The Spy with 29 Names

by Jason Webster

  Hence the use of G.W. to keep a track on ‘Snow’. They could trust Williams, a former policeman. He was also a Welsh nationalist, which helped with the cover story of a man happy to work for the Nazis in the hope of one day liberating his homeland.

  Now he had claimed his biggest scalp. G.W. posed as a link man between Calvo and the Abwehr. His efforts had been invaluable in incriminating the Spaniard. But it meant that his MI5 work was finished. His connections to the Abwehr were broken the moment that Calvo was arrested. He could no longer work as an ‘enemy spy’. To maintain the pretence he would have to cease operations for fear of being discovered by the British. Any other behaviour would be out of character. So Robertson would have to close him down as a double agent.

  That was a problem with double-cross: the patterns of lies were so complex that success – as with the Calvo case – could also bring loss. Using the system against the enemy often meant that double agents – sometimes carefully nurtured over years – had to be discarded like empty bullet casings. You got one shot, that was it.

  The other problem with double agents was that most of them only worked under duress. Captured German spies – pathetic creatures, many of them, trying to move around the country with a few quid in their pocket and heavily accented English – were given a choice: the noose or turn against their former masters. Some chose death but plenty opted for the alternative. Robertson had been the one who suggested the option be given them in the first place. A dead German spy was no use to anybody. But one who continued communicating with the Abwehr yet was actually being controlled by the British? That was different. Using all these agents in tandem, getting them to tell the same story to the Germans, could be very useful indeed. Double agents were as old as warfare itself, but no one had tried to do anything on this scale before.

  It needed coordination, funds, organisation, cooperation and a lot of man-hours. Then they had to get the right Whitehall people on board – without telling them too much.

  That side of things was John Masterman’s job. As head of MI5’s B1A section, Robertson ran the double agents, each with their minders and housekeepers and wireless operators and whole teams around them, making sure they did what they were told, and told the Germans what they were meant to tell them. John Masterman, meanwhile, a tall, reedy fifty-year-old bachelor don from Christ Church, detective novelist and future Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, was better suited to dealing with the process of deciding how and when the agents were to be used, working with representatives from the various government authorities. A ‘back-room boy’, Masterman later described himself, the head of the Twenty Committee that oversaw the double-cross system as a whole – ‘Twenty’ because in the playful minds of those who worked on it, the Roman numerals XX formed a ‘double-cross’.

  Masterman had been in Germany at the start of the First World War and spent the entire four years of the conflict as a civilian internee, so he knew both the language and the people well. And as a former MCC player he liked drawing parallels between running the Twenty Committee and captaining a cricket XI. His intellect and scholarly manner were perfect for the job.

  Robertson was no intellectual, as Masterman and others commented. But he did have nous. The others might be cleverer, but they did not always see things clearly. They needed Robertson for his ability to read people and situations. He got things right, almost always, and sometimes when ‘logic’ suggested otherwise. And he was a natural leader. Masterman and the others respected him for that.

  Working for MI5 was a far cry from Robertson’s earlier, hellraising life, when the nickname ‘Passion Pants’ had stuck – a reference to both his womanising and the colourful tartan trousers he had worn as a Seaforth Highlander. The debts he had accrued back then with all the parties and nightclubs meant he had to resign his commission. First he had gone into the City, before a change of tack had taken him to the Birmingham police force as a rank-and-file copper. At some point during this period he came to the notice of MI5, when the organisation’s founder, Vernon Kell, recommended Robertson because he had been at Charterhouse with his son, John.

  Charming, courteous and easy to be with, Robertson was likened by one of his colleagues to the actor Ronald Colman, a Rudolph Valentino type who, with Hungarian star Vilma Bánky, had formed a silent-movie duo that had rivalled that of John Gilbert and Greta Garbo. Robertson was most at ease doing business in bars and restaurants: the banter over a few drinks often showed a man’s true character, brought in the best results.

