Agent Garbo

by Stephan Talty

  When Federico finally opened Garbo’s letter of November 1, here in his hands were all the details of a major Allied invasion, written a week before it happened. The Germans were crestfallen, but hugely impressed: “Your last reports are all magnificent,” Federico wrote.

  Plan Solo was an unqualified success. When Hitler learned about the invasion, he marveled, “We didn’t even dream of it.” It was a high accolade. For the first time, deception had cloaked the plans of a major strategic victory. As German analysts dug through the sheaves of telegrams, coded letters, wireless traffic and reconnaissance reports and rumors that had preceded the invasion, looking for the clues they’d missed, a single fact stood out: Agent Garbo had seen it coming.

  As the American battalions left Casablanca and headed toward Tunisia, chasing the German genius Rommel and his Afrika Korps, a small item appeared in the death notices of the Liverpool Daily Post: “GERBERS. November 19 at Bootle, after a long illness, aged 52, WILLIAM MAXIMILIAN. Private funeral. (No flowers, please.)”

  Now that the convoys had long departed from Liverpool, the imaginary Gerbers had been allowed to die in peace. MI5 had placed the notice so that Garbo would have proof to send Madrid. Not only that, he reported to the Abwehr that he’d consoled the grieving widow (“the poor girl is very broken up” ), slipped her an envelope filled with cash, told her what William had really been up to and then managed to recruit the widow to spy on the Liverpool docks in place of her dead husband.

  With Pujol quickly rising to the top of the double agent game, Araceli was getting ready to join him. They were still very much in love. From Lisbon, Araceli wrote her husband: “Think about me a lot but don’t burst your brains arranging for me to go over there. You know how I love you and the joy of finding myself at your side makes me think of everything as very easy; you know that I obey you blindly and now more than ever, and will do everything that you have told me in all your letters.”

  Araceli finally arrived in England in the late spring of 1942, carrying her ten-month-old son, Juan, in her arms. She was seven months pregnant with her second son, Jorge. The London she saw and heard through the window of the British secret service car was no better than bombed-out Madrid—all blackened ruins, food queues, austerity drive posters and air raid sirens instead of the glittering capital she’d expected. “She was alone with a new baby, away from home in a city she didn’t know,” says Araceli’s daughter, Maria, “and her husband was working fourteen-hour days with Tommy Harris.” Soon Araceli’s nanny quit and she found it hard to replace her; Araceli struggled to make meals out of the strange British ingredients available in the shops. When Pujol did come home, exhausted from living the lives of twenty-seven other people, he didn’t want to socialize with the Spaniards in London, afraid that they’d betray him or sell him out. Night after night, the intensely sociable Araceli, who craved both high and low forms of intellectual stimulation, was forced to stay at home. In many ways, Araceli had taken an even bigger leap than her husband and gotten by far the worst end of the deal. Juan was out saving the world with his new partner Tommy Harris, living his boyhood dreams with real battleships and real dictators. She, once his inspiration and his equal, was a housewife trapped behind blackout curtains, listening to the Glenn Miller Orchestra play “Moonlight Cocktail” on the wireless while bombs smashed into nearby streets.

  The young woman who’d wanted adventure and love, “to talk, to reason, to discuss,” found herself in a place more confining than the tiny hometown of Lugo she’d escaped years before. She hated London almost from the start, and that was soon to prove a problem for MI5 and Pujol at the moment they could least afford it.

  Garbo was one of the XX Committee’s rising stars, along with Brutus, a Polish air force officer, and Tricycle, the Serbian playboy Dusko Popov. They had each intoxicated the Germans in their own way. But J. C. Masterman, head of the XX Committee, saw that the field of spies was becoming overly crowded. As the Allied generals and political leaders began to talk about D-Day, he needed to depend on a few well-trusted agents whose stock was high in Berlin and not muddle the message with cut-rate operatives who would only detract from the main players. He suggested that the XX Committee “‘liquidate’ some of our agents, both for greater efficiency and for plausibility.” An “execution subcommittee” was assembled, and agents began to be killed off in both gruesome and ordinary ways. No one was actually executed, of course, only their noms de guerre. The way was cleared for Garbo and a handful of others to lead the D-Day deception.

