It takes years to develop a well-founded and flourishing spy network in an alien country, and Canaris didn’t have that kind of time. The delay in inserting agents had left him exposed. This led to a gold rush of agents into England and the countryside that at times became a slapstick adventure in how not to insert a spy. For example, the Belgian Four were sent to England in the late summer of 1940 by minesweeper and dinghy, arriving on the Kentish coast. The original purpose of their mission, to gather information for Operation Sea Lion, was no longer valid, but the spies were sent anyway. Two of them understood English only if spoken very slowly. Another didn’t speak it at all. When they landed, one of the spies hooked up an aerial on a bush and sent word: “Arrived safely, document destroyed. English patrol two hundred meters from coast … No mines. Few soldiers.” He signed it with his real name, Waldberg. Only a few hours into his mission, he sent his second message: “Meier prisoner, English police searching for me, am cornered, situation difficult.” The Abwehr had failed to give their agents even basic information about life in England, such as the fact that one should not wander into an English pub and ask for a glass of cider at nine in the morning. When Meier did just that, the pub owner reported him and he was arrested. The other three were soon rounded up. All but one were hanged that winter on the scaffold at Pentonville Prison.
Its high attrition rate made the Abwehr’s success stories rare. It was one reason Garbo was such a valuable agent: there were so few others like him. His competition was either dead or working for the Allies.
But there was another reason that Garbo ascended so fast in the German intelligence world. Canaris considered Spain his spiritual home and General Franco his brother and pet political project. The Abwehr chief had been Hitler’s liaison with the Spanish fascists, arranging for a military aid package worth 5 billion reichsmarks and assembling plane convoys to ship 14,000 Spanish troops, along with their artillery guns, from Morocco. When it became necessary to choose a station for spying on England, Canaris selected Madrid to head up this all-important mission. Spain became the keyhole into England and the Allied mind.
For this sensitive post Canaris chose Wilhelm Leissner, a naval officer turned publisher who’d moved to Nicaragua after World War I. Canaris brought him back, reenrolled him in the German navy, gave him the rank of commander and packed him off to Madrid as head of the “Excelsior Import and Export Company,” dealers in zinc, mercury and cork. The old-fashioned front for the Madrid station reflected its boss. A stolid, old-school navy man who wore high starched collars and funereal suits, “he looked like the man in the old ads selling pomade for moustachios,” of which he had one, a fine Teutonic handlebar. A dynamo when it came to paperwork, Leissner lacked the suppleness of imagination required to see into the intricacies of wartime Britain.
That was left to Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, the man who’d “discovered” Pujol and who was grooming him for bigger things. Kühlenthal was the son of a distinguished German officer and diplomat who’d risen to the rank of general and had served as a military attaché in Paris and Madrid. His wealthy family was related to Canaris, who’d shepherded the young man through the intelligence services and, when Kühlenthal was thirty-five, expunged the one thing that could have doomed him in Hitler’s Germany. In his MI5 file, the British noted an anomaly: Kühlenthal was “a half-blood Jew.” Canaris had him legally declared an Aryan in 1941, but the conversion didn’t sit well with Kühlenthal’s peers. The Madrid spymaster was aware that any slip-up could mean a demotion or being sent to the Eastern Front. “It is known that [he] is trembling to keep his position so as not to have to return to Germany and serve in a workers’ battalion,” said an informer. “He is therefore doing his utmost to please his superiors.” It was no wonder Kühlenthal had dubbed Juan Pujol’s network Arabel; in Latin the name means “prayerful” or “answered prayer.”
Kühlenthal was consistently rated the best mind in the enormous Madrid station: MI5 described him as “a dangerous man, one of the most efficient German intelligence chiefs in Spain.” But looking through the reverse telescope from London, Tommy Harris believed he’d spotted the man’s Achilles’ heel. “His characteristic German lack of sense of humor, in such serious circumstances as these, blinded him to the absurdities in the story we were unfolding.” That is, Kühlenthal couldn’t conceive of someone actually creating a Garbo; he was so extravagant he had to be real. Tommy Harris had worked and socialized with people like Garbo; his salon before the war was crawling with weirdoes and misfits. The outrageous was fairly normal in his world. But not in Kühlenthal’s. From Harris’s point of view, the Germans were culturally and institutionally handicapped when it came to deception, because they’d closed their minds to the irrational.
