The Spy with 29 Names

by Jason Webster

  * * *

  fn1 The twenty-seven fictional members of the network, along with the German code name ‘Alaric’ and the British code name ‘Garbo’, make Pujol ‘the spy with 29 names’.

  PART FOUR

  ‘It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction.

  Fiction has to make sense.’

  Mark Twain

  14

  Germany and the Eastern Front, July 1942–March 1943

  FAR FROM JERMYN Street, the war on the Eastern Front ground on.

  After guard duties on the Azov Sea came to an end in July, the men of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler – LAH – were sent to France, where their swelling numbers were converted into a Panzergrenadier Division – motorised infantry equipped with armoured personnel carriers and half-track fighting vehicles.

  Jochen Peiper did not rush to rejoin his men, spending time with his wife in Germany and visiting his mentor, Reichsführer Himmler, at his headquarters. It was an important moment for the head of the SS. His leading subordinate, Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Final Solution, had recently been wounded in an assassination attempt in Prague by Czechoslovak resistance fighters. Heydrich had not been killed in the attack itself, but debris had been blown into his abdomen and he would later die from his infected wounds.

  It was a questionable victory for the Czechoslovaks. Nazi retribution for Heydrich’s death was massive and brutal, and, if anything, his murder sped up the process of the Holocaust. In the May of 1942 the gas chambers at Auschwitz became fully operational and Himmler spent part of the summer visiting the site to ensure that his new installations were running as efficiently as possible.

  Staying close to the centre of these developments, Peiper did not make it to France to join his unit until August. There, in September, he was made commander of the III Battalion – a fighting unit comprising almost a thousand men organised into five companies. It was an important step in his already rapid rise through the ranks.

  One of his first acts as commander was to forbid his men from having relationships with French girls or visiting the local brothels. It made a poor initial impression and later, on the recommendation of a medical officer concerned, perhaps, by the consequences of imposing monastic rules on fighting men, Peiper rescinded the order.

  The autumn was spent getting used to the division’s new military equipment. The armoured personnel carriers came with machine guns or anti-tank guns, and could travel off-road, transporting an entire squadron and protecting it from enemy infantry fire. By the winter, they were ready to be used.

  Things were developing rapidly in the east. The situation in the southern sector of the front, in and around Stalingrad, was becoming desperate: it was time for Hitler’s crack troops of the SS to be brought in to show their worth. On 30 December, the LAH received orders to prepare for deployment to the Ukraine.

  The first units were already heading east when, still in France, Peiper was promoted to Sturmbannführer – the equivalent of major. It was 30 January, the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s coming to power, and Peiper’s twenty-eighth birthday. The next day his battalion caught the train and headed east, just as, in Stalingrad, General Friedrich Paulus surrendered the German 6th Army to the Soviets.

  The defeat at Stalingrad was a shocking blow for the Germans. The 6th Army, a fighting force that had once numbered 300,000 men, had been destroyed and the Wehrmacht’s air of invincibility, earned after years of spectacular victories across Europe, had been lost.

  The LAH – now also known as the 1st SS Division – was joined by the 2nd SS Division, Das Reich, on the southern sector of the Eastern Front, and together with the 3rd SS Division, Totenkopf (Death’s Head), they made up the SS Panzer Corps. Their objective was to retake territory lost in the wake of the Stalingrad defeat.

  Peiper and his men were in action as soon as they got off the train, arriving near the city of Kharkov. It was cold and many Wehrmacht units were demoralised. The German 320th Infantry Division – which had once numbered some 20,000 men – had become trapped behind enemy lines. Peiper’s III Battalion was given the job of rescuing it, and with only a few hundred soldiers under his command he completed the job in less than two days, destroying the Soviet forces he encountered and fighting his way back to the German lines the long way round because the river ice could not hold the weight of his equipment.

  The action won him the German Cross in Gold, one of the highest honours in the Wehrmacht. But as if rescuing an entire infantry division was not enough, Peiper continued over the coming days and weeks with more heroic and daredevil exploits, punching deep into enemy territory and inflicting heavy losses. He gained a reputation for leading from the front, issuing orders calmly and with tactical precision.

  Yet there was a price to be paid for his style of leadership – Peiper was becoming known for suffering high casualties among his troops. He admired commanders like Georg Preuss, a first lieutenant who became company commander under him. Preuss not only obeyed orders to the letter, he also used to comment with a grin that the more of his men were killed ‘the more women will be left for me’.

  Peiper’s scant regard for human life was extended many times over when it came to the enemy – both soldiers and civilians. The Germans had abandoned Kharkov on 15 February, yet fighting around the city continued as they tried to retake it. On 3 March, Peiper’s battalion invented a new weapon designed for combat in enemy-held villages: the blowtorch.

  Taking the heaters that were used to warm the engines on their vehicles in the sub-zero temperatures, Peiper had them modified and turned into flame-throwers that could spew out a jet of fire of up to 15 metres long. He soon had a chance to test them out. The next day they were used for the first time when the village of Stanichnoye, and anyone left inside it, was reduced to ashes. The nearby village of Staraverovka soon suffered the same fate. Anything – and anyone – that got in the battalion’s way was incinerated.

