The Spy with 29 Names

by Jason Webster

  Kühlenthal made a better businessman than he did a spymaster. Dienz flourished, and the Kühlenthals became respectable members of the community. He died in October 1975.

  Did he ever know the true story of ‘Alaric’, his top spy in London, who was really ‘Garbo’, a British double agent?

  Harris, his British opponent in MI5, was damning in his conclusion: ‘His characteristic German lack of sense of humour . . . blinded him to the absurdities of the story we were unfolding.’

  The records suggest that he was fooled; his family insist that he was not.

  Today the Dienz company is owned by his son, Edgar Kühlenthal.

  Cecil ‘Monkey’ Blacker won the Military Cross following Operation Goodwood and continued to fight with the 23rd Hussars across northern France and Germany, being made regimental commander in 1945.

  He stayed in the army, rising through the ranks and serving in Northern Ireland and Yemen. Throughout this time he continued his horse racing activities, riding Sir John in the 1948 Grand National. They fell at a fence before the Chair, and Blacker had to stand at the side and watch as the race was won by Sheila’s Cottage.

  After becoming Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1970, his final position was that of Adjutant General to the Forces, one of the highest officers in the Army.

  He retired in 1976 and died in 2002. His son is the writer and journalist Terence Blacker.

  On the day after the liberation of Paris, Amado Granell and other members of La Nueve escorted Charles de Gaulle in the victory parade down the Champs-Elysées. It was a great moment of pride for the Spanish lieutenant. Soon all France would be free and the eyes of the world could turn to deposing another fascist dictator. Franco.

  But while the French gave him honours such as the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’honneur, no one was in the mood to start waging war in Spain by 1944. In Europe, Germany and Hitler were the target, nowhere and no one else.

  The political battles within liberated France now enveloped Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division, and towards the end of 1944 Granell decided that he had had enough. He went with the conquering Allied armies as far as the Rhine, where he washed his hands and face in a symbolic gesture, and then retired from military service.

  He was a great loss to La Nueve. His commanding officer, Captain Dronne, wrote that with Granell’s departure his company had lost ‘part of its soul’.

  Granell’s dream of re-establishing democracy in Spain did not end there, however, and he became friendly with a number of Republican politicians, including Francisco Largo Caballero, the former Republican prime minister. For a while, in the late 1940s, he provided a line of communication between exiled Republicans and Don Juan, son of former King Alfonso XIII and heir to the Spanish throne, in an attempt at reconciliation. Don Juan, like the Republicans, was also in exile, living in Portugal, forbidden by Franco to return to Spain.

  Franco’s own contacts with Don Juan in 1948, in which he promised to pass power to Don Juan’s son, Juan Carlos, on his death, brought the discussions with Granell to an end.

  In 1950 Granell opened a small restaurant in Paris, Los Amigos, where known Spanish Republicans often gathered. But within two years he returned clandestinely to his beloved Spain. At this stage death sentences were still being carried out against those who had fought against Franco during the Civil War, and Granell was forced to live secretly in Santander, Barcelona and Madrid.

  In 1971 he opened a white-goods shop in the town of Orihuela, to the south of Alicante. On 12 May 1972, while driving to Valencia to talk to the French consul about his war pension, he was involved in a car crash and died. He never learned of the critical role that another Spaniard – Juan Pujol – had played in the Allies’ victory in France.

  In his diary, Dronne suggested that anyone checking Granell’s car, turned upside down in the rice paddies around the town of Sueca, would have found bulletholes. Just as with the crash that killed Harris eight years earlier, there was a suspicion of foul play. No evidence to support this has ever been found.

  At the end of the war, Private Jack Poolton of the Royal Regiment of Canada was liberated by US soldiers moving into central Germany in April 1945. His captors gave up the fight, refusing, at the end, to carry out an order by Himmler to shoot all prisoners.

  Poolton had been in POW camps for almost three years after the disaster at Dieppe, and his health was suffering. A troopship took him back to Britain, where, on arriving at Waterloo station, he telegraphed his parents back in Canada to tell them that he was safe. Thin, dirty and louse-ridden, he spent much of his time eating to get his strength back, but struggled to keep his food down. He lost so much weight that friends and relatives did not recognise him.

  In July 1945 he sailed back to Canada, slowly recuperating. The return to civilian life was painful; he suffered from depression and considered committing suicide, unable to cope with the sense of guilt that he had survived while so many of his comrades had been killed.

  With time, he built a new life for himself, working as a mechanic until his retirement. He married and had three children.

  In 1992 he returned to Dieppe for the fiftieth anniversary of the raid. Despite his shaking the hands of German servicemen who also attended, a certain bitterness over what happened that day in August remained.

  ‘I am convinced’, he wrote in his memoirs, ‘that the Germans did know of the Dieppe Raid in advance, and those who planned it were aware of this.’

  Johnny Jebsen was held in German concentration camps until the last days of the war. He never told his captors what he knew about the British double-cross system, and the secret was kept safe.

  No one knows what happened to him. Was he one of the last victims of the Nazis, who killed as many of their prisoners as they were able to before the enemy could liberate them? Or did he manage to escape and begin a new life under a different name?

