Artillery of Lies

by Derek Robinson

  He was recruited in a fashion typical of the day. He was in Brown’s, a club which had a lot of members who were obviously decent chaps, and someone he occasionally played backgammon with came up to him at the bar and asked him if he might be interested in doing something interesting. Freddy said he might. It all depended on what and where and why and how long. Hard to say, the man said. We do lots of different things in lots of different places, all for the same reason, and we’ll go on doing them as long as this war lasts. It’s not boring. They had lunch, then Freddy went with him, and by teatime he was a spy.

  He had dual nationality, and until the fall of France he floated around Europe on his Spanish passport, doing harm and good by stealth and subterfuge. What he mainly did was help talented Jewish scientists escape from Germany. The man in Brown’s had been right: it was not boring. After the fall of France, he joined MI5’s new B1A section, which ran the Double-Cross System.

  “They tell me your Mr. Cabrillo is a bit of a handful,” Freddy Garcia said.

  “Two handfuls, actually,” Templeton said. “You don’t get Luis without Julie Conroy. Very pretty, very American, very head-screwed-on.”

  “Damn. Where on earth did he pick up Miss Conroy?”

  “Madrid, and it’s Mrs. Conroy.”

  “Double damn.”

  “It’s all in the Eldorado file,” Templeton said. “I suggest you read the file before you make any judgments.” He hoisted a fat bundle of papers from his briefcase.

  “Crikey.” Garcia weighed the bundle on his palms. “He’s been busy, hasn’t he?”

  “The Abwehr certainly think so. I’ll get the kitchen to send you up some sandwiches at lunchtime. It’s a jolly good read.”

  Templeton went out. Freddy Garcia put the bundle on a table and tugged at the ends of the tape around it until they came loose. The first page was headed Origins. He found a deep armchair and began to read.

  CODENAME: “ELDORADO”

  AGENT: Luis Jorge Ricardo CABRILLO

  NATIONALITY: Spanish

  AGE: 24 (b. September 9, 1918)

  LANGUAGES: Fluent English (self-taught), some French

  POLITICS: None (anti-Fascist and anti-Communist)

  EDUCATION: Varied. Cabrillo claims to have attended 27 different schools in 13 towns and to have been expelled from 23 of them. (As an employee of Spanish State Railways, his father moved from town to town.)

  Spanish Civil War

  Having left school at the age of 15 and tried many jobs, Cabrillo was a taxi-driver (aged 17) in Granada, specializing in tourists, when the Civil War broke out. He soon found profitable work as chauffeur/interpreter for English and American war correspondents. Cabrillo claims he became expert at “discovering” appropriate news to suit the political slant of any reporter’s newspaper (e.g. Guernica was destroyed either by German bombs or by the dynamite of Republican saboteurs); for this he got well paid. The work took him back and forth through the Republican and Nationalist lines and grew increasingly dangerous. Both sides suspected him of spying. He was nearly arrested in Guernica shortly after the bombing but escaped. In the course of his escape a Nationalist army officer chasing him was killed (accidentally, Cabrillo says) and Cabrillo somehow acquired a very large sum of money.

  He went into hiding for the next four years. The first two, he spent moving about northern Spain, keeping clear of areas of the fighting, always traveling on foot and pretending to be a poor peasant. When the war ended (March 1939) he moved to Madrid and rented a small apartment. He claims not to have left it for the next two years—he was still on the wanted list of Franco’s police in 1939 and 1940—and spent all his time reading books in English, thus acquiring a huge, if miscellaneous and secondhand, knowledge of life in Britain.

  Introduction to intelligence work

  By May 1941 Cabrillo’s money had run out. He emerged from hiding and applied to the British embassy for work as a spy. As he had no experience apart from his job with the war correspondents, no contacts in Occupied Europe and no knowledge of German, the embassy turned him down.

  Cabrillo immediately went to the German embassy and offered to spy for the Axis cause. (He now asserts that this move was intended to give him valuable inside knowledge of the workings of German military intelligence which he could later offer to British Intelligence.) It seems that Madrid Abwehr were impressed by his initiative and imagination and agreed to train him. This they did, very thoroughly: he learned codes, secret writing, gunmanship, unarmed combat, Morse transmission, radio maintenance and repair, technique of microdots, landing by rubber dinghy, principles of military intelligence, conversion of British systems of weights, measures and currencies, how to recruit sub-agents, the psychology of espionage. According to Cabrillo he scored well in everything except gunmanship and radio.

