Agent Garbo

by Stephan Talty

  “Oh! Bad chaps, eh? Pity, pity!” said Gort before disappearing.

  When the old-school officer left, Mason-Macfarlane could only spread his hands wide “in a gesture of resignation.”

  This ignorance extended to espionage, at least in the beginning. When the war started, the War Office had only a hazy idea of German strategy or capabilities. This was illustrated when an air raid signal sounded in London on September 3, 1939, the day after the outbreak of hostilities. The War Office’s entire staff descended to their bomb shelter, where a former military attaché who’d been through the Spanish Civil War listened to a series of blasts and told everyone that they were German bombs. The sounds had actually been doors slamming in the offices above; there’d been no air raid, because the Luftwaffe didn’t yet have the resources to mount one and Hitler’s strategy at the time was to lure England into a peace treaty, not attack it.

  Double agents worked in an area of intelligence that fell under the broad name “deception,” which was carried out by a host of outfits with a blizzard of acronyms: BiA, LCS, MI5, A Force, JPS, R Force. Despite the array of outfits, deception wasn’t a popular tactic in the British military at the beginning of the war. “We are bred up to feel it is a disgrace ever to succeed by falsehood,” stated a plaque on the wall of Churchill’s bunker-like headquarters underneath Westminster. They were the words of Sir Garnet Wolseley, former commander in chief of the British army, from 1869. Wolseley’s point was that anyone who believed those words was doomed to fail, and that deception was essential in all wars. But if falsehood was a necessary part of beating the Germans, few British officers felt that way, at least early on.

  It didn’t help matters that, because of the wartime squeeze on office space, the headquarters of MI5 were moved to the moldy cells of Wormwood Scrubs in west London. Common criminals could be seen milling around the prison’s exercise yard as intelligence analysts tried to get inside the minds of the German High Command. “Don’t go near them,” a warder told female staff about the prisoners. “Some of them ain’t seen no women for years.” The cell—now office—doors had no handles on the inside, and some MI5 agents spent terrifying hours locked in the malodorous, soundproof rooms.

  Britain’s early deception efforts were often comically inept. Dennis Wheatley was one of the first recruits to the effort, a stout, bibulous former wine merchant and successful novelist who wrote tales of intrigue and occult magic with such titles as To the Devil—a Daughter and They Used Dark Forces. In 1941, he joined something called the Joint Planning Staff, an arm of the War Office, after writing a series of colorful papers on military strategy, some of which were read by King George VI. Wheatley found the response to this “newfangled business” of deception to be tepid at best. Generals didn’t want to lend their tanks and regiments to fool the Germans. Admirals blanched when it was suggested they redirect a destroyer or two to support an elaborate “crack-brained” plot that had emerged from Wheatley’s fertile imagination. British officers called the deception schemes “a racket,” “a lot of nonsense,” “a shocking waste of time and material.” Some generals even refused to believe the Allies were engaged in such a thing, since information was given to the fewest possible decision makers. “The very fact that the Allies were engaged in deception at all,” writes the historian Thaddeus Holt, “was a secret almost as closely held as Ultra or the Manhattan Project.” In fact, Pujol’s secret would be held far longer than J. Robert Oppenheimer’s.

  And the original leaders of the deception effort were far from first rate. Wheatley’s first boss was a crusty old one-legged lieutenant colonel named Fritz Lumby, who every morning would limp into the office beneath Whitehall on his wooden leg and spend the first hour doing the Times crossword puzzle. Down the hall, Churchill met with his cabinet in the war room, under huge red-painted steel girders, and in gas-proof, flood-proof offices that featured four-foot-thick concrete ceilings. Close to Wheatley’s office was the transatlantic phone to the White House and FDR, the world’s first hot line, housed in room 63 with a sign that read “Keep Locked” and connected by cables to the enormous Sigsaly scrambler in the subbasement of Selfridges department store. Everyone believed room 63 was a working toilet for the exclusive use of the prime minister. Down the hall, a sign posted in a hallway noted the “Schedule of Alarms.” If the klaxon sounded for two minutes, a German ground attack was expected. A royal marine in a dark blue uniform and white gun holster and shoulder strap stood guard around the clock. He was there to protect Churchill and the War Cabinet. As for Wheatley and Lumby, they could have expired from sheer boredom in their office and their deaths would barely have been noticed.

