The Spy with 29 Names (17 page)

Over the summer of 1943, once the crisis with Araceli had been dealt with, the Garbo network also had a taste of disappointment.

August 1942 had seen the disaster at Dieppe, when Jack Poolton and most of his comrades had either been killed or captured. That attack had been launched with neither surprise nor deception, and with inevitably poor results. ‘It is sad, but interesting,’ Masterman wrote, ‘to speculate whether the Dieppe Raid might not have been more successful, or at least less costly, if it had been effectively covered [by a deception plan].’

In September 1943, a year later, the Allies attempted the reverse: a plan to deceive the Germans into thinking that an attack was coming when there was none at all.

In the east, Stalin was still urging for the Second Front to be opened, but the British and Americans were holding back, waiting until they were fully prepared to launch an assault on what Hitler described as ‘Fortress Europe’ – the vast network of defences being erected on the coasts of France and other occupied countries. In the meantime, however, in an attempt to take some of the pressure off the Soviets, fake landings would be staged at various points to keep German troops tied down, thereby preventing them from being sent to the east.

The plan was called Operation Cockade and it marked a shift in the Garbo story, in which the network moved fully into what Masterman described as ‘deceiving the enemy about our own plans
and intentions’ – the final and culminating reason for running the double-cross system.

The idea for the operation came from the London Controlling Section (LCS), the highly secret committee based in the underground Cabinet War Rooms that was now coordinating all deception plans. Headed by former stockbroker Colonel Johnny Bevan, the LCS was using MI5’s double-cross system directly to influence enemy thinking, with Garbo as one of its main players. The Spanish double agent, Bevan already foresaw, would ‘have a very important role to play in the future’.

It was August 1943. Pujol-as-Garbo had been in Britain for almost a year and a half, but for the Germans, as Arabal, he had been spying for them for two whole years. True to character, he sent Kühlenthal a long, moody letter to mark the anniversary of his arrival:

A few days ago
[he wrote on 2 August]
I completed the second anniversary of my stay here, fulfilling from the start the sacred duty of defending the ideals which inspire me so profoundly against our common enemies, disturbers of justice and social order. I have accomplished a great deal since then, always without thought for the dangers through which I must pass, leaping all obstacles which they put in my way . . .

Don’t you realise that this is a sacrifice for me to write these long letters? My work weighs on me, God alive! But I know, although at times you smile at my humour, you appreciate the contents as more valuable than if you read a hundred English newspapers and heard a thousand Anglo-American radio transmissions, because through those you would only hear lies, and my writings only tell you concrete realities . . .

My cool head and effrontery with which I defend the democratic-Jewish-Masonic ideology have opened many doors to me, and from there I have drawn opinions . . . I am not therefore generally taken by surprise by all the moves of our enemy. He is cunning and has ambushes fit for bandits . . .

England must be taken by arms, she must be fallen upon, destroyed and dominated, she must be sabotaged, destroying all her potentialities . . .

I love a struggle which is hard and cool, difficult and dangerous. I am not afraid of death, because I am a madman convinced by my ideals. I would rather die than see myself called democratic . . .

With a raised arm I end this letter with a pious remembrance for all our dead.

Masterman always emphasised the need for double agents to live a life as close as possible to that of their supposed characters. Whether or not Pujol, standing in his tiny Jermyn Street office, actually did a Hitler salute as he wrote out the final lines of his letter to Kühlenthal is not known.

Over the following weeks Garbo’s letters to Madrid focused almost exclusively on the build-up to Operation Cockade.

The principal agents used for the deception plan were Senhor Carvalho (Agent 1), Pedro the Venezuelan (Agent 3), Fred the Gibraltarian (Agent 4) and Stanley the Welsh nationalist (Agent 7).

Carvalho and Stanley got things started in August by separately reporting to Garbo on military exercises in southern Wales in preparation for a landing, probably in Brittany (Operation Wadham). Thus the two reports confirmed each other and Garbo was able to pass their information on to Kühlenthal.