  In February 1950 a court in Berlin pronounced him officially dead, but the question has never been satisfactorily answered.

  Mavis Batey continued working at Bletchley Park until the end of the war, but left shortly afterwards. She became an academic, teaching at Oxford University’s extra-mural courses, and wrote extensively on the role of the Enigma code-breakers in the defeat of Nazism. She and her husband Keith Batey had three children. They continued to share a love of crossword puzzles but never spoke to each other about their respective work within the secret world.

  Mavis was made an MBE in 1987 and in 2009, Mavis’s biography of Dillwyn Knox, Dilly: The Man who Broke Enigmas, was published.

  She spent her last years in Sussex and often spoke about the code-breaking work at Bletchley during the war and the important achievements of Dilly Knox’s team. She died in November 2013 at the age of 92.

  * * *

  fn1 Logan Place was later home to Queen singer Freddie Mercury.

  fn2 In 1962 Harris had offered to place his Goya collection on permanent loan to the British Museum, and in 1979 the bulk of it was accepted in lieu of tax on his estate.

  39

  London and Normandy, June 1984

  JUAN PUJOL MIGHT never have allowed himself to be revealed as Garbo had Nigel West not got in touch with him when he did. His second son with Carmen Cilia, Juan Carlos, was studying in New Orleans at the time, and had suffered racial abuse on account of the dark complexion that he inherited from his mother. The revelation that his father was the famous Second World War double agent Garbo, Pujol reasoned, would prove that he had no reason to feel inferior to anyone.

  Unaware of this, Nigel West had a hook of his own to get Pujol over to London for the fortieth anniversary celebrations of the Normandy landings. By agreeing to appear now, he said, he could get a publishing deal to tell his story, and would also have an opportunity to meet Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace.

  The latter was not strictly true – West had not yet had any contacts with the Palace over Pujol. But he felt certain that Prince Philip, an amateur spy-buff, woul
d jump at the chance to meet the famous Garbo in person.

  In effect, West ‘did a Garbo’ on Garbo. Pujol accepted the invitation, and West hurriedly arranged things. In the end, the Palace reacted as he had expected them to.

  Before his audience, however, West arranged a meeting with the surviving members of the deception group who worked on the Garbo operation all those years before. Present at the Special Forces Club were Tar Robertson, Roger Hesketh, Cyril Mills and Desmond Bristow. None of the intelligence veterans believed West’s claim that he had found the real Garbo.

  When Pujol walked into the room, however, everyone fell silent. Here he was, the man they had worked with during the war, someone who had been reported dead at least once over the past decades.

  Cyril Mills was the first to say anything.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘It can’t be you. You’re dead.’

  Tar Robertson was so moved that he burst into tears and rushed over to embrace Pujol.

  Other reunions were held: a gathering with Sarah Bishop, Charlie Haines and Harris’s sisters, who had also been engaged on the Garbo operation at various stages. Later there was a private lunch between Sarah Bishop and Pujol to which West was not invited.

  The audience with Prince Philip followed on 31 May, at which Pujol was publicly awarded with the MBE that had secretly been given to him back in 1944. Prince Philip thanked him for his help during the war, asking Pujol why he had decided to assist Britain.

  Pujol looked at him. Prince Philip was Greek, yet had served with the Royal Navy during the conflict.

  ‘Why did you help the British?’ Pujol asked. Prince Philip smiled.

  Photos were taken of the newly discovered war hero, and Pujol’s face appeared the next day on the front cover of the Daily Mail. From forced obscurity he was famous overnight.

  The Spanish press soon caught on to the story, and Pujol agreed to lengthy interviews with a magazine and on Catalan television. The fact that he was now known about in Spain opened up old wounds: he had not been in touch with Araceli or the three children he had with her since they left Venezuela to return to Spain in the 1940s. To this day Nigel West feels there is still some rancour on their part for his having uncovered a past that they preferred to leave buried.

  Months later Pujol returned to his home in Caracas, where he wrote an account of his life. Nigel West wrote chapters dealing with the inside workings of double-cross, which Pujol was never fully aware of, and the jointly written book was published in 1985.

  Pujol glossed over many aspects of the story, however. Araceli’s role, his exact relationship with some of the other members of the Garbo team, the art dealing after the war – all this and much more was left out.

  The truth behind the gaps in his own account died with him. Three years later, on 10 October 1988, Pujol suffered a stroke and died. His son called the British Consulate to inform them, but the official on duty forgot to pass the word on to London. Neither did word reach Spain.

  Pujol’s death was only marked by a short announcement in the local newspaper. He was buried in the cemetery at Choroní, by the waters of the Caribbean.

  Months later, once the news had finally spread, his family received letters of condolence from all over the world.

  It was only after he had appeared publicly that Pujol got a true sense of the scale of his own achievement, of the importance that Garbo had had during the war. The double-cross system and the vast apparatus of deception that the Allies had built and which they used to bolster, back up and complement his work was kept largely secret from him while he was in London. His work was important – that much he was told. But not quite how much depended on it.