By late 1942, Garbo had won over Madrid. But that was only the first step. The key decisions, of course, would be made 1,200 miles away in Berlin. And it wasn’t just Kühlenthal who was searching for a way into the Allies’ mind. Hitler himself was becoming more and more obsessed with what was happening in London. He complained that his intelligence service couldn’t even provide him with the names of the opposition in Parliament; he’d been reduced to reading the Guardian and The Times to find out who Churchill’s political adversaries were. “We are separated from England by a ditch thirty-seven kilometers wide,” Hitler said, “and we cannot find out what is happening there!”
Nevertheless, he had his own ace in the hole, a slim, cold aristocrat named Colonel Alexis von Roenne. Roenne was the descendant of an old family that had once owned vast tracts of land in Latvia, awarded to them by Frederick the Great for their service in the Prussian wars. Roenne was devoutly Christian, patriotic, often haughty to his peers and subordinates, “impossible to make friends with,” a perfectionist with a zeal to save Germany from its enemies. Trained as a banker, when war came Roenne had volunteered for the highly regarded Potsdam Regiment and was wounded on the Eastern Front. After recovering from his injuries, he’d joined military intelligence, where he’d advanced quickly by modernizing the service’s information analysis, in part by developing the so-called Feindbild, an evaluation of enemy forces pieced together from every available source into a constantly evolving portrait of the Allied armies.
If Kühlenthal was a kind of huckster, Roenne was the real deal, a ruthlessly objective filter of the reams of confidential information that came across his desk. He’d commanded the “big table” during the German invasion of France and had correctly predicted the key episodes of the blitzkrieg. When Hitler was contemplating the attack on Poland, Roenne went against the Abwehr by saying that “the Western allies would protest a German attack [on Poland] but would take no military action.” This caught Hitler’s eye, as did Roenne’s accurate analysis that the French army was vastly overrated and that the Maginot Line wouldn’t hold. By 1942, when he assumed the top intelligence job at Foreign Armies West, responsible for all intelligence relating to the battle against the British and the Americans, Roenne had the Führer’s full confidence. Roenne wasn’t a mystic or a brown-noser; in fact, he considered himself a knight of ancient Prussia. His family had won battles for Frederick the Great while Hitler’s ancestors were being used as cannon fodder. He refused to tell Hitler what he wanted to hear.
The colonel was installed in German army headquarters in Zossen, about twenty miles south of Berlin, sheltered in a reinforced A-roofed bunker, protected from Allied bombs by layers of concrete. The Abwehr gathered the intelligence and Zossen analyzed it. It was the brains of the High Command: teams of photo analysts spent their days studying blurry black-and-white pictures shot from five thousand feet, rubbing elbows with exhausted codebreakers and the soldiers who manned the fixed intercept posts, which listened in on telephone and wireless communications. Those intercepts give one indication of the breadth and depth of German surveillance: the agency responsible for wiretapping, the Forschungsamt, had six thousand employees, many of whom spent hours crouched over their desks in rented rooms around Germany, monitori
ng the daily lives of suspicious persons. The staffs of the listening stations would write “Z reports” on brown paper—the official color of the Nazi Party—and forward them to analysts, who received 34,000 domestic and up to 9,000 foreign messages daily over the war years.
Anything relating to the military situation in the West flowed to Roenne: reams of diplomatic cables, secret letters from double agents like Garbo, Allied magazines and newspapers, wireless traffic and purloined documents came in from all across Europe. Roenne’s analysts pored over each message in detail, checked the new information against the cards in their enormous files, then suggested revisions to the Feindbild. The reviews of the spy reports were sometimes harsh: “worthless,” “swindle,” “absolutely blooming idiotic,” along with the pungent “full of shit.” Roenne would evaluate the day’s harvest, then write daily reports that were sent to commanders in the western theater, with another copy going to Jodl, the army’s chief of operations and its liaison with Hitler. If Jodl thought a message was important, it would be placed on the Führer’s desk.