  Now he was the head of B1A section, and although it was a Sunday, he was off to have a chat with Ralph Jarvis, MI6’s man in Lisbon, who was over in London for a few days. It would be useful to meet, to see how things were over there.

  Luis Calvo had not been the only Spanish spy on Robertson’s mind. For the past month or so they had been chasing the mystery man the Germans referred to as ‘Alaric’ or ‘Arabal’, with his phantom shipping convoys. They still had not found him. Herbert Hart, the head of MI5’s research unit, had come to the conclusion that ‘Arabel’ – as he preferred it – was Spanish, as some had suspected from the start. (By now most were referring to him as ‘Arabel’, choosing the more English-sounding spelling of his German code name so that he sounded more like an imp or a fairy than a spy: someone you were not sure even existed.)fn2 Arabel was reporting to the Abwehr spymaster in Madrid, so Hart’s theory made sense. Yet despite his claims to the Germans, it was clear that Arabel was not in London. No one actually present in the country could come up, as he did, with such comical material about life in Britain.

  Liverpool’s amusement centres, according to his reports, were hives of ‘drunken orgies and slack morals’. Perhaps that was not entirely mistaken, yet clearly he had never travelled to Glasgow, where he claimed that owing to so much wartime hardship the local men could be persuaded to carry out acts of sabotage and terrorism for the novelty of ‘a litre of wine’. ‘This product does not exist on the island,’ Arabel insisted. Although Robertson had been born in Sumatra, his parents were Scottish; few understood better than he the beer-drinking preferences of his fellow countrymen. Just as surprisingly, Arabel had informed the Germans that during the summer months London effectively shut down due to the heat, with diplomatic missions taking refuge on the cooler shores of Brighton. He appeared to have little idea of British ways, or the country itself. Judging by an expenses sheet he sent to the Germans, he clearly had no grip on £ s d (a train journey between Glasgow and London cost him ‘£0 s87 d10’). By now it was obvious to the British that he was only pretending to be in London.

  The question was whether the Germans also guessed that. Some of his mistakes were amusing, but others were more worrying. He had told his spymasters that minesweepers were being used as escorts for shipping convoys over the Atlantic. That was bad enough, but one that he named as still being in operation, HMS Chestnut, had been sunk in November 1940 – ‘a fact that’, a Navy representative reading his material concluded, ‘the Germans can hardly have failed to notice’.

  Even if he was making his reports up, the double-cross system was so delicate that MI5 could not allow people to freelance like this. If the Germans found out that Arabel was duping them – and it could only be a matter of time before they did – they might start to suspect all their agents. And even if they did not, Arabel’s reports might contradict information sent by genuine double agents. The risk was too great. Arabel had to be found, and stopped.

  Unless, of course, MI5 could get him and persuade him to join the Twenty Committee’s special team. It was a long shot. Even if such a feat could be pulled off, the chances were that he would be compromised in some way. There were plenty in the intelligence community who thought he could not be trusted, that he might be a German plant meant to infiltrate British intelligence. Others preferred to wait and see.

  First he had to be located, though.

  The search was split between two sections of MI5. Robertson in B1A checked his double agents’ communications
with the Germans for possible clues to his identity. Meanwhile, B1G, which dealt with counter-espionage in the Iberian Peninsula, searched through their sources. Tomás (Tommy) Harris was in charge of that section. Half-Spanish on his mother’s side, he was a wealthy artist who helped his father run the Spanish Art Gallery in Mayfair selling El Grecos and Goyas. Harris spoke Spanish like a native, yet neither he nor Robertson had had any success in locating Arabel.

  It was not just that Arabel was a German agent supposedly operating from London. The fact was, the counter-intelligence chiefs were confident that they had picked up most of the Nazi spies that had been sent to Britain by this point. Not only that, thanks to double-cross, Robertson was only months away from concluding that MI5 was running all German intelligence operations inside the country. Arabel was an anomaly, one that had apparently slipped through the net. It had been over a month now since they had first become aware of him, his name appearing on the Bletchley intercepts. His material might be bogus, but it was imperative that they find him.

