The Spy with 29 Names

by Jason Webster

  Araceli had been stalled for a while by being told that an answer to her request for travel papers would come the following evening. Shortly before the appointed time, however, after the Spanish Embassy had closed for the day, two police officers knocked on her door. They told her that her husband had been arrested and that they had come to collect his pyjamas and toothbrush.

  Araceli reacted exactly as expected. Her husband was loyal to Britain, she insisted. There was no way that he could have been detained. In tears, she called up Harris to find out what had happened. Harris told her the story that Pujol had concocted for them:

  Pujol, he said, had been asked to meet section chief Guy Liddell that afternoon. Liddell had told him that he was agreeing to give Araceli and the children their travel papers, but that Pujol would have to go with them as well, and that the Garbo operation was being henceforth shut down. Liddell asked Pujol to write a letter to the Germans explaining away the suddenness of his disappearance.

  Pujol, according to the story, refused. He had come to Britain to carry out this work, and his wife could leave if she wanted to, but he wanted to stay. But Liddell explained to him that his wife had threatened to betray everything and so they needed the letter from him to protect themselves.

  At the word ‘betrayal’ Pujol had lost his temper. It was impossible, he said, for Araceli to do such a thing. He refused to believe it. The discussion had become heated, Pujol had become aggressive, and the police had been called to take him away to Camp 020, where he was now being held.

  Araceli listened to Harris’s tale, believing every word of it. Pujol, she said, had acted exactly as she would have expected – defending her honour, preferring to go to prison rather than write their letter for them.

  She seemed a little pacified, and the conversation ended. A short while later, however, she called Harris back, this time in a more belligerent mood, threatening to take the children and disappear. Putting down the phone, she called Charlie Haines, the Garbo wireless operator, in a desperate state, asking him to come round to the house. When he got there, Haines found a distraught Araceli sitting in the kitchen with the gas taps on. She was incoherent, and a little later she made a second attempt on her life.

  Haines concluded that she was mostly play-acting. But with a 10 per cent possibility of an accident, he and Harris arranged for Harris’s wife Hilda to go and spend the night with her.

  The following morning, weeping, Araceli was taken to see Tar Robertson. She was more repentant now, and told Robertson that she was to blame for the situation, that her husband was not at fault and pleaded that he be pardoned. In exchange she promised never to interfere with his work, misbehave or ask to return to Spain again. Agreeing, as per the plan, Robertson made her sign a statement to that effect and told her she would be allowed to visit her husband later that afternoon.

  At 4.30 she was taken under escort to Kew Bridge. There she was blindfolded and driven in a closed van to Camp 020. When she arrived an officer told her in no uncertain terms that she had escaped being arrested herself by only a hair’s breath.

  Pujol was allowed to appear before her wearing prison clothing, and clearly unshaven. He asked her to tell him on her word of honour whether she had been to the embassy. She swore that she had not and that she would never behave like this again, or make any threats.

  Pujol was taken back to his cell, to await a ‘tribunal hearing’ the following morning. Araceli was taken home, ‘more composed but still weeping’.

  The following morning she was summoned to a further meeting to be ticked off by MI5 staff, this time at the Hotel Victoria on Northumberland Avenue. She was told that the ‘tribunal’ had cleared her husband, but she was warned once again never to repeat her recent behaviour. As a sop, she was informed that Harris had been taken off the Garbo case. This was untrue, but the plan was that henceforth Araceli and Harris would have as little contact with each other as possible.

  The plan had worked. Pujol returned home later that evening for a reconciliation with his wife, shaken by the whole episode, even though the means of resolution had been his own idea. It was, he told Harris, one of the most distasteful things he had done in his life.

  Within MI5 there were sighs of relief. The crisis, which had been playing on everyone’s minds for the past couple of days, had been ‘liquidated’ and things across the entire double-cross system could go back to normal.