When Roenne had first become head of intelligence for Foreign Armies West, he’d naturally gone to Canaris to ask about German spies in England. The answer surprised him. “The fact,” Canaris boasted, “that we have any V-men at all in Britain, and have had several for as long as three to four years, is undoubtedly the most remarkable feat in the history of espionage … We have succeeded in sustaining them so well that we are receiving even at this stage … an average of thirty to forty reports each day from inside England, many of them radioed directly on the clandestine wireless sets we have operational in defiance of the most intricate and elaborate electronic countermeasures.” He was describing Garbo’s network, and only a few others, all run by double agents. They were the eyes and ears of the German High Command inside the enemy fortress. And they were all controlled by England.
In one of the drawers of his desk at Zossen, Roenne kept a small map of Europe. Periodically he’d take it out, his clear gray eyes slowly tracing the rocky coastlines and mountain routes of the Continent, imagining the Allied divisions, the convoys, the supply trucks moving toward Norway or departing from Southampton. Just as Garbo and Harris were probing the mind of the German High Command, Roenne was trying to picture where the Brits were placing their armies and how many American soldiers were dawdling at that moment in Piccadilly Circus.
And, of course, what it all meant.
11. The Rehearsal
THE DECEPTION GAME was based on a series of arcane techniques, many dating back to the time of Sun Tzu or before, which had been only slightly refined for modern warfare. The fact that the basic methods were well known to the operatives on both sides didn’t stop them from being used and reused constantly; even a chess grandmaster who knows the Sicilian Defense by heart will still fall victim to a particularly ingenious or convincing variation. There was the classic bluff, telling a false but highly detailed story to cover a real operation; the bluff was the common coin of every nation’s espionage arsenal and the basis for most of Garbo’s schemes. Then there was the rarely tried, forbiddingly intricate and gaspingly dangerous double bluff (“We should never resort to it unless in absolute despair,” the British spymaster Sir Ronald Wingate gravely opined), in which an agency put forth the details of the real operation and hoped the enemy would come to believe, partly because of the scheme’s sudden appearance in their hands, that this was in fact a false cover story, planted by their opponents, which would convince the enemy to look elsewhere for the attack. If the double bluff failed, of course, the entire game plan had been exposed to the enemy and disaster awaited. There was the fine art of “coat-trailing,” offering up one’s own agent to the opposition in hopes he’d be recruited, thereby planting a mole deep in the enemy’s ranks. And the “breakoff,” also known as the “get-out,” was the name given to one of the most important maneuvers in all doublecross operations: explaining to the enemy why the fake story didn’t turn out to be accurate, in such a way that he doesn’t lose faith in your agent—or in his own spy-runners.
Pujol had intuited many aspects of the game even before coming to England, simply by using his own highly developed sense of guile. But now he had to hone other skills, and scale them up to global range, using the worldwide assets of the British empire as his tools. One of the first things he was asked to master was how to make something—in this case a 23,000-ton aircraft carrier—disappear.
In December 1942, a request came in from the XX Committee to “cover” the repositioning of the HMS Illustrious, the last flattop patrolling the Indian Ocean. The enormous ship was being routed to more urgent war duties, but the Admiralty wanted the Germans to believe it was still lurking near the Horn of Africa. Garbo was given the job. He dreamt up a report from Agent No. 3 in Glasgow, who “spotted” three aircraft carriers in the waters of the river Clyde in Scotland, one of which was the brand-new HMS Indefatigable. (Actually, that ship had been launched just a week earlier, on December 8, but would need a year of fitting out before it would enter active service.) Agent No. 3 made friends with an officer of the crew who let it slip that the carrier was soon to sail for the Indian Ocean, “with specially equipped aircraft for tropical flights.” After a suitable delay, which would have given the Indefatigable time to sail to the Horn of Africa, the radiomen of the Illustrious, still off the African coast, began to send messages identifying their ship as the Indefatigable. The Abwehr’s agents picked up the traffic and reported it to Berlin. The Illustrious then went quiet and sailed north for its new assignment.
