By the end of 1942, the Garbo network included an airline employee, the courier who supposedly smuggled Garbo’s letters to Lisbon, a wealthy Venezuelan student named Carlos living in Glasgow, his brother in Aberdeen, a Gibraltarian waiter in Chislehurst whose anti-British feelings were said to be exacerbated because “he found the climate in Kent very disagreeable,” a senior official in the Spanish section of the Ministry of Information, an anti-Soviet South African, and a Welsh ex-seaman living in Swansea described by Pujol as a “thoroughly undesirable character.” The personality, activities, and messages of each spy were carefully imagined, refined, and entered in a logbook. Some of these subagents were supposedly conscious collaborators, while others were unwitting sources of secret information; some were given names, while others remained anonymous. The information they theoretically supplied was written up in secret ink and dispatched inside innocuous letters that the Germans believed were either brought by courier or sent by airmail to various cover addresses in neutral Spain and Portugal. In fact, they were transported in MI6’s diplomatic bag. Pujol’s subagents were able to correspond with the Germans independently after he was authorized to supply them with secret ink; those agents then began recruiting their own sub-subagents. The network began to self-replicate and metastasize, until the work of Pujol and Harris came to resemble a limitless, multicharacter, ever-expanding novel.
The early objective of the Garbo network, in the words of Harris, was “to swamp the Germans with information, misinformation and problems.” The information, true and false, was vetted by the Twenty Committee; the problems were the fruit of pure creativity; all of it was written up in Pujol’s bombastic style. “I do not wish to end this letter without sending a Viva Victorioso for our brave troops who fight in Russia, annihilating the Bolshevik beast.” If the Germans could be inundated by this deluge of intelligence, “in as much confusing bulk as possible,” from myriad fake spies, it would at the very least dissuade them from trying to send over any more genuine ones. “The greater the work we caused them to put into the Garbo case, the more they would become conscious of his importance to them.” By continually emphasizing “the fanatical loyalty, the quixotic temperament and the untiring energy” of Pujol himself, MI5 could make the Germans increasingly dependent on this “temperamental genius” who needed to be placated and flattered at all times. They sent money, encouragement, and ever more extravagant “expressions of high satisfaction.”
In response, Juan Pujol threw periodic hissy fits. His tone was that of a testy and demanding lover: “Why have I been made to suffer?” His complaints were exhaustingly long-winded: “I want you to know that if it were not for the esteem which I feel personally for you, which I feel you reciprocate, as well as the interest which I have in helping our cause for which I have fought for three years during our war, and continue to fight for, though in a more responsible position in order to terminate this plague of Reds, I must tell you that in all sincerity, and as a friend, that I would have returned to Spain some time ago.” The relationship between Pujol and his handler, Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, began to resemble an abusive marriage in which one partner holds the other in abject submission. Pujol battered Kühlenthal with verbiage. “The more we dictated our terms, the more they cooperated; the more arrogant and temperamental Garbo became, the more considerate they were in return.”
The information provided by the Garbo network was voluminous but of strictly limited worth: low-grade military information, political gossip, reflections on public opinion, the occasional item of real deception, and physical evidence when this was requested, such as gas-mask crystals sent to Spain inside a tin of Andrew’s Liver Salts. When Garbo did send important, real information, this was carefully timed to arrive too late to be of use. It never occurred to Kühlenthal to wonder why items of little importance, such as gas-mask crystals, arrived promptly, whereas the most significant nuggets were invariably delayed in the postal system. It certainly occurred to John Marriott, Robertson’s silky deputy, who wondered how the Germans could fail to see their agents as people “who seldom or never say anything untrue, but who equally never say anything which is new.” The infatuated, dominated partner in any relationship tends to overlook, sometimes willfully, the small clues to infidelity. In German eyes, Garbo’s failure to supply high-grade information in a timely way was not his fault but theirs; and the more often he tried and failed, the more they loved him.
One by one, as the flock of double agents fluttered into MI5’s coop, Tar Robertson began to imagine new ways of combating German espionage and using enemy spies to Allied advantage. His thoughts, increasingly, turned to pigeons.
