The Spy with 29 Names

by Jason Webster

  ‘Mrs Garbo was in tremendous form,’ Liddell wrote, ‘and related to me in animated and broken English the part she had played in the early days of her husband’s double agent career.’

  She told him of the events three years before, when Pujol had been at his lowest ebb in Lisbon, and she herself had taken the initiative to talk to the Americans, to persuade them to listen to her husband’s story. It was the final move that had brought Pujol to the attention of the British and eventually to London as their top double agent.

  Listen, Araceli was saying, none of this would have happened without me. I deserve this – you owe it to me.

  Pujol himself was more subdued that evening, perhaps wisely allowing his wife to have her moment, to bask in the glory of his MBE. He had grown a beard – all part of his new role of ‘spy in hiding’. Later he would try to get some photos of himself in this ‘disguise’ over to Kühlenthal by post to show what measures he was taking against getting caught. Liddell thought the beard made him look rather like Lenin.

  Yet despite the hidden tensions at the table – the hostility between Harris and Araceli never appeared to abate, while we can only speculate about the levels of intimacy between Pujol and Sarah Bishop – the evening was a success, at least as far as Liddell was concerned. Pujol and Araceli were, he concluded, ‘very likeable characters’.

  In truth the marriage was still in trouble. The war was close to an end and Araceli longed to be back in Spain, yet for Pujol his work remained unfinished.

  Something of his feelings for Araceli, and the problems they had been through, can be sensed in a handful of letters he wrote in the early months of 1945, part of his ruse to convince Kühlenthal that he was hiding from the British. He wrote to his wife, date-lining the letters from various cities in Spain, to where he was pretending he had now successfully escaped. In fact he was sending them from Britain to Madrid, where Kühlenthal played his part and had the letters franked in Spain itself and sent back to Britain, thereby providing his agent with ‘proof’ for the British authorities that he was out of the country.

  In the first letter Pujol talked about being back in Madrid, and how the city was a ‘plague of memories’ for him of his previous life there with Araceli, which only made the pain of their separation that much harder to bear.

  I have no plans; I am like a little boat at the mercy of the waves of the Atlantic, waiting for a ray of light to show the way in my dark future. How different everything would be if you were here. I don’t want to say too much about Madrid, because I know it will only make you as sad as I am as I walk the streets and realise that you aren’t by my side. I don’t plan to stay long in the capital; I’m hoping to leave next week because a journey is the best thing for me in my current state of health, which is in a terrible way with my nerves and the way I feel right now.

  In a later letter, in which he talked about a supposed business venture that he was getting into, he again expressed his feelings for her:

  Just remember, day after day, how much I love you and that everything I am doing is for both of us. That way the loneliness won’t feel so bad, and you will be able to stand up strong against any adversity that comes your way.

  I love you very much and send you millions of kisses.

  If Pujol’s wish was to rekindle the fondness of their early years together, to try to persuade Araceli to stay with him in London for a while longer, it failed. Her calls to be sent back to Spain continued, although at the last minute she wavered over whether to return when she heard that the naval officer she had been having an affair with earlier in the war was being repatriated from his POW camp. By now, however, MI5 were tiring of her. Apart from the matter of marital infidelities, Harris commented that ‘the domestic situation in the Garbo household had become extremely complicated’. Araceli struggled to find a servant and was having to look after the two small children and do the housework on her own – a situation that was becoming untenable owing to an unspecified illness.

  On 1 May 1945, one day after a defeated Hitler committed suicide in the Berlin bunker, she and the children finally flew back to Madrid, at MI5’s insistence. The marriage was not over – not yet – but it was staggering towards an inevitable breakdown.

  35

  Britain, the Americas and Spain, May–September 1945

  JUST AS HE was saying goodbye to his wife, wondering how long his marriage could survive, Pujol was also busy with what would turn out to be the last Garbo messages sent between London and Madrid.

  Harris and MI5 were keen to keep tabs on the German spy network in Spain after the war. The conflict was coming to an end, but there were fears that diehard Nazis might linger on and even stage a fightback at a future date. As a result it was decided that Garbo should maintain contact with Madrid.

  There was another reason, more personal for Pujol, to carry on, however. Until that point there had never been any suspicion that Kühlenthal had any inkling that his top London spy had been working for the British. Yet there was always the danger that one day Pujol’s cover might be blown, in which case he and his family would potentially be under threat. He needed to be certain that no one on the German side knew anything about his true loyalties.

  Through all this, Pujol had to keep up the pretence of being a ‘German spy’ on the run from the British authorities. As such he had to think of escape routes to relative safety overseas. He put forward a number of possibilities to Kühlenthal, including sailing to Cuba with a tobacco smuggler, or getting to Canada using Fred’s – Agent 4’s – ID papers. In the end Kühlenthal suggested the Cuba plan was the best.

  By this time the war in Europe was in its final days and Franco, keen to ingratiate himself with the winners and distance himself from his former friends, was rounding up German officials and placing them under house arrest. The British had learned that Friedrich Knappe, Pujol’s first contact inside the defunct Abwehr, was detained in Catalonia, while Kühlenthal had been given permission to live in Ávila. Nonetheless, he was still able to respond to the Garbo messages.

