By the time Pujol had landed in England in April 1942, BOAC’s KLM charter planes had flown more than 4,000 passengers to and from Lisbon and a twice-weekly run to Gibraltar had been introduced. The airliners were attacked by the enemy on only three occasions. The Ibis, the first of the all-metal DC-3s in Europe, sustained only superficial damage on 15 November 1942 when a Messerschmitt 110 made a short, strafing attack, and on 16 April 1943 the incident was repeated. Apart from a few bullet holes, including one in a hat belonging to a Swiss diplomatic courier, no serious harm was suffered. But less than two months later, on 1 June 1943, the Ibis, piloted by Captain Quirinius Tepas, was shot down, with the loss of all the passengers and the Dutch crew.
The destruction of BOAC flight 777a from Lisbon made headline news around the world because the film star Leslie Howard was among the seventeen people killed. Another victim was Tyrrel Shervington, a Shell Oil executive and a valued member of the British Secret Intelligence Service station in Lisbon. He had been returning to London for some well-earned leave. Others aboard included Leslie Howard’s manager, the Washington correspondent of Reuters, a representative of the Jewish Agency, some elderly businessmen, three women and two children.
When news of the loss was announced, GARBO complained bitterly to the Germans. Their behaviour had jeopardised the lives of members of his network and had threatened to destroy his valuable line of communication with the Espírito Santo bank. The Luftwaffe subsequently held an investigation into the incident and it was established that the unarmed plane had been shot down by a Junkers 88 from the mixed fighter wing Kampfgruppe KG 40 based at Kerhouin-Bastard airfield, near Lorient, piloted by a Luftwaffe flight lieutenant named Bellstedt. Bellstedt and his staff had been on routine patrol across the Bay of Biscay when they had encountered the DC-3 shortly after midday. Both he and his crew were described as young and inexperienced, and they made two cannon passes at the defenceless transport before it crashed into the sea in flames. No action was taken against Bellstedt, and he was later killed in combat over Germany, but his radio operator and navigator survived the war. According to one account, they were subsequently forced to ditch in the North Sea and were rescued by an RAF air-sea rescue launch. But when the two Germans had been hauled out of the sea they had inadvisedly boasted of having shot down the airliner ‘for target practice’. Before being put ashore both had been badly beaten up. It is worth recording that although the Luftwaffe did not officially discipline Bellstedt, there were no further attacks on civilian aircraft flying between Portugal and England.
Pujol’s second notional agent was J(2), the KLM airline pilot who fulfilled a back-up function as a courier for J(1). He was soon considered superfluous by MI5, bearing in mind the new method of communication offered by Risso-Gill, and he was therefore allowed to slip quietly into the background.
Pujol’s most experienced agent, and future deputy, was designated Agent THREE, a wealthy Venezuelan student named Carlos. In order to protect his identity, the Abwehr always referred to him in their secret communications by the code name BENEDICT. These, of course, were routinely intercepted at Hanslope Park and decrypted. BENEDICT allegedly lived in Glasgow and had promised to recruit his own subagents in the north of England. According to Pujol (and this was subsequently confirmed by ISOS decrypts), BENEDICT had first materialised in a message from Lisbon dated 7 October 1941. His brother, Agent FIVE, was also a student and was supposedly based in Aberdeen. He was reported as having joined his brother on 14 June 1942, was sent on a special intelligence-gathering mission to the Isle of Wight, and then on another to the West Country, but was then forced to travel to Ottawa later in the summer. In reality, this involved Cyril Mills’s moving to Canada, and will be described in detail later.
