Agent Garbo

by Stephan Talty

  Jebsen apparently never told his interrogators what he knew about Garbo.

  As summer turned into fall, the planners and the generals finally had time to look back on the deception operation and Garbo’s part in it. The praise began to roll in. “Connoisseurs of the double cross,” J. C. Masterman would later say, “have always regarded the Garbo case as the most highly developed example of their art.” Anthony Blount called Garbo’s coup “the greatest double cross operation of the war.” The deception planner and historian Roger Fleetwood-Hesketh put it most succinctly: “His contribution to D-day was indeed stranger than any fiction … It could not have been done without him … It was Garbo’s message … which changed the course of the battle in Normandy.” When Eisenhower had the chance to meet Tommy Harris (he never spoke to Pujol himself), at the ceremony honoring the spy-runner’s OBE, or Order of the British Empire, the American general stood up and reached out his hand. “Your work with Mr. Pujol most probably amounts to the equivalent of a whole army division,” he said as the two men shook hands. “You have saved a lot of lives, Mr. Harris.”

  Though German reinforcements had begun moving toward Normandy in late August, by then it was too late to crush the second front. When the Allies captured German intelligence maps, they showed Garbo’s phantom divisions in the exact spots the spy had said they were. On Roenne’s big map of the Western Front, the flag of the imaginary FUSAG remained pinned in place until October.

  When the war diarist for the German High Command, Professor Percy Schramm, was being interrogated by the Allies after V-E Day, an odd and telling moment occurred. Schramm was a historian of medieval ritual; his specialty was the study of how the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire projected their power through images and symbols. During the war, he’d had unfettered access to the leaders of the German military.

  In the middle of the interrogation, a question suddenly popped into the historian’s mind. He interrupted the conversation and asked it.

  “All this Patton business wasn’t a trick, was it?” he asked the Allied officer suspiciously.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “What I mean is this,” Schramm said. “Were all those divisions sent to southeast England simply to hold our forces in the Pas de Calais?”

  The interrogator paused, then gave a rather nuanced reply. The forces were there to reinforce Monty in Normandy, he claimed, and would have only invaded Calais if the Germans had abandoned it.

  “Ah,” Schramm said, relieved. “That is what we always thought.”

  The war had been over for months, but the German expert on imagery still believed that FUSAG had been real. Garbo’s fiction lived on.

  21. The Weapon

  GARBO HAD TRIUMPHED, but two lingering threats—to England and to his marriage—required immediate attention. The national crisis came first.

  In the summer of 1943, rumors had swept London that Hitler was developing a superweapon. MI6’s sources had heard that it was to be some kind of enormous rocket, weighing between ten and fifteen tons, which would travel through the stratosphere loaded with high explosives, a weapon that couldn’t be shot out of the sky or defended against with existing technologies. MI5 wanted Garbo to see if he could find out what this dream weapon was. On June 10, he wrote Madrid: “I must now discuss another matter connected with the report of a Swedish journalist called Gunnar T. Pihl who … spoke of an enormous rocket gun which is installed on the French coast to bombard London as a reprisal … The result of this was that my wife became panicky and wants at all costs to leave England … [I] promised her that if it were true I would send her to the country out of the range of this weapon.” So, was it true? Madrid brushed him off, saying only that “there is no cause to alarm yourself.”

  But months later, out of the blue, came this bulletin from the Abwehr: “Circumstances dictate that you should carry out your proposition with regard to setting up your home outside the capital.” Not only that, a second radio transmitter was to be built “without regard to price” in case the first was destroyed. What was the “threatened action” Madrid referred to later in the message, this wondrous weapon that was so frightening it would drive Garbo out of London? He asked for a few days’ notice before the reprisals began, which would give the British Ministry of Home Security time to prepare for the mysterious attack. But Madrid steadfastly refused to give any more information. Meanwhile, Garbo moved Araceli and the children out to the country.

  The Ultra intercepts showed that the project was so secret even Madrid didn’t know what was happening; the directives were coming directly from Berlin. The Abwehr headquarters told Madrid to expect a series of highly sensitive questionnaires for Garbo about the secret weapon, prefixed by the code name Stichling. The answers were to be forwarded immediately to Berlin with the same prefix. Madrid would not be allowed to decipher the messages before sending them.