  Sunday, 22 February wore on, and the time came for Robertson’s meeting with Jarvis: an informal chat, an MI5 man and an MI6 man smoothing over the fault lines where the two organisations joined and sometimes clashed. There were plenty of matters to talk about – Lisbon had become an espionage centre when the war began. But over the course of their conversation, Jarvis threw out an unexpected question.

  ‘Do any of your double agents’, he asked, ‘write messages to their German case officers with addresses in Madrid?’

  Robertson nodded.

  ‘The address Apartado 1099 mean anything to you?’

  It was a PO box number.

  Robertson told him it was genuine, that one of his double agents sent letters to the same address.

  Jarvis excused himself and got up to make a phone call to his section head in St Albans, Felix Cowgill. Once he got the necessary clearance, he returned to Robertson.

  There was something important that MI5 needed to know, Jarvis said, something about a Spaniard in Lisbon who had been pestering MI6 for months . . .

  * * *

  fn1 Also sometimes spelled ‘Arabel’.

  fn2 From here onwards I generally use the spelling ‘Arabel’ unless in direct quotation from, or reference to, the German.

  2

  Spain, Autumn 1941

  FOR A TIME he had feared for his life, but the immediate threat had passed and now Karl-Erich Kühlenthal had reason to believe that he was on the cusp of a major triumph.

  Outside the embassy, skeletal horses pulled delivery carts up and down the Avenida del Generalísimo. Madrid was a poor city, its people suffering after the destruction and pain of the Civil War. All over the country mothers scavenged for food for their children, surviving off scraps and stealing whatever they could to stay alive, while in prisons, tens of thousands awaited retribution for having fought on the losing side. The firing squads and garrotters were kept busy cleansing Spain of Reds.

  German diplomats had an upmarket address in the centre of the capital, not far from the Real Madrid stadium. This was the centre of the new Spanish Establishment, where the victorious made their homes and came to watch the State-favoured football team. For the embassy staff, Madrid was an important posting in a friendly, if austere, country. Franco had defeated his Republican enemies in April 1939, just five months before the new world war began, and he had done so thanks in large part to help from Mussolini and Hitler.

  Since then, and against the Germans’ best efforts, he had resisted calls for Spain to join the Axis. Franco was a Galician, from the north-west, where caution and inscrutability were applauded. Exhausted after so much fighting, Spain could not, he told his ally, become a full player in a new conflict. It would remain officially neutral, but it would still be Hitler’s friend.

  Big and important as it was, the German Embassy was more than a symbol of this amicable arrangement. As with many foreign legations, it was also an espionage hub, with an active Abwehr station at the heart of it, the biggest in any neutral country. And Kühlenthal was becoming one of the most important officers of the hundreds on the payroll.

  His connection with Spain went back years. In the 1930s his father, General Erich Kühlenthal, had been military attaché to both France and Spain, and had made friends with members of the Spanish armed forces. As a result, when Franco had joined the military uprising against the Spanish Republic in 1936, he turned to General Kühlenthal to seek German support for his campaign – which quickly turned into the Spanish Civil War.

  The upshot of Hitler’s subsequent decision to help Franco was the creation of the Condor Legion, a unit of several thousand military volunteers from the German armed forces sent to fight alongside Franco’s army. Spain became a testing ground for new military ideas, concepts that would later turn into the ‘blitzkrieg’ tactics that won the Germans such rapid victories across Europe. Despite efforts to cover it up, most blamed the Condor Legion for the massacre at Guernica.

  The Legion had also had an intelligence corps, headed by Joachim Rohleder. In 1938, Kühlenthal, then in his late twenties, became Rohleder’s secretary.

