Garbo’s influence was growing. His dispatches began showing up in messages out of German outposts in Stockholm and Sofia and as far away as Istanbul and Tokyo. The Abwehr shipped him an improved type of secret ink in cotton-wool balls, disguised as medicine. German and British scientists were engaged in a constantly evolving chemical war: invisible ink vs. reagent. As the British concocted new and more exotic compounds (from methylene blue to “tetra base”) to uncover the secret writing in letters, the Germans responded by inventing more subtle formulas, including one whose secret ingredient was hemoglobin. For that formula, the spy had to cut his finger and use drops of his own blood to make the ink.
Along with the ink came a higher-grade cipher in a series of seventeen miniaturized photographs. This was a closely guarded asset, and Kühlenthal asked Garbo to “prevent it at any time from ever falling into the hands of the enemy.” Harris considered this a breakthrough, “the most important development in the case so far.” The Germans had recently switched to a new ciphering technique, which the geniuses at Bletchley Park had been unable to break even after weeks of effort. The photographs sent to Garbo allowed the British to penetrate the new code “within a very short time.” Later, there would be still more advanced ciphers. “Denys Page tells me that the information supplied to him about Garbo’s code was of the utmost value,” Guy Liddell wrote. “Before he received this code he was working entirely in the air and says that it is quite doubtful whether he would have ever got on to the right lines.”
It was all excellent buildup material for the spy. But the topper that spring was the cake job.
In March 1943, Garbo excitedly told the Germans that his Agent No. 3 had gotten a glimpse of an RAF “aircraft recognition handbook,” filled with drawings and technical data on the current air fleet. The book belonged to a noncommissioned officer in the air service who was down on his luck. When Agent No. 3 casually mentioned that he’d like to have the book as a souvenir, the NCO said he might let it go for the right price. No. 3 asked Garbo how much he could offer, and Garbo asked the Germans. They came back with the rather exorbitant price of 100 pounds, about $5,200 in today’s dollars. No. 3 drove a hard bargain and got it for three pounds.
But how to get the bulky thing to Madrid?
Other messages had been inserted into the bindings of books and bunches of fruit, and one “left [the] last days of January with letters camouflaged in the stomach of a dog.” (The dog was a toy in the shape of a Scottish terrier.) For the RAF handbook, Garbo hit on an idea: he would wrap the book in grease-proof paper and bake it inside a cake. He got the widow of his deceased “agent” William Gerbers to make the concoction and then wrote in chocolate icing: “With Good Wishes to Odette”—the two t’s in Odette were the prearranged signal that the message was genuine. The cake was sent by the diplomatic bag to Lisbon and delivered by a secret service officer. In invisible ink, Garbo wrote on the cover letter: “Inside the cake you will find the book on aviation which was obtained by 3 … I had to use several rationed products which I have given in a good cause … If it does not arrive too hard it can be eaten … Good appetite!”
On July 1 at 2121 hours, Garbo read an incoming message: “We have received the cake in perfect condition.” Kühlenthal was delighted with the caper. The book was authentic—though MI5 had removed all the up-to-date information on the planes, so it was practically useless. A year later, an MI5 informer reported that when Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, was touring Spain, Kühlenthal was “the star turn at this meeting … He told a great number of Garbo stories, among them the story of the cake.” The Madrid spymaster ended it by saying that “he had an agent in England who was also a cook, who made cakes which were unpleasant in taste in spite of the fact that their contents were excellent.”
Each double agent had his specialty. Agent Tricycle, the dashing Dusko Popov, was exceptional at what might be called physical espionage. He was dispatched to foreign capitals to meet Abwehr agents face-to-face, and proved very good in the moment, when one had to outthink a Gestapo officer who might kill you if your next answer was wrong. Garbo, on the other hand, was known for his imagination and daring. “I would never have had the nerve,” said the intelligence officer Christopher Harmer, “to allow any of my agents to be as audacious as he was.” The cake job was a small example of the theatrical flair that would soon come into play in a major crisis.