  After the reunions with the Garbo team members in London, Pujol was taken by plane on 6 June 1984 to the Normandy beaches for the commemoration ceremonies taking place that day marking the fortieth anniversary of the landings. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, President Reagan and President Mitterrand were all in attendance, as were thousands of veterans who had taken part. A camera crew followed Pujol around as he visited several sites along the coastline, and news quickly spread that ‘Garbo’, the double agent who had done so much to ensure the campaign’s success, was present. Elderly medal-wearing men, some in uniform, pressed around to shake Pujol’s hand and hear his story.

  The most emotional moment, however, came when Pujol went to the American military cemetery at Omaha beach. Thousands of pearl-white crosses and Stars of David stand in arrow-straight rows across the perfectly kept lawns, with views over the cliffs to where so many men were killed on the morning of the invasion. Even today, so long after the events, it remains the single most moving site along the Normandy coastline.

  Pujol wandered off on his own at one point, pacing gently among the gravestones, with their simple inscriptions to each person buried there. One in particular seemed to draw his attention – the white cross of a Sergeant. Arthur B. Buschlen of the 16th Infantry Regiment, who was killed on D-Day at Omaha beach. Pujol was clearly affected by what he saw, and soon began to weep. He knelt down and made the sign of the cross, before walking back to Nigel West and the television crew.

  West asked him if he was all right. They had come here, after all, to celebrate his amazing achievement.

  ‘They told me,’ Pujol said, wiping away his tears, ‘that the work I did saved thousands of lives.’

  He looked back at the endless lines of the dead.

  ‘Only now, coming here, I see I didn’t do enough.’

  Epilogue

  What If?

  To understand the importance of what Juan Pujol and Tomás Harris achieved with Garbo and the stories they told the Germans, it is essential to ask the question: ‘What if?’

  Today, historians hail Garbo as ‘the greatest double agent in the Second World War’. But what if Garbo had been a failure, or had not existed at all? Serendipity played a crucial role in his tale, the meeting of specific people at the right time in the right place. What if none of these factors had turned out as they did, and he had not become a British-run double agent?

  Roger Hesketh, who worked in Eisenhower’s deception unit, Ops B, and who was a key figure in the double-cross operation, wrote a book on the Fortitude plan after the war. In it he asked a pertinent question: Of all the elements employed in deception for the Normandy campaign, from the fake runways and aircraft, to the dummy airborne troops, and the double agents feeding lies to the enemy, which one had the greatest effect? Which part of Fortitude had actually fooled the Germans?

  There were many different and important parts to the overall puzzle, but on examining the German records after the war, and interviewing their commanders, one key piece stood out over all the others: Garbo’s message of 9 June 1944 in which he clearly elaborated the theory that the Normandy landings were a trap meant to divert the best German troops away from the Pas-de-Calais. Other factors had helped – the other double agents feeding the Germans the story of FUSAG and the fictional build-up of Allied troops around Dover. But it was Garbo’s D+3 message that made Hitler himself give the counter-order that stopped the German reserves – and importantly the 1st SS Panzer Division LAH – from attacking the Allied soldiers struggling to get a toehold on the Normandy coastline in the first few days of the invasion.

  Keitel himself, Hitler’s Chief of Staff, said as much. When shown the text of Garbo’s message he agreed that it had been the reason why the Führer ordered his crack reserves to stay close to the narrowest part of the Channel.

  ‘There you have your answer,’ he told his interrogator. ‘If I were writing a history I would say, with ninety-nine per cent certainty, that that message provided the reason for the change of plan.’

  No other double agent or factor within the deception set-up had such a dramatic and powerful effect. Garbo was the single most important part of the success of Fortitude.

  ‘Taking the evidence as a whole,’ Hesketh concluded, ‘the reader will probably agree that GARBO’s report decided
the issue.’

  And would Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, have succeeded without the deception plan? Could all those thousands of soldiers have managed to fight their way off the beaches and deep into France had Fortitude not been set up to protect them from the best German troops then available in Western Europe?

  Some historians prefer to downplay the importance of Fortitude, yet Allied commanders at the time were convinced that it was pivotal. It was the reason why the deception was carried out in the first place.

  Considering the numbers of German troops available in France and Belgium, and the speed with which the Allies could get men and equipment ashore, the success of Fortitude was not a mere bonus that would help keep casualty rates down, it was crucial to the success of the invasion itself. Deception planners in London had already envisaged a scenario where no deception was carried out, estimating a timetable showing how quickly the Germans would pour men into the invasion area once the assault started. If the enemy correctly assumed that Normandy was it – that there was no second invasion coming in the Pas-de-Calais – and as a result sent the bulk of its forces in to repel the invaders, then by D+25 they would have some thirty-one divisions in Normandy, including nine Panzer divisions. That scale of build-up, Eisenhower and the other Allied commanders knew, was impossible to match. They had the floating Mulberry harbours, which they could use to ship supplies and men into France at a rapid rate. But even with these it would not be sufficient to bring in enough soldiers and armour to combat such imposing numbers.

  ‘In short, if Fortitude did not work, if the Germans pulled their Fifteenth Army away from the Pas-de-Calais and hurled it against Normandy, Overlord would fail.’