To maintain his growing reputation, however, Garbo needed to demonstrate access to high-grade material. He therefore sent two letters, both containing correct information: the first accurately reported a convoy leaving the Clyde on October 29 (“I fulfil my duty by advising you of this danger”); the second relayed information, obtained through the Ministry of Information, indicating an imminent invasion of French North Africa. The B1A team contrived to ensure that these arrived in Spain on the eve of the invasion, too late to be of any use.
The Germans were wholly unprepared when Allied forces landed at Casablanca, Algiers, and Oran in early November. Pujol’s handlers were pleased, nonetheless, by the evidence of his loyalty and efficiency, even if the postal system had stymied his efforts. “Your last reports are all magnificent but we are sorry they arrived late, especially those relating to the Anglo-Yankee embarkation in North Africa.” Bevan was promptly promoted. But Masterman was too hard-eyed a realist to claim credit for the Double Cross team: “The success was not primarily a triumph for deception, and still less for the double-agent system.” The Germans seemed, in fact, to have fooled themselves into thinking that the Allies lacked sufficient shipping for such an invasion. The system might not yet be powerful enough to make the enemy believe a false plan, but it had helped disguise the real plan. Here was an exhilarating foretaste of what the spies might be able to achieve in the future.
With the eye of a successful coach, Masterman looked back on the season with satisfaction. By the end of 1942 “the team was distinctly stronger,” he wrote. Some impressive new players were stepping up to the crease, in the shape of Bronx and Brutus. Garbo was piling on the runs. Tricycle was back in the squad. But cricket and espionage are games of patience as well as skill. “If the agents were ever to have their big day in the future, they had to be built up and maintained so that at the right moment we could be sure that we had a team of trusted agents who would be ready when called upon.” The players, Masterman knew, are only the most visible parts of a successful team: winning also depends on the trainers, the specialist advisers, the backroom staff.
The double agents were a mixed, even a motley crew, but the men and women who ran the Double Cross system were, in some ways, even odder. Tar Robertson deliberately gathered around him people who were out of the ordinary. Their very strangeness set them apart from the herd, reinforcing secrecy but also a sense of exclusive camaraderie that a more conventional unit would never have achieved. There was John Masterman, dry and deliberate, “an older, wiser statesman to stop the inexperienced young hotheads from doing something totally irresponsible.” Masterman could be “guaranteed to argue each side of an issue with total logic and lucidity” and then “come down with a dull thud on the side of the status quo.” John Marriott, the sharp-tongued Cambridge-educated solicitor, who did little to disguise his opinion that double agents were only one step removed from crooks, and that a short one; Tommy Harris, the extrovert art dealer; Billy Luke, the pleasure-loving industrialist; Cyril Mills from the world of the circus; and Hugh Astor, the scion of a newspaper dynasty. Each had been diverted from a more orthodox military path: Christopher Harmer was almost blind in one eye and therefore precluded from advancement in the service; childhood polio had left Astor with a permanent limp; Ian Wilson could handle humanity brilliantly on paper but found personal conversation almost impossible. Gisela Ashley would have made a fine military officer, had she not had the misfortune to be a woman. Ewen Montagu was too old for frontline action, and Masterman was troubled by guilt because he had been interned in Germany during the First World War and had missed the action, and sacrifice, that claimed so many of his contemporaries. Unable to do battle physically, they compensated by devoting their talents to a form of intellectual warfare.
From behind their desks, these men and women fought a specialized conflict “without any training whatsoever,” using language, ideas, and information as others fought with guns and bombs. It was the indefatigable Gisela Ashley who urged the team to come up with ever more extravagant forms of deception and never to underestimate the literalness of the German mind. “What may appeal to an Englishman, even an Englishman engaged in double-crossing, as absurd, unlikely or naïve, may be the very thing that a typical Nazi would swallow and do.”