The KLM steward (Agent ONE) and William Maximilian Gerbers (Agent TWO) proved less satisfactory, and in due course each had to be dispensed with. Agent ONE eventually resigned in November 1942 after having been caught up in a disastrous deception plan, code-named COCKADE, which will be covered shortly. William Gerbers, who lived in Bootle, was obliged to contract a serious illness during the preparations for TORCH, the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942. He had been credited with reporting ARABEL’s infamous Maltese convoy, which had never existed and had caused the German admiralty so much difficulty. Gerbers’s failure to notice or comment on the unmistakable military build-up in the Liverpool docks prior to embarkation would be stretching German credibility. It was reluctantly agreed that his absence could only be plausibly explained by his transfer into a hospital, and he eventually succumbed, after a lengthy illness, on 19 November 1942. A suitable obituary notice was placed in the Liverpool Daily Post on Tuesday 4 November 1942:
GERBERS – Nov. 19 at Bootle, after a long illness, aged fifty-nine years, WILLIAM MAXIMILIAN. Private funeral. (No flowers please.)
The newspaper cutting was promptly sent to Lisbon. MI5 subsequently took advantage of the tragedy to arrange for TWO’s widow to continue her late husband’s good work in London.
Having heard much of Pujol’s story, Harris recognised that the first priority was to allow ARABEL to find some truly important sources who were sufficiently well placed to supply some information of better quality. MI5 feared that unless ARABEL developed some useful contacts the Germans might be prompted to review the material they had so far received. Harris was convinced that an analysis of any depth would inevitably conclude that ARABEL was manufacturing his own intelligence and probably had never visited England. After consulting with the Twenty Committee, he obtained permission for GARBO to recruit his best source yet, a non-existent character, designated J(3), who occupied a senior position in the Ministry of Information. This news was sent to Lisbon, buried in the text of a typically long-winded report from ARABEL, on 16 May 1942.
J(3) was ARABEL’s first source of any significance, and was entirely the product of the Harris/Pujol collaboration. He was generally rated very highly, although he never suspected (or so claimed ARABEL) that he was collaborating with a Nazi spy ring. When J(3) came to be described by Harris in a secret, internal report, he commented that J(3)
could possibly be identified as the head of the Spanish section of the Ministry of Information. For a time, GARBO was employed by him on translation work for the MOI. He is suited for the passing of high-grade information of a political or strategic nature. He has frequently been quoted by GARBO as one of his best sources. He believes GARBO to be a Spanish Republican refugee and treats him as a close personal friend. He is an unconscious collaborator.
J(3) was quickly followed the next month by CHAMILLUS (Agent FOUR), who was portrayed as a Gibraltarian waiter working in the NAAFI (Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes) at a secret, underground establishment in the famous caves at Chislehurst. Pujol described how the agent had become increasingly anti-British, having been forcibly evacuated from the Rock along with the rest of Gibraltar’s civilian population. He apparently found the climate in Kent very disagreeable and was a willing recruit. CHAMILLUS was to prove an exceptional spy, not so much because of his access to the secret work being undertaken in the caves or his observation of army units passing through the depot, but because of his many useful contacts. In fact, soon after the introduction of Agent FIVE, the Gibraltarian master-minded the recruitment of Pujol’s wireless operator.
The necessity of wireless communication had become apparent to Harris and MI5 after Pujol had been in harness for just three months. The decision to develop GARBO’s network so dramatically was only taken after ISOS decrypts had been examined and had been found to indicate that the improvement in ARABEL’s information had not gone unnoticed in Madrid and Lisbon. The escalation was well-justified, and also allowed MI5 to exploit the network more effectively. Pujol’s letters to Lisbon usually took a minimum of a week for delivery, and often took longer if a king’s messenger was not scheduled to visit Lisbon or Gene Risso-Gill was otherwise occupied. A swifter means of communication offered more opportunities, not the least o
f which was the acquisition of some valuable signals intelligence.
