Artillery of Lies

by Derek Robinson

  “Double-bluff. The enemy expects a deception plan. When we make so much fuss about the obvious invasion route he thinks it can’t be true, it’s a deception, Eldorado’s sub-agents are being shown what Allied Intelligence wants them to see, so the landings must be planned for elsewhere.”

  She waited. “Like where else?”

  Luis shrugged. “Somewhere a long way off, probably. My money’s on the French Riviera. If I was Hitler that’s where I’d be looking.”

  “And maybe Hitler’s right,” she said.

  “No.”

  “What makes you so sure? There’s a lot to be said for the Med. The tide doesn’t rush in and out like the Channel, for a start.”

  “Sure. Nice weather, too. But it’s a double-bluff. He’s looking for a deception plan, isn’t he? Fine. He’s found it. What he doesn’t know is that the phony attack is also the real attack.”

  “OK, Luis. OK. For the sake of argument. But what if he doesn’t buy the double-bluff? What if he buys the deception plan pure and simple?”

  “Then he’s an idiot.”

  “He’s an idiot with an awful lot of guns waiting in the Pas de Calais area.”

  They stared at each other, Julie half-smiling, Luis frowning as his mind picked its way through this phantom maze.

  “Maybe I should talk to Freddy,” he said. “Maybe it’s time Eldorado told Madrid about the possibility of a double-bluff.”

  “Madrid might not believe Eldorado,” she said. “Madrid might suspect that Eldorado has been sold a brand-new deception plan by British Intelligence. That would make it a triple-bluff. Look: our invasion build-up opposite the Pas de Calais is so obvious that the Germans know they’re meant to ignore it, so that’s what they don’t do, because the last thing they’re going to do is what they know we want them to do, except that in this case they know that we know what it is they think we want them to think, and then when Eldorado spells all that out to them they reckon his warning is just a further layer of deception. Therefore they do the opposite.”

  Luis’s head had sunk lower and lower under the weight of her reasoning. “They do the opposite,” he repeated. “What’s that?”

  “I can’t go through it all again,” she said. “You’ll just have to wait and see.”

  He got out of her bed and began putting on his clothes. “I can’t be expected to make love to you and organize the Second Front,” he said. “Are you wearing my socks? I can’t find my socks … Look, why can’t we live together? It would save all this dressing and undressing.”

  “We can’t live together,” Julie said, “because you’re such a tremendous pain in the ass, Luis.”

  “That’s a double-bluff,” he said. “When you get to know me better you’ll discover that I’m really a tremendous pain in the ass.” He found his socks and put them on. “Back to work,” he said.

  Larbert 17 was a three-man pillbox made of concrete. It was one of a chain of pillboxes that guarded a valley through which roads and railways ran between Glasgow and Edinburgh. The chain had been built in a hurry in 1940 when it seemed more than possible that a German invasion fleet might steam up the Firth of Forth and put ashore a horde of infantry in field-gray and coalscuttle helmets who would seize Falkirk and Larbert, stream down the A80 to Dumbarton, Muirhead, Stepps and Carntyne, from where they could take a tram to anywhere in Glasgow they pleased. It was the sort of thing that had happened to Poland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France, so why not to Scotland? Hence the pillboxes: chunky, five-sided concrete cells with narrow gun slits.

  Larbert 17 was set on a hillside that overlooked a road bridge. In 1940 it was camouflaged green and brown but by the spring of 1943 nature had done a much better job. Moss, lichens, brambles and ivy left little of the concrete exposed. The pillbox blended gently into the hillside, forgotten and ignored by everyone except the farmer’s dog.

  The farmer raised sheep in the fields beyond the hillside. By springtime his ewes had lambed but that didn’t mean they couldn’t get into trouble. They wandered off, found (or made) gaps in the hedge, fell over, got their fleece trapped in brambles or thorn trees, struggled, exhausted themselves, sometimes died. Or they might plunge a leg in a rabbit-hole and be stuck. Those were the ewes. The lambs, of course, were twice as daft. So the dog—a border collie with a bit of spaniel somewhere in his ancestry—had a nose for accidents. He could smell distress or injury a long way off. Especially he could smell death. One day he let his master know it. The dog led him to Larbert 17. The farmer took one look inside and went to Larbert police.