  Garbo soon won another badge of honor, this time from the Abwehr, a privilege reserved for their most important agents: permission to use a wireless radio. Harris obtained an 80-watt German-built set that had been seized from an Abwehr spy en route to South America. Madrid sent the cipher plan and codes : call signs for every day of the week, alternate frequencies in case the primary one didn’t work, a cipher table and code groups. Harris found an MI5 staff member named Charles Haines who’d taught himself Morse code. Haines installed the radio at the Crespigny Road safe house where Pujol was living. Garbo sent Madrid the location of the set, in case one of its direction-finding radio teams picked it up. On March 7, Haines tapped out the call code for the first time. By August 1942, all reports were being sent by radio, with up to twenty messages flashing out every day in sessions sometimes lasting a full two hours. Problems did crop up—monitoring stations as far away as Gibraltar picked up the suspicious traffic and reported it to British authorities—but soon Garbo had a direct link to the Abwehr in Madrid.

  Garbo and the operator did all the enciphering and deciphering of the messages themselves. Garbo would first translate the message into Spanish. “The convoy left Dover with three destroyers and two cruisers” became “El convoy partió del Dover con tres destructores y dos cruceros.” Then he would chop up the Spanish message into groups of five consecutive letters: “ELCON VOYPA RTIOD …” He would then consult the cipher table supplied by the Germans. For each letter, the table gave a substitute. “E” became “K,” and “ELCON” became “KCYDM.” Haines would then put on the headset with its thin steel band, adjust the black enamel earpieces, flip the power switch and wait for the tubes to warm up behind the vented black steel of the casing. Once the tubes were glowing and the machine was ready, he would send Garbo’s call code. Soon Haines would hear a distant tapping in the ether, the Abwehr responding from their radio station just outside the Madrid embassy. Haines would send “KCYDM” and the rest of the message would follow.

  The German operator, listening intently on the other end, would jot down the coded letters and, referring to the same table that Pujol had used to create the cipher, reverse the process. The result would be a piece of paper with the original message in Spanish being handed to Kühlenthal, the real leader of the Madrid Abwehr. From there the report would enter the bloodstream of one of the most remarkable, contradictory and odd spy services in the history of intelligence gathering.

  10. The Blacks and the Santa Clauses

  AT THE BEGINNING of World War II, the two main spy agencies in Germany—the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, and the Abwehr—formed the biggest and one of the best-financed spy networks in the world. They had thousands upon thousands of agents spread out from Aden to New York to Zanzibar, often working under the auspices of legitimate companies like I. G. Farben, the maker of Bayer aspirin, and Lufthansa, the national airline. Their spies lurked as far away as the unmapped Goiás region of central Brazil; two of its agents froze in the upper reaches of the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan, on assignment to connect with the Fakir of Ipi, a Pashtun revolutionary and sworn enemy of the British empire. They hired deaf-mutes to read the lips of suspects in a popular Berlin restaurant and operated a dozen spy schools, the best of which, in Hamburg (which was responsible for overseas operations), soon became one of the finest in the world, so rigorous that in the entire course of the war it graduated only two hundred agents. A typical exercise in an Abwehr school might feature a major stalking
through thickly forested terrain while his students followed:

  “What is that?” he would ask.

  “A sheep.”

  “What?”

  “A white sheep.”

  “No. You have to be more exact in your reports. What you must say is that at 1643 hours on 28 September 1944 on the right side of the road from Vienna to Breitenbrunn you saw a sheep that was white on the side that faced you.”