MI5 would later be given a quantifiable estimate of just how valuable Garbo’s services were to the Third Reich. An internal message from Madrid to Berlin contained this startling line: “[The] activity of Arabel”—i.e., Garbo—“in England constantly at the price of his life was just as important as the service at the front of the Spanish members of the Blue Division.” It might have been a bit of hyperbole on Kühlenthal’s part—puffing up his best boy—but the Spanish Blue Division had sent 45,000 volunteers to the Eastern Front over the course of its service. They’d fought bravely at Novgorod and frozen to death while fighting at Leningrad. By the war’s end, 4,594 members of the division had been killed and 8,700 wounded.
So Madrid had set Garbo’s worth at 45,000 soldiers. But what is a relationship if it isn’t tested every so often? In June 1943, Garbo decided to flex his muscles in an incident that made headlines around the world.
The vital air link between Portugal and London had remained open that summer of 1943. The British Overseas Airways Corporation flew planes from Poole Harbor in Dorset to Cabo Ruivo, near Lisbon, and a second route from Sintra in Portugal to Whitchurch in Somerset. The London-bound planes left Portugal daily, the eyes of ten thousand refugees looking longingly on their silver fuselages as they headed north. The two routes were crucial, giving British intelligence a link with the spy capital and maintaining the leading air connection with Europe (there was a nighttime flight from Scotland to Stockholm, but the route was more dangerous and the schedule more erratic). Luftwaffe fighters ruled the airspace over Europe, and sometimes attacked the aircraft; a burst of machine-gun fire from a Messerschmitt 110 once left a bullet hole in the hat of a Swiss diplomatic courier. But Flight 777A kept flying, often with a cabin populated by spies and top-secret envoys.
Until June 1, 1943. A camouflaged DC-3 named the Ibis was flying a roundabout route to London over the Bay of Biscay, hoping to avoid the Luftwaffe. Suddenly a schwarm of eight Junkers Ju 88s from the Kampfgruppe 88 fighter wing, based in Brittany, appeared in the blue sky and began making strafing runs, the bullets thudding into the DC-3’s fuselage. The Ibis desperately tried to evade the German fighters as they blasted away with their wing-mounted guns, but on the third pass, the passenger plane began to smoke, then crashed into the bay in a ball of flame, killing everyone aboard.
The incident made headlines because of who was on board: Leslie Howard, the British star of Broadway and Hollywood, who’d played Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind, reportedly bedded Tallulah Bankhead and Myrna Loy and moonlighted for MI6. LESLIE HOWARD IS LOST IN AIR LINER SHOT DOWN BY NAZIS, London’s Daily Mirror screamed. Before boarding the flight, Howard had been traveling across Portugal and Spain giving lectures on the modern cinema while secretly meeting with anti-Nazi activists and firming up support for the Allies.
Garbo couldn’t let the incident pass. One of his imaginary subagents could have been on that plane, and his KLM pilot-courier could have been flying it. He sent a blistering message to Federico demanding to know what the Luftwaffe was thinking. The Portugal–London planes were never attacked again.
Pujol was growing confident enough in his abilities to outsmart the Abwehr that he and Harris began to amuse themselves by dreaming up cryptic messages to drive their opponents batty. After the “death” of William Gerbers, Garbo claimed to have discovered a cache of notes made by the operative just before his illness struck. Garbo examined the scribblings and “decided that they were certainly annotations made during the course of the agent’s espionage travels.” But the code was unknown to him; perhaps the Germans would have better luck?
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Pujol and Harris must have cackled with delight as they batted ideas back and forth in their little office in Jermyn Street, one-upping each other with fiendishly tantalizing cryptograms. First they decided to compose the “notes” in German, since Gerbers had come from a Swiss-German family. Some of the messages they cut off just as they were getting interesting: “Grosse olbek zwischen Birkenhead e—,” which meant that large olbeks had been spotted near Birkenhead—but no German-English dictionary lists the word olbek. They hinted in another that the British battleship King George V was being fitted with torpedo tubes when in fact it had none. Harking back to his Lisbon days, Pujol drew up detailed diagrams of airfields, sketching in everything from the exact position of unidentified aircraft to the location of enormous hangars. But he failed to say where these airfields actually were.
“It is true to say,” Harris admitted, “that the only virtue in passing on these notes was that they were a satisfactory leg-pull.” Pujol had infected the normally serious Harris with the joy of the flimflam.