  That was in the morning. At midafternoon Inspector Hogg picked up José-Carlos Coelho at the Department of Pathology and drove him the thirty-odd miles to Larbert 17, which was being guarded by a local constable.

  “I thought this might be useful experience for you,” Hogg said to Coelho. “Assuming it’s the same man, of course.” They had to duck to get through the cramped entrance at the rear.

  It was the same man. Laszlo Martini lay in a corner under a couple of sacks. Hogg had a flashlight. “He looks smaller,” Coelho said.

  Laszlo was smaller. He looked like a child: a bearded child, a circus freak. His face was turned to the gun-slits. Presumably he had been looking at the sky.

  After he had squirmed through the bathroom window he had escaped the police by no more than a minute; but as he was on a bus, a minute was plenty. Laszlo had earned the rewards of daring and (considering the pain he was in) of courage. He had crossed Coelho’s back garden, found a gate into an alley, and instead of running along the alley he had found another gate into another back garden, off the next street. It could have been full of large and angry men with spades or hoes, ready to challenge him. He was lucky: it was empty. As he made his way to the street he wrapped a woolen muffler around his battered face. What he needed was a bus, any bus, going anywhere, and obligingly one trundled around the corner.

  He could only mumble and gesture to the conductress; in the end she lost patience and gave him a ticket to the end of the ride. Laszlo was trembling, and he dropped his ticket. She thought maybe he had the flu and that’s why he was all wrapped up. Anyway, he got off the bus long before the end of the ride, as she told the police when they questioned her. But that was next day. Laszlo had taken several more bus rides by then. He was out in the countryside, slowly starving to death.

  He could not chew. Anything like chewing set up a chain of pain in his shattered jaw that made him cry out. In any case he had little food and no ration book to buy more, even if he had the money. Most of his coins had spilled from his pockets in various parts of 22A Buccleuch Avenue.

  He found the pillbox while he still had enough strength to climb to it and to drag open the small steel door at the back. He left it only once, to steal potatoes from a clamp. On his way back he washed them in a stream and drank from the stream too, sucking up the cold water with the unbroken half of his mouth. He paused for breath and saw himself reflected. He looked like his father in the year he died.

  Half a mile upstream from the place where Laszlo drank, the water was used by pigs. He carried his potatoes back to Larbert 17, picking up a couple of ripped and useless sacks on the way. Inside the pillbox he examined the potatoes. They were not big. If he could cook them he might be able to swallow the soft centers. He had no matches. It was a very difficult problem, an exhaustingly difficult problem. He fell asleep.

  What woke him was the burning ache in his belly. That and the lunging throb in his head. It was night. He was shuddering from the cold and sometimes he could not find the strength even to shudder. He lay under the sacks for three days. Once, a field mouse came in and took a very long look at him. On the fourth day Laszlo died.

  José-Carlos Coelho squatted and examined the face. He ran his forefinger down the jawline, tracing the zigzags of the fractures. “I find it utterly astonishing that he got through that window,” he said. “I thought I’d killed him when I hit him.”

  “Desperate fel
low,” Hogg said. “He was certainly out to kill you. The gun was loaded.”

  “If you’d caught him, what would have happened to him? Eventually?”

  “He would have been hanged.”

  “I see he left his trademark,” Coelho said. “Small potatoes.” He looked up at Hogg. “Joke,” he said.

  D-Day was June 6, 1944. The event came as a great surprise to Luis and Julie, as it did to most people. “It’s a ruse,” Luis said. He had only recently discovered this word and he enjoyed it. “You watch. This is a tremendous ruse. Invading Normandy is absurd, it’s far too far away and we haven’t even tried to capture a port, so there’s no hope of reinforcing the first wave of troops fast enough. Normandy …” He shook his head. “It’s got to be a ruse.”