Once the Twenty Committee had given their consent, Pujol informed Madrid that CHAMILLUS, the Gibraltarian waiter, had befriended an enthusiastic supporter of the Spanish Republican Party who, before the war, had held an amateur radio operator’s licence. Apparently, he had served as an ambulance driver during the Spanish Civil War and was now a convinced pacifist. He was classified as a conscientious objector who lived alone on a farm, and therefore presented an ideal candidate for the post of ARABEL’s wireless operator. Pujol explained that his new recruit, designated Agent 4(1), had retained his wireless illegally and was perfectly willing to transmit messages to Spain. Pujol had neglected to tell Agent 4(1) that he was a German spy, and had instead fed him a story about a group of Spanish Republicans in London, led by Dr Juan Negrín, who supposedly wished to keep in touch with the communist underground movement in Spain. As GARBO pointed out, the advantage of this ploy was in the extra protection it offered. Even if the British traced the transmitter and closed it down, none of the rest of Pujol’s ring would be endangered, and the likelihood was that the police would accept the cover story at face value. In any event, the agent would never learn the text of his signals as Pujol proposed only to supply him with enciphered messages. As expected, the Abwehr was delighted with Pujol’s proposal and quickly gave its approval to the plan. It also provided a transmitting schedule, a set of variable transmitting frequencies and, perhaps most importantly of all, a newly introduced cipher, which was received with delight by the Radio Security Service.
In practice, the new wireless operator was Charles Haines, a French-speaking field security NCO who had indeed taken an interest in becoming a ‘radio ham’ before the war. He was not, however, a communist sympathiser. In reality, he had worked as a clerk in Lloyds Bank, an occupation he was to return to after the war. Since Juan’s English was still rudimentary, and MI5 had no radio operators fluent in Spanish, the two men conversed in French. The Radio Security Service gave him a crash course in Morse and a transmitter was set up in the back garden of Crespigny Road. Once the link between Hendon and Madrid had been opened on a regular basis, the RSS was provided with a veritable flood of valuable intelligence. Continuous monitoring of the Abwehr channels revealed that ARABEL had risen in the Germans’ esteem, and also betrayed some of the Abwehr’s internal code names. ARABEL, for example, was sometimes referred to as V-man (for ‘Vertrauensmann’ or confidential agent) 319. The Venezuelans were referred to as V.373 and V.374, while Haines was given the code name ALMURA. His principal contact in Madrid signed off the wireless net as CENTRO. All this information was registered on card indices at Section V headquarters, while MI5 authorised Tommy Harris to separate the GARBO operation from the rest of the Iberian section. Accordingly, Harris and Sarah Bishop moved into a tiny new office in MI5’s headquarters and set to work developing the network further.
By the end of 1942 GARBO had only lost Agent TWO (William Gerbers), but had gained its ninth source, code-named DAGOBERT. DAGOBERT was an ex-seaman living in Swansea, and was described by GARBO as ‘a thoroughly undesirable character’ who worked only for money. Nevertheless, he was later to acquire a further seven subagents and thus became GARBO’s link with an important, self-contained, network. When seeking Madrid’s permission to go ahead with DAGOHERT’s recruitment, GARBO pointed out that his addition would give the network greater geographical coverage. He also suggested that, as a seaman who occasionally visited neutral ports, DAGOBERT was in a position to smuggle documents and other items of espionage paraphernalia which were too bulky for his regular K LM couriers to handle. As predicted, the Abwehr responded positively, and the scene was now set for large-scale exploitation of a widely spread spy ring. GARBO had achieved everything hoped for and was now basking in the praise of no less than two contented and opposing intelligence organisations.
Having established GARBO as a reliable source for the Abwehr, the Allies were anxious to flex their muscles and demonstrate the scope of their powers. Unfortunately, the first opportunity to participate in a major deception campaign proved less than satisfactory.