  On the evening of 1 May, just hours after Araceli and the children flew off for Spain, Garbo, ever the fanatical Nazi, offered to carry on fighting for the cause.

  I am convinced that, providing we take the necessary steps in order to organise ourselves adequately and efficiently at the present time, we will be able to maintain contact with Three and Five after my departure, and thereby control a network, the benefits of which may be of incalculable value for the future.

  For their part, the Germans thanked him for his continuing support in the face of ‘the rapid course of events and the confusion reigning all over the world’. They would organise the necessary documentation to get him out of Britain and make sure he received some funds to help him along. But it was time to close down the network. The situation was critical and he had to think of the safety of his collaborators.

  Over the next few days more messages were sent back and forth detailing the particulars of shutting down the network, of getting funds across to Garbo, and about escape plans.

  Then, at nineteen minutes past nine in the evening of 8 May – VE Day, just as the crowds were drinking and celebrating in the streets of London – Pujol and Harris sent their final message to Madrid. Garbo insisted on pressing the Germans for some sort of contact in Madrid, a way that would enable him to stay in touch with them. Now, four years after he first penned his fake reports on Britain from Lisbon, delighted at the outcome of the war and perhaps even under the influence of a glass of champagne or two from Harris’s wine cellar, it was as important as ever to stay in character:

  I understand the present situation and the lack of guidance due to the unexpected death of our dear Chief shocks our profound faith in the destiny which awaits our poor Europe, but his deeds and the story of his sacrifice to save the world from the danger of anarchy which threatens us will last for ever in the hearts of all men of goodwill. His memory, as you say, will guide us on our course and today more than ever
I affirm my confidence in my beliefs and I am certain that the day will arrive in the not too distant future when the noble struggle will be revived which was started by him to save us from a period of chaotic barbarism which is now approaching.

  The reply from Madrid was exactly what they were waiting for: details about how to keep in touch now that the war had ended:

  To make contact with the person employed in Madrid we ask you to frequent the Cafe Bar la Moderna, 141 Calle Alcalá, every Monday between 20 hours and 2030 hours, starting June 4th. You should be seated at the end of the Cafe and be carrying the newspaper “London News”. A person will meet you there one Monday who will say that he has come on behalf of Fernando Gómez . . .

  It was the last message the Germans ever sent.

  Pujol later remembered the celebrating crowds in Piccadilly on VE Day, drinking beer and dancing in the street. Victory had come, and there was an overwhelming sense of joy. Yet in that scene the story of how the war had ended was so different in the minds of each person there. The soldiers and servicemen and women had their own experiences to shade and give colour to a momentous occasion, yet they did not know what the little Spaniard and his friend from MI5 knew about how – or why – the Allies had prevailed.

  Yet if we were to remove those two men from the picture, from history altogether, the scene would collapse. There would be no celebration, no party in Piccadilly. Normandy, the Second Front, would have failed, and things would have turned out very differently indeed.

  Nonetheless they passed unobserved by the crowds, happy, yet still with work to complete. Doing their bit, as so many millions had done. Vital yet invisible. Storytellers who had helped shape an ending that was far from certain.

  Pujol now had to get to Spain, but he did so in a roundabout fashion. By travelling to the USA and Latin America first he would be able to pick up a new passport from a Spanish consulate – pretending to have lost his old one – and thereby disguise any trails back to his time in London.

  There was another reason to go, however. The head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, had heard about the Garbo case, and he wanted to meet the men behind it.

  In early June Pujol and Harris took off in a Sunderland flying boat from Southampton for a twenty-four-hour flight to Baltimore. From there they headed to Washington, where they had dinner with Hoover in an underground bunker that the ever paranoid FBI chief had beneath his official residence.

  ‘Hoover showed great interest in my activities as a double agent,’ Pujol remembered, ‘and was most affable throughout, but he never asked me to work for him.’

  Pujol had already turned down an offer from the British to take a comfortable, well-paid job at the Eagle Star insurance company. He was happy to continue working for them in secret, keeping an eye on any Nazi resurgence movements that he came across, but he was thinking about his own future, about his family, and a chance perhaps to repair things with Araceli. After so many years of difficulties – from his years in hiding during the Spanish Civil War, to his knife-edge existence in Madrid and Lisbon as a freelance double agent, to the long hours and strain of his work for MI5 – he owed it to his wife and children to start something new. Besides, he had the feeling that tyranny followed him wherever he went – first the lawlessness of Republican Barcelona, then Franco and finally Hitler: he wanted to settle somewhere tranquil, with no threat of revolution or dictatorship. A fresh beginning. Perhaps now at last he and Araceli might enjoy the kind of life that they had dreamed of all those years ago while working at the Majestic Hotel in Madrid.

  There was one more task to perform, however: re-establishing contact with the Germans in Spain.

  Pujol arrived in Barcelona by boat on 9 August 1945, the same day that the Americans dropped a second atomic bomb on Japan, over Nagasaki. After an emotional reunion with his mother and family, he travelled to Madrid, where Harris was waiting for him with their old friend from MI6, Desmond Bristow.

