Agent Garbo

by Stephan Talty

  In late October 1941, the Iberian section’s pleasant offices were located in a glass conservatory in the rear of Glenalmond, overlooking a grove of chestnut trees. The boys in the unit called this “the snakepit,” presumably because they spent their time in it plotting against the venomous creatures of the Abwehr. Sitting in the room that autumn day, Bristow was so bored he almost regretted his decision to join M16. He’d been assigned to leaf through an old Lisbon telephone directory, attempting to match the intercepted phone number of a possible spy with a name and a street address. As one of the most junior men in Section V, he often got the scutwork: poring over registers of hotel guests or studying long lists of airline passengers. It wasn’t what he’d imagined espionage to be. There were occasional sessions of lively gossip and serious drinking in the snakepit—pink gins were the poison of choice—but the work was often sheer drudgery.

  The room was ice cold and quiet. Bristow had managed to light a fire, but the rays of warmth hadn’t yet cut through the chill. The other members of the section sat nearby: Trevor Wilson, the local Morocco expert and a former Abyssinian skunk-excrement exporter, and Tim Milne, a former copywriter who’d written ads for Guinness. By the bay window overlooking the chestnut trees was the most ambitious officer of them all: Kim Philby, the head of the subsection, sitting in a battered leather jacket he’d worn while working as a correspondent for the Times in the Spanish Civil War.

  There was a knock at the door. It was the motorcycle courier who brought the daily pile of deciphered messages known as ISOS (Intelligence Service Oliver Strachey), the product of codebreakers who were assigned to Abwehr messages. The intercepts were picked out of the ether by towering radio masts erected at a place called Hanslope Park, where a crack assortment of intellectuals, mathematicians and Oxford scholars, led by a genius named Oliver Strachey, scanned the Abwehr’s traffic between Madrid, Lisbon and Berlin. The man on the motorcycle handed the dour Tim Milne that morning’s crop and hopped back on his machine.

  Milne took the bulletins with a nod. It was his job to go through the intercepts and decide which would stay with the subsection and which would be routed to the German, French and Dutch branches.

  “This sounds very odd,” he said almost immediately.

  The eyes in the room shifted from their work to the unexcitable Milne.

  “What does it say?” Philby asked.

  “Madrid’s telling Berlin that their V-man, Arabel, has reported the formation of a convoy in the bay of Caernarvon.”

  The tension in the room spiked. There weren’t supposed to be any German spies in England, not one. The intelligence services had managed to catch every agent parachuted into the countryside or paid off by the Abwehr. But here was a previously unidentified agent who was apparently watching a convoy gather in the upper reaches of northwest Wales. If true, England had a problem on its hands.

  Philby grabbed the green phone sitting on his desk, a secure line to MI5. Snapping his fingers to battle the effects of his painful stammer, he called the Abwehr-research department. As the others listened to Philby’s stuttering words, it became clear the rival agency had received the same message and was equally concerned about it.

  Soon, as Pujol would later discover, “the British were going crazy looking for me.” MI5 hurriedly checked the schedule of ships leaving Liverpool; none matched Arabel’s description. Scotland Yard sent agents to remote Llyn Peninsula and scoured the boggy heath and the inns for suspicious characters, but found none. Commander Ewen Montagu, MI5’s link with the Admiralty, sent a telegram saying that the Caernarvon convoy didn’t exist. The men of Section V blew out relieved breaths—Arabel was clearly a phony.

  More deciphered messages came in from ISOS, handed over by the motorcycle courier. It was Arabel again, reporting that the convoy had left Caernarvon, heading south, in strength. “We know there is no bloody convoy,” Philby hissed. “Why and who is this Arabel and why is he so obviously lying?” They began watching for messages from Arabel every day. Yet the agent frustrated the men of the Iberian section by going silent for weeks before chirping up again, often with some ridiculous new bulletin: the staff of foreign embassies in London, he reported, had moved to the seaside in Brighton to get away from the intolerable heat. It was preposterous; only an idiot would even suggest such a thing. But a few of Arabel’s messages hit close to the bone, giving half-accurate reports on British armaments or naval movements that indicated some access to English ports. The Germans responded avidly to every word. “The Abwehr’s trust in this creative liar grew with every fishy message,” wrote Bristow. The Abwehr even agreed to pay Arabel’s expenses, which strangely were always given in shillings, not pounds, as if the spy didn’t understand British currency.

