The Spy with 29 Names

by Jason Webster

By this time Fred had recruited some sub-agents of his own. The most important – Agent 4(3) – was an American sergeant in the US Army Service of Supply. Fred had met him in Soho, where they had ended up talking about the Spanish Civil War. The American was described as ‘sociable, jocular and fairly talkative’ and was virulently anti-Communist. He was also an admirer of Franco, and he and Fred had established a friendship based on their shared anti-British sentiment. Never given a name by the British – although the Germans referred to him as ‘Castor’ – Agent 4(3) would be the main source through which Garbo passed on misinformation about the US military – even details that a mere sergeant would almost certainly never have been privy to. The Germans, thankfully, never questioned this.

  Garbo himself stayed in London as the head of the network, where he was also gathering intelligence from his unconscious collaborators: J(3), Garbo’s supposed boss, was still a source from the Ministry of Information, while Garbo’s mistress, J(5), continued unwittingly to give him material direct from the War Office itself in their pillow talk.

  The final part in the Garbo jigsaw puzzle was played by members of the recently created Brotherhood in the Aryan World Order. Stanley – Agent 7, the man who had recruited them originally – was moving back and forth between south Wales and London, acting as a contact. Agent 7(2) – David – was stationed in Dover to cover Kent. Agent 7(3) – Theresa Jardine, the group’s secretary – had been transferred to Ceylon to cover the war effort in the east. Her lover, Rags the Indian poet – Agent 7(4) – was now in Brighton covering the Sussex and Surrey coasts. Agent 7(5) – an unnamed Welshman – was sent to cover Exeter, Devon and Cornwall. Agent 7(6) – also unnamed – was stationed in Swansea to cover south Wales. And Agent 7(7) – the group’s treasurer, unnamed but known to the Abwehr as ‘Dorrick’ – was in Harwich covering the coasts of Essex and Sussex.

  By this time Agent 5 – Agent 3’s brother – was working for Garbo from Canada, a part that was being played by Cyril Mills, Pujol’s first MI5 case officer, who had gone to liaise with the intelligence agencies on the other side of the Atlantic.

  Agent 3 – Pedro (a role played by Harris) – was now acting as Garbo’s deputy and sending in reports of his own in English directly to Kühlenthal. Written in a much more concise style than Garbo’s, they often detailed supposed troop positions and movements around southern England.

  A typical Pedro message of the time went like this:

  Area west of Stifford closed to civilians, including Grays by pass. Very large vehicle park at Belhus Park, has special new road built to it . . . Hordon-on-Hill, saw large NFS HQ and depot. At Gravesend, saw men, vehicles of 47 London Division, 61 Division, East and Southeastern Command, and men, 9 Army Division.

  Kühlenthal could not get enough of this kind of thing. He still had one eye over his shoulder, and needed good intelligence to strengthen his position within the Abwehr – a hotbed of professional jealousy and back-stabbing at the best of times. Ambitious and hard-working, by early 1944 he had become the head of the Madrid station in all but name, but his Jewish blood meant that there remained the threat of being sent back to Germany to join one of the workers’ group battalions supporting front-line troops. He replied to Garbo, praising his Venezuelan sub-agent:

  We are very satisfied with the way messages have been set out by [Agent] Three. They are very clear and efficient.

  A recommendation from his direct opponent, the same man he was deceiving – Harris must have allowed himself a smile.

  Communication by this point was almost exclusively through wireless transmissions – a set-up that MI5 was happier with, and had managed to arrange by making the Germans think that most of their cover addresses in Lisbon had been blown. The amount of material being sent over was now very high, with five or six messages being broadcast every day. From January to D-Day on 6 June 1944, some 500 wireless messages were exchanged between Garbo and Kühlenthal in Madrid. The only letters were the few that Garbo wrote accompanying those that he forwarded from Agent 5 in Canada and Theresa Jardine in Ceylon, a role played by Peter Fleming, the elder brother of author Ian.