  The two deceivers spent hour after sleepy hour waiting for orders in what the novelist called “the lost section.” To pass the time, Lumby developed an unusual filing method: he gleefully confided to his subordinate that once, when a folder detailing some operation had become too big for his liking, he simply took it out and burned it. One steel filing cabinet was filled not with secret documents but with bottles of gin and Scotch, for the regular afternoon snort. Wheatley, who was a social animal with friends all over London, went out for three-hour lunches with “cloak and dagger men” and plowed through courses of “smoked salmon or potted shrimps … a Dover sole, jugged hare, salmon or game, and a Welsh rarebit to wind up with,” then went back to the office and collapsed for a long nap. On March 28, 1942, Lumby left a despairing memo in Wheatley’s tray: “The day has brought forth nothing —not even a lemon.”

  When the pair did concoct a scheme to fool the Germans, it was often badly misguided. One of Wheatley’s proposals especially seemed to come straight out of one of his garish potboilers. On April 10, 1942, the same day that Pujol was boarding the British merchant ship on his way to Gibraltar, Wheatley submitted a memo called “Deception on the Highest Plane.” In it, he stated that the Germans had probably lost their faith in Hitler, as he’d failed to conquer England and had added the United States and Russia as opponents. (In reality, Hitler enjoyed wide support in Germany in the spring of 1942.) So the ex-novelist proposed that the deception planners give the enemy a new leader to deliver them out of the darkness. He suggested that British intelligence create a figure who would, like Christ, be the son of poor parents, emerge after a period of seclusion, appear magically in various places all over the German countryside and conduct a “demonstration of supernatural powers” that would rally even hard-core Nazis to his message of “peace, universal brotherhood and passive resistance to all further war activities.” Lumby adored the idea, suggested the name Bote (“messenger” in German) for the imaginary leader and added that, to really whet the Teutonic imagination, Bote should be rumored to be a descendant of the emperor Barbarossa.

  MI6 and its informers and spies would then spread stories about Bote, which would force the Nazis to issue denials that such a man existed. The controversy would somehow suck legitimacy away from Hitler and eventually, somehow, lead the Germans to the negotiating table. (In another memo, Wheatley had fixed the date for the Nazi collapse, rather optimistically, at November 8, 1942.) A ridiculous scheme if ever there were one, the plan showed Allied intelligence at its most out of touch.

  Deception and “psywar,” which included the spreading of rumors, were separate disciplines. Psywar aimed to sap enemy morale; deception aimed to induce the enemy to do or not do something concrete and specific. But innuendo was used effectively in both crafts. When they were desperately trying to stave off a German invasion of the island in 1940, the Brits had put out the story that they’d discovered a way to set the English Channel on fire. The idea had come to Major John Baker White, an officer in the Directorate of Military Intelligence, while witnessing a demonstration of a new weapon of war: a kind of sprinkler system where a flammable mix of gas, fuel oil and creosote was fed by underground pipes to sprinkler heads that created a fine mist. Once lit, the mist could turn any beach in England into a searing wall of flames. The device was never used, but the imag
e of a burning beach got inside White’s head. How smashing it would be, he thought, if we could convince the Germans that we could set the entire ocean aflame.

  Unlike Dennis Wheatley, White began with an insidious, primordial instinct—the fear of being burned alive—and carefully built on it. He went to British scientists and asked if it was possible to set the English Channel on fire. They told him it was, provided that you had almost unlimited amounts of money to spend on equipment and fuel. White didn’t care about that; he only wanted something that was within the realm of possibility. He carefully began feeding the macabre rumor through his network of informants and touts: in the Café Bavaria in Geneva and the Ritz in Madrid, places where spies and diplomats and Germans gathered by night, his agents whispered about this horrible new invention. Next, he spread the story in Cairo, New York, Ankara and Istanbul.