  Thanks to Pujol, they learned that Araceli had never intended to carry out her threat to go to the embassy, that it was merely a ploy to make them take her request to return to Spain more seriously.

  And Pujol had risen even higher in their estimation. He had placed his work with the British above his marriage, playing out on his wife the kind of ruse that he usually concocted for the Germans. Surprisingly perhaps for someone who knew him and his ways so well, Araceli never twigged that she was being duped.

  The relationship had received a body blow and problems in the marriage continued, but after the crisis of June 1943, as Harris wrote somewhat wearily in his report, Araceli gave MI5 ‘no parallel trouble thereafter’.

  16

  Britain, Summer 1943

  FOR GENERATIONS BROUGHT up on war films depicting great British espionage triumphs, it is easy to conclude that the Germans were a bit dim when it came to spying. The Man Who Never Was and I Was Monty’s Double show brilliant, creative Brits consistently outwitting the more powerful yet not-so-bright Boche.

  This is not simply a rosy take on events years after the Allies won the war. Even at the time, members of the secret establishment were labelling the Abwehr officers as ‘the most inefficient, credulous gang of idlers, drunkards and turncoats as ever masqueraded as a secret service’.

  In the immediate aftermath of the conflict, Tomás Harris and John Masterman, separately and secretly writing up their accounts of the Garbo case and the double-cross system, portrayed an enemy that had been no match for British secret services. In hindsight, they both concluded, much more could have been done to fool the Germans given their gullibility.

  Easy to say, perhaps, in the initial glow of victory. The truth was that the Germans were no easy opponents in the secret war, and the British were cautious throughout precisely because they knew how formidable they could be. The Venlo Incident, towards the start of the conflict, when German spies had fooled and captured two MI6 agents on the Dutch border, had demonstrated that. Subsequently the limited success of SOE operations in occupied Europe, and the capture by the Gestapo of many of their operatives, continued to make the point.

  German expertise was not limited to counter-espionage. They could carry out deception plans of their own, as the Soviets had discovered in the summer of 1942. Operation Kremlin fooled the Red Army into thinking that the Germans would repeat their push on Moscow that year, having failed to take the city the previous winter. The Luftwaffe increased its reconnaissance flights over the Soviet capital, and maps of Moscow were distributed within the Wehrmacht in preparation for the supposed offensive. All this filtered back to Stalin and his generals, who readied themselves for the attack. When, instead, the Germans launched Operation Blau and pushed south towards Stalingrad and the oil fields of the Caucasus, the Red Army was caught by surprise.

  Over the summer of 1943, once the crisis with Araceli had been dealt with, the Garbo network also had a taste of disappointment.

  August 1942 had seen the disaster at Dieppe, when Jack Poolton and most of his comrades had either been killed or captured. That attack had been launched with neither surprise nor deception, and with inevitably poor results. ‘It is sad, but interesting,’ Masterman wrote, ‘to speculate whether the Dieppe Raid might not have been more successful, or at least less costly, if it had been effectively covered [by a deception plan].’

  In September 1943, a year later, the Allies attempted the reverse: a plan to deceive the Germans into thinking that an attack was coming when there was none at all.

  In the east, Stalin was still urging for the
Second Front to be opened, but the British and Americans were holding back, waiting until they were fully prepared to launch an assault on what Hitler described as ‘Fortress Europe’ – the vast network of defences being erected on the coasts of France and other occupied countries. In the meantime, however, in an attempt to take some of the pressure off the Soviets, fake landings would be staged at various points to keep German troops tied down, thereby preventing them from being sent to the east.

  The plan was called Operation Cockade and it marked a shift in the Garbo story, in which the network moved fully into what Masterman described as ‘deceiving the enemy about our own plans and intentions’ – the final and culminating reason for running the double-cross system.