Next came reports in support of a supposed attack on Norway – Operation Tindall. Garbo himself travelled up to Glasgow to consult with Pedro, learning that commandos in Scotland were training in mountain warfare, while new camps were being built near aerodromes for airborne troops who would be used in the attack. Other observations included the use of new cranes and unloading equipment at the docks, an increase in RAF personnel, as well as a general rise in the amount of troops and materiel from his previous visits to the area.

To give a sense that the Garbo network was sending over more information than the Germans were actually receiving, the envelopes were painted with the censor’s stripes, indicating that they had been tested for secret inks in Britain before being sent on. The letters that ‘got through’ were numbered in a way to make the Germans think that some of them had indeed tested positive for secret inks and been confiscated. In that way the Garbo network was seen to be doing a good job, while leaving gaps in what it actually reported. The result was that the Abwehr began to rely even more on Garbo’s wireless transmissions – something they had been reluctant about for security reasons, but which MI5 were keen to encourage.

Towards the end of August, the network began passing on reports to back up Operation Starkey, the main plank of Cockade, involving an ‘attack’ on Calais. Troops were reported to be amassing on the south coast. As a result, Garbo told the Germans that he had called
Stanley and Pedro urgently to London with a view to sending them south to find out what was happening.

Meanwhile, Fred the Gibraltarian, digging away in the Chislehurst Caves, had enjoyed a lucky break, and had been transferred to canteen duties in the NAAFI – the armed services recreational organisation. Sent down to Dover for a while, he was able to report that a large number of assault craft and troops were grouping in the area. Over the next few days and weeks, Carvalho, Pedro and Stanley confirmed this with more reports on forces and equipment amassing along the Kent coastline. Everything was set, it appeared, for an attack of some kind against the Pas-de-Calais.

It was around this time that Garbo introduced a new source of information in his expanding network of agents, a character whom Pujol later described as ‘without a doubt the most important’ in the network. Known only as J(5), she was a secretary in the Ministry of War, ‘far from beautiful and rather dowdy in her dress’, as Garbo described her (Kühlenthal christened her ‘Amy’). She was, however, in need of attention from the opposite sex, a role Garbo was happy to play in exchange for her unwitting indiscretions about things she had heard and seen at work.

‘You must let me know’, Garbo wrote to Kühlenthal shortly after meeting her, ‘whether I have carte blanche with regard to expenses incurred in her company, for it is natural that whenever I take her out I have to invite her to dinner and drinks and give her presents. I am certain that with this girl I can obtain information.’

Imagining Garbo to be an exiled Spanish Republican, J(5) became his mistress and began passing over more information about the troop movements on the south coast. They were, she said, intended to probe the coastal defences, and if possible, penetrate into enemy territory, but only using a small force. Either that, she told him, or there was a larger force elsewhere preparing for the attack as well.

It was a clever move, designed to cover Garbo’s back once the operation had been carried out. For Starkey was never going to be a full-scale invasion and Garbo would need something to keep his reputation intact once that became clear to the Germans.

Finally the day for the ‘attack’ came. In a further boost to his reputation as spymaster, Garbo actually reported the night before that it was going to take place. That evening, Pedro had come up to London
from the coast to report that soldiers had been given iron rations and confined to barracks. The operation would begin that same night.

Hours later, on 9 September 1943, Operation Starkey finally took place. The battleships and troopships sailed out, complete with a large escort of RAF fighter planes, towards the Calais coast. There they waited, expecting the Germans to react in some way, particularly to send over the Luftwaffe so that they could be engaged in battle. But over in France the Germans merely got on with their day, untroubled by the armada sitting impatiently on the horizon.

They had not fallen for any of it.

All the build-up, the troops, equipment, the ships and fighters, and the deception plan, had come to nothing. The boats and planes were obliged to turn around and head back home.

German High Command did not believe that the Allies were going to invade in the summer of 1943, and they were right. The only exception was Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, the commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht’s western forces. He did think an invasion was coming, but had been overruled. In the build-up to Starkey, German High Command had even taken ten divisions out from France for duties in other areas. The Allies’ plan to get the Germans to concentrate forces in France and thus keep them away from the Eastern Front was a complete failure.