  The technical departments were, as might be expected of the Germans, first class. The Abwehr (known as the Santa Clauses, because of the gray-haired men who ran it) employed twenty master engravers and artists who reproduced the intricate ornamental backgrounds on passports. Its rival agency, the SD (known as the Blacks, because of their uniforms), kept a small team of men busy working over boiling vats, producing special batches of paper in the small hamlet of Spechthausen, northeast of Berlin. When a foreigner turned in an expired passport anywhere in the Third Reich, it was secretly passed from hand to hand until it reached Berlin, where every stamp and bit of typography was studied and copied. The slightest mistake could mean the difference between life and death. For example, the staples in a typical Russian passport of the 1940s were prone to rust, leaving red marks on the paper. But a passport carried by one unlucky Abwehr agent showed no rust. The German technicians had failed to notice this detail and had stapled the passport with nonrusting chromium-plated wire. Another agent was found in a Soviet military uniform that was an exact duplicate of a real one—except the Abwehr’s tailor had sewn the shoulder tabs onto the sleeve, while their Russian counterparts always left them loose. Their fates are unrecorded, but were most likely grim.

  Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, was a deeply intelligent strategist, a punishingly hard worker (partly because his home life was so miserable) who hated the sight of military epaulets and crisp SS uniforms. He was “very brilliant and lively, and as talkative as an old lady,” an animal lover who doted on his pet dogs, going so far as to rent them their own hotel room when he traveled so they could sleep in a bed and not on the floor. His rival and uneasy friend Walter Schellenberg, head of the SD, thought Canaris an anachronism in the Reich, a kind of ghost from imperial days: “In many ways, he was what might be called a mystic.”

  Schellenberg was the more ruthless of the two. His staff car was equipped with a short-wave transmitter with a range of twenty-five miles, which kept him in constant touch with his staff officers. In his richly decorated office there was a battery of telephones that could link him to the Reich Chancellery in seconds, high-tech microphones concealed in the furniture and walls, electrified iron bars across the windows to prevent escape and an advanced alarm system that would bring squads of black-uniformed SS men running if anyone attempted to enter Schellenberg’s office without permission. Worked into the beautiful mahogany desk itself were two submachine guns that Schellenberg could activate with the press of a button; they were engineered so that if a visitor approached his desk, the gun barrels would swivel and follow them.

  Canaris and Schellenberg were both modern men. But in trying to supply the German leadership with objective information and rational analysis, they were confronted with a culture of medieval mysticism, a strange Aryan voodoo that permeated the upper reaches of the Third Reich. Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, was a serious student of the black arts. Himmler believed himself to be the reincarnation of the eleventh-century monarch King Heinrich I and wished, when the Nazi victory was complete, to replace modern conveniences such as airplanes and trains with a hardy breed of “steppes horses,” which would supply the Reich with all its transportation needs. The Reichsführer was constantly surrounded by spiritualists, conjurers, seers and fakirs. To divine the whereabouts of Mussolini during his imprisonment by Italy’s Badoglio government, Himmler put up forty of the most accomplished magicians in a richly appointed villa, fed them the finest food and wine available in the Reich’s storerooms and informed them that the first seer to come up with Il Duce’s exact location would be given 100,000 marks. (The conjurers, most of whom were plucked off the streets and dressed in rags, agreed among themselves to take their time arriving at an answer, so as to enjoy the Reichsführer’s hospitality to the fullest.) There was a running joke among the SD’s top ranks that, in order to find out when the Allied invasion of Europe was coming, Hitler was going to summon a coven of witches and magicians. The joke was not allowed to circulate beyond SD headquarters.

  To assemble their sprawling organizations, the SD and the Abwehr began looking for men as World War II approached, just as the British had. First the new recruits had to pass a loyalty test. In one of his speeches, Himmler declared that an intelligence agency “must found itself upon a race, upon a people of the same blood.” This was Aryan boilerplate, but later in the speech he dictated not only who should staff the service but what its work product should reflect. Not objectivity or imaginative brilliance, but “unconditional obedience … certainty of German strength and the final German victory.”

