Agent Garbo

by Stephan Talty

  Araceli had had her fill of wartime London, a grimy, difficult place to live. In the early months of her stay, the capital had burned nightly; people in the suburbs would go outside to watch “the huge red glow of the distant flames,” as one Londoner remembered, during which the air could reach 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Death was a constant presence. One evening, a woman was stepping out her front door to walk her white Scottish terrier when a Luftwaffe raid began. After the all-clear signal, her body was “found lodged on top of a telephone box at the bottom of Dault Road, over a hundred yards away.” Corpses were everywhere—pieces floating in the Thames or deep in cellars, found rotting days after the German planes had left. After a bombing raid, the air had a nasty texture: the smell of cordite from the ack-ack guns, phosphorus from the German bombs, burnt timbers, sewage, masonry dust released from buildings hundreds of years old, the charred sap of trees with their bark blown off —“dust, dirty water, the cabbagey smell of gas,” recalled one Brit who spent the war in the capital, “a whole concoction of smells that in those days you associated with newly destroyed buildings.” Glass from windows crunched underfoot, and shrapnel hissed menacingly from the piles of collapsed brick. Londoners learned to fear the “bomber’s moon,” the clear nights with a full orb in the sky, which attracted the Luftwaffe like hornets. Every night was crisscrossed with the beams of four thousand searchlights, many of them mounted on mobile trucks, that guided the British antiaircraft gunners. There was nowhere you could look in London to escape the evidence of war.

  The newspapers were hard to stomach, especially for parents of young children such as Araceli. “One by one,” the News Chronicle reported about the aftermath of one air strike, “the tiny victims were recovered. A dark-haired baby boy in a blue knitted bedjacket and a fair-haired girl in pink. Others just as they had been dressed and tucked in for the night. They were identified by the little labels tied to their ankles.”

  Araceli navigated this blasted landscape as a stranger, an exile. Her husband was one of the key operatives in the war, but she couldn’t tell anyone this, couldn’t even wear a “sweetheart badge,” the small lapel pin—a regimental badge or miniature RAF wings—that told other women your boyfriend or husband was doing his part. Neighbors watched from behind their curtains as the telegram boy from the post office turned down their street on his noisy motorcycle, engine thrumming, everyone silently praying the messenger wouldn’t stop at their door—in his pouch was a telegram from the War Office, informing the family their son was dead or missing in action. Araceli, whose husband returned home every night from his mysterious work, couldn’t share any of this with her neighbors, and couldn’t tell of the enormous sacrifice they’d made to be here.

  The marriage came under increasing stress. “Many tense moments” marked the relationship as Garbo got deeper and deeper into the deception effort. On June 22, 1943, Guy Liddell, MI5’s director of counterespionage, recorded a worrisome development in his diary: “There has been a crisis in the Garbo case. Mrs. Garbo is extremely homesick and jealous of Garbo who is completely absorbed in his work and has consequently to some extent neglected her. Her one desire is to go back to her home country. She thinks that as the whole of Garbo’s network is notional we have no further use for his services.”

  It was an easy inference to make. Why couldn’t MI5 just imitate Garbo’s distinctive voice and let her and Pujol return home? But Cockade would prove that Pujol was the essential guardian of Garbo’s voice, and his ideas and his tenacity in creating the character were invaluable. Araceli’s request that MI5 release her husband was rejected out of hand.

  The break came on the night of June 21, 1943. Araceli had arranged to attend a dinner at the Spanish Club with fellow expats she’d recently met. The luminaries of Spanish London would be in attendance, including the staff of the embassy. Araceli was looking forward to dressing in her finest outfit, feasting on some Spanish delicacies and perhaps drinking a glass or two of champagne. She desperately needed a night out. But Pujol said no, the danger was too great. The Spanish embassy was a well-known nest of pro-Nazi sympathizers, and he couldn’t risk even the tiniest indiscretion.