Despite the fun and games, Garbo’s first serious attempt to create a D-Day deception ended in abrupt failure. Plan Bodega was a “most complex and elaborate” scheme to create an imaginary arms depot in the very real Chislehurst Caves, in the southeastern suburbs of Greater London, and to lure Federico to England to inspect them. In the spring of 1943, Garbo put forth the story that his Agent No. 4, a “Gibraltarian waiter,” had gone to London looking for work in one of the posh hotels frequented by diplomats and tycoons. There it was hoped he’d be able to eavesdrop on after-dinner conversations between gentlemen enjoying their Port and forward the news on to Berlin. But the Ministry of Labor had instead sent No. 4 to work in a quarry, in the belief that “all Gibraltarians should have a natural aptitude for tunneling” (because of the many sieges of the island fortress throughout history, which required the natives to dig passageways for supplies and arms). The waiter grudgingly “accepted” the excavation job, thinking he might be able to discover some unknown underground depots. But what he found surpassed his wildest hopes.
Pujol and Harris were deep into spy-fiction territory as they told Federico that No. 4 had been marched down to the London Underground and put to work digging extensions of its tunnels. What the operative found out was this: the British were connecting their subway lines to the enormous Chislehurst Caves, where arms had been stored during World War I. “Immense quantities of small arms munitions” were being shipped by train from armaments factories in the Midlands, switched to secret small-gauge tracks and forwarded on under the feet of unsuspecting London pedestrians to the caves (which were actually empty of all armaments and served as public air raid shelters). This was all going on away from the eyes of the Luftwaffe, with remote-control electric trains that required no personnel, running silently beneath the streets of Soho. After months of digging and investigating, Agent No. 4 “reported” that he had stumbled on nothing less than the network that would supply the D-Day regiments. By finding out when the work was expected to be completed, he could give the Nazis the date of the invasion. And by detecting where the tunnels led, he could tell them where the operation would be launched. From that, the Germans could deduce the target.
Those were the questions that troubled Hitler in his sleep, that he would have paid millions for. And Garbo was offering the answers on a platter.
Garbo himself offered to take Federico through the tunnels. MI5 operatives started searching for an arms depot where Federico, after being led into a tunnel and bamboozled into thinking he was walking through the London Underground, would have his blindfold removed. “He would … have been allowed to return to Spain from where he would undoubtedly have proceeded to Berlin to report on his extraordinary adventure, full of praise for Garbo’s astuteness and ability, and conscious of the importance of the underground depots.”
The codebreakers at Bletchley Park began picking up traffic on Garbo. Madrid was forwarding the entire texts of his messages about the Chislehurst Caves on to Berlin. Hopes rose.
Then Garbo made a mistake. In a twelve-page letter sent by courier, he laid out a plan—supported by blueprints that No. 4 had managed to smuggle out—to dynamite the tunnels leading to the caves. “It was explained that by blowing up one of the trains whilst in the main tunnel by means of a time bomb the tunnel itself would collapse and thus the stores would be entombed at the vital moment when they would be required.”
Harris and Pujol waited. They knew the plan would be catnip for Hitler: if the Germans could blow up the tunnels, D-Day would have to be canceled or scaled back. The only thing better than predicting the invasion was stopping it before it ever happened.
Then the answer came back from Madrid: a firm no. It soon became clear why. MI5 had made a crucial miscalculation. Over the past year, Garbo had become such a luminary in Madrid—with both Federico and Kühlenthal hitched to his star—that the suggestion that he turn to bombing tunnels was met with a cold chill. Blowing up the Chislehurst train would mean transferring control of Garbo away from the Madrid station to Division II, the Abwehr agency responsible for “sabotage and special tasks.” Kühlenthal and Federico had found, groomed, paid and staked their careers on Garbo. Why would they now give him up to another division? MI5 hadn’t counted on the intense rivalries inside the German intelligence agencies, a matter of life and death for men like Kühlenthal.
As more messages arrived from Madrid, it became clear that two other factors were at play: Federico had no desire to come to London. If he was caught en route, he’d likely face long months in a brutal interrogation center, and possibly the hangman’s noose. He would let Garbo go it alone. And the Abwehr’s specialists at Zossen, south of Berlin, had gone over Garbo’s excitable twelve-page letter with a fine-tooth comb and found it wanting. Too much opinion, not enough detail.