  The proof of Arabel’s high standing came when ISOS began intercepting messages showing that the Germans were scrambling their forces to ambush the convoy from Caernarvon—a convoy that didn’t exist. The German navy diverted U-boats from their regular patrols to hunt the Allied ships; Italian fighter planes loaded with torpedo bombs were moved to Sardinia in case they were needed for an attack. Thousands of crucial man-hours, tons of fuel and important naval assets were being sent to fight a phantom. The Germans planned to ambush the five-vessel convoy at a point east of Gibraltar.

  It was incomprehensible. Even Philby, generally acknowledged to be the section’s best mind, couldn’t understand what was happening. Either the Abwehr had fallen for a con man with hazy motives, or it was a complex ruse to get Arabel to London and inside the lair of the British High Command. Philby knew his spy history: in 1939, the Abwehr had attempted a similar stratagem, drawing out the British secret service with a fake triple agent, leading to the kidnapping of two SIS agents in the Netherlands. Were the Germans using the same scheme again? Philby couldn’t be sure; he hadn’t so much as identified Arabel yet.

  MI5 chimed in with a theory: perhaps Arabel was working at the Spanish embassy in London, a well-known rat’s nest of pro-Nazi Francoists; it was even believed that one Spanish diplomat sat every day in the bay window of Boodle’s, the gentlemen’s club in St. James’s Street, across from the entrance to MI5 headquarters, and noted down the comings and goings of all the visitors for the Abwehr. Other analysts suspected that Arabel had to be working out of the anti-British stronghold of Ireland.

  Philby and MI6 sent out the equivalent of an all-points bulletin on Arabel. During the war, thousands of foreigners entering the country were questioned at the Royal Victorian Patriotic School in Wandsworth, and now MI5 began questioning the refugees about Arabel. But even though the interrogators were exceedingly thorough, no likely suspects emerged.

  The supposed date of the Gibraltar ambush came and went. New ISOS intercepts revealed, of course, that no convoy had been spotted. The German submarines and Italian fighter planes were sent home. Astonishingly, however, the Germans blamed the fiasco not on Arabel but the notoriously erratic Italians. The agent’s stock was still sky high.

  Arabel disappeared from Section V’s screens as the winter of 1941 passed. Then on February 5, at 10:30 in the morning, the ISOS courier again appeared at Glenalmond, the tires of his motorcycle slipping on the ice as he pulled to a stop. Kim Philby was in London for the day, meeting with MI5. It was left to Bristow to sort through the telegrams, and he quickly spotted one postmarked Lisbon. He tore it open, saw that it was from MI6, and read that a Spanish national named Juan Pujol had approached a Lieutenant Demarest, the American naval attaché in Madrid, with a curious offer: he wanted to spy for the Allies in London. Pujol also mentioned that he’d been sending the Germans messages from Lisbon.

  A thrill ran through Bristow. He was convinced they’d finally found Arabel and that the spy was trying to switch sides. He ran upstairs to the office of Colonel Felix Cowgill, head of MI6’s Section V. Cowgill thought the telegram intriguing, but he didn’t want to alert the Nazis that their codes had been broken and that Section V was reading their communications, nor did he want to hand Pujol ov
er to his rivals in MI5. He told Bristow to wait until Philby returned. When the lanky spy walked through the door of Glenalmond, knocking the snow off his shoes, Bristow buttonholed him and showed him the telegram. “I think it might be Arabel,” Bristow said excitedly.

  “By God, Desmond,” Philby exclaimed, “I think you’re right.” He agreed to send an agent to meet with this Spaniard and entice his story out of him. After months of trying, Pujol had gotten the Brits’ full attention.

