The Spy with 29 Names

by Jason Webster

Pujol now thought that he had all the proof he needed, and he made yet another approach to the British in Lisbon. After some difficulty he was interviewed by someone in the Military Attaché’s office. Pujol explained that he could provide secret inks and questionnaires from the Germans to back up his claims. He pointed out, however, that it was extremely dangerous for him to keep coming to the British Embassy, and that should he hand over the material he mentioned, he would never be allowed back into Spain, and would probably have to leave Portugal as well. So he insisted that the British could only have the material which would expose the German spy network in Madrid in exchange for helping him leave and get to the United States.

  The British official said he would discuss the matter with his superiors and agreed to meet Pujol the following day at the English Bar in Estoril at 7.00 in the evening. Pujol duly showed up, but after a long wait it was clear that the British were not coming. Furious, he returned to the British Embassy, where the official told him that he had not been able to locate the superior whom he had intended to bring along for the meeting. Eventually Pujol left in disgust. There was no one, he concluded, among the British delegation in Lisbon who was at all interested in what he had to offer. If he was to make any progress at all, it could only be through the British Embassy back in Madrid.

  Pujol was in a difficult situation: the Germans thought he was in England and were demanding intelligence reports. Yet the British, the people he was trying to help, wanted nothing to do with him. If the Germans found out that he was lying, and worse, that he was trying to make contact with the British, his life would be forfeit. He was twenty-nine years old, living in a foreign country, and his wife had just given birth to their first child. Resourceful and imaginative as he was, the danger involved was all too clear.

  He had to do something, so he fell back on Kühlenthal’s orders – to build up a network of sub-agents. He had already started with his KLM courier. Now he would begin creating new characters. In his second letter back to Madrid, he introduced the first two. Agent 1 was a Portuguese citizen living in Newport, South Wales, called Carvalho, who had agreed to watch the shipping convoys coming in and out of the Bristol Channel. Agent 2 was a German-Swiss named Gerbers, based in Bootle, keeping an eye on the Mersey. In a later letter, he created a third sub-agent, a Venezuelan student based in Glasgow who eventually became known as Pedro. These were the characters appearing on Bletchley intercepts read by Philby and Bristow at Section V, who would cause British Intelligence so much concern.

  The invention of the sub-agents had a double benefit: firstly, by passing on information to the Germans as having come from them, Pujol put in a safeguard should ‘their’ intelligence prove to be wrong: any mistakes and he could easily liquidate them. Secondly, these agents demanded money for their reports: Gerbers wanted 2 dollars a day, plus 25 dollars for any important information that he passed on. The more ‘sub-agents’ he had, the more money Pujol could ask of the Germans.

  Kühlenthal was delighted. But still the demand came for real information that the Germans could use. From making up characters, Pujol had to start inventing ‘intelligence’.

  By now it was September 1941. Pujol did not have any English, but he could check newspapers written in French. He travelled into Lisbon city centre, visiting libraries to pick up whatever information he could from reference works about shipping and military matters. From British newspapers he gleaned information about certain firms – their names and addresses – with which he could pepper his reports to add to their realism.

  His letters to the Germans were verbose – a ruse that he later claimed to have adopted deliberately in order to say as little as possible with a maximum number of words. The truth was that it was his natural prose style.

  I had an agent near Avonmouth. Unloading was mostly of foodstuffs. This I gathered from a dock worker who said: ‘Fortunately a hungry winter is finished for us.’ From the information from North America it is judged that this convoy is that indicated by Churchill when he referred in his speech to the largest convoy which has ever crossed the Atlantic . . .

  Number Three agent reports the following: The latest recruits called up a few days ago in the Glasgow area go out every morning in formation to effect military exercises on the Rangers football ground. This ground is on the left bank of the Clyde near Broomstown Street [sic] . . .