The major military preoccupation of 1943 was defensive in nature, in anticipation of the two huge, long-term Allied operations planned for the future: the invasions of Italy and France. The chiefs of staff were agreed that despite demands from Moscow there was no likelihood of marshalling the necessary forces before 1944, so the deception planners were instructed to make the enemy believe that the Allies were planning no less than three amphibious landings during the summer of 1943: STARKEY was to be across the channel in the Pas-de-Calais region, WADHAM was an American attack on Brittany, and TINDALL was a supposed invasion of Norway. All three deception plans, known collectively as COCKADE, were designed to bottle up German troops in Norway and keep the enemy guessing about the exact target of the landings in France. The basic objective was to keep the enemy contained in northern and western Europe and the Mediterranean, in the hope of easing the burden of the hard-pressed Red Army. In addition to STARKEY and WADHAM, fourteen raids were to be conducted along the coast to capture prisoners. Code-named FORFAR, these brief incursions were supposed to unnerve the defenders and convince them that their kidnapped sentries had been taken prisoner so they could be interrogated about the local troop strengths.
Another of COCKADE’s optimistic objectives was to lure the Luftwaffe into a series of air battles over the Channel. The idea was to promote belief in an invasion, thus forcing the Germans to deploy their aircraft at particular moments when the RAF could press home their advantage. In the event these aerial ambushes failed to materialise.
COCKADE was approved by the chiefs of staff on 10 February 1943 and the Twenty Committee enthusiastically committed GARBO and his network to playing their part. No time was wasted, as can be seen by the claimed recruitment by BENEDICT, just three days later, of a source reported to be an airman. He was followed on 10 April by GARBO’s introduction to a censor in the Ministry of Information, designated J(4). Finally, the NAAFI waiter at Chislehurst announced on 25 April 1943 that one of the soldiers on guard duty at his depot had started to provide some useful information. These were the individuals chosen by the Twenty Committee to perpetrate the most ambitious deception yet on the enemy’s intelligence service. It was to be the forerunner of many more successful schemes.
The mechanics of channelling bogus information to the Axis has already been described, as has the elaborate system developed to coordinate the activities of the various parties involved in the manipulation of the double agents. It now remains to sketch how, at the planning level, the overall cover operations were formulated. As it progressed, it became clear that deception had become a weapon of strategic importance, but the essence of an effective deception policy was good coordination, with all the services playing their parts. Acting in concert, it was perfectly possible to mount a truly ambitious scheme and convey it to the enemy. Experience indicated that such operations could not be mounted piecemeal if they were to have any hope of success. More specialised, influential bodies were required to supervise deception policy, so in June a new, highly secret unit, the London Controlling Section (LCS), was created under the auspices of the chief of staff to the supreme allied commander (COS SAC) and, in the autumn, General Eisenhower established SHAEF Ops B, of which more will be heard later, to concentrate on preparing for D-Day.
After the Allied chiefs of staff had agreed on their objectives for the future, their staffs proposed a number of alternative cover plans. Some of these were of sufficient merit to be of possible use when the real invasion took place; these were shelved in case they might be needed and become a reality. Others were considered suitable for the feints of COCKADE and FORFAR. Once the chiefs of staff had made their minds up and decided the priorities, the issue of cover plans was passed to the London Controlling Section for implementation. Basically, LCS had three weapons at its disposal: physical deception (with camouflage and dummy equipment); s
ignals (to imitate the presence of a large body of troops); and the conduit discreetly referred to as ‘special means.’ In fact, this last category (which, incidentally, proved the most potent) consisted of controlled leakages of information, either to ‘neutral’ diplomats in London (who would promptly report the latest rumours in the capital) or via MI5’s stable of double agents. And among MI5’s double agents GARBO had quickly established a formidable reputation. It was therefore to him and his network that the LCS turned in February 1943. The head of LCS was Colonel John Bevan, and it was one of his senior assistants, Colonel Harold Peteval, who presented the COCKADE project to the Twenty Committee at one of their regular Wednesday afternoon meetings. A plan had been drawn up involving a number of imaginary troop formations. Would GARBO’s network report a few plausible sightings to persuade the Germans that the south coast of England was teeming with men from a non-existent Sixth Army, formerly based in Luton, which was about to cross the Channel? Although he may have regretted his decision later, Tommy Harris committed GARBO’s network to relaying the deception to the Abwehr.
Operation Garbo Page 12