working for or how things were organised around him. Over the months and years he gained a sense of some of this, but the fact that he rarely asked any questions helped to deepen the trust in him, and in particular the esteem in which Harris held him.
The Spy with 29 Names Page 9