For some time, Robertson had been receiving long and detailed reports on “the possible uses, and actual uses, that Pigeons can be put to from the point of view of espionage.” (Pigeons, like Lesbians, frequently merited a capital letter.) The author of these reports was one Flight Lieutenant Richard Melville Walker, who headed one of the most secret and peculiar units of MI5: “The Pigeon Service Special Section, B3C,” charged with disrupting the enemy’s use of pigeons and deploying Allied pigeons for passing on secret intelligence.
To describe Flight Lieutenant Walker as a “pigeon fancier” does not quite do justice to the depth of his passion. He adored pigeons. He lived for pigeons. His reports were long, cooing poems of love. “Years of breeding have made the Carrier Pigeon into a thoroughbred,” he told Tar, with a “magical” ability to find its way home over a range of up to seven hundred miles. Walker wrote about his homing pigeons in the same way that Robertson described his most valued agents: “Out of a hundred birds of the same stock perhaps one will be that bird all breeders hope for—a bird of highly individual character, courageous and resourceful. Much depends on the individual bird and especially its character and intelligence.”
Britain had abandoned its military pigeon service after the First World War. But even before the outbreak of the Second World War, Walker had realized that Britain was falling behind Germany in the pigeon race, since these birds remained an important way of passing information across enemy lines: fast, reliable, and virtually impossible to intercept. The Nazis incorporated pigeons into the very heart of the Reich: each of Germany’s 57,000 pigeon fanciers had to have a certificate of political reliability from the Gestapo; Jews were banned from keeping pigeons, and the German Pigeon Federation was placed under the control of the SS. “Himmler, who has been a pigeon fancier and enthusiast all his life, has brought his enthusiasm for pigeons into the Gestapo,” Walker reported. Eugenics theories were applied to pigeons, and “any lofts where the pigeons did not come up to standard were wiped out.” In 1937, a pigeon race had been staged in which some 1,400 German pigeons were brought to Britain by plane and then released to fly home. Walker believed the race had been a cover “to accustom as many German pigeons as possible to the sea crossing from England to Germany.”
Walker was convinced that Nazi pigeons were now pouring into Britain, by parachute, high-speed motor launch, and U-boat, providing enemy spies in Britain with an undetectable method of sending information to occupied Europe. Walker was not alone in his pigeon paranoia: Basil Thomson, the veteran Scotland Yard spy catcher, observed: “It was positively dangerous to be seen in conversation with a pigeon.” Some experts claimed to be able to identify a pigeon with a German “accent.”
With MI5’s wholehearted backing, Flight Lieutenant Walker drew up maps of known pigeon lofts in occupied Europe and logged suspicious pigeon sightings (homing pigeons tend to fly in a telltale straight line, particularly across water). He argued that agents should be sent into occupied territory with a knapsack of pigeons rather than a wireless, since “they are easier to work and, once liberated, the agent has nothing incriminating to carry about.” Walker began to develop ever more elaborate ways for pigeons to carry secret messages: small holes burned with a fine nail in the feathers; a tiny roll of rice paper inserted into the hollow part of the main wing feather; messages in Morse code writt
en on the quills in waterproof ink. Evidence of enemy pigeon activity mounted: an exhausted bird dropped onto the Isles of Scilly, off the Cornish coast, with an intelligence message in French; two German pigeons were blown across the Channel in bad weather, carrying routine training messages. “Both birds are now prisoners of war, working hard breeding English pigeons,” Walker reported.