  If London culled its operatives from the universities and their arts and sciences faculties—and more generally from among the intelligentsia and cultural elite—the Germans took a very different tack. They recruited staunch bureaucrats, military careerists and scions of old Prussian families. Far from pursuing eccentricity and daring, as the British had done out of necessity, the Abwehr and the SD chose men who were loyal and dependable. They didn’t want communes or coffee klatches for arts faculty; they wanted a combination of an export-import firm and a military division. Efficiency trumped eccentricity.

  Germany’s attitudes toward spies were even more toxic than they were in England in the early part of the war. The SD manual distributed to intelligence officers admitted this up front: “The Germans consider espionage to be work for criminals and adventurers.” Military officers from ancient Prussian families who’d served the country for centuries regarded intelligence officers not only as beneath them but also as interlopers out for their jobs. The German army “ostracized officers who dealt with spies on the ground that association with these deceivers had tainted them.”

  Hitler hated secret agents. He claimed he would never shake the hand of one. When two spies were killed in a failed mission, Hitler was grieved that they had been good German boys. “In the future, you will use Jews or criminals for missions of that kind.” Part of the German disdain for espionage came from Hitler’s own sense of his infallibility. Time and again, his generals and spy chiefs had advised him against offensive action and been proven wrong. When the Führer was considering an attack on Holland and France, General Franz Halder, the head of the army’s General Staff, wrote in his diary: “No one among the staff thinks that the offensive has the slightest chance of success.” They were, of course, proven wrong. Before the attack on Czechoslovakia, the Abwehr’s Canaris told Hitler that the Czech defenses were formidable and that the panzer divisions would not be able to crack them; Hitler ignored him and won. When the SS was rampaging across Poland, Canaris warned his chief that the British and French were poised at the German border near Saarbrücken with 110 divisions against the Germans’ 23, and that the enemy was going to invade. Hitler brushed him aside, and the invasion never came. It was the Führer who, often alone, again and again saw through the enemy’s bluster to its hidden intentions.

  Hitler regarded himself as a genius surrounded by bureaucrats who were “dumb as a carp,” winsome intellectuals, eggheads and cowards. Either his men exhibited the “sparrow-like brain of mediocrity” or they talked defeat. He steered only by an inner light, and as the war went on he was increasingly shielded from any report that conflicted with what he wished to be true. When the SD’s Schellenberg compiled a carefully researched report on America and its awesome capacity for making war, it was returned with this comment: “Everything you’ve written is pure nonsense. You’d better see a psychiatrist.” When he did the same thing a year later—report truthfully on an enemy, the Soviets this time—Hitler blew up, order
ing that the analysts quoted in its pages be arrested and charged with defeatism. “He closed his mind against the truth,” Schellenberg said, “but thought he could draw important conclusions from … random observations.”

  And yet at the same time Hitler was a voracious consumer of the intelligence reports that reached his desk, and he constantly asked for more and better information. He gave Canaris an unlimited budget and took the reports that reached him seriously—as long as they didn’t contradict one of his core beliefs. When his megalomaniacal tendencies were not at play, Hitler used intelligence well.

  In the early months of the war, the Abwehr was focused on France, considered to be Germany’s most formidable military opponent on the Continent. Canaris poured resources and men into Paris, but London was kept off-limits. Hitler believed that, once he overran the Continent, he could negotiate a peace with Churchill. “I don’t want any wretched spies creeping about in England,” he told his staff officers, “and jeopardizing my plans.”

  That all changed in the summer of 1940, when Churchill’s obstinacy and the RAF made it clear that England would never surrender. The chief of the German army’s Operations Staff, General Alfred Jodl, demanded Canaris get a network up and running in London. “Send them into England as quickly as possible. The landings may take place as early as September 5, but not later than the 15th. We need these wretched people in England well before then.” The original aim of the German intelligence effort in Britain was to lay the groundwork for an invasion. When Operation Sea Lion—the German assault on the island fortress—was finally abandoned, its double agents switched their attention to the Allied war effort. And then, particularly, to the coming invasion of France.