  The German reaction to Pujol’s fake convoy had impressed everyone. “If it was within Pujol’s power to cause such mischief unwittingly,” wrote the espionage historian Nigel West, “what might be the results if his efforts were directed in concert with other weapons of deception?” Back in St. Albans, Philby contacted MI6’s head of station in Lisbon, asking him to set up a “discreet interview” with this Juan Pujol. MI6 chose its most effective Lisbon officer, Gene Risso-Gill, a well-bred Portuguese with a thick, short-cut beard, to conduct the first interview.

  On an unseasonably hot February evening, Risso-Gill waited for Pujol at a horseshoe-shaped café overlooking the white sands of Estoril beach. “Never before or since have I been so nervous,” he remembered. “I thought every German agent was watching me, [that] everybody around the area and in the café was a German agent.” As the seagulls swooped and cried overhead and the sardine fishermen dressed in their brightly patterned homemade sweaters pulled in the day’s catch on the broad beach in front of him, Risso-Gill waited, watching the crowd. Eventually a small, well-dressed man emerged from the welter of refugees, walked up to the bar and spoke to the server in good Portuguese, tinged with a Spanish accent: “Tea with lemon, no sugar, please.” Risso-Gill studied the man, then sidled up to him. “The view is much better at the table by the steps leading down to the beach,” he said casually. The man looked over. The code words were the ones agreed to for the rendezvous. Juan Pujol smiled and the two men walked to the table, and there Pujol handed over the bottles of secret ink and began to tell his story. He was in the Allies’ hands at last.

  Just over two months later, after wrapping up his affairs, Pujol was smuggled out of Lisbon on a British merchant ship headed for Gibraltar, without any luggage, leaving Araceli and little Juan behind, to be brought over later. Risso-Gill personally walked him up the gangway, escorted him past the Portuguese national police guarding the ship and showed him to his room. “My legs were shaking,” Pujol recalled, as Risso-Gill whispered in his ear that there was no need to worry, it was a short journey. The captain had been alerted to their unusual passenger, and given instructions on whom to hand him over to once they arrived. Two men met Pujol at the Gibraltar dock, passed him “a wad of sterling notes” and told him to buy some clothes; prices on the Rock were one-third of those in England. After two days on the island, he flew to Plymouth on a powerful Sunderland seaplane.

  As the Sunderland descended toward the black strip of runway, Pujol had a flash of foreboding: “I was suddenly acutely aware that I was away from home and about to enter an alien land. Would the English be friendly toward me? Would they believe my story … ? Would they understand my motives for all that I had done and honestly believe that I wished to work for the good of mankind?” As he walked down the plane’s gangway, Pujol felt the first bite of English frost. “Terrible cold,” he remembered. “Cold outside and icy fear inside.”

  Only days after that, he was upstairs in a room at 35 Crespigny Road being debriefed and meeting his future case officer, Tommy Harris, for the first time. It had required a long and often tortured apprenticeship, but the career of the most important Allied spy of World War II was about to begin in earnest. “It seemed a miracle that he’d survived so long,” Harris would later write. “It was crazy,” Pujol agreed. “I had no idea what I was doing.”

  II. Garbo’s Rise

  7. A Fresh Riot of Ideas

  PUJOL HAD FOOLED the Germans, but an even more rigorous test awaited him: getting past MI5.

  On the morning of May 1, 1942, Desmond Bristow stood outside the front door of the small Victorian house at 35 Crespigny Road and blew a breath into the crisp London air. The place was an ordinary-looking two-story detached home, rented from a Jewish officer in the British Armed Forces. Upstairs, Pujol was sitting in a room furnished with four simple chairs and a table, a guard outside the door. For the past three days he’d been telling Bristow the story of his life. Soon the M16 officer would have to tell his superiors whether he believed it or not.

  For Bristow, there were two possibilities: either this charming man was telling the truth, or he was a German triple agent trying to infiltrate the Allied war machine and destroy it from the inside.

  The British agent glanced up and down the street, looking for Tommy Harris, the brilliant half-Jewish MI5 operative who would help Bristow conduct the next round of interrogation. Nothing.

  Bristow had been sent in soon after Pujol’s arrival, and for hour after hour he’d been asking the Spaniard to repeat key parts of his story; he’d backtracked, intentionally mixed up names and dates and tried to confuse the almost handsome and very personable young man. Analysts in London had studied Pujol’s intercepted messages line by line and sent Bristow intricately plotted questions designed to trip up the alleged spy. But Bristow hadn’t been able to lay a finger on him. The Spaniard would simply nod and go back to the contested point and unspool one unbelievable episode after another in a thoroughly believable way.