  The Abwehr must have been confident of Cabrillo’s value because he survived two potential disasters. The lesser involved his friendship with an American woman, Mrs. Julie Conroy, whom he met at the German embassy; she was seeking information about her husband, an American journalist, thought to be somewhere in Europe. Their friendship ripened but so did Mrs. Conroy’s anti-Nazi views, which she expressed openly. This disturbed Brigadier Christian (then head of Madrid Abwehr); however, Cabrillo persuaded him that a vehemently anti-Nazi girlfriend was excellent cover for an Abwehr agent. In any case Mrs. Conroy left Madrid for America (or so Christian believed) and the crisis passed.

  More serious was the involvement of Freddy Ryan, an MI6 agent who was infiltrated as a potential Abwehr agent. Ryan trained alongside Cabrillo until something (or someone) betrayed him. The Abwehr shot him, in Cabrillo’s presence. Cabrillo might have been considered guilty (or at least suspect) by association; in the event Christian seems to have decided that Ryan’s death had so frightened Cabrillo that he had been cleansed of any possible disloyalty.

  Madrid Abwehr planned to land Cabrillo in England by rubber dinghy from a U-boat. He took strong exception to this, pointing out that since he was a Spanish neutral he could go by ship or air to Britain, traveling as a businessman. He further persuaded them that he had arranged a method of communication which was better than radio: he would use friends in the Spanish embassy in London to send his reports by diplomatic bag to Lisbon, where another contact would forward them to Madrid. Christian agreed to these arrangements and Cabrillo left Madrid for England, traveling alone, on July 23, 1941.

  Creation of the Eldorado Network

  Cabrillo went no further than Lisbon. He rented an office and an apartment and began sending his reports to Madrid; the first arrived only a week after his departure and was warmly welcomed. As he got into his stride he maintained a steady output of two, sometimes three, extensive reports per week, covering virtually every aspect of the war in which the Abwehr was interested, from Atlantic convoy patterns and scales of food rationing, to secret tank trials and new airfields, as well as political intelligence about the strategic policies of the various Allied governments. Quite rapidly, Abwehr HQ in Berlin began to attach considerable importance to Eldorado reports. Digests and analyses of them were routinely forwarded to the German High Command and even to Hitler’s headquarters.

  Cabrillo has described how he was able to maintain such a continuous stream of apparently high-grade “intelligence.” He names three factors:

  (1) His wide knowledge of English life, the product of two years’ ceaseless reading in Madrid.

  (2) His use of three works of reference which he had found in Lisbon, namely: the 1923 Michelin Guide to Great Britain; Holiday Haunts, published by the Great Western Railway in 1937; and a school geography textbook, Exploring the British Isles by Jasper H. Stembridge, Book 4.

  (3) His creative formula, which consists of looking at what is actually happening in the war, then asking himself the question: “What would the Germans most like to hear?,” and shaping his answer into something that resembles military intelligence.

  Cabrillo wasted no time in recruiting sub-agents and
communication assistants. The latter were codenamed BLUEBIRD and STORK, minor officials in the Spanish embassies in London and Lisbon; the former were SEAGULL, a Communist foreman in the Liverpool docks, and KNICKERS, a traveling soft-drinks salesman in southeast England. In due course at least seven more sub-agents were supposedly recruited:

  GARLIC—a Venezuelan medical student in Glasgow

  NUTMEG—a retired army officer working for the Ministry of Food in Cambridge

  WALLPAPER—a lecturer at the University of Birmingham, probably homosexual

  HAYSTACK—manager of a London hotel

  PINETREE—British employee in the American embassy

  HAMBONE—telephone operator in Plymouth

  DONKEY—telephone engineer in Belfast

  Naturally, all these members of the Eldorado Network had to be paid for the information or services they provided, as did Cabrillo himself. Before he left Madrid, the Abwehr had opened accounts for him in Switzerland and Lisbon; now they rewarded him generously. By the end of 1941 he had received almost £50,000.