  When Araceli heard the news that she’d be staying home another night, she exploded. The two argued “rather violently.” Unable to stand being in the same house with her, Pujol fled and called MI5 from a local phone box, saying that if Araceli called making outrageous threats, they should just ignore her. Araceli did call Tommy Harris, her rival, the man who’d replaced her as Pujol’s partner, and screeched into the phone at him:

  I am telling you for the last time that if at this time tomorrow you haven’t got me my papers all ready for me to leave the country immediately—because I don’t want to live five minutes longer with my husband—I will go to the Spanish Embassy … As I haven’t got any further with threats, even if they kill me I am going … I know very well what to do and say to annoy you and my husband … I shall have the satisfaction that I have spoilt everything. Do you understand? I don’t want to live another day in England.

  Araceli was threatening to expose Garbo. The incident reverberated all the way to the top of MI5—even before Churchill was briefed. “She ought really to be locked up and kept incommunicado,” growled Guy Liddell. “But in the state of the law here nothing of the sort is possible.”

  MI5 had to get Araceli under control. The man tasked with overseeing the double agents, Tar Robertson, hurried over to the Pujols’ home to “read her the riot act,” but Araceli stood her ground. One agent suggested she be told that MI6 had intercepted a message from the Gestapo to one of its sleeper agents in London, telling him “to make contact with Garbo,” an ominous sign that could mean a planned hit on her husband. Another analyst suggested that MI5 call the Spanish embassy and warn them to be on the lookout for a crazy woman who was “anxious to assassinate the ambassador.” But this would complicate matters by getting the police involved in the drama, “which would be a bore.” Sending Araceli back to Spain was considered too, but Liddell couldn’t trust her not to talk there, especially now that she hated MI5 and Pujol equally.

  One can only imagine Araceli’s theatrics. Months before in Madrid, she’d scared the Abwehr agent Federico half to death with her performance as the distraught wife, and then she’d only been acting. Now she really was at the end of her rope. Harris, whom Araceli certainly perceived as her rival, called her “highly emotional and neurotic,” even “unbalanced.” More likely, she was just desperate to go home.

  British attitudes toward emotional women in wartime were far from sympathetic. “Causing a scene” wasn’t just bad form, it was endangering morale through pure selfishness. When people’s husbands were dying on the front lines or in the skies above London, missing home didn’t justify screaming at an MI5 officer. But Araceli surely went much further than screaming. “In contrast to her husband,” Tommy Harris wrote, “Mrs. Garbo was a hysterical, spoilt and selfish woman.”

  MI5 had to come up with a plan. Pujol himself masterminded it. During a meeting with Harris, he laid out a bold course of action for preventing his wife from betraying the cause. Harris was taken aback by the “rather drastic” scheme; it was more diabolical than the fake assassination idea. It’s clear from reading the case notes that Pujol was shocked and embarrassed by what Araceli had done, and he wanted to put an end to the threat she posed once and for all. To do so, he decided to use everything he’d learned about deception and intrigue and turn it against his wife.

  Liddell laid out the plan: “It is now proposed that Len Burt should take a letter to Mrs Garbo after 5pm when the Spanish Consulate would be closed, telling her that her husband had been arrested and asking for his pajamas, toothbrush, etc. Tomorrow, if she appears to be in a repentant mood, she will be taken to see Garbo either in a cell at Cannon Row or at Camp 020.” Before she arrived, MI5 would give her the disturbing news: earlier, they’d brought Pujol to see their chief, who’d informed the Spaniard that his mission was being terminated
. The chief then demanded that Pujol send a final communiqué to Federico, making some excuse as to why he was breaking off contact. An outraged Pujol had refused and demanded to know why he was being deactivated. Liddell had told him it was because Araceli had apparently gone out of her mind and threatened to expose everything. At that insult to his wife, Pujol had “completely lost his temper,” tried to attack the MI5 head and his fellow agents and, all in all, “behaved so violently” that he’d been arrested and thrown in jail along with various spies and malcontents headed for long prison stays or execution. Pujol had sabotaged his career—maybe his life—to defend Araceli’s honor.