  The idea for the operation came from the London Controlling Section (LCS), the highly secret committee based in the underground Cabinet War Rooms that was now coordinating all deception plans. Headed by former stockbroker Colonel Johnny Bevan, the LCS was using MI5’s double-cross system directly to influence enemy thinking, with Garbo as one of its main players. The Spanish double agent, Bevan already foresaw, would ‘have a very important role to play in the future’.

  It was August 1943. Pujol-as-Garbo had been in Britain for almost a year and a half, but for the Germans, as Arabal, he had been spying for them for two whole years. True to character, he sent Kühlenthal a long, moody letter to mark the anniversary of his arrival:

  A few days ago [he wrote on 2 August] I completed the second anniversary of my stay here, fulfilling from the start the sacred duty of defending the ideals which inspire me so profoundly against our common enemies, disturbers of justice and social order. I have accomplished a great deal since then, always without thought for the dangers through which I must pass, leaping all obstacles which they put in my way . . .

  Don’t you realise that this is a sacrifice for me to write these long letters? My work weighs on me, God alive! But I know, although at times you smile at my humour, you appreciate the contents as more valuable than if you read a hundred English newspapers and heard a thousand Anglo-American radio transmissions, because through those you would only hear lies, and my writings only tell you concrete realities . . .

  My cool head and effrontery with which I defend the democratic-Jewish-Masonic ideology have opened many doors to me, and from there I have drawn opinions . . . I am not therefore generally taken by surprise by all the moves of our enemy. He is cunning and has ambushes fit for bandits . . .

  England must be taken by arms, she must be fallen upon, destroyed and dominated, she must be sabotaged, destroying all her potentialities . . .

  I love a struggle which is hard and cool, difficult and dangerous. I am not afraid of death, because I am a madman convinced by my ideals. I would rather die than see myself called democratic . . .

  With a raised arm I end this letter with a pious remembrance for all our dead.

  Masterman always emphasised the need for double agents to live a life as close as possible to that of their supposed characters. Whether or not Pujol, standing in his tiny Jermyn Street office, actually did a Hitler salute as he wrote out the final lines of his letter to Kühlenthal is not known.

  Over the following weeks Garbo’s letters to Madrid focused almost exclusively on the build-up to Operation Cockade.

  The principal agents used for the deception plan were Senhor Carvalho (Agent 1), Pedro the Venezuelan (Agent 3), Fred the Gibraltarian (Agent 4) and Stanley the Welsh nationalist (Agent 7).

  Carvalho and Stanley got things started in August by separately reporting to Garbo on military exercises in southern Wales in preparation for a landing, probably in Brittany (Operation Wadham). Thus the two reports confirmed each other and Garbo was able to pass their information on to Kühlenthal.

  Next came reports in support of a supposed attack on Norway – Operation Tindall. Garbo himself travelled up to Glasgow to consult with Pedro, learning that commandos in Scotland were training in mountain warfare, while new camps were being built near aerodromes for airborne troops who would be used in the attack. Other observations included the use of new cranes and unloading equipment at the docks, an increase in RAF personnel, as well as a general rise in the amount of troops and materiel from his previous visits to the area.

  To give a sense that the Garbo network was sending over more information than the Germans were actually receiving, the envelopes were painted with the censor’s stripes, indicating that they had been tested for secret inks in Britain before being sent on. The letters that ‘got through’ were numbered in a way to make the Germans think that some of them had indeed tested positive for secret inks and been confiscated. In that way the Garbo network was seen to be doing a good job, while leaving gaps in what it actually reported. The result was that the Abwehr began to rely even more on Garbo’s wireless transmissions – something they had been reluctant about for security reasons, but which MI5 were keen to encourage.

  Towards the end of August, the network began passing on reports to back up Operation Starkey, the main plank of Cockade, involving an ‘attack’ on Calais. Troops were reported to be amassing on the south coast. As a result, Garbo told the Germans that he had called Stanley and Pedro urgently to London with a view to sending them south to find out what was happening.