Just as the double agents lived double lives, so each officer had to try to inhabit the life of his agent. “The case officer had to identify himself with his case,” wrote Masterman. “He had to see with the eyes and hear with the ears of his agent; he had to suffer himself the nervous prostrations which might follow an unusually dangerous piece of espionage; he had to rejoice with his whole heart at the praise bestowed by the Germans for a successful stroke.” More than that, the case officers had to imagine themselves into the lives of their German opposite numbers, after the “most careful psychological study.” Through Elvira Chaudoir’s letters, Hugh Astor sought to understand what made Helmut Bleil, her German handler, tick; Ian Wilson found himself trying to fathom the corrupt and charming Ludovico von Karsthoff; Tommy Harris began to feel something like kinship with Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, whose eager gullibility was the key to Garbo’s fictional world. These were intimate enemies.
Handling such fissile human materiel, for such high stakes, was an emotionally demanding and highly stressful business. “We were playing with dynamite,” said Masterman. Some, like Wilson, drank too much pink gin to alleviate the strain. Everyone smoked, all the time. Yet there was also a unique brand of merriment in the cramped and smoky rooms of St James’s Street, a sense that their shared mission was not only important but occasionally fun and frequently absurd. Gisela Ashley found herself stumped, in a message to Popov, by a reference to the “Gonorrhoea expert without hairs.” Who could the Germans be alluding to? Popov himself was miraculously free of VD. “This might be a heavily jocular reference to Johnny Jebsen,” Wilson suggested, with convoluted delicacy. “What we know of his habits makes the suggested description not entirely inapt. The hair on his head is described as thick, but the reference may not be to his head.” This was, truly, a strange war.
Much of the work was done on paper, with the careful gathering and sifting of material, the drafting and redrafting of messages. The Double Cross system was, in part, a triumph of filing. Masterman insisted that “only a well-kept record can save the agent from blunders which may ‘blow’ him or inconsistencies which may create suspicion.” The B1A files grew to “a truly formidable size,” each one indexed and cross-referenced, since “the messages of any one agent had to be consistent with the messages sent by him at an earlier date and not inconsistent with the messages of other agents.” The evidence on enemy intelligence officers and agents grew to more than twenty volumes, a veritable who’s who of German spying. The Garbo case alone would swell to twenty-one files, more than a million pieces of paper. The Germans continued to send over spies, though in dwindling number since the existing ones were doing such a good job: Josep Terradellas, a Catalan separatist who was turned to become “Agent Lipstick”; Waldemar Janowsky, a German landed by U-boat in Canada who was run jointly with Royal Canadian Mounted Police and MI5. The most remarkable new arrival was Eddie Chapman, the British safecracker parachuted into East Anglia in December 1942, who would become “Agent Zigzag.” Each fresh arrival, each intercepted spy, each potential new double agent, added to the strength of the system and the mountain of paper.
With some trepidation, it was decided to introduce Winston Churchill to the Double Cross story. The hesitation did not spring from any sense that the prime minister was uninterested in spies. Quite the reverse; he was fascinated by deception and would look back on wartime espionage with glee: “Tangle within tangle, plot and counter-plot, ruse and treachery, cross and double-cross, true agent, false agent, double agent, gold and steel, the bomb, the dagger and the firing party, were interwoven in many a texture so intricate as to be incredible and yet true.” In fact, Churchill was far too interested in the delicate business of espionage, and the
re was a danger he might interfere. The Twenty Committee was unofficially approved by Churchill but not subject to ministerial responsibility. That way, the committee “could not claim to have been ‘authorised’ to do” what they were doing, much of which was, strictly speaking, illegal. Today this would be called “plausible deniability.” The arrangement gave the Double Cross team unusual freedom, and it kept Churchill at arm’s length. When it was first proposed that the prime minister should be informed of what was actually going on, Guy Liddell, the head of B Section, feared that he might, “on seeing some particular item, go off the deep end and want to take action, which will be disastrous to the work in hand.” But by the beginning of 1943, the system was running so well, its potential so great, and its substance so certain to appeal to Churchill’s vivid imagination, that it was agreed to introduce him to the cast and the drama, a little at a time.