A lesson had been learned: the Abwehr in Zossen was not the Abwehr in Madrid. Zossen’s agents were tougher, more analytical, less susceptible to Garbo’s special brand of intrigue. It’s unknown whether the cave proposal ever reached the desk of the gray-eyed Roenne at Foreign Armies West, but his highly trained officers had shot down the scheme. Plan Bodega was pure Garbo, wildly colorful, Jules Verne–like in its scale and depth of detail, its talk of winding tunnels and a secret world underneath London. But it hadn’t worked.
Imagination simply wasn’t going to be enough.
Juan Pujol as an infant, with his mother, brother Joaquín and sister Bonaventura.
The young dreamer, dressed up in a harlequin costume for Carnival.
Pujol (upper right) as a young man with family and friends.
Pujol (center) and older brother Joaquín (left) in a light moment.
Posing with a friend (left) and Joaquín.
The ambitious, alluring and volatile Araceli.
A poised and confident Pujol before the desperate years of the Spanish Civil War.
Translation of an Abwehr political questionnaire sent to Garbo.
Pujol in his uniform as a lieutenant in the Spanish Republican army.
The inimitable Colonel David Strangeways during the war.
An Abwehr letter containing a cipher table.
Tommy Harris in his days as an aspiring artist and art dealer.
A self-portrait of the young Tommy Harris in Spanish costume.
Garbo’s famous June 9, 1944, message that declared the June 6 landings a feint. His German code name— “Alaric” — is clearly visible at the upper left.
Pujol after the war, when he was living in Venezuela.
The former spy’s Venezuelan passport.
Pujol with his wife, Carmen Cilia, daughter Maria Elena and son Carlos, in Venezuela.
D-Day veterans surround Pujol on the fortieth anniversary of the landings, 1984.
The man known as Garbo (left) viewing a monument to the Normandy dead.
III. The Far Shore
12. The Dry Run
IN 1942, THANKS TO Operation Torch in North Africa, the her
oic Soviet fighting at Stalingrad, and the Allied air raids on German cities and targets in the industrial region of the Ruhr, the Allies were beginning to turn the tide of the war. The next step would be the opening of a second front with an Allied invasion of Europe. It was originally planned for 1943, but at the Casablanca conference in January it became clear that the men and materiel—landing craft, supply ships and especially the thousands upon thousands of American troops that would storm the beaches—wouldn’t be available for the epic battle that would be necessary to take back France and begin the long slog to Berlin. Churchill and Roosevelt set the tentative date for invasion back to May 1, 1944.
If it became known that there would be no D-Day in the next twelve months, Hitler would be free to pull troops and panzer divisions out of Western Europe and bring them to bear on the Eastern Front. In order to keep the German divisions away from the crucial battles in Russia, Hitler had to be made to believe an invasion was not only possible in 1943, but imminent. Every great drama requires a dress rehearsal, and in the spring and summer of 1943 Garbo and the entire deception community took their places for D-Day’s dry run. It was called Operation Cockade.
The very capable Lieutenant General Frederick “Freddie” Morgan was given command of the operation as chief of staff to the supreme commander, responsible for planning the cross-Channel invasion and all its preliminary missions. The goal of Cockade, his first major assignment, seemed straightforward. Morgan had to lead “an elaborate camouflage and deception scheme extending over the whole summer with a view to pinning the enemy in the West and keeping alive the expectation of large scale cross-Channel operations in 1943.” There were three main elements to the plan, each with a code name. Wadham was a phony attack on Brittany, on the French coast; Tindall was a phony attack on the Norwegian coastal city of Stavenger; and the linchpin to the plan, Starkey, was “a major amphibious feint” on the Pas de Calais in France. Starkey had two objectives: to lure the Luftwaffe’s planes out of their hangars and destroy them in the air above Calais, and to convince the Germans that the second front was being opened in France. There was also a provision in Cockade’s original outline to turn it from a feint into a real invasion if the German defenses looked exceptionally weak. Should the conditions look promising, the Cockade armies could pour across the beaches and head for Paris.
Agent Garbo Page 14