  The SS was no stranger to atrocities, but this was eye-catching even by their standards. Peiper’s cachet was raised even more by his innovation and his unit earned itself the nickname the ‘Blowtorch Battalion’ – a moniker his men were proud to bear, painting blowtorches on their vehicles as an unofficial symbol.

  Meanwhile, Peiper continued in his relentless progress, often reaching his daily objectives early in the morning and then continuing further into enemy territory on his own initiative. Such an action won him another medal – this time the highest in Germany: the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.

  His greatest moment, in the Third Battle of Kharkov, was yet to come.

  Again on his own initiative, by 9 March Peiper’s Blowtorch Battalion had reached the western outskirts of the city as the Germans pushed to retake it and the stage was set for a full assault against the Soviet positions, using all three SS divisions available. At the start of the offensive, Peiper was ordered to advance along the main street and reach Red Square in the centre. After seizing a small bridge of the River Lopan, he used his new heavy Tiger tanks with their powerful 88mm guns to achieve his objective. Fighting was fierce and the losses, again, were high, with over 4,500 LAH casualties, but by 14 March Peiper’s men had pushed through and the defenders were beaten. Kharkov was back in German hands and the Waffen-SS had achieved one of its greatest victories.

  The city may have been recaptured, but Peiper wanted more. Acting independently, and turning off the radio so as not to hear the orders calling him back, he continued to push repeatedly against Soviet positions, breaking through with no protection on his flanks or to the rear. He did not care: Peiper was racing north from Kharkov at breakneck speed, pushing through towns and villages without stopping.

  The result was that, at 1135 hours on 18 March he was able to declare that he had single-handedly taken the nearby city of Belgorod as well. The Third Battle of Kharkov had ended.

  The Germans were ecstatic. After the disaster at Stalingrad only weeks before they now had something to
celebrate on the Eastern Front. And victory had come thanks to the fearless efforts of the three Waffen-SS divisions of the SS Corps. Of these, the LAH, the 1st SS Division, received the largest share of the medals that were subsequently handed out.

  Triumphant, they carried out a massacre of Soviet prisoners, murdering hundreds of wounded soldiers in Kharkov’s hospitals. Officers and commissars were also executed as a matter of course.

  Jochen Peiper, meanwhile, the glorious commander of the III Battalion and the victor of Belgorod, was now a hero of the Reich and one of the most dangerous men in the German armed forces.

  15

  London, March–June 1943

  AFTER MONTHS OF hesitation, Kühlenthal finally gave permission for Garbo to communicate with Madrid by wireless in March 1943. Pujol was sent the Abwehr cypher table – one that Bletchley had already broken – and was able to put the machine he had ‘bought on the black market’ into operation. A friend of Fred the Gibraltarian acted as wireless operator, thinking, as Garbo explained to the Germans, that he was sending secret messages on behalf of a clandestine Spanish Republican group. In fact, the man tapping away in Morse code was a real, not fictional, new member of the Garbo organisation: Charlie Haines, a former bank clerk who had failed to get into the armed services owing to a limp brought on by polio.

  Harris and the Twenty Committee were pleased: the transmissions and codes that the Germans provided were a clear indication of the value they put on Garbo’s material. And the more they trusted him, the greater the opportunities for MI5 to use the channel to deceive the enemy.

  The Garbo operation appeared to be going very well. A plan for the Germans to pay Garbo through Spanish fruit merchants as intermediaries was up and running, and several thousand pounds had already been received. By June the figure had reached £7,000, with the added irony that the Abwehr was effectively paying to be deceived.

  Meanwhile the Germans had fallen for a new story that Garbo had been working on – a secret arms depot being set up in the Chislehurst Caves, in the south-eastern suburbs of London. From his waitering duties, Fred had been transferred to a job helping to dig and expand the underground chambers as ‘all Gibraltarians should have a natural aptitude for tunnelling’. The arms and ammunition stored there would, according to the story, be used once the Allies opened up the Second Front, and by the speed at which the caves were opened and filled, it was hoped that the Germans would come to an erroneous conclusion as to the date of such an operation. The fact was that there were no weapons being kept in the Chislehurst Caves. The tunnels had served as an arsenal during the First World War, but were now acting as a large-scale air-raid shelter.

  Towards the end of May, an even greater success came for Garbo. Some weeks earlier, suspecting that the British might have broken them, the Abwehr had changed their Enigma codes. The code-breakers at Bletchley thought they could crack the new ones eventually, but that it could take some considerable time. In the meanwhile they were temporarily blind, unable to read the Abwehr traffic. Help came, however, when Kühlenthal sent Garbo seventeen miniature photographs containing the new cypher tables. These were sent to Bletchley and within a couple of months – a far shorter time than it would have taken otherwise – the code-breakers were back in, reading the Germans’ messages once more.

  On sending the cypher tables, the Germans wrote to Garbo: ‘We trust that you will be able to guard all this material which we confide in you conscientiously and prevent it at any time from ever falling into the hands of the enemy.’