The first monthly report to Winston Churchill, in March 1943, offered an espionage inventory. “In all, 126 spies have fallen into our hands. Of these, twenty-four have been found amenable and are now being used as Double Cross agents. In addition twelve real, and seven imaginary persons have been foisted upon the enemy as Double Cross spies. Thirteen spies have been executed.” The report described Garbo, Zigzag, and Mutt and Jeff, who had just received a wireless, two hundred pounds in notes, and sabotage equipment via parachute in a remote Scottish glen. Churchill was riveted. Across the report he scrawled: “Deeply interesting.”
In time he would be introduced to Tricycle, Brutus, and Bronx. The reports were drafted by Anthony Blunt, who drew up a long version that was then boiled down for the prime minister; Agent Tony also passed the information to his Soviet handlers. Stalin was fully versed in the Double Cross system: indeed, as Christopher Andrew, the authorized historian of MI5, writes, the Soviet leader may well have “seen more detailed reports than Churchill.”
The prime minister’s marginalia showed why it had been wise not to get him too involved too early. When informed that a clerk at the Portuguese embassy was spying for both the Germans and the Italians, he wrote: “Why don’t you shoot him?” But Churchill did not go off the deep end; instead he was gradually immersed in the story, the strange tale of cross and double cross, true agent, false agent, double agent.
Elvira Chaudoir was shaping up to be a “very competent letter-writing agent,” reported Masterman. The tap on her telephone had produced “no evidence of any pro-German sentiments” and was maintained “merely to keep an eye on her financial position.” This was, as usual, dire. Unpaid bills from various nightclubs showed that Elvira was enjoying her return to London’s “high spots.” “She plays bridge or poker every night, principally at the Hamilton Club or Crockford’s, obviously for high stakes,” her MI5 minder reported. “She is not engaged in any sinister activity,” although he added: “It is not known whether she is continuing in her Lesbian tendencies.” (She was.)
Under the watchful eye of Hugh Astor, she began sending letters in secret ink to Helmut Bleil, care of Banco Espírito Santo in Lisbon and the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo. The cover letters consisted of “completely meaningless feminine chat,” according to Astor. “This text is so much in her own style (which is very far removed from anything I could produce) that in my opinion any attempt to interfere with it would be liable to show that the text was written under control.” Between the lines, writing in capital letters with a matchstick dipped in secret ink, she began to record items that might be of interest to Bleil. Initially, her observations were banal: “Last week I saw a man unloading a lorry full of foodstuffs into an old empty house next to the church at Roehampton.” But as she grew more confident, she and Astor began to insert half-truths, rumors, elements of propaganda, and harmless military details. “Her friends are to be found in any of the smart bridge clubs in London,” wrote Astor, and “as a friend of several English ‘socialites’ she has been in a position to pick up much indiscreet gossip from Government circles.” Among her acquaintance were aristocrats such as Lord Carnarvon, the Duke of Marlborough, Duff Cooper, head of the Security Executive, and a number of senior military officers.
In addition to reporting items of interest she had really heard, with Astor’s guidance Elvira made up additional snippets and attributed them to individuals she might plausibly claim to have met, including Churchill’s son-in-law and the chairman of a War Cabinet committee, Duncan Sandys, and the press barons Lords Beaverbrook and Kelmsley. As ever, MI5 had no scruples about putting words in the mouths of real people. “We took great care to make every detail as authentic as possible,” Astor later recalled. “I’m afraid we took the names of a good many people in vain. We certainly suggested that the [former] War Minister, Oliver Stanley, and peers such as Lord Lovat and Lord Mountbatten were among her circle of friends. Of course, they had no idea Bronx was attributing some splendid indiscretions to them. If they’d known, they’d have been furious.” To supplement her income, Elvira wrote vigorously anti-Nazi articles for the British popular press, for which she apologized to Bleil in her secret letters: “I hope you won’t mind reading my article in Sunday Graphic as it was essential that I should get the reputation for hating Germany.”