  During the summer and autumn of 1941, MIS began to receive intercepts of some of the Eldorado reports. At that time, these appeared to be authentic and it was assumed that Eldorado was in fact operating from Britain. All attempts to locate the agent were of course doomed to failure.

  Mrs. Conroy

  In Lisbon there were several interesting developments. Mrs. Conroy stumbled across Cabrillo’s path and tracked him down. It says something for the persuasiveness of his reports that when she first read them (after breaking into his office) she was so convinced that he was a German agent that she tried to shoot him, using an old revolver she had found in a file cabinet. Fortunately, she missed; Cabrillo was able to convince her that he was a freelance operator working entirely for his own benefit and that if anything he told the Abwehr was true, this was pure coincidence. Thereafter Mrs. Conroy joined him; they lived and worked together. She provided a useful double-check on his reports and was instrumental in detecting and correcting several mistakes which might well have betrayed him.

  Bradburn & Wedge

  At the same time the Portuguese Ministry of Taxation took note of the fact that Cabrillo seemed to be running a business of some kind, and required him to supply details. To satisfy the Ministry, and to create a cover, Cabrillo and Conroy set up a genuine business called Bradburn & Wedge, a name they had found in the 1923 Michelin, and began trading in such items as lemonade crystals, de-greasing patents, and soap. (An accountant was engaged to handle their tax returns and the company flourished, albeit on a small scale.)

  Cabrillo continued to expand his imaginary network. He had every encouragement from Madrid Abwehr whose payments and questionnaires served as guides to those areas of intelligence in which they were especially interested. However, Mrs. Conroy became concerned about the mounting risk that the flood of intelligence emerging from Eldorado would sooner or later contain an element of truth (for instance, details of a convoy route) with disastrous results for the Allies (e.g. interception by U-boats). She therefore persuaded Cabrillo to apply again at the British embassy and volunteer his services for the Allied cause.

  Rebuffed by MI6

  Cabrillo did volunteer. Through sheer bad luck he was interviewed by William Witteridge. We know now that Witteridge was totally unsuited to work in an intelligence agency, given his almost complete lack of imagination and a profound distrust of his colleagues. Shortly after his meeting with Cabrillo he was transferred to the Khartoum office, but from his brief notes of the interview it seems that Witteridge demanded Cabrillo’s undivided loyalty: i.e. if he wished to join the British Secret Service he must first resign from his German employment. Witteridge was apparently incapable of getting his mind around the concept of a double-agent, and so for a second time Cabrillo’s offer was rejected by British Intelligence.

  Abwehr agent “Eagle”

  Meanwhile one of the Abwehr controllers in Madrid, Otto Krafft, had recruited another agent in Britain, an American businessman codenamed EAGLE. This led to a crisis in Cabrillo’s operations when Eldorado submitted a report on the British output of light alloys which directly contradicted a report on the same subject received from Eagle. Brigadier Christian ordered the two agents to meet on a specified date at a given rendezvous—Manchester railway station—in order to resolve their disagreement. This was obviously impossible and at first Cabrillo thought his network had been blown. Then he discovered that someone in Lisbon was trying to intercept the Abwehr’s order to him concerning the rendezvous. Cabrillo succeeded in following the man to business premises in Oporto and asked him to explain his behavior. The man attacked him and in self-defense Cabrillo killed him. When Cabrillo searched his office he learned that the dead man was Eagle, and that Eagle was the brother of Otto Krafft. It seems certain that Otto Krafft had seen the potential for earning large sums of money by selling invented information to the Abwehr and that he had established his brother as a fictitious agent, supposedly in England but actually in Oporto. (Phony agents of this kind have, of course, always been the bane of intelligence agencies. Eagle had one great advantage in that Otto Krafft could advise him what to write; it was pure bad luck that he chose to write about British light alloys.)