  Camp 020 was a grim place, a former asylum for shell-shocked World War I troops, ringed by a barbed-wire fence. It was filled with prisoners undergoing harsh interrogations and ruled over by Lieutenant Colonel Robin “Tin-Eye” Stephens, a man of violent prejudices who strutted through the camp’s hallways grumbling about “loathly Germans” and “scrofulous Bosches.” Stephens despised Spaniards especially, seeing them as “stubborn, immoral and immutable.” He never removed the monocle from his right eye, through which he fixed a menacing stare at the prisoners; he was even rumored to sleep with it in place. And though it was never specified to Araceli that her husband would be hanged, that had been the fate of fourteen German spies who came through Camp 020. The place fairly reeked with menace. MI5 hoped she would repent, protest her husband’s innocence and admit that “the whole crisis has been due to her stupidity.”

  It’s no wonder that Harris thought Pujol’s plan drastic. Araceli would be led to believe that her tantrum had earned her husband a possible death sentence. Harris, no friend to Araceli, asked Pujol if he was sure he wanted to put her through it. Pujol didn’t flinch. “He took full responsibility for all possible reactions which his plan might produce on his wife,” Harris wrote. MI5 agreed that Pujol would have control of the operation and could change tactics at any moment if he thought the scheme was going south. “Had it failed,” Harris wrote, and had Araceli found out that it was Pujol who’d thought up the plan, it “would have ruined forever his matrimonial life.”

  The scheme was quickly put into action. An MI5 agent delivered the note about Pujol’s arrest to Araceli. She immediately fell into a “hysterical outburst” and refused to get her husband’s pajamas and toiletries. Then Araceli phoned Harris, as Pujol had predicted she would. Harris relayed the story of her husband’s arrest: the meeting with MI5’s commander, Pujol’s refusal to write the breakoff letter to Federico, the violent struggle and the clank of the jail door.

  Araceli heard him out and, calmer now, replied that Pujol “behaved just as she would have expected him to. She said that after the sacrifices he had made, and her knowledge that his whole life was wrapped up in his work, she could well understand that he would rather go to prison than sign the letter we had asked for … She was convinced he had behaved in this way to avoid the blame … falling on her.” Pujol had predicted his wife’s reaction precisely. Now to see if she would take the bait.

  As badly broken down as the marriage was, as lonely and neglected as Araceli felt she was, she clearly still had deep feelings for Pujol. “In tears,” she told Harris that MI5 was wrong to arrest her husband, that Pujol would give everything for the Allies, including his life. She begged him to release Pujol. Then she hung up.

  Success. But Araceli wasn’t finished. A few minutes later, she called Harris back, now “in a more offensive mood,” and threatened to take her two children and disappear into London’s back streets. Next she phoned Pujol’s wireless operator, Haines. The startled officer reported that Araceli was “apparently in a desperate state, and asked him to come by the house in thirty minutes.” If MI5 had thought Araceli wasn’t capable of stratagems as maniacal as her husband’s, they were wrong. Alarmed, Haines rushed over to the Pujols’ house.

  There he found a frightening scene: Araceli in the kitchen, incoherent, the house filled with the rotten-egg smell of gas. Apparently MI5 had driven her to suicide. Haines shut off the gas and picked Araceli up off the floor. Luckily, she was still breathing.

  No one close to her believes this was a suicide attempt. “Was she capable of pretending that she wanted to kill herself to make a point?” asks her granddaughter, Tamara. “Absolutely. Would she really have done it? With her two children in the house? Absolutely not.” Liddell agreed. “This was clearly a bit of play-acting for [the agent’s] benefit.” Araceli had one-upped the British spooks with a little drama of her own. But in staging it, she had underestimated Pujol.

  Haines tried to calm Araceli down, but that evening she tried the gas trick again. MI5 was forced to station an agent to watch over her all night, to see that no harm came to her. The next morning, Tar Robertson arrived and listened to Araceli plead for her husband’s life. It would seem that the incident was over and that Pujol’s plan had worked. Araceli was repentant and had been “weeping incessantly for hours.” Harris demanded she sign a document promising never to try to leave England again, and to leave Pujol free to do his work. She signed it. With the document in MI5’s files, Pujol could now, as per his agreement with MI5, call off the final and most painful act.

  But he didn’t. Knowing how tough and wily Araceli was, Pujol wanted to drive his point home. Perhaps he wanted to punish his wife, too. She’d nearly sunk Garbo and put the lives of thousands of Allied soldiers at risk. So he decided to give her a day she’d never forget.