Flight Lieutenant Walker loved all pigeons, even enemy pigeons, but this was war. It was time to go on the attack. Walker brought in the falcons. In 1942, the falconry unit, comprising three peregrine falcons and a falconer, was established on the Isles of Scilly with the task of intercepting enemy pigeons: it would eventually bring down a total of twenty-three pigeons, every one of which turned out to be British. These incidents of what might now be called “friendly fire” did nothing to dampen Walker’s enthusiasm: “The falconry unit proved it could intercept pigeons,” he wrote triumphantly. Finally, the birds of prey went AWOL. But by this time Walker had come up with another ingenious plan. Homing pigeons are sociable creatures, and if a pigeon spots other pigeons flying about, it may join them and, particularly if tired, return with them to their home lofts. This gave Walker an idea: “If all the fanciers living within ten miles of the coast from Cornwall to Norfolk could be organised to form a screen” by releasing their birds at staggered intervals, then “any enemy pigeon on a homing flight would stand a good chance of coming across these pigeons exercising and would be tempted to join them.” Astonishingly, Walker was given permission to carry out the largest military deployment of pigeons ever attempted, a sort of aerial Home Guard. Walker boasted that the resulting screen “covered an area roughly ten miles deep all along the coast from Land’s End to Cromer.” It had no effect whatsoever for the simple reason that the Germans had never attempted to use pigeons to send messages from Britain. Walker did not mind: “Had they done so, it is fairly certain that the loft screen would have bagged a fair proportion of them.”
Walker’s pigeon reports received an enthusiastic and supportive reception from Tar Robertson. The idea of using pigeons for deception lodged somewhere in his fertile mind and would soon take flight.
10. True Agent, False Agent, Double Agent
As Brutus and Bronx joined the team and Garbo and Tricycle spun their webs tighter, it dawned on Tar Robertson that he had built a form of weaponry that could inflict some major damage. Garbo (Pujol) had bewitched the Abwehr in Madrid. Brutus (Czerniawski) had established a brand-new channel of communication to the Germans in occupied France (assuming he was not playing some fiendish triple game). Bronx (Elvira Chaudoir) was up and running, writing letters to a mysterious branch of German intelligence, and Tricycle’s (Popov) hold over the Lisbon branch of the Abwehr seemed even stronger, thanks to the corruption of his case officers. In each case the German spy handlers were being handled, unknowingly, by the spies: Garbo was running Kühlenthal; Brutus was in control of both Bleicher and Reile; Bronx had Bleil twisted around her elegantly manicured little finger; and Tricycle knew that the greed, ambition, and paranoia of von Karsthoff and Kammler had turned his relationship with the Germans 180 degrees. The double agents were now controlling their controllers.
The B1A team would later wonder why it had taken them so long to appreciate the full potential of the Double Cross system. Masterman put it down to an obsession with “the idea there might be a large body of spies over and above those whom we controlled.” By the summer of 1942, Robertson felt “reasonably certain” that no such body existed. Most Secret Sources gave no hint that the Abwehr was running any spies other than those already in the Double Cross team. By 1942, almost all the traffic of German intelligence services was being read, with over two hundred messages decrypted every day. From this trove of information MI5 constructed a detailed picture of German intelligence and its personnel, methods, strengths, and frailties; MI5 knew who its enemies were and what they were doing and thinking. Indeed, it probably knew more about the Abwehr than the Abwehr did.
In July 1942, emboldened and increasingly ambitious for his flock, Tar Robertson made an astonishing claim: he, and not Wilhelm Canaris, controlled the German espionage network in Britain, and as a consequence he could make Hitler and his generals think what he wanted them to think. The capabilities of this “powerful weapon” were laid out in a formal memo to the Twenty Committee: “The only network of agents possessed by the Germans in this country is that which is now under the control of the Security Service,” he wrote. “The Combined General Staff in this country have, in MI5 double agents, a powerful means of exercising influence over the OKW”—the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the supreme command of the German Armed Forces.
The implications of Robertson’s claim were extraordinary. Hitherto, the Double Cross organization had been used to catch more spies, extract information on German intentions, seduce the enemy into believing he already had a functioning spy network, spread propaganda, and influence enemy thinking, but only at the margins. After months of passing over chicken feed, true but harmless, there was now an opportunity to distribute information that was methodically misleading and potentially highly destructive. What had begun with the ad hoc interception and turning of enemy agents was developing into a genuine system in which the misleading information from one double agent could be bolstered by all the others, an intricate, self-reinforcing structure that could “fill the German files with what we want.” From the summer of 1942, the Twenty Committee began trying to influence overall German strategy, to burrow into Hitler’s thoughts in a way that could cause the Germans massive, and perhaps critical, damage.