  A few weeks later, a German pilot was captured after ejecting from his plane over Kent, and brought to an interrogation center at Trent Park in Cockfosters, north London. He admitted that the pilots and commanders of the Luftwaffe were already familiar with the “burning sea defenses” that British scientists had invented. Three days later, another captured German airman gave up the same details. When some RAF planes dropped incendiary bombs on German soldiers practicing for the invasion of England, the most critically injured victims were sent to occupied Paris for treatment. Suddenly the rumor had undeniable evidence to back it up: French partisans—who’d heard about the burning sea scheme through their own sources—believed the men were part of a secret invasion force that had tried to cross the English Channel and had been broiled alive.

  The rumor now spread like crazy. French citizens stood behind German soldiers in the cafés along the Champs-Élysées, rubbing their hands together as if they were warming them over a campfire. A Belgian shopkeeper was brave enough to advertise men’s swimming trunks in his front window “for Channel swimming.” Faced with this fast-moving virus, the Germans panicked. They began to test ways of making their invasion vessels fire-resistant. A barge in Fécamp, Normandy, was lined with asbestos, loaded with German soldiers and pushed into a pool of burning gas. The vessel came through the test; the men didn’t—the entire crew was consumed by the flames and died. Some of the blackened corpses tumbled into the water and drifted to shore, where they gave further evidence of the horrors awaiting any German attackers. Sefton Delmer, a broadcaster who would one day write a thinly disguised account of the Pujol case, even went on the air and gave the German invasion forces some language tips: Ich brenne (I burn), Du brennst (You burn), Er brennt (He burns).

  The “flammable sea” idea showed the power of what the Germans called “nerve warfare.” It was, in a way, the perfect rumor, the one every deception officer dreamt of. It was terrifying, scientifically possible, and it spread exponentially.

  Dennis Wheatley’s Jesus-in-Berlin idea was nothing of the sort. But, astonishingly, an even more bizarre variation of Wheatley’s plot was adopted by British intelligence. In April 1942, the British secret service began putting out rumors of a “mysterious personality,” now called simply Z, who instead of resembling Jesus Christ looked “a little like Bismarck when he was young” and had formed a secret underground organization to take back Germany. Prominent Germans, including the airplane designer Willy Messerschmitt, were said to be supporting him and had been “buying up corner houses to be used as machine-gun posts that would dominate the main square of cities when the time came to rise against Hitler.” For some inscrutable reason, only people who spoke perfect English could join the clandestine group.

  The Z craze failed to catch on in Berlin and Düsseldorf. When he heard about the operation, Wheatley was appalled. “Obviously, [they] missed the whole point of my paper,” he lamented. “I have rarely heard anything more crazy.”

  Though Juan Pujol had an image of suave MI5 officers effortlessly bamboozling their opponents, in reality British deception often struggled to find a way into the German military mind.

  MI5 managed the agents. It assigned a case officer to each double agent and saw to his day-to-day needs. It screened the candidates for the double life, including real German spies who’d entered England, weeded out the venal and the stupid ones, of which there were many in the four hundred or so candidates, chose the best and provided them with everything they needed to become conduits to the German High Command. If the incoming spies couldn’t be turned, they were often imprisoned and used as “reference books,” living encyclopedias on German spy techniques. MI5 kept secret offices throughout London, disguised as legitimate businesses, where agents could interview recruits; it arranged for apartments for the double agents to live in and provided housekeepers, guards, clothing coupons, ration books, identity cards, a wireless operator to transmit messages and even female companionship (case officers sometimes hired prostitutes for their lonely operatives). Then there was the matter of the “appointed scribes,” active British soldiers who were asked to write the letters of any imaginary subagents; if a subagent’s handwriting looked the same as the spy’s, Berlin would grow suspicious. When a scribe died—taking with him his inimitable longhand—the fake subagent often had to be killed off, unless a man with the exact same cursive style could be found quickly. (This would later happen to Pujol’s “Agent No. 6,” whose real-life letter writer perished in a plane crash.)