  Kühlenthal would immediately retransmit to Berlin any information on military matters. At times Garbo would add a personal appreciation to the messages, a kind of exegesis on the information that he was receiving from his sub-agents. In the past these might have been dropped or reworded before being sent on to Berlin, but from now on they would be broadcast over word for word. The Germans were not only relying on Garbo’s information; they were also starting to value his opinions on the Allied preparations for the invasion of France.

  And as ever, thanks to the material from Bletchley, MI5 were fully aware of these developments. When the time came they would prove to be very important.

  As luck would have it, the Germans sent in requests for information on precisely what MI5 and the deception planners were intending to give them. One of the key pieces in the puzzle was the Allied Order of Battle for the landings. These were largely supplied by the US sergeant, Agent 4(3). Unfortunately for the Germans, the details he gave of the Allied formations – the divisions, their commanders and how they would all fit together – bore only a passing resemblance to reality.

  A central plank of Fortitude was making the Germans think that the Allies had far more troops available to them than they actually did. This was necessary for pulling off the stunt of pretending that the main force of the invasion would come over the Pas-de-Calais, even after the Normandy landings had taken place. To this end dummy tanks and landing craft were built, dotting the English countryside and port areas to fool German spy planes. Meanwhile phantom divisions were created, with fake insignia and other paraphernalia. The biggest element of all in this was the creation of an entirely fake army group – the First US Army Group – or FUSAG, based in the south-east of England and supposedly headed by General Patton.

  Patton was the Allied general that the Germans feared the most, with his ivory-handled pistol and ruthless military vision. Controversial and confrontational, he had been temporarily suspended from duty after slapping a battle-weary soldier in Sicily in the face. There was, he had asserted, no such thing as shell shock; it was an invention of the Jews. No wonder Hitler admired him.

  The deception planners knew that the Germans held Patton in high regard, so he was the obvious choice to command what was meant to be the main invading force. FUSAG, centred around Kent, was made up of the Canadian First and US Third Armies, but was fictitious. Garbo and the other double agents sent in reports – such as Pedro’s quoted earlier – giving details of the various formations of FUSAG that were supposedly stationed in the area. Meanwhile, up and down the south-east coastline went radio transmission trucks, simulating the volume of traffic that such a large military formation would have created, which was picked up by the Germans listening in across the water.

  Dover, meanwhile, was filled with ships and landing craft, which were easily visible from German spy planes. The spotters were allowed to fly high over the port to take their shots, but were immediately attacked if they tried to get better-quality photos from lower down. Had they managed to do so their images might well have shown that those ‘battleships’ in the harbour were no more threatening than pleasure cruisers: almost all were dummies made to look as though the Allies had more weaponry and resources than they actually did. Dover, during this period, rather than a military HQ, was more like ‘an enormous film lot’.

  All this, and the hundreds of other details, required enormous cooperation. The centre of it was the area around St James’s, in central London. General Eisenhower was now the overall commander of Overlord and his HQ – the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force, or SHAEF – was set up in Norfolk House in St James’s Square. His deception group was known as Ops (B) and worked in close and sometimes informal collaboration with MI5, the Twenty Committee and the London Controlling Section, which was the coordinator of the deception plan as a whole. It was a small group of p
eople, all working in offices a short walk from one another. The fact that so many different bodies were involved in the planning and executing of the deception might have caused serious bureaucratic problems. Thankfully it did not, largely, as one historian of the time has put it, ‘because responsibility still lay with a handful of men who knew each other intimately and cut corners’.

  Tar Robertson, John Masterman and Tommy Harris were in constant touch with Noel Wild and Roger Hesketh at SHAEF and Johnny Bevan and Ronald Wingate of the London Controlling Section, allowing them to conduct business ‘with speed and informality’.

  And in the middle of all these scuttling feet pacing up and down the streets of London’s secret heart, sat Pujol in his Jermyn Street office, dreaming his dreams and writing his stories.

  By now Garbo’s disinformation was being used, often verbatim, in the Daily Intelligence Reports sent out by German High Command.

  Everything was set for him to help carry out the greatest act of military deception in history, one that could decide the outcome of the war.

  What could go wrong?