  Londoners watched the skies and waited for Hitler’s last chance to arrive. And Garbo waited for the Stichling messages. The weapon came first. On June 13, 1944, seven days after the Normandy invasion, a buzzing whine was heard in the sky over London and the first V-1 rocket dropped onto a railway bridge in the East End, killing six. Looking like a sleek unmanned plane, the V-1 was a remote-controlled flying bomb that carried a 2,200-pound warhead. The British called the V-1s “flying robots” and “doodlebugs.” Germans cheered them as the “omnipotent miracle weapon” that would save the country. “Day and night [the V-1] thunders down with fiery blows on the city on the Thames,” crowed the German newspaper Das Reich. “There is a new wheel in the machinery of war.”

  On June 16, Berlin sent the long-awaited message to Madrid: “Arras reports Stichling is beginning.” The Germans requested that Garbo mark the impact zones of the V-1s on a special London map. The reason was clear: the German engineers wanted to fine-tune the rockets’ guidance system to ensure strikes in central London, to kill as many people as possible.

  Garbo stalled. If he and the other double agents who’d been given the Stichling message, Brutus and Tate, acted as scouts for the V-1 program, they’d be assisting in mass murder. Garbo passed along information only on a recent strike in the West End, believing that diplomats from neutral countries still living in London would report the attacks anyway. “8 dead and 13 wounded … Square 10, grey section. Many houses damaged. Square 82 … Many victims in the street.” Hoping to dampen the enthusiasm for the V-1, Garbo then wrote Kühlenthal a long personal letter. Its theme was simple: “We are wasting our time.” The flying bomb was ineffective as an offensive weapon, he argued, and a disappointment as a psychological one. Londoners simply weren’t terrified enough.

  But Garbo could delay only so long. If he didn’t send the coordinates and the impact times, he would lose standing with the Abwehr. A solution had to be found. Harris and Pujol came up with an idea: Why not run the same gambit on the Abwehr that they had on Araceli? It was a natural way out. One day when he was out looking at bomb damage, Garbo failed to return home. His “deputy,” No. 3, reported by wireless to Madrid that their chief was missing and that Araceli was frantic. All indications pointed to the likelihood that Garbo had been arrested.

  In time the “details” came out. While looking at a bomb site in Bethnal Green, Garbo had attracted the notice of a plainclothes policeman. Garbo, to use a term from a later era, had been profiled. “[The policeman] started to insult me,” Garbo claimed to Madrid, “saying that Spaniards were a lot of dogs and followed the footsteps of the greatest butcher ever recorded in history and that we should be treated as enemies.” Taken to the local station house, Garbo swallowed a piece of paper with suspicious writing on it before the bobbies could stop him. Luckily, his powerful friends in the Ministry of Information intervened on his behalf, and in a few days he was released, worried but still defiant. MI5 forged a letter of apology from the home secretary, which Garbo passed on to Madrid. His Abwehr handlers were shaken, and it was decided in Berlin that Garbo was far too valuable an asset
to risk on the V-1 program. He was released from his bomb assessment duties—exactly what MI5 had wanted.

  On July 29 came news from Kühlenthal that “with great happiness and satisfaction” they could announce that Garbo had been awarded the Iron Cross. The medal was usually given only to front-line combatants, but the High Command had made an exception for its star spy. Garbo wrote back effusively: “I cannot at this moment, when emotion overcomes me, express in words my thanks for the decoration conceded by our Führer … I must state that this prize has been won, not only by me, but also by Carlos [Agent No. 3] and the other comrades … My desire is to fight with greater ardor to be worthy of this medal which has only been conceded to those heroes, my companions in honor, who fight on the battlefield.”