  Obtaining all these things—from real soldiers to whores—in wartime London required great imagination and secrecy. “The running of doublecross agents entailed not only the deception of the Germans,” said the spymaster Sir John Cecil Masterman, “but often and in many cases the deception of people on our own side.”

  The Twenty Committee, signified by “XX,” for doublecross, supplied the agents with information. It was formed in January 1941, and its members included representatives of all the relevant agencies that would contribute to its mission: GHQ Home Forces, the War Office, Air Ministry Intelligence, MI6 and MI5. The committee was headed up by Masterman, an academic in civilian life. Tall and donnish, Masterman was a cricketer at heart. He’d had a high-flying career in the late 1920s with the cricket bat—which he wielded from a left-handed stance, though he bowled right-handed at a “medium pace”—for teams like the Free Foresters and the Harlequins. A former provost at Worcester College, Oxford, Masterman was also an author of crime fiction: one of his books, the crackling murder mystery An Oxford Tragedy, featured a Sherlock Holmes–like detective “of European reputation.” The spymaster’s novels revealed his interest in what he called “pre-detection”—that is, how “to work out the crime before it is committed, to foresee how it will be arranged, and then to prevent it!” It was the criminal equivalent of what the double agents were being asked to do: to imagine and construct an event before it happened and to predict against every possible response to that event. And then to game those responses, too.

  Masterman’s last gift was that he knew what people wanted: the only way to get all the heads of departments to attend his meetings, he decided, was to offer them a freshly baked bun, something almost unobtainable in wartime London. At more than 226 weekly meetings of the XX Committee, the attendance was a perfect 100 percent.

  Nineteen forty-one had been a year for experimentation in the doublecross system, which meant not only churning out dozens of plots but coming up with a philosophy of espionage: what worked, what didn’t and why. The year 1942 was supposed to be the flowering of that philosophy, but most of the operations simply didn’t pan out. Plan Machiavelli, for example, involved the passing of confidential charts of minefields off the east coast of Britain; the Serbian double agent Tricycle transported the plans, but the Germans ignored them. Plan Guy Fawkes was a fake mission to attack a food dump in Wheatstone, England, in order to build up the sabotage credentials of British-controlled operatives by sending authentic newspaper clippings recounting their deeds to the Germans (this was formally known as “doublecross sabotage,” and Plan Guy Fawkes was the first example of it during the wa
r). After long negotiations with Scotland Yard, the operation was given the green light. But the intelligence officers had trouble rousing the two elderly men who were guarding the dump, which delayed the planting of the incendiary devices, and then the officers were almost collared by an annoyingly efficient bobby. In Plan Brock, MI5 plotted to blow up Nissen huts in Hampshire for the same reasons that motivated Fawkes, but the Norwegian compass that had been left as evidence was stolen by some local thief, and a flock of sheep wandered too near the explosion site, nearly causing the planners to abort. Even when deception plans made sense, they were tricky to pull off. And even when they were executed, the enemy might not believe them, or might ineptly ignore them.

  As Pujol was shown the ropes, it was felt inside the British High Command—and within the XX Committee itself—that the leaders of the deception operations were playing it too safe, afraid to reveal too much to Hitler, which was the risk of any truly ambitious deception plan: the nefarious plots cooked up in London could reveal as much about the Allies’ war plans as they did the Germans’. The XX Committee, it was widely believed, had deteriorated into a bunch of nitpicking censors, cutting the information to be passed down to the least dangerous level (called “tonic” or “chicken feed”) and vetoing everything that involved significant risk.

  Many observers worried that a group of men who were having trouble blowing up a couple of Nissen huts in lonely Hampshire wouldn’t be ready for far more ambitious missions. “How should we feel if the whole of the double cross system collapsed,” Masterman worried, “before it had been put to the test in a grand deception?” At one point, the Home Forces even suggested to Masterman that the dozen or so double agents be abandoned and their operations shut down.

  Pujol’s first great challenge in joining the deception effort in England was the state of the deception effort in England.