  19

  Britain, Spain and Algeria, 1936–44

  IT WAS A time of suspense, expectation and excitement. People were intent on having fun while they could.

  The first sign that the long wait might be coming to an end came when Monty visited to give his set-piece pep talk. It was early in 1944. The 23rd Hussars had only been in existence for a few years, an armoured regiment born by ‘the stroke of a pen’ in the War Office in late 1940. Cecil Blacker had joined shortly afterwards, a junior officer and veteran of Dunkirk brought in to help turn a collection of civilian men – farmers, businessmen, the unemployed, cobblers, clerks and carpenters – into soldiers, keen operators of the US-built Sherman tanks with which they were now carving up the English countryside on manoeuvres.

  During his officer training at Sandhurst, Blacker had been given the nickname Monkey – one of the wits there thought he looked like an ape and scratched his armpits, shouting ‘Monk, Monk’, whenever Blacker appeared. It was part of a custom of giving new officers embarrassing nicknames – ‘Ugly’, ‘Crackers’, ‘Splosh’ – and Blacker thought he had got off lightly. But the name stuck, perhaps on account of his smiling, circular face, and he was ‘Monkey’ thenceforth.

  His passion was horses. Brought up in Oxfordshire, where his father had been secretary of the Bicester Hunt, Blacker had enjoyed the world of stables and livery yards, of cubbing and the thrill of the chase from a young age. Now an officer in the 23rd Hussars, commander of its C Squadron and with sixteen tanks under him, he did his best to combine his duties with his first love. But it was getting harder now: the moment was soon coming when the years of training would show as they were sent into battle.

  Tanks, of course, were not horses, but it had fallen to the lot of the former cavalrymen of the British Army to take on board this still relatively new weaponry. The British may well have invented the tank in the First World War, but the Germans had taken the technology on much further. The British Mark VIB light tank, which Blacker had been fighting with in France in 1940, being rapidly pushed back to the Channel, was little more than a truck with thin armour plating nailed on the sides. Uncomfortable and offering little protection, it had been no match for the German Panzers and the blitzkrieg tactics of the Wehrmacht.

  Now, veterans of the desert campaign and Monty’s victory at El Alamein were swanning around, full of themselves and talking condescendingly about how to win a tank battle. Blacker and his men had their doubts as to whether the sands of North Africa were really comparable with the mud and fields they could expect in northern Europe. No one knew exactly where they would be going when D-Day finally came, but it would not be Egypt, that was for certain.

  And then Monty himself showed up. They had read the same speech several times in the newspapers as he travelled around the country addressing the troops. But Blacker found it interesting to see him in the flesh.

  ‘The performance was impressive, mainly for the remarkable self-confidence and bounce which the little man exuded,’ he remembered.

  Monty performed his usual ritual, looking at the men intently, then summoning them to form a square around him while he stood up on his jeep to give them an address.

  ‘I wanted to have a look at you,’ he said, ‘and for you to have a look at me – we have a job to do together – hitting the Boche for six . . .’

  Blacker’s sergeant, a Yorkshireman, commented drily that ‘the general seemed to have a very good opinion of himself’.

  The 23rd Hussars had been shunted around the country several times, from Whitby to Sussex to Norfolk, Newmarket, Bridlington . . . Now came the final change before being sent over to France: Aldershot. It was convenient for getting into London and they took advantage of the pleasures that the capital offered. Blacker was in his late twenties and had a girlfriend, but the atmosphere was licentious and sexually charged, many living to the motto of ‘eat, drink and be merry’ with the spectre of sudden death hanging over them. The Berkeley Hotel in Piccadilly acted as an officers’ club where champagne cocktails fuelled the revelry. Other party venues included the Four Hundred, the Embassy or the Café de Paris, where couples could dance cheek to cheek in semi-darkness.

  ‘Emotional stress was by no means confined to the single. Many married couples became infected by the prevailing mood of “anything goes” and danced off into the night with a new partner, for good.’

  For Blacker, the mood was summed up by the Cole Porter song ‘Just One of Those Things’ with its message of quick, uncomplicated sexual encounters and one-night stands.

