Eldorado Network

by Derek Robinson

  Luis worked an eight-hour day and a seven-day week for the rest of the summer and the whole of the autumn of 1942. He and Julie shared a flat on the top floor of the embassy; Templeton had arranged a job for her in the Press Office. In many ways life was easier for Luis: he had a skilled team advising him and directing him, checking his reports, doing his research. But it wasn’t like the old days. “It’s not so much fun,” he complained to Julie. “They’re all so damned efficient, they take all the sport out of it.”

  “It’s not supposed to be fun,” she said. “It’s supposed to work. Is it going to work?”

  He shrugged. “Only Madrid knows that.”

  In the short crisis that followed the deaths of Christian and Adler, Richard Fischer had been appointed temporary head of Madrid Abwehr. He made a good job of it, and the appointment became permanent in September.

  A couple of weeks later, during his weekly meeting of controllers, he suddenly interrupted Franz Werth’s report on Seagull. It was unknown for Fischer to interrupt a report. Everyone was very surprised. Fischer looked quite agitated, too, which was unlike him.

  “Never mind Seagull,” he said. “Never mind Knickers or Wallpaper or Haystack or what any individual agent is saying. Put it all together! Look at the overall picture! Where does it point?”

  The controllers looked blank.

  “It’s obvious!” Fischer exclaimed. “All that stuff from Seagull about fleets of ships getting sent round the Horn to Suez and not coming back.”

  “But that was a month ago,” Franz said.

  “Exactly! And three weeks ago Knickers heard about those crated Spitfires and Hurricanes with Syrian lettering on the crates.”

  “En route to Russia, we decided,” said Otto Krafft.

  “Then why weren’t the crates lettered in Russian? And what about Nutmeg’s report on that special secret training center for the British Army Catering Corps in wherever-it-was—”

  “Harrogate,” Dr. Hartmann said. “They taught rather exotic cooking, as I recall. Goats and stuffed squid and so on.”

  “And we all thought it meant desert warfare, eating Arab food,” Fischer said. “Wrong again!”

  “What, then?” Otto asked.

  “Look at last week’s report from Garlic. Massive Commando training in the Western Islands of Scotland. Endless amphibious landings. Now where do you find terrain like that in Europe?”

  “You mean rocky islands?” Franz asked. “Mountains and sea and stuff? Norway?”

  “With goats, for God’s sake!” Fischer cried. “Goats that live within flying distance of Syria and sailing distance of Suez! And if that isn’t enough we’ve been staring at a dozen other clues every time we open an Eldorado report!”

  “Good heavens. It must be Greece,” Dr. Hartmann said.

  “Of course it’s Greece,” Fischer told him.

  “They’re going to invade Greece?” Otto asked, but Fischer was no longer listening. “You’re in charge until I get back,” he told Franz. “I’m on the first plane to Berlin. How could we be so blind?”

  *

  Six weeks later, British and American forces landed in Morocco and Algeria. They were not opposed.

  The news surprised and dismayed everyone in Madrid Abwehr. It surprised Luis too. He and Julie met the Director in his office on the day the landings were announced. Philby was very pleased. “Complete success,” he said. “The enemy was quite convinced it was going to be somewhere else. Well done.”

  “I thought it was going to be Norway,” Luis said. “I had convinced myself it would be Norway.”

  “Hell, everyone tips Norway,” Julie said. “Norway’s been done to death.”

  “Of course. That’s why I thought it was a good bet, because it’s become unfashionable, everyone’s so bored with Norway, so—”

  “Shall we have a drink?” Philby asked. He rang a little brass bell and a secretary came in. “Now that Eldorado and his friends have sacrificed themselves so nobly,” he said, “there’s something you deserve to know. It goes back to your poor friend Adler, and why he had to have his heart attack. Actually, it goes back a lot further than that, but Adler’s death was the point at which you became involved.”

  He waited while his secretary found out what they wanted, and gave it to them, and went out.

  “Adler didn’t die simply to protect and preserve your operation,” Philby said. “Good health.”