  When Eagle (as Eldorado reported) failed to keep the rendezvous, Christian’s faith in Eldorado was restored. Cabrillo had had a lucky escape. His response to this was to work harder than ever in order to fill the vacuum left by Eagle. He added more sub-agents; his appetite for creating fake intelligence seemed limitless. At the same time his relationship with Mrs. Conroy, always variable, became occasionally stormy as she recognized the mounting risks of swindling the Abwehr on such a scale, while he talked of becoming the first spy millionaire.

  MI6 again: no joy

  The next development, early in 1942, came about because Cabrillo had met Charles Templeton (MI6, Lisbon), whom he trusted to some extent—they had shared hazardous experiences in the Civil War. Templeton persuaded him to apply yet again to work for the British. By now Witteridge had gone from MI5 and the fact that Cabrillo was Eldorado had begun to sink in. Unfortunately Witteridge’s replacement also took completely the wrong line with Cabrillo. His tone was brusque and impatient; he insisted that Cabrillo had no choice but to join the department. Cabrillo thought otherwise. The meeting was a failure.

  Abwehr request rendezvous

  Almost immediately Cabrillo got a summons to meet Brigadier Christian in a Lisbon hotel in four days’ time. The great risk inherent in keeping this appointment was obvious: if the Abwehr had cause to suspect Cabrillo then Christian would seize him and he would face interrogation and almost certain death. Partly as a reaction against his treatment at the British embassy and partly because he was loath to abandon his network when it was so profitable, Cabrillo decided to meet Christian. He was astonished to be awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class, for his services to the Reich.

  The occasion was all the more remarkable as Christian was accompanied by Wolfgang Adler, an Abwehr officer who had never concealed the fact that he disliked and distrusted Cabrillo. After Christian and Adler left, Mrs. Conroy joined Cabrillo and they celebrated the award. Then Adler unexpectedly returned, announced that he wanted to go over to the British, and asked Cabrillo to help him.

  Adler’s thinking was that a German victory was impossible, the war must end to avoid further atrocities, and he (Adler) could tell the British everything about the Abwehr organization and operations. Behind Adler’s request was the implication that he knew Cabrillo to be a double-agent and therefore able to get in touch with British Intelligence. When Adler became insistent, Cabrillo reluctantly contacted Templeton, but Templeton’s reply was that British Intelligence had no use for Adler since there was nothing new he could tell them. At the same time, Mrs. Conroy pointed out to Cabrillo that if Adler was allowed to defect he would effectively destroy the Eldorado Network since the Abwehr must assume that he had betrayed its existence to MI5.

 
; Cabrillo now tried to delay Adler, saying the British were not ready for him and he should wait in Madrid. Adler rejected this. He said that he must go to England at once as he had just murdered Brigadier Christian (by strangulation) in the German embassy. (Cabrillo believes that Adler was not altogether mentally stable, a condition aggravated by his recent service on the Russian Front. Also, murdering Christian may have been a way of burning his boats.) Thus Cabrillo—by now highly anxious—was left with no choice but to take Adler to the British embassy. Before they could arrive there, Adler collapsed in the street and died, apparently from a heart attack but actually from the effects of a fast-acting poison administered by one of our men using a hidden syringe. Templeton was on the spot; he took Cabrillo and Conroy to the embassy, where at last a deal was struck and the Eldorado Network was absorbed into the Double-Cross System.

  Eldorado and Torch

  Cabrillo and Conroy remained in Lisbon. From now on their work was integrated with the overall Allied policy for disinformation—principally the deception plans preceding Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa. Here, Eldorado’s reports seem to have been highly effective in persuading the enemy that an invasion of Greece was being planned; indeed, German military resources were transferred to the eastern Mediterranean shortly before Allied troops landed at the western end.

  This, it was assumed, would mark the end of Eldorado: surely the Abwehr would cease to trust an informant who had so completely pointed them in the wrong direction. In the event, this did not happen and we can only assume that Madrid gave Eldorado credit for faithfully reporting a major Allied diversionary exercise which was meant to deceive the enemy; as such it was sound military intelligence and Eldorado would have been at fault if he had not detected it. In any event, the Abwehr continued to pay Eldorado and therefore we saw no reason to wind up the Network; quite the reverse. This being so, it was decided to transfer Cabrillo and Mrs. Conroy to England where they could more easily be integrated with the rest of the Double-Cross effort.