  In his third letter he talked about convoys arriving in the Clyde. The last thing he wanted was to unintentionally endanger any real convoys, so he said that before docking, the convoy broke up and dispersed all around the coast, thus making themselves more difficult targets for German U-boats. It was a good plan, so good that a couple of years later the Admiralty in London adopted it in all reports about convoys fed back to the Germans through double agents.

  For the time being, however, Pujol was on his own and living by his wits. He made a further attempt to approach the British, this time through a passport official in Madrid. Araceli went with him, but again it came to nothing: Mr Thompson, he was told, was away.

  It was even more dangerous for him to be in Madrid than in Lisbon; he would have to return as soon as possible. In the meantime, he wanted to confirm that the Germans believed in him as their spy in London. What if they were deceiving him just as he was them?

  He concocted another plan: Araceli was to deliver a letter by hand to Knappe in Madrid. This she then did, and at the meeting she started quizzing the German, wondering about her husband’s unusual behaviour. What was this letter about? What was going on? Why was she passing it on to him, a man she had never met before? Eventually she confided that she thought her husband was having an affair. Knappe, anxious to get his hands on Pujol’s letter, told her everything. He was actually working for them, he said, spying for the Germans from inside Britain. Feigning doubt at first, Araceli finally accepted the story, handing a photo of her little son to Knappe to pass on to her husband.

  Araceli was as good an actor as Pujol, and had secured the proof that the Germans did indeed think that her husband was genuine. Their minds could be put at rest on that point, at least. Yet still Pujol was getting nowhere with the British, and still he had to produce intelligence for his controllers.

  In Lisbon he bought a Blue Guide to Great Britain and a Portuguese book on the British fleet. The reports began to flow – often concentrating on shipping, but also talking about troop movements that he observed as he pretended to travel about the country:

  Along the Windermere – Barness [sic, presumably Bowness] road, and along the road which follows the shores of the lake to where it crosses the Windermere – Ambleside road (at a point called the Wood where there is a small chapel of Santa Catalina) there are camps full of troops. These forces are excellently equipped and have modern weapons.

  The Germans swallowed it all, even the pieces about non-existent minesweepers and the summer heat in London.

  Months passed, and Pujol’s situation became more desperate. He would not be able to sustain the pretence indefinitely, yet already, in one of their replies, his controllers had told him that his mission in Britain would be a long one, and that on no account should he try to return to Spain. There was no option but to carry on. Eventually the British would have to listen.

  In October he made a last attempt to make contact. Again in Madrid, he got through to the passport official named Thompson, producing German questionnaires and promising to provide evidence of German secret inks and other methods. But Thompson, like so many other British officials, refused to believe him. He failed to even take note of the questions asked of Pujol by the Germans. They included many on the situation in the Pacific, including: ‘How does England expect to resist Japanese aggression? What help is expected from the USA in case of war with Japan?’

  A little over a month later, on 7 December 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the world war extended into the Far East.

  Meanwhile, in Lisbon, Araceli was worried. There had been so many rejections. Her husband was at a low
ebb. He started talking about emigrating to Brazil. They had to get out: there was no way they could carry on as they were.

  He was close to giving up. He would, she knew, make the most of a new life in Latin America, but this failure would hang over him for the rest of his life.

  It was at this point that she decided she would have to act alone, without his knowledge: a last-ditch attempt to make this work before either the Germans discovered the truth, or circumstances forced them to leave Europe for good. In November she went to the US Embassy in Lisbon, asking for an interview with the assistant naval attaché, a man called Rousseau. She had information, she told him, about a man spying for the Germans from within the United States itself. She had a telegram from him talking about sabotage plans in Chicago.

  Would Rousseau listen . . .?

  PART THREE

  ‘And, after all, what is a lie?

  ’Tis but the truth in masquerade.’

  Lord Byron

  8

  The Eastern Front, Southern Sector, 25 December 1941

  IT WAS CHRISTMAS Day. At Bletchley Park Mavis Lever and Dilly Knox were starting to stream the first decoded Abwehr messages to Bristow, Philby and others in British intelligence. At that moment, far from London and the Home Counties, the heaviest fighting in the war was taking place in the Soviet Union, where, on the shores of the frozen Azov Sea, at the southern tip of the Eastern Front, the temperature was dropping to minus 40 degrees.