  At first they tried to contact the Germans by radio, but no signal came back. Then Pujol went to the Café Bar la Moderna, as instructed in the last German message, but no one came to meet him. When he visited Knappe’s Madrid flat, he found that his former contact was not at home, but Knappe’s sister informed him that he was now living somewhere in Catalonia.

  This was the information that the British already had – that he was living in Caldes de Malavella, near the French border. Now Pujol could satisfactorily explain to the German how he knew this.

  It was late August by the time he made it there. Knappe became nervous when he saw his former agent standing at his door: the Spanish authorities did not allow him to have visitors. They agreed to walk around to a nearby forest where they could talk more freely.

  Knappe was depressed. Germany had lost the war, and his own situation, now under house arrest, was uncertain. To Pujol he looked lost, saddened and worried about what might happen to him. It was clear that he had almost no contact with any of the others in the German secret services; he was on his own.

  He did, however, have Kühlenthal’s address in Avila; he gave it to Pujol, suggesting that he go and see him.

  Their conversation lasted some three hours, but by the end Knappe was becoming increasingly nervous and brought things to a conclusion. He was determined, he said, not to be sent back to Germany. He would rather live as a fugitive here in Spain.

  Pujol never saw him again.

  Back in Madrid, Pujol told Harris and Bristow what he had heard from Knappe, before heading to Avila to meet his former German spymaster, Kühlenthal. As he drew into the city, he imagined that the great medieval walls somehow reflected the cool response his arrival would elicit. Instead, he was surprised to find Kühlenthal delighted to see him.

  By this time Pujol was something of a superman in Kühlenthal’s eyes. Not only had he run a highly successful Nazi spy ring from the heart of enemy territory, he had also managed to escape detection when the authorities had cottoned on to him, and now here he was, unscathed.

  Or at least that was how Pujol later recounted his meeting with Kühlenthal to MI5. There are questions about Kühlenthal, however. Was he really duped as comprehensively as the records suggest? Did he never suspect that Pujol was acting as a double agent? The German historian Arne Molfenter has interviewed members of Kühlenthal’s family. They insist that their relative did have his doubts. Perhaps, in the end, like so many in the Abwehr – even the organisation’s head, Admiral Canaris himself – Kühlenthal was playing a double game of sorts, never fully loyal to the Nazi State, perhaps motivated more by self-preservation owing to his Jewish blood than anything else. Garbo, the Germans’ greatest spy inside Britain, gave him a get-out-of-jail card, yet by passing on his agent’s supposed intelligence as genuine he was also helping to undermine the regime that was murdering the Jews.

  It is impossible to say. Perhaps Kühlenthal was cleverer than anyone realised, only acting the fool. Or perhaps his family want him to be perceived in that way, in an attempt to recover the good name of a man who has largely been ridiculed by history.

  Whatever the truth of the situation, Pujol was relieved to see – in his eyes at least – that there was no hint of suspicion in Kühlenthal. Even now, after all that had happened, the German intelligence officer appeared none the wiser. Pujol suggested establishing contacts with other spies still active, and keeping his network alive. But Kühlenthal refused. It was not possible in the current situation. Nonetheless, he wanted Pujol to see him as ‘a colleague and brother with whom he would always wish to share whatever good fortune might come his way in the future’.

  There was nothing but praise for Pujol. Kühlenthal regretted that he was not able to give him his Iron Cross. There had been some bureaucratic complications which meant that it had never arrived in Madrid. Hitler himself had been involved in the matter, and had insisted that the medal be sent, but the end of the war had intervened in the meantime.

  Kühlenthal was keen to know what Pujol planned to do now; perhaps his su
per-spy could help him get out of Spain. Like Knappe, he was anxious not to be sent back to Germany. Pujol said he would talk to his sub-agents and see what they could do.

  He, meanwhile, was going to leave Spain as quickly as possible. He told Kühlenthal that he thought that British spies were already on to him, and that he intended to cross into Portugal.

  ‘How are you going to do that?’ Kühlenthal asked him as Pujol was about to leave. ‘How are you going to get over the border?’

  Pujol gave him an enigmatic look, and simply said: ‘Clandestinely.’

  Pujol travelled back to Madrid, then on to Lisbon, where he met up once more with Harris. They flew to London, where Pujol was debriefed on what he had learned from both his meetings with his former German case officers.

  His time as a double agent had come to an end; it was time to make his goodbyes to those who had been part of the Garbo operation. To Charlie Haines the radio operator; to Tar Robertson and John Masterman; to Hilda, Harris’s wife; to Sarah Bishop, who had spent so many hours with him at the Jermyn Street office; and to Harris himself, the other half of Garbo: over the years the two men had become the best of friends.

  MI5 were not ungenerous. Garbo had brought them some £31,000 in funding from the Germans, providing the final irony that the enemy had ended up paying several times over for the very service that had been used to fool them. Now a portion of that money was given to Pujol to help him start his new life.

  It was September 1945. Just as, four years previously, he had popped up magically out of nowhere, now Pujol – like his namesake Greta Garbo – simply vanished.

  PART TEN

  ‘A tale, fictitious or otherwise, illuminates truth.’

  Rumi