  By August 1944, the end of Garbo’s career was in sight. Scores of former Abwehr agents were turning themselves over to the Allies, and in their debriefs a few of them referred to the miraculous Garbo, who’d managed to report from London throughout the war. It was only a matter of time before the Germans realized that, with this new information, Garbo should have been shut down. The British failure to catch him would reveal that Garbo was a double agent. A Spanish informer named Roberto Buénaga even called the Madrid office of MI6 and volunteered to give up the most powerful German spy in London if the British paid him a large amount of money. The MI6 officers questioned the Spaniard, and it soon became clear that the man knew enough about Pujol to blow his cover. MI6 considered sending an agent to kill Buénaga, but that might have drawn yet more suspicion to the Garbo operation.

  There was only one solution: Garbo had to disappear, permanently. The spy’s deputy, No. 3, would wrap up the remaining business of the network. Garbo would “leave” London (in reality, he didn’t go anywhere). He told the Germans he’d fled to a hideout in southern Wales, a farm miles from any town, which he shared with “an old Welsh couple, a Belgian deserter and a half-witted relative of the owners.”

  Back in London, MI5 pretended to conduct a search for him. As the details of his nefarious work emerged, the police closely interviewed a supposedly terrified Araceli, and the British embassy in Madrid filed a protest, shocked to discover that a German spy ring had been operating in London for the whole course of the war.

  Months passed, with Garbo sending occasional messages to Madrid and supposedly hiding in the countryside. But as World War II ground to a close in the spring of 1945, MI5 was faced with a dilemma: whether or not to deactivate once and for all one of the most effective spies in their history. The specter of Nazism was fading, but Stalin loomed in the East. MI5 began to explore the idea of running Garbo against the Russians. Guy Liddell recorded the details in his diary: “[Tommy Harris’s] plan is to get [Garbo] to write to the Soviet military attaché in London anonymously before he leaves for Spain. He would tell the latter the whole of his story and give them his code. He would tell them that he had been working for the English against Franco and that if they liked they could monitor communications between ourselves and the Germans to get what information they liked and incidentally to satisfy themselves as to his bona fides.”

  The plan seemed like a natural, but it was quickly nixed by Pujol’s old pursuer Kim Philby. Years later it would become clear why. Philby, of course, was spying for the Russians and had been ever since his days as a newspaper correspondent in the Spanish Civil War. He knew Garbo’s skills well enough; he didn’t want the Spaniard playing in his garden.

  Back in December 1944, in recognition of his services, Pujol had been awarded the MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), the first British agent to be so honored. A formal investiture at Buckingham Palace was impossible because of the need for secrecy, but the key players—Harris, Guy Liddell, Masterman, Tar Robertson and a few others—celebrated with Pujol. The director general of MI5, Sir David Petrie, gave a “nice little speech” at agency headquarters, and afterward his friends took Pujol for lunch at the Savoy, where he stood up and thanked them in halting English. “I think he was extremely pleased,” wrote Liddell in his diary. The men banged on the table and cheered as Pujol finished his short monologue. “It was a very moving moment,” he remembered.

  To the Germans, Garbo predicted that a “world civil war” was coming and it would result in the “disintegration of our enemies.” Five days after he wrote that message, on May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered to what Garbo called (to the Abwehr) the “Anglo-American-Bolshevik onslaught.” The moment Pujol had worked toward for so long had arrived. “London exploded with joy,” Pujol recalled. “People invaded Piccadilly Circus and Regent Square, and traffic came to a standstill; everyone was drinking beer, singing and dancing.”

  His personal war with Hitler was over. All that he’d worked for and all that he’d sacrificed was reflected in the faces of those delirious Londoners.

  Still, he kept up the charade. “I am certain that the day will arrive in the not too distant future when the noble struggle will be revived,” he wrote Madrid, “which was started by [Hitler] to save us from a period of chaotic barbarism, which is now approaching.” Madrid responded in a final message, setting up a meeting between Garbo and Federico in the Spanish capital: “We ask you to frequent the Cafe Bar la Moderna, 141, Calle Alcala, every Monday between 20 hours and 20:30 hours, starting on June 4th. You should be seated at the end of the cafe and be carrying the newspaper London News.”

  MI5 decided that Pujol should make the rendezvous. Before he disappeared forever, the Spaniard had one last mission to complete.