  There the SS troops whose fighting lives would in time be profoundly affected by Pujol’s stories were expecting a special visitor for lunch, flying in from Berlin to celebrate with this elite unit. To insiders like Jochen Peiper, their guest was known as King Heinrich – ‘K.H.’ – the reincarnation of Germany’s first king. Others referred to him by his official title: Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.

  The advances of the summer and autumn had now ended, yet vast areas of the Soviet Union had been conquered. To the north, Moscow itself had been within reach only weeks before, while in the south, Rostov-on-Don had briefly been theirs. The Soviets had fought back and pushed them out of the city, westwards to Taganrog, Chekhov’s birthplace. Yet the thaw of spring would see another German offensive. In a short time they would push towards the Caucasus again, with its mineral and oil wealth so important for the Reich.

  Conditions at the front line had deteriorated over the past weeks: rations had been reduced to 150 grams of food a day. At the winter headquarters, however, no effort would be spared to make the best Christmas lunch possible for their guest.

  There were many sections of the SS, acting as front-line troops, concentration-camp officers and death squads. Yet within the Nazi Praetorian Guard, one unit was held higher than any other, a privileged inner corps: the men of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler – the LAHfn1 – were proud to bear on their uniforms the name of the Führer himself, whose life it was their mission to protect. No other body was closer to the top ranks of the Nazi Party.

  Despite the brutalising experiences that he had already lived through, Jochen Peiper still had a boyish face, with pushed-back dark-blond hair, pink cheeks, heavy eyebrows, pale eyes, a long straight nose and cleft chin. He had turned eighteen on the day that Hitler had come to power, 30 January 1933. Weeks later he joined the SS. The officer training programme was infamous: people claimed that a recruit had to stand still while a grenade was let off on top of his helmet. The story was untrue, but contained a truth nonetheless – about the commitment required, the importance given to following orders, and a cavalier attitude to physical injury and death. Officers of the Wehrmacht – the traditional German armed forces – might frown at the methods and high casualty rates of SS soldiers, the Waffen-SS, but for Peiper and his comrades theirs was a war of Weltanschauung, of ideology, of building the dream of the Reich. They were a new Order of Teutonic Knights, men who one day, in the hall of Valhalla, would reminisce about the battles they had fought and the sacrifices they had made for Germany.

  Peiper was no ordinary member of the LAH. From before the war, and during the first years of the conflict, he had been adjutant to Himmler himself, and the Reichsführer had come to value the young man who was bright, ideologically passionate and obedient. ‘My dear Jochen’, he called him in his letters. Peiper had married Sigurd Hinrichsen, one of Himmler’s secretaries, who was best friends with Hedwig Potthast, Himmler’s mistress, and with Reinhard Heydrich, his deputy.

  Working so close to Himmler was second only to being adjutant to Hitler himself. But Peiper had craved the life of a soldier from a boy, inspired by his father’s experiences as an officer in the Imperial Army. Himmler had allowed his adjutant a brief stint away to fight with the LAH during the conquest of France. Now, however, Peiper had been on the Eastern Front for months, proving that he was more than a mere desk officer, that he could also fight and lead men. And his superiors were pleased with him. Hauptsturmführer Joachim Peiper – Jochen to those who knew him – was still only twenty-six, yet was already a captain, decorated with an Iron Cross, First Class.

  Now it was Christmas. His wife Sigi was pregnant with their second child and a new year was about to begin, one that would put the failures of 1941 behind them. They had not taken Moscow, but once the Russian winter came to an end they would strike again.

  And they had something important to tell Himmler.