  The word came back from a delighted Bletchley – it was the highest-grade cypher used thus far by the German secret service. Harris was in no doubt that it was ‘the most important development’ yet in the Garbo case.

  Garbo was proving useful in other areas as well. On 1 June a KLM plane on the civilian route from Lisbon to Britain was shot down by the Luftwaffe over the Bay of Biscay, killing all seventeen people on board. One of the passengers was the actor Leslie Howard, who had starred in films such as Gone with the Wind and The Scarlet Pimpernel, and was returning to Britain after a lecture tour in Spain and Portugal.

  There have been many theories about the shooting down of Flight 777, including that the Germans mistakenly thought that Churchill was on the plane and were trying to assassinate him. From Garbo’s point of view, however, the event was significant – his fictional courier, taking his letters back and forth to Lisbon, worked on that route. He had not been on Howard’s flight – luckily – but he might have been.

  The Germans were putting a line of communication with Kühlenthal at risk. There could be no more attacks on these civilian planes, Garbo told his spymaster. They had to stop.

  And stop they did. Whether or not because of Garbo’s intervention is not certain – the planes were re-routed after the attack and henceforth only flew at night. Garbo’s message, however, may well have influenced the German decision to leave the planes alone.

  It was clear that within a year of arriving in Britain, Garbo had become a star player in the double-cross system. Some of those involved were even beginning to think that Prime Minister Winston Churchill might be interested to hear about this new, very useful agent of theirs. But then, just as the operation was starting to show real promise, a crisis emerged.

  Araceli was unhappy. Brought over to London shortly after her husband had finally been taken on by MI5, she struggled to settle in her new home. She had two small boys to look after now – Juan and Jorge – and was forced to live largely isolated from the Spanish community for fear of inadvertently giving the Garbo secret away. The language, the weather, separation from her mother back in Spain, the domestic arrangements at their house in sleepy Hendon, her husband’s long hours – all these became sources of tension and stress.

  She and Harris did not get on; in fact they disliked each other intensely. From being her husband’s collaborator in Spain and Portugal, Araceli had now been reduced to the role of supporting housewife, Harris taking over her position as Pujol’s partner in deceit. For his part, Harris appreciated that Araceli was intelligent and astute, but also condemned her as ‘hysterical, spoilt and selfish’.

  Deeply homesick and unhappy with her new life, Araceli longed to go back to Spain, even for a short visit. MI5 refused, fearful for the security of the Garbo operation.

  After many arguments and tense words, things came to a head on 21 June 1943.

  Pujol and Araceli used to spend time occasionally with one Spanish couple, known to MI5 as Mr and Mrs Guerra. They were members of a social group called the Spanish Club, and invited the Pujols to join them one evening at one of their functions. There was a problem, however: staff from the Spanish Embassy would also be there for the dinner – people who worked directly for Franco, neutral yet still friendly with the enemy. It would be far too dangerous for Pujol to show his face in such company and he had to insist that they could not go.

  It was too much for Araceli – she was perfectly aware of her husband’s real work and therefore of the dangers, yet, lonely and isolated, she felt that this was a refusal too far. A violent argument began during which she threatened to go the Spanish Embassy and tell officials there all about Pujol’s work for the British. Such a move would not only have brought the Garbo operation to a swift end, but also most, if not all, of the double-cross system itself.

  Trying to avoid a crisis, Pujol managed to get out of the house for a few minutes and dashed to a phone box to put a call through to his office. His wife was in a highly excited frame of mind, he said. If she rang up and was offensive they should not take any notice.

  As he predicted, later that night Araceli called Harris at his home. Harris made a note of what she said:

  ‘I am telling you for the last time that if at this time tomorrow you haven’t got me my papers all ready for me to leave the country immediately – because I don’t want to live five minutes longer with my husband – I will go to the Spanish Embassy. As you can suppose, going to the Spanish Embassy may
cost me my life – you understand? It will cost me my life – so by telling you that I am telling you everything . . . I shall have the satisfaction that I have spoilt everything. Do you understand? I don’t want to live another day in England.’

  Years later, Harris was able to write with English aplomb: ‘Whilst we were not unaccustomed to such outbreaks the present crisis seemed particularly serious.’

  The fact was, Araceli’s threat was a major problem for MI5 and they had to come up with a plan quickly. Unfortunately, in their view, there was no way that they could lock her up as the law at the time would not allow it. As a first step, Tar Robertson went over personally to Hendon the next morning to give her an official ticking-off, warning her that she had already committed ‘an act preparatory to an act’ with her threat.

  Meanwhile, two proposals were discussed within MI5. The first was intended to distract Araceli and give her something to do: a bogus side-story to the Garbo set-up would be arranged, involving a notional Gestapo officer wanting to get in touch with her husband. They would let her run this mini-operation in the hope that it would cure her of her obvious boredom. The second plan was to warn the Spanish Embassy that a woman of Araceli’s description was planning on assassinating the ambassador – the hope was that she would be thrown out of the building before being able to tell anyone about her husband’s espionage activities.

  In the end, however, both these ideas were shelved when Pujol himself came up with a very Garbo-esque solution.