  “So I was told,” Luis said. “Cheers.”

  “The fact is that we couldn’t allow him to defect, either. If the Abwehr believed that he had betrayed all their secret agents to us, they would obviously cease trusting those agents. That was the last thing we wanted, since every one of their agents had long ago been intercepted by us and turned around.”

  “What?” Julie stared. “You mean all the Abwehr agents in England are working for you? That’s incredible.”

  “Yes, isn’t it?” Philby said. “Presumably that’s why the Abwehr goes on accepting and endorsing their reports. Perhaps I shouldn’t claim that all their agents are working for us. Some of them refused, some were temperamentally unsuitable, some were too stupid, but when that happened we simply replaced the man with one of our own chaps and kept sending reports in the original fellow’s name, using his style and technique. The point is that everything the Abwehr gets out of Britain comes from us.”

  “Let’s get this straight,” Luis said. “You British are actually running all German intelligence operations in Britain?”

  “It’s a highly successful business,” Philby said. “Naturally the enemy keeps paying all his agents, and so we get that money. Managing double agents is an expensive affair, but we expect to show a profit at the end of the year.”

  “Now I know how you got away with it for so long, Luis,” Julie said. “I could never understand why the Abwehr didn’t see through Eldorado,” she told Philby. “I kept thinking of all those real agents in England sending back genuine reports, and I knew that sooner or later someone had to notice that Eldorado’s stuff was always different. But if there never were any real agents …”

  “Occasionally we had inquiries from the Abwehr,” Philby said. “You know: requests to such-and-such an agent to check this set of figures or that location. Sometimes we recognized items that had appeared recently in Eldorado reports, reports that we’d intercepted.”

  “Just as well I never knew that was going on,” Luis said.

  “Oh, we always radioed back that your information was good,” Philby told him. “After all, none of it was correct, so there was no point in denying it, was there?”

  Luis finished his drink. Philby gave him another. “What now?” Luis asked. “Now that the balloon’s burst, I mean.”

  “I think you should keep on sending them your misinformation until they stop paying you, Luis. Paying us, that is. I don’t suppose they’ll sack you overnight. We’ve found that the Abwehr is remarkably reluctant to acknowledge its mistakes.”

  “Luis isn’t just a mistake,” Julie said. “Luis is a total disaster.”

  Philby chuckled, and they all drank to that.

  *

  As it happened, Eldorado was neither a disaster nor a mistake. After a prolonged and painstaking review of the events leading up to the Anglo-American landings in North Africa, Madrid Abwehr came to the conclusion that the Eldorado Network had honestly and accurately reported a series of actions that had been carefully and deliberately contrived by Allied Counter-Intelligence in order to divert German attention to Greece and the Balkans as a probable invasion area.

  “Eldorado did a good job,” Richard Fischer decided. “He and his team saw what there was to see, and reported it accurately. The fact that what they saw was part of a major diversionary exercise by the enemy can hardly be blamed on them. The whole point of such a deception is that it should look like the real thing. The Eldorado team would have been at fault if they had not reported what they found. As it is, my confidence in their diligence, skill and courage
is renewed.”

  “Bad luck, old boy,” Charles Templeton said when he heard that the Abwehr payments were continuing. “Looks as if you’re going to be with us for rather a long time. Will you find it too awfully boring?”

  Julie laughed when she heard the news. “Terrific,” she said. “You can’t quit and they won’t fire you. What will you do now?”

  Luis wondered. Julie was standing by the window, and the way the light shone through her dress was especially attractive. He went over and put his arm around her. “I’ll just have to go all the way and become a myth, I suppose,” he said.

  Afterword

  You may, perhaps, have found this novel rather fanciful, even unbelievable. In fact it was suggested by a true story.

  Luis Cabrillo is based upon a Spaniard who, after spending two years hidden in a house during the Civil War, in January 1941 offered himself to the British as an intelligence agent, was rejected, and thereupon joined the Germans—with the deliberate intention of double-crossing them because he calculated that this would greatly improve his prospects of employment by the British.