  The British wanted Garbo to meet with Federico and Kühlenthal to see if the Nazis were “proposing to carry on any form of underground organization in the post war.” But to get to Madrid, Garbo first had to “escape” from England clandestinely. It was too dangerous to allow him to travel on his own passport, especially since the Brits were supposed to be checking every airplane and merchant ship for him.

  In June 1945, Pujol left his adopted homeland and flew on a Sunderland seaplane to Baltimore, Tommy Harris sitting beside him. By then, though unknown to the public at large, Garbo was a private legend among the initiated on both sides of the Atlantic. One captain in Luftwaffe intelligence, bitter about the way the spy had hornswoggled the entire German intelligence community, put forth the theory that Garbo had been so successful … because there was no Garbo. “He … had been invented by the Abwehr so that they could pretend they were doing important work, justifying their comfortable jobs … far from the fighting fronts and the bombs and hardship of war.” It was perhaps better to believe that he was a German fantasy than a British double agent.

  But the Americans were in awe of him. Mickey Ladd, an assistant to the FBI director, sent a message to one of the agency’s operatives in London “instructing him to give every assistance with regard to Garbo.” J. Edgar Hoover himself demanded to shake the hand of the man who’d fooled Hitler, and arranged for Harris and Pujol to be brought to Washington as soon as they arrived in the United States. “[He] wanted to meet me personally,” Garbo wrote. “He invited both Tommy and me to his house, where we had dinner in an underground room.” Though Hoover was “most affable throughout,” he didn’t ask Pujol to work for the FBI, which seemed to surprise him. The Americans gave him some much-needed travel documents, and he flew to Cuba alone to establish the alibi that he’d been smuggled out of London to Havana.

  Getting the right entry and exit stamps on his papers took longer than expected, and Garbo didn’t reach Madrid until September 8, well after the date specified in the letter. He reunited with Harris and Desmond Bristow, the two men who’d debriefed him at the house on Crespigny Road more than four years earlier, and together they worked out how he’d approach Kühlenthal and Federico.

  Garbo went to La Moderna and sat at a table, holding a copy of the London News, as the Abwehr had instructed. The contact never showed, so using his local contacts, Garbo tracked Federico down to a house in a small village near the Guadarrama Mountains, which ring Madrid to the
north. “Very overcome” by the sight of the master spy standing in his doorway, Federico nervously told Pujol to follow him to a nearby woods where it would be safe to talk. They hiked up to the treeline, and Federico explained that he was now living in fear of being deported back to Germany, or even kidnapped and shot by the Allies. “Speaking of the future, he prophesied utter misfortune for himself and his family.” Federico had lost contact with Kühlenthal, the whole Abwehr apparatus was in disarray, and he feared everyone around him.

  Federico, who’d once been for Pujol the very image of the tough, cosmopolitan spy, was close to being a broken man. As the wind sighed through the trees, Federico rather pathetically asked if Garbo could use his skills in deception to get him out of Spain. Garbo told him he would do what he could. As he left, the double agent told Federico that the German cause was not yet finished. They would work together in the future, when Nazism rose again.

  “He fell for it completely,” Garbo later said.

  Next the Spaniard went to Ávila, where Kühlenthal was living with his wife in reduced circumstances. When Garbo knocked on the door, Kühlenthal was “overcome with emotion” and told him that he’d always visualized this reunion. Kühlenthal sat in his humble living room and told Garbo his life story, including the difficulty of being half-Jewish in Hitler’s Germany and his dedication to the cause—if he could bring about the Fourth Reich, he told the spy, he wouldn’t hesitate, though “he did not believe that it would be possible to rebuild Germany again.” The pair talked about possibly going into business together, selling information and splitting the profits fifty-fifty, but the German spy-runner was, at present, deactivated: “I was able to deduce that he was at present out of touch with all Service matters.” Garbo asked his Abwehr control if the wild letters he’d sent from London had made him sound crazy. Kühlenthal confirmed what MI5 had always suspected, that “on the contrary those letters had in themselves been evidence of Garbo’s good faith and honesty.” But above all, Kühlenthal marveled at the superagent who had represented the pinnacle of his career in the Abwehr. “He thought me almost a God, saying that he still did not know what advice to give me.”