  Meanwhile, Fred the Gibraltarian, digging away in the Chislehurst Caves, had enjoyed a lucky break, and had been transferred to canteen duties in the NAAFI – the armed services recreational organisation. Sent down to Dover for a while, he was able to report that a large number of assault craft and troops were grouping in the area. Over the next few days and weeks, Carvalho, Pedro and Stanley confirmed this with more reports on forces and equipment amassing along the Kent coastline. Everything was set, it appeared, for an attack of some kind against the Pas-de-Calais.

  It was around this time that Garbo introduced a new source of information in his expanding network of agents, a character whom Pujol later described as ‘without a doubt the most important’ in the network. Known only as J(5), she was a secretary in the Ministry of War, ‘far from beautiful and rather dowdy in her dress’, as Garbo described her (Kühlenthal christened her ‘Amy’). She was, however, in need of attention from the opposite sex, a role Garbo was happy to play in exchange for her unwitting indiscretions about things she had heard and seen at work.

  ‘You must let me know’, Garbo wrote to Kühlenthal shortly after meeting her, ‘whether I have carte blanche with regard to expenses incurred in her company, for it is natural that whenever I take her out I have to invite her to dinner and drinks and give her presents. I am certain that with this girl I can obtain information.’

  Imagining Garbo to be an exiled Spanish Republican, J(5) became his mistress and began passing over more information about the troop movements on the south coast. They were, she said, intended to probe the coastal defences, and if possible, penetrate into enemy territory, but only using a small force. Either that, she told him, or there was a larger force elsewhere preparing for the attack as well.

  It was a clever move, designed to cover Garbo’s back once the operation had been carried out. For Starkey was never going to be a full-scale invasion and Garbo would need something to keep his reputation intact once that became clear to the Germans.

  Finally the day for the ‘attack’ came. In a further boost to his reputation as spymaster, Garbo actually reported the night before that it was going to take place. That evening, Pedro had come up to London from the coast to report that soldiers had been given iron rations and confined to barracks. The operation would begin that same night.

  Hours later, on 9 September 1943, Operation Starkey finally took place. The battleships and troopships sailed out, complete with a large escort of RAF fighter planes, towards the Calais coast. There they waited, expecting the Germans to react in some way, particularly to send over the Luftwaffe so that they could be engaged in battle. But over in France the Germans merely got on with their day, untroubled by the armada sitting impatiently on the
horizon.

  They had not fallen for any of it.

  All the build-up, the troops, equipment, the ships and fighters, and the deception plan, had come to nothing. The boats and planes were obliged to turn around and head back home.

  German High Command did not believe that the Allies were going to invade in the summer of 1943, and they were right. The only exception was Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, the commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht’s western forces. He did think an invasion was coming, but had been overruled. In the build-up to Starkey, German High Command had even taken ten divisions out from France for duties in other areas. The Allies’ plan to get the Germans to concentrate forces in France and thus keep them away from the Eastern Front was a complete failure.

  Cockade was inevitably renamed ‘cock-up’.

  Important lessons needed to be learned, and fast, because the Allies were now committed to launching a proper invasion of France the following spring. If their lack of success with Starkey was anything to go by, D-Day was going to be a disaster.

  For the Garbo network, all energies were engaged in damage-limitation. There was a danger not only that Garbo would lose credibility with Kühlenthal, but that Kühlenthal himself would go down in his masters’ estimation. Rejecting official Allied statements that Starkey had merely been an exercise, Garbo insisted that a full attack had been envisaged from the start, but that it had been called off at the last minute owing to the recent armistice in Italy. The Italians, now that US and British troops in Sicily threatened the mainland, had deposed Mussolini back in July and on 8 September announced their surrender. According to Garbo, officials in London were now speculating whether something similar might not happen in Germany, hence the last-minute decision to call off the Calais attack.

  The story appeared to have the desired effect. Kühlenthal reported this to Berlin, who came back with messages, picked up by Bletchley, that they were very happy with Garbo’s intelligence.