  Heinz Seetzen was commander of Einsatzkommando 10a, a sub-unit of the SS death squads sent in behind the front-line troops. He was wintering near the LAH, and while the fighting continued he and his men were kept busy. The LAH had helped where it could: tank-trap ditches were useful for disposing of corpses. Seetzen was even using a new machine to carry out his work – a Gaswagen, a truck on which the exhaust was piped back into the body of the van. The screaming could still be heard from outside, and the truck had to drive a few kilometres around the city before everyone inside was dead, but by the time it returned to Taganrog the job was done, and it prevented some of the stress that the task could cause Seetzen’s men. Thousands had already been killed using this method: Communist Party members, the mentally ill, and particularly Jews. The fact was – and this was the news they could tell Himmler on his arrival – with the work of the Gaswagen, Taganrog was now Judenfrei – free of Jews entirely.

  Peiper had not seen Himmler since the late summer. It was possible, he knew, that the Reichsführer would ask him to return as his assistant. The two men got on, and he had heard that his replacement was not doing well. He enjoyed soldiering, yet being next to Himmler allowed him to witness the inner workings of state. There was little he did not know about the Reichsführer’s plans for their struggle against international Jewry and communism. And it had allowed this Berlin boy from a middle-class family to see more of the world than he otherwise might have: there had already been official visits to France, Greece, Norway, Italy and Spain. Franco had treated them to a bullfight in Madrid, before Himmler’s entourage had moved on to Barcelona. They had visited a monastery in the mountains – Montserrat. Obsessed with his search for ancient sacred relics, Himmler thought he might find clues there to the location of the Holy Grail.

  Now there was talk of a new move, a new chapter. Not just Gaswagen, but other, bigger machines that could do the work of thousands of men. Heydrich would be put in charge; it would only be a matter of time before their final objectives were met.

  Peiper took his place, ready to welcome his chief and mentor.

  A salute: Heil Hitler. Arms outstretched.

  And Himmler in front of him, thin mouth, weak chin, eyes black and still behind circular glasses.

  A smile.

  ‘My dear Jochen.’

  * * *

  fn1 Later renamed the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, LSSAH. For the sake of simplicity I refer to it as the LAH throughout.

  9

  London, Spring 1942

  THE CHANGE FROM sifting through hotel registers was more than welcome. Bristow spoke fluent Spanish, and although MI5 was taking over th
e case, MI6 still needed a man there before handing over ‘Bovril’. Besides, there was plenty of legwork to be done, translating messages to the Abwehr into English from the original Spanish – copies that Pujol had brought with him from Lisbon. Then there would be many days of hearing the man’s story over and over again, cross-referencing, looking for possible inconsistencies.

  Bristow, posing as ‘Captain Richards’, caught the train down from St Albans early in the morning on 28 April 1942, before taking the Tube to Hendon, and 35 Crespigny Road.

  The MI5 safe house was an unremarkable late-Victorian place, painted white and with brick-red roof tiles, on a street of houses all quietly distinct yet essentially the same. Inside, behind the lace curtains, it was sparingly decorated: chairs and tables had been set in a back room where the interviews took place. The window looked out on to a small garden. Mrs Titoff, an elderly Russian émigré and MI5 employee, was the housekeeper.

  Cyril Mills, from MI5, had been named the new man’s case officer, and made the introductions. Bristow’s impression of Pujol was favourable from the start. The small Catalan appeared relaxed. His brown eyes had a warmth about them, with something of a mischievous glint.

  After the first day at Hendon, Bristow rushed back to Glenalmond from the train station, wanting to tell Philby and the others about the mysterious Nazi agent who had kept them guessing for so many months.

  ‘Well, Desmond, h-how is our friend?’ Philby asked.

  It was getting late, and his colleagues were already in the snakepit, sipping after-work cocktails.

  ‘Very well,’ Bristow said. ‘Surprisingly relaxed. Seems to enjoy answering any questions I put to him. Without any doubt it is he who sent the notes to our opponents in Berlin. He is Arabel.’

  ‘No doubt in your mind at all, Desmond?’ Philby asked.