  “You’re just pissed off because Eisenhower hasn’t taken your famous short route,” Julie said. They were in Freddy’s office, drinking tea.

  “Not at all. The ruse will serve its purpose, you watch.”

  “What is that?” Freddy asked.

  “Hitler will detach some of his defensive units from the Pas de Calais area and send them off to Normandy,” Luis declared. “When this so-called invasion, which is really a ruse, has distracted a large amount of German tanks and artillery, Eisenhower will make his real move. You wait and see.”

  “I don’t think you should wait,” Freddy said. “Not too long, anyway.”

  The following day, Eldorado signaled Madrid that the Normandy landings were only a diversion, a ruse. He warned that the real attack was poised to be launched against the Pas de Calais area at any moment. He repeated this warning twice in the next seven days, with supporting evidence from Haystack and Pinetree.

  “I thought you hated Haystack,” Julie said. “I thought you told me he was an idiot.”

  “Can we discuss this in bed?” Luis asked. “I’m feeling rather weary. It’s very tiring, holding back half the German army.”

  Two weeks after D-Day, Freddy told him to forget about the Pas de Calais landings. “It seems Hitler is now convinced that it’s Normandy after all,” he said. “He’s just taken six or seven divisions out of the Pas de Calais and sent them westward.”

  “Very ill-advised,” Luis said. “He’ll regret it.”

  “Lucky for us he didn’t do it on D-Day. Our chaps might have been booted off the beaches.”

  Luis took Julie out to lunch. “Eisenhower was lucky. Freddy told me as much. The Allies never expected to be so successful in Normandy, that was just supposed to be a decoy landing to confuse the Hun. When it went so well, Eisenhower canceled his main attack. Obvious, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t suppose Freddy told you where the main attack was going to be,” she said.

  “I told Freddy.”

  “Fine. Now you can tell me.”

  “Dieppe. Hitler would never in a million years expect us to attack twice in the same place … Anyway, none of that matters anymore. There’s obviously no future in working for the Abwehr, is there? So I’ve found a new client. Well, two new clients, actually. The Russians and the Americans. They each think they’ve turned me.”

  For a moment Julie thought he was joking; then she recognized the suppressed pleasure in his voice. “How did you do it?” she asked.

  “Usual way. Walked into their embassies and made a deal. The pay’s good. Especially from the Reds.”

  She sipped her drink while she studied his contented face. “Haven’t you any sense of loyalty at all, Luis? I mean, how can you go on working for Freddy while you’re betraying MI5?”

  “It was Freddy who suggested it. He said the Yanks have started spying on the British, the Russians have been spying on them for years, and since neither of them trusts anyone to tell the truth, Eldorado could be a useful way of passing information which they’ll believe because they know they shouldn’t have it.”

  “Now you’re a quadruple-agent,” she said.

  “And very strenuous it is. A chap has to keep his strength up. I wonder if they have any roly-poly pudding today? If there’s one thing in this dreadful country worth fighting for, it’s roly-poly pudding.”

  “You don’t really mean that.”

  “No,” Luis said. “It’s a double-bluff. I really want apple pie.”

  At last, on July 20, 1944, somebody had the courage and the competence to blow up Adolf Hitler. The man was Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg, not only a regular officer and a Catholic but a patriot who had lost one eye and two fingers while fighting for his country. He was now involved in the raising of new divisions—urgently needed following catastrophes on the Eastern Front—and he came to a conference at the Fuehrer’s headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia in order to present his report. This was in his briefcase along with a packet of British plastic explosive, captured the previous year.

  The first thing he did when he reached Hitler’s headquarters was to visit the lavatory. There he broke open the tiny container of acid which activated his time bomb. He entered the conference room and was briefly presented to Hitler. An officer then continued describing the latest grim developments in the east. Hitler stood at a map table. Von Stauffenberg put his briefcase under the table, near to Hitler. After a few moments he murmured that he had to make a telephone call, and he left.