  Kühlenthal was tall and slim, with light brown hair smoothed back with a parting on the left side. His nose was thin and ‘hawk-like’ according to those who met him, while his eyes, a typically German blue-grey, were described as ‘piercing’ and ‘searching’. He dressed well, usually wearing double-breasted suits, and had the appearance of a German of ‘the better class’. As a young man, Kühlenthal had wanted to follow his father into the army, with dreams of reaching high rank. But there was a problem, one which, after Hitler came to power in 1933, made his entry into the German armed forces impossible: his grandmother on his mother’s side was Jewish. Under the Nuremberg Laws passed in 1935, in which the Nazi state gave legal definition to its anti-Semitism, a quarter-Jew was regarded as a ‘second-degree mongrel’ (Mischling zweiten Grades), and while not persecuted quite as heavily as those considered ‘more Jewish’, was still denied certain basic rights.

  Kühlenthal had initially come to Spain to escape the pressure of his racial ‘impurity’, and for a while he ran a business in Madrid selling radios imported from the United States – ‘Elcar’ he called it, the name coming from a combination of his wife’s first name, Ellen, and the Spanish version of his own name, Carlos. Then the Spanish Civil War broke out and he was forced to return to Germany. But shortly afterwards he was back in Madrid, this time in German intelligence through his father’s military connections.

  During the First World War, his father had become friends with a diminutive naval officer. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was now the head of the Abwehr, and had become the young Kühlenthal’s mentor. A former U-boat captain, Canaris had been made head of the German secret service after Hitler came to power. He was a conservative, a right-winger, but there was much about the Nazis and their ideology that Canaris did not agree with, including their ideas about race. Kühlenthal was one of many Jews whom he assisted; until Himmler ousted him in February 1944, the Abwehr chief helped save the lives of hundreds, sometimes naming them as his agents, sending them abroad as he did with Kühlenthal, getting them out of sight.

  Ironically the threat of persecution only seemed to make Kühlenthal work harder, running spy networks from Madrid. In 1941 he was thirty-three years old. He was industrious and his passion for his job had, with time, made him one of the most important figures in the Abwehr station, to the annoyance of some of his colleagues who resented the fact that, despite his lack of military training, he had been made ‘specialist-captain’ and put in charge of the section running secret agents.

  People regarded him as stand-offish and serious. And while many in the Abwehr were drawn by the excitement and adventure of espionage – the money and sex – Kühlenthal, married with two children, was noted only for his passions for tennis and for cars, of which he owned two: a brown French coupé with changeable number plates for daytime driving, and a black German car for c
ruising the streets at night.

  And yet, despite his invaluable work for the Reich, he could not be entirely at ease. Since the previous summer Germany had been at war with its former ally, the Soviet Union. The killing of Jews was now a large-scale enterprise with special murder squads – Einsatzgruppen – sent in behind the front-line troops to execute Jewish populations in newly conquered territories. Kühlenthal could busy himself with work, show that he was a useful intelligence officer, but how much longer could he survive, even in Madrid? When would it be his turn, the knock on the door in the middle of the night?

  For the Abwehr was not the only covert German organisation operating from the embassy in Madrid. Himmler’s secret police, the Gestapo, and his Nazi-controlled intelligence body, the Sicherheitsdienst or SD, also had agents on the ground there. Himmler had made an official visit to Spain in October 1940, meeting Franco to pave the way for his men to enjoy full cooperation from the Generalísimo’s police. This effectively gave them a free hand.

  Kühlenthal could not feel safe. Perhaps Spain was not the haven that he had imagined. Franco was sitting out the world war, yet had quickly set up a special military force for Spanish young men wishing to help the Führer. Once the invasion of the Soviet Union had begun in June 1941, the Spanish Blue Division recruited tens of thousands of eager volunteers to be sent to the Eastern Front.

  The truth was that Spain was becoming even friendlier with Germany, which was fine for ordinary embassy employees, sharing in the glory of the Reich’s victories against the Reds; they went down well in Franco’s Madrid. But Kühlenthal needed something to make his position more secure.