“It was always in the back of our minds,” wrote Masterman, “that at some time in the distant future a great day would come when our agents would be used for a grand and final deception of the enemy.” For the moment, caution ruled. Canaris was known to boast about his network of agents in Britain, but the Abwehr was becoming wary: “The enemy is becoming increasingly ruthless and penetration of agent circles is not to be ruled out,” warned the Abwehr bosses in Berlin. The interconnected nature of the Double Cross system was a source of vulnerability as well as strength. As one German intelligence officer observed: “If one pearl is false, the whole string is false.” It would take just one mistake or betrayal to reveal to the Germans that not one, not a few, not even most, but all their agents were false. In that case, rather than Britain’s High Command shaping German thinking, Hitler would know exactly what falsehoods the British were trying to feed him and change his plans accordingly. For all his boldness, Robertson was haunted by the knowledge that if one of his double agents was really a triple agent, then far from unveiling a war-changing new weapon, he could be leading the Allies toward disaster: “It is always impossible to be certain in such cases whether the Germans are fooling us or we are fooling them,” he reflected. Gisela Ashley, B1A’s expert on the German mentality, sought to reassure him, insisting that while “the Nazis are very good double-crossers,” they lacked the patience and guile to set up a “carefully and cleverly worked out system of deception.”
“The very few really important agents,” it was agreed, “should be held in readiness for a large-scale deception which could at a crucial moment be of paramount operational importance.” This “glittering possibility,” as Masterman put it, was some way off, but it could be glimpsed in the distance, and it was brought an enormous step closer by the appointment as Britain’s chief deceiver of a man with “the most highly polished shoes in the British army.”
Colonel J. H. Bevan, the newest member of the Twenty Committee, was a straitlaced, cricket-playing, workaholic stockbroker of rare intelligence and impeccable attire. Johnny Bevan tended to judge others by appearances, taking particular exception to slovenly uniform, but there was probably no one in the British military establishment more acutely aware that appearances can be deceptive. From May 1942, he headed the London Controlling Section, known as LCS, with orders from Winston Churchill to “prepare deception plans on a worldwide basis” and put in tra
in “any matter calculated to mystify or mislead the enemy.” As controlling officer, Bevan would become the mastermind of wartime deception, overseeing a worldwide web of deceit and mystification from the underground warren beneath Whitehall known as the Cabinet War Rooms.
In September 1942, Bevan was inducted into the arcane world of Double Cross. For the rest of the war, the double agents, no longer an exotic sideshow, would be fully integrated into military operations. “We had an instrument which had been tried and tested and which we could offer to the Controlling Officer for his deception plans,” wrote Masterman. Bevan played this instrument like a virtuoso.
The initial test of Tar’s claim came with Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa in November 1942, the first great Allied amphibious offensive of the war. Bevan drew up a deception plan aimed at misleading the Germans into thinking the Allies intended to attack northern France and Norway while simultaneously attempting to relieve Malta. Among the double agents used to put across the deception were the two Norwegians, Mutt and Jeff, Tricycle’s subagents Balloon and Gelatine, and Tate. But the main burden fell on Garbo and his fictional network. He and his agents reported troops massing in Scotland apparently poised to attack Norway, preparations for a fictional cross-Channel assault, and numerous other tidbits that, when assembled, would encourage the Germans to tie down troops far from the real point of attack. At the very least they would sow confusion. Some of Garbo’s fake agents, it transpired, were simply too well placed for their own good. “William Gerbers” was a German-Swiss businessman living in Liverpool who had been conjured into being by Garbo before he even arrived in Britain. Ships and troops were massing in the Mersey for the invasion of North Africa; Gerbers, had he existed, would surely have seen them there. How to explain that this active agent had failed to report such an obvious prelude to invasion? The solution was simple and brutal: Gerbers was first rendered extremely ill with a “lingering malady” and then put to death. MI5 even inserted a death notice in the Liverpool Echo, which Pujol clipped out and sent to his handlers. The Germans sent a letter of condolence.
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