  Hitler was six feet from the bomb when it exploded. The blast was so violent that an adjutant got flung through a window. One general had a foot blown off. Two generals were injured so badly that they died. By then von Stauffenberg was in a fast car to the plane that would take him to Berlin and Operation Valkyrie, codename for the state of emergency that should ensure the success of the coup. But Hitler was not dead.

  He was deafened, his face was cut, and he was badly peppered about the legs with splinters; but after treatment he ate lunch as usual, and in the afternoon he went ahead with a scheduled visit from the Italian dictator Mussolini. Hitler even showed Mussolini the ruins of the bombed hut. Meanwhile his orders were going everywhere to reverse Valkyrie. By evening the coup was dead (as was von Stauffenberg) and all over Occupied Europe, men were hastening to reaffirm their loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi regime.

  One such was Admiral Canaris. In fact Canaris had not known in advance of von Stauffenberg’s attempt. That did not save him. He escaped the first wave of arrests but was detained on July 23. Oster had been taken two days earlier. They were part of a round-up that went on and on, circles ever-widening, until perhaps five thousand had been arrested. Few survived. Canaris and Oster lasted longer than most. They were hanged on April 9, 1945.

  *

  Afterword

  There is much fiction in this novel, but it is built on a framework of fact. The reader is entitled to know which is which.

  Artillery of Lies is a sequel to The Eldorado Network, now reissued in Pan paperback. Luis Cabrillo, the central character of both books, is based on a young Spaniard who in fact went into hiding at the end of the Spanish Civil War, emerged in January 1941 and offered himself to the British as an intelligence agent, was rejected, and thereupon joined the Germans—meaning (he later claimed) to double-cross them in order to improve his prospects of employment by the British.

  The Abwehr codenamed him “Arabel,” trained him in Madrid, and in July sent him to spy in Britain. He arranged to travel there on a Spanish diplomatic mission. Actually he went to Lisbon where, with the help of a few books and a skilled imagination, he supplied Madrid Abwehr with long reports (all supposedly sent from England) which they came to value highly. As his efforts increased he created sub-agents to help him.

  Once established, Arabel again approached the British. Again they rejected him. Then, in February 1942, British Intelligence learned that the enemy was wasting his time trying to intercept a non-existent convoy from Liverpool to Malta. Arabel had invented it. At last they recognized his value. He was smuggled to England, given the codename “Garbo,” and made part of MI5’s Double-Cross section, which operated German agents who had been caught and “turned.”


  Starting with this improbable but historically true outline, I wrote The Eldorado Network. It is a bizarre yarn, and even more surprising was the discovery that Garbo/Arabel was still alive. Juan Pujol—his real name—made his home in Venezuela after the war. He visited London in 1984, and revealed details of his wartime network of phantom agents and sub-agents. Readers who find Eldorado’s codenames a little fanciful—Nutmeg, Wallpaper, Knickers and so on—might like to know that two of Garbo’s agents were called Moonbeam and Dagobert. Another agent, Benedict, was a Venezuelan student in Glasgow.

  When I wrote The Eldorado Network, my slim knowledge of Garbo came from J. C. Masterman’s excellent book, The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939-1945 (Yale, 1972), which describes Garbo as “the most highly developed example of the art” of double-cross. Masterman also said: “By means of the double-agent system we actively ran and controlled the German espionage system in this country.” MI5 operated about 120 double-agents; certainly the operation was a considerable triumph.

  However, it has been suggested more recently that maybe the enemy was not as gullible as he seemed. Did the Abwehr really believe that so many of its spies survived for so long, never got caught, and were able to uncover and transmit so much secret information? Or did some Abwehr officers know very well that their agents had been turned by MI5, but preferred to let this arrangement continue because they could exploit it to their own advantage? We know that Admiral Canaris, General Oster and other senior Abwehr officers were involved in plans to overthrow Hitler, in which case a direct line to MI5 would have been very useful. Heinz Höhne, the biographer of Canaris, gives evidence of a meeting in the summer of 1943 between the Admiral and the heads of Allied Intelligence—Menzies for Britain, Donovan for the United States—at Santander, in northern Spain, where the Abwehr leader argued for a separate peace in the west. Stranger things have happened.