Cockade was inevitably renamed ‘cock-up’.

Important lessons needed to be learned, and fast, because the Allies were now committed to launching a proper invasion of France the following spring. If their lack of success with Starkey was anything to go by, D-Day was going to be a disaster.

For the Garbo network, all energies were engaged in damage-limitation. There was a danger not only that Garbo would lose credibility with Kühlenthal, but that Kühlenthal himself would go down in his masters’ estimation. Rejecting official Allied statements that Starkey had merely been an exercise, Garbo insisted that a full attack had been envisaged from the start, but that it had been called off at the last minute owing to the recent armistice in Italy. The Italians, now that US and British troops in Sicily threatened the mainland, had deposed Mussolini back in July and on 8 September announced their surrender. According to Garbo, officials in London were now speculating whether something similar might not happen
in Germany, hence the last-minute decision to call off the Calais attack.

The story appeared to have the desired effect. Kühlenthal reported this to Berlin, who came back with messages, picked up by Bletchley, that they were very happy with Garbo’s intelligence.

In Jermyn Street, the Garbo team could heave a sigh of relief. It was clear that despite the lack of Cockade’s success, they still had a channel for passing over deception to the Germans. In the post-mortem, though, there were many mistakes to be picked over.

Militarily, it was clear that all sections of the armed forces needed to be working in closer harmony – the Royal Navy and RAF had only played reluctant parts in the plan.

As far as MI5 were concerned, other conclusions were reached. The first was that being overly subtle, trying to make the Germans reach their own conclusions, was not always a benefit in the Garbo traffic sent to Madrid. In fact, it became clear that the more specific and sensational they were, the more attention they were given. By tracking how the Garbo material trickled through to the Abwehr via the Bletchley intercepts, Harris could see that extremely urgent messages from Garbo reached Berlin within an hour. This was a useful observation for the more important deception plans to come.

Another problem was the bureaucracy involved in drawing up a message that Garbo could send. So many authorities needed to check and double-check the bogus reports that it slowed the process down considerably, to the extent that some messages had to be cancelled as events on the ground changed and rendered them out of date. This would be amended to some degree in the run-up to the invasion, but continued to be a problem, much to Harris’s frustration. These difficulties, he later wrote, ‘always constituted by far the most strenuous and exasperating work in the running of the case.’

A final lesson from Cockade was the need for coordination with the media. Just a few days before Operation Starkey, the BBC French Service had been about to broadcast a coded message to the Resistance that the coming attacks on the coast did not concern them and that they were not to rise up in response. The text could have seriously undermined Garbo’s credibility had it gone out, and was only exchanged at the last minute and after much wrangling for something less compromising to the deception plan.

In general, Operation Cockade might have been a mess and a failure, but, like the Dieppe Raid a year before, it afforded the Allies important lessons for the real invasion nine months later.

They were still quite unprepared, their armies manned largely by inexperienced conscripts. Against them, on the other side of the Channel, stood a vast force of hardened soldiers, many of them with a fanatical belief in their cause.

Would the Allies be able to learn those lessons?

Would the lessons in themselves be enough?

‘. . . I expect the reader to expand his concept of truth to accommodate what follows.’

Anthony Burgess

AFTER MORE THAN
two years nurturing and expanding his fake Nazi spy network, strengthening the Germans’ trust in their ‘man-in-London’, the time had come for Garbo’s most important task.

From February 1944 onwards Pujol and Harris focused exclusively on deception preparations for Operation Overlord – the code name for the full-scale Allied invasion of German-occupied France. Across southern England, British, American and Canadian soldiers, sailors and airmen were preparing for the amphibious assault on the Normandy coastline, waiting to take part in ‘the greatest combined operation in history’. On the first day of the invasion alone – D-Day – 150,000 men and 1,500 tanks were scheduled to be landed on the beaches by a fleet of almost 5,500 ships, escorted by 12,000 planes. Almost 3 million more servicemen would then join them over the following weeks as subsequent waves were expected to punch deep into Nazi-held territory and finally open up the much-awaited Second Front.