The switch had been made. Intercepts from ISOS found that the Germans and Japanese now believed that there were two aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean, the Indefatigable and the Illustrious, when in fact there were none. Garbo had made a carrier disappear and another—which hadn’t been commissioned yet—appear.
Soon after, Garbo faced a sudden crisis. In a message marked “Urgent,” Federico ordered him to give the Germans the departure times of trains out of London to the south and southwest of the country. Ten lines were specified: Canterbury–Dover, Dover–Deal and Deal–Sandwich among them. Federico indicated that there were more trains that the Abwehr had its eyes on; further requests would follow in the near future. The request lit up the switchboards in the intelligence and defense ministries. Why would the Germans want to know when the Dover train left Canterbury, down to the exact minute? It was a puzzle, and Harris, Pujol and MI5 had to tease it out before they could reply. What was the significance of the south of England? Was something being planned—acts of sabotage, a bridge blown up for a spectacular mass murder?
Finally, an officer in the Ministry of Home Security figured it out. He did this by thinking not about what the Germans were planning to do, but what the Allied Bomber Command was already doing, night after night in the air above the occupied countries. Since late 1942, the RAF had initiated a policy of “train-busting,” a specialized form of attack by “intruders,” often single-engine Hawker Typhoons, whose expert pilots prowled the skies looking for steam locomotives streaking through the lowlands of Belgium and France. When they found one, the pilot would swoop down and open up on the train—loaded with armaments, food and other vital supplies—with explosive shells. “I saw my cannon shells hitting the locomotive,” one aviator said after such an attack. “There was a big flash and clouds of steam.” The fighters sometimes flew so low that debris from the exploding trains blew skyward and ripped holes in their wings; others, veering away from German antiaircraft fire, cut through telegraph lines and returned to base with the wires embedded in their radiators. The operation played havoc with enemy supply lines: the RAF was blowing up engines pulling twenty or thirty cars of badly needed goods. The RAF pilots—especially from the hard-flying 609 Squadron—became heroes in the British press.
What this lone analyst figured out was that the Germans wanted revenge for the train-busting, and they weren’t going to limit themselves to supply routes. Federico’s request cou
ld only mean that the Luftwaffe was going to go after passenger trains, and the fliers needed the exact departure times to coordinate the strafing runs. Guy Liddell, head of MI5’s counterespionage division, wrote in his diary: “The Germans’ tactics are apparently to shoot up the engine and then the passengers if they are foolish enough to get out.”
Garbo was caught. He could easily have walked into a railway station and picked up the timetables, but doing so would mean that innocent civilians would die. It was strictly against MI5 policy to provide the Germans with any information that could lead to direct military action, especially against civilians. But how could he say no and keep the Abwehr’s confidence?
After delaying for weeks, Garbo finally told Kühlenthal that the timetables were unavailable, so he was sending the times for January (which would already be slightly outdated), warning that “my experience when traveling has been that the trains nowadays do not go with the same regularity as before.” He had provided schedules recent enough to satisfy the Abwehr, but imprecise enough to save English lives. The Luftwaffe was never able to mount the revenge attacks.
All the while Garbo kept the Abwehr on edge with his demands and outbursts. When reporting bomb damage from Luftwaffe attacks, he fumed: “It displeases me very much to have to do this work as my blood boils when I have to hear nonsense about our attacks. I have done it this time as you asked me to give you the truth about the morale of the people and to find out something about the effects of our bombing.” He was providing reams of information—locations of air bases and ships—but as far as he could tell, the Germans weren’t acting on it. Why weren’t Luftwaffe bombers attacking the ports and blowing the destroyers out of the water? “I have been able to estimate that possibly from the highest spheres my mission has not been appreciated as it should be, and though the matter has earned your spirited enthusiasm it has become apparent to me that in Berlin they have shown themselves skeptical with regard to my work.” Like a petulant lover, he seemed to want Berlin to love him as much as Madrid did; MI5 knew that the real power lay in the German capital. Kühlenthal wrote back hurriedly, blaming bureaucracy: “We beg you not to be impatient if the objectives indicated have not been bombed because this is outside our control here.”
Agent Garbo Page 13