  The finale went ahead. Araceli was loaded into a Black Maria—a secure police van—and brought to Camp 020. She was blindfolded and led into the interrogation center, where Tin-Eye Stephens was waiting for her in his Gurkha Rifles uniform. The blindfold was removed and Araceli found Tin-Eye glaring at her through the monocle, most likely with visible disgust. He turned and led her to Pujol, who’d been dressed in the clothes of a common prisoner.

  The spy was now in control. As Araceli sat in front of him, weeping, Pujol asked his wife, “on her word of honor,” whether she’d gone to the embassy to reveal his secrets. (He knew she hadn’t, thanks to the MI5 agent posted by the embassy door.) She told him no, it had all been a cry for attention. “She promised him that if only he were released from prison, she would help him in every way to continue with his work with even greater zeal than before.” Then Pujol broke the bad news: he was to stand trial the next morning. The chief of MI5, the man he’d tried to attack, would meet with her tomorrow at the Hotel Victoria to give her the verdict.

  The next morning, Araceli met with the chief—played masterfully by an intelligence officer named Cussen—who told her that she “had only avoided being arrested by a hair’s breadth.” As for Pujol himself, MI5 had decided on mercy. He’d be allowed to continue his work and return home. But Cussen emphasized that any repeat of her threats could jeopardize his stay in England and perhaps his life. “Thoroughly chastened,” Araceli went home to wait for Juanito to come back to her. He was released that night, his prison stay marked by the beginnings of a thick beard, which made him look “rather like Lenin.”

  Harris found the whole affair fascinating, a glimpse inside the private life of the voluble but secretive man he’d worked with elbow to elbow for two solid years. To see how well Pujol had read Araceli, and how he’d neutralized her outbursts with a plan that relied on all the tricks of the spy trade, was to Harris truly impressive. It confirmed “that the conclusion which Garbo had drawn before putting the plan into operation had been correct.”

  But MI5’s Guy Liddell saw another side to the episode. “I gather that [Pujol] is somewhat shaken by his experience of the last forty-eight hours,” he wrote in his diary for June 24, “and that although the plan was of his own making it was one of the most distasteful things that he has had to do in his life.” Pujol knew that Araceli was really homesick and miserable, while he was having the time of his life living out his boyhood dreams. There’d been rumors of trouble in their marriage—Guy Liddell at one point refers to a naval officer “for whom some consid
erable time ago [Araceli] formed an attachment,” though there is no further mention of the officer in the records.

  Yes, Araceli had been outrageous. But her pain was real. And instead of taking her side, Pujol had tricked her so that he could continue his personal war with Hitler.

  Pujol never spoke about the incident and never wrote down his version of the events. The motives for his icy resolve remain unknown. But perhaps, along with his anger that Araceli was risking the lives of thousands of men with her dramas, he was indignant that she’d violated that part of himself that he’d long considered almost sacred: his imagination. Just as Operation Cockade was playing out, she’d tried to tell people that his greatest creation, Garbo, was a fake, to suggest that the British could pull the character’s strings and speak with his flamboyant voice as well as Pujol could. She’d tried, in effect, to separate Pujol from Garbo.

  In response, he’d played Araceli like a violin. They might have started out as equals in deception, but by now he’d surpassed her in every way. His mastery of the game was complete, even when he used it against someone he loved.

  14. Haywire

  IN THE SUMMER AND early fall of 1943, Operation Cockade’s planners, along with Pujol and Harris, began to experience what John Masterman called a “gnawing anxiety” in their collective gut. It became clearer and clearer in those months that the planners had underestimated what it took to get commanders and thousands of soldiers in far-flung encampments organized into an invasion force, albeit a fake one. Plans began to be whittled down, resources withdrawn. On June 17, the Joint Planning Staff crossed out a provision in the plans that would allow Cockade to become a real invasion if the defenses looked weak. From then on, it would be a pure deception exercise, all bark and no bite. Four days later, the Royal Navy protested that using the powerful R-class battleships for a fake invasion was unacceptable. What if they were hit by the coastal batteries and sunk in the English Channel? The propaganda victory for the Germans would be huge. The idea quietly went away.