  As they spoke, something in Pujol’s hazel eyes made Bristow uneasy. Every now and then the MI6 agent would catch a certain “mischievous glint” there, a glint suggesting that Pujol’s answers were the product of something other than complete and utter honesty.

  Where was Tommy Harris? Crespigny Road was full of commuters on their way to London offices, but not the tall, soulful-eyed Harris, impossible to miss. If anyone could tell whether Pujol was the real thing, it was Harris, whose nickname inside the agency was Jesus.

  Finally, Harris arrived and the two agents went upstairs, nodded at the man standing guard and walked inside. Pujol stood and greeted the agents and the three got down to work. On the desk were copies of every message Pujol had sent to the Abwehr. There were thirty-eight in all, written between July 1941 and March 1942. They went over the handwritten reports in detail, studying how Pujol constructed his sentences, how he used periods and commas, even how he crossed his t’s and dotted his i’s. They worked steadily through the day, the housekeeper—a woman named Miss Titoff—bringing coffee in to relieve the stress. All the while Tommy Harris watched Pujol, watched him speak, watched his eyes, watched how he read the messages, watched how he told his stories. “Tommy seemed to have the size of Pujol very quickly,” Bristow remembered. “[He] manipulated his new agent in any direction he cared to.”

  As the sun warmed the interior of the small room, the three men came to the crux of the matter, the question Bristow had asked over and over again. Why was Pujol here? Why had he risked his life and that of his Spanish wife to spy for the Allies? Pujol nodded and said that his older brother, Joaquín, had been traveling in France when one day he stumbled on a terrible scene: the Gestapo conducting a wholesale slaughter of innocent people. Hearing Pujol tell it, the agents could almost hear the screams of the terrified men and women and the bark of the Walther PPKs, the Gestapo’s gun of choice. When Joaquín had returned home and told Juan the awful story, his younger brother had decided he had to fight Hitler, no matter the cost.

  It was a grisly and moving story. It was also a complete fabrication.

  Harris listened, nodding occasionally, rolling and smoking the Spanish black cigarettes he preferred. “[Pujol’s] motives for working against the Germans were obvious,” Bristow said. “He had all the right answers.”

  As dusk approached, Bristow grew exhausted and suggested to Harris that they get a beer at the local pub. The two men said their goodbyes and walked down the path to Crespigny Road, Tommy Harris’s eyes twinkling.

  What do you
think? Bristow asked.

  Harris raised his eyebrows, shook his head and smiled.

  “Desmond, he is obviously Arabel, but I do find it hard to believe such an outwardly simple man still has the Germans fooled and had us worried for so long.”

  Bristow nodded. He’d wondered the same thing. How could this naïve young man, not quite a rube but no master spy, be conning the best minds in the Abwehr?

  As they walked toward the local hotel—Harris, the sophisticate, had suggested to Bristow that they have a glass of wine instead of a lager—the MI5 man gave his verdict. He told Bristow, “He is such a dreamer … but he is going to be a marvelous double agent.”

  Upstairs, Juan Pujol took another drag of one of Tommy Harris’s Spanish cigarettes and watched dusk fall across north London. It’s hard to believe, from what we know of him, that he wasn’t smiling.

  As Pujol settled into his new role those first few weeks, gorging himself on enormous English breakfasts—he hadn’t tasted bacon in six long years—his hosts were just beginning to find a foothold in the shifting game of espionage.

  One of the first requirements of intelligence is to acquire a picture of who the enemy is and what he intends to do. Early in the war, top Allied officers often had little insight into either of those things. One officer recalled a story about Major General Mason-Macfarlane, director of military intelligence for the aging field marshal Lord Gort, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, one of the most important Allied leaders. One day Gort stuck his head around Mason-Macfarlane’s door.

  “Bulgarians?” he asked. “Good chaps, aren’t they?”

  “No, sir, not very good,” Mason-Macfarlane said.