  Once the parties ended, however, and lovers pulled themselves free of each other’s embrace, the sense of purpose across the country to defeat the Germans and see the war through to the end, was almost palpable.

  ‘Although we were on the threshold of what might be a terrible and for many a terminal experience, we felt uplifted and carried away by the mood of the moment. There had been so much suffering, so much heartbreak, so many tragedies and sacrifices, so much disruption, and now the time was at hand when we were to rise up and strike the blow which could end it all. The British people, for once totally united, held their breath and waited.’

  The men of La Nueve company liked and respected Lieutenant Amado Granell; he had been a soldier for longer than most. Now, very soon, the Spaniards under his command would be heading for France to fight alongside other Allied troops. It was the next step – perhaps the first of many – but the dream of a Spain free from fascism kept them going. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco – they would all fall in the end. And now they had American guns and tanks to get the job done.

  Granell liked soldiering: as a young man, in the 1920s, he had joined the Spanish Legión – a force based in Spanish Morocco and modelled on the French Foreign Legion. Its founder, Colonel Millán Astray, was a one-armed, one-eyed maniac and devotee of the Japanese ‘samurai way’. His ‘legionarios’ were expected to embrace a heroic demise; not for nothing were they dubbed the ‘bridegrooms of death’. Tough conditions and harsh punishments for misbehaviour were the norm – unlike other units, the members of the Legión were often bearded, wearing their shirts unbuttoned to the belly and sniffing at the way other soldiers marched – a legionario always ran.

  Millán Astray’s second-in-command in the 1920s was a young major – Francisco Franco. Millán Astray revered his protégé and thought he was destined to be the saviour of Spain. Franco, a conservative Catholic, did not disagree. Amado Granell had different politics from his commanding officer, however, and once his service in the Legión came to an end, he returned to civilian life in his native Valencia and joined the Republican Left Party, becoming an active member of the socialist UGT trade union.

  When the Spanish Civil War started, Granell joined the Republican army to fight the rebels – or the Nationalists as Franco’s coalition of monarchists, fascists and Catholics came to be known. Within a short time Gran
ell had risen up the ranks to become an officer, and commanded a unit equipped with armoured cars and motorcycles – shock troops to be used at various key points of the shifting front lines. He spent much of the Civil War defending Madrid, riding up and down the streets where, only three years later, his compatriot Juan Pujol would meet at cafés with his Abwehr controllers to discuss plans for spying in London.

  But after two and a half years of fighting, and half a million deaths, the Republicans lost the Civil War. As Franco’s troops, helped by his German and Italian allies, conquered the remaining areas of Republican territory, in late March 1939 Granell was one of the last left-wingers to get out of the country, securing a place on HMS Stanbrook as she sailed out of Alicante towards Algeria. Many of his comrades left stranded on the docks committed suicide where they stood.

  The French in Oran were uncomfortable with so many armed Spaniards turning up. They stripped the new arrivals of their weapons, put them in concentration camps, ordered some to join the French Foreign Legion. Granell held on for over three years. A new world war started, France fell to the Nazis, and the French soldiers now watching over him shifted their allegiance to Pétain and the regime collaborating with Hitler.

  Granell and the other defeated Spanish Republicans never stopped dreaming that a moment of redemption might come.

  And then, in 1942, at long last the Americans landed in Oran. As they were being shot at by French defenders, Granell took his chances and helped the GIs move around the city, giving them directions, telling them where the defenders were staked out. He had been waiting for this moment. Now other kinds of French – the Free French – were in control. He and the others quickly joined up to help, and they became soldiers in the French 2nd Armoured Division, led by General Philippe Leclerc.

  Spaniards were scattered throughout the unit – over 2,000 of them. The largest concentration, however, around 150 men, was in the 9th Company, which soon became known as ‘La Nueve’ in Spanish. The commander was Captain Dronne, a Frenchman. Under him, and the effective company commander, was Lieutenant Granell. His years in the Legión and then the Spanish Republican Army counted for much.