The sum of one hundred pounds soon landed in her Swiss bank account, the first monthly payment from the Germans. It was a drop in the ocean of her debts. Harmer advised the MI5 accountants to be generous: “As she is a woman with expensive tastes, we would come off better if we allowed her to keep what the Germans sent her.” The deposits to her account arrived with “satisfactory regularity,” but they were always “minus several hundred pounds,” suggesting that “somebody on their side is taking a rake-off.” This fresh evidence of corruption planted the seed of an idea. Bronx sent a letter suggesting that Bleil or his associates should send her a large sum of money that she could invest, on their behalf, on the British stock exchange. “It was hoped that an unscrupulous member of the Abwehr might see in this an opportunity of getting capital out of Germany” and creating “a nest egg for after the war.” The money, of course, would be appropriated, enabling the case to become self-financing and solving her money problems. Elvira, needless to say, was enthusiastic about the plan and extremely cross when her German handlers “ignored this suggestion.” The Germans might be gullible, but they were not so foolish as to employ a woman with a gambling habit as a secret stockbroker.
Initially, Elvira’s reports consisted of economic morsels; as time went on, her range widened to include reports on political and military affairs. Her letters were a strange, almost surreal, mixture of the mundane, the personal, and the important. “Tank production retarded by lack of tracks,” she reported. “Heavily in debt. Canadian invasion practices in Scotland. Increased number of American troops in London. Shortage of kitchen utensils.” She insisted on swift and regular payments: “Money must be sent at beginning of month. Serious risk and no claims for expenses.” When the Germans asked for information on gas warfare defenses, she gave “a glowing account of the excellence of British preparations” and pointed out that “the British had developed large stockpiles of chemical weapons to retaliate if the Germans resorted to a gas attack.” Masterman believed her report had helped to dissuade the Germans from mounting a gas attack, possibly saving many lives and proving that “we can in some instances influence and perhaps change the operational intentions of the enemy.”
The only fly in the ointment sat in the Secret Intelligence Service next door. Claude Dansey, deputy chief of MI6, took every opportunity to poison his protégée’s mind against MI5, telling her that she was being grossly underpaid. “He has apparently said that he did not think we were working along the right lines,” Astor reported through gritted teeth. “It is interesting to note that the case is being supervised by Dansey in this indirect manner.” Interesting and extremely annoying. A formal complaint was lodged, which only encouraged Dansey to redouble his interference.
MI5 began to wonder whether it was Bleil or someone pretending to be
him who replied with letters in secret ink, praising her work. “We have no knowledge of which section is running Bronx or who are the officers in control of her case,” wrote Astor. Even so, references to a female agent, “a member of the international smart gambling set,” began to appear in Most Secret Sources, indicating satisfaction at a high level with this new spy at the heart of the British social scene. “Bronx is believed to be a reliable agent,” Astor recorded. “It may be of course that Bleil or the officers running her know, or assume, that she is under control, but there is every reason to believe that the HQ at Berlin are led to believe that she is a reliable agent.” Six months after her return to Britain, Elvira was given a formal seal of approval: “The evidence suggests that the Germans believe in Bronx.”
The clouds of doubt surrounding Agent Brutus took longer to disperse. The radio technicians of B1A constructed a wireless using the crystals he had brought from France, and under close supervision Roman Czerniawski made his first radio contact with Paris shortly before Christmas 1942. The enthusiastic response from Oscar Reile, his German handler, suggested he had complete confidence in his agent. The same could not be said of the British, who still wondered whether the Germans had sent him to the UK knowing he would switch sides. “They had studied him from the psychological standpoint,” Masterman observed. “If they convinced themselves that he had thrown them over, his traffic from this country could be a source of great danger to us,” since they would read his messages “in reverse.” If, for example, he passed on evidence of an attack on Denmark, then the Germans, knowing he was controlled, would conclude that Denmark was safe. The Twenty Committee ruled that Brutus should be run “sparingly” and not used for operational deception. He would be “allowed to lead a free and normal life,” but under close scrutiny, his telephone bugged and his mail opened. The Polish intelligence service also put him under surveillance. One false move and he would be joining Mathilde Carré in prison.
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