  The Germans codenamed him “Arabel,” and after training he left Madrid in July 1941, having arranged to travel to Britain on a Spanish diplomatic mission which would provide cover for his spying activities.

  In fact Arabel went no further than Lisbon. For the next nine months he wrote long and lively letters to German intelligence in Madrid, all supposedly sent from Britain. Arabel had never in his life set foot in Britain. He had only a few elementary documents to help his work—a Blue Guide, a map of England, an obsolete railway-timetable and the like. Nevertheless, such was his skill, imagination and daring that the Germans came to value his reports highly, and he soon created three subagents to help expand his operations.

  Once established, Arabel again tried to join the British. Again they rejected him. However in February 1942 British intelligence learned from other sources that the enemy was wasting considerable effort on intercepting a non-existent convoy from Liverpool to Malta. Arabel had invented it. At last his value was recognized. He was smuggled to England and joined MI5, where he was codenamed “Garbo.”

  For the rest of the war Garbo/Arabel worked with a prolific skill that verged on genius. By 1944 he headed, so the Germans believed, an organization in Britain of fourteen active agents and eleven valuable contacts. By then his organization had sent them about four hundred secret letters and transmitted about two thousand radio reports, for which they had paid some £20,000.

  Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Garbo network was to help persuade the Germans that the main D Day landings would take place in the Pas de Calais area, and that the Normandy attack was only a diversion. The German Secret Service not only believed this; it went on believing it. Three days after D Day, Garbo sent an urgent warning that the real assault was now about to strike the Pas de Calais area. Immediately, two Panzer Divisions were sent there. At least seven German divisions which might have been expected to be sent to Normandy were kept in the Pas de Calais area for two weeks after D Day. To the end, it seems, the Germans were convinced that the only reason why the Pas de Calais attack never took place was because the Normandy landings were unexpectedly successful. This explains the Germans’ continued trust in Garbo’s reports. In December, 1944, when the British decorated him with the M.B.E., the Germans were trying hard (despite the obstacle of his Spanish nationality) to award him the Iron Cross, Second Class.

  Garbo was only one—although perhaps the outstanding one—of many double-agents controlled by the British Secret Service. Astonishingly, MI5 was so successful in intercepting enemy agents and immediately “turning them around” that before long all German agents in Britain were double-agents, transmitting misinformation to the Abwehr.

  In his excellent book, The Double-Cross System, 1939-1945. J. C. Masterman writes: “by means of the double-agent system we actively ran and controlled the German espionage system in this country.” (Masterman’s italics.) He goes on: “This is at first blush a staggering claim and one which in the nature of things could not be advanced until late in the history of the war.” According to Masterman, MI5 controlled about 120 double-agents, 39 of whom were important enough to be described in his book. It is a totally convincing account of a brilliant triumph.

  Other characters in my story were also suggested by real people or events. “Eagle” was based on an individual code-named “Ostro,” one of several Germans living in the Iberian Peninsula who supplied information to the Abwehr which (so they claimed) came from agents in England; in fact their reports were invented. Wolfgang Adler’s fate emerged as the logical conclusion of a threat to the Double-Cross System that was, in fact, posed by certain Abwehr officials when they attempted to desert the German cause. If they had succeeded, the Abwehr would naturally have expected its agents to be betrayed and arrested; thus the defection had to be prevented at all costs—a response which must have considerably depressed and bewildered the would-be defectors.

  The man in charge of British counter-espionage in Spain and Portugal for most of the war was Kim Philby, then chief assistant of Section V in MI6. His staff included Graham Greene and Malcolm Muggeridge, and Philby was outstandingly good at his job. I have juggled history by actively involving Philby in the Double-Cross System, which was not his department, and by installing him in Lisbon: he visited Portugal but his office was in England.

  As for the earlier episodes in my story: the references to the Visions at Fatima and the account of the Battle of Jarama are substantially accurate, as are the descriptions of the bombings of Durango and Guernica. Everything else I made up; which is not to say that it could not have happened.

  D.R.