Agent Garbo (11 page)

As the sun warmed the interior of the small room, the three men came to the crux of the matter, the question Bristow had asked over and over again. Why was Pujol here? Why had he risked his life and that of his Spanish wife to spy for the Allies? Pujol nodded and said that his older brother, Joaquín, had been traveling in France when one day he stumbled on a terrible scene: the Gestapo conducting a wholesale slaughter of innocent people. Hearing Pujol tell it, the agents could almost hear the screams of the terrified men and women and the bark of the Walther PPKs, the Gestapo’s gun of choice. When Joaquín had returned home and told Juan the awful story, his younger brother had decided he had to fight Hitler, no matter the cost.

It was a grisly and moving story. It was also a complete fabrication.

Harris listened, nodding occasionally, rolling and smoking the Spanish black cigarettes he preferred. “[Pujol’s] motives for working against the Germans were obvious,” Bristow said. “He had all the right answers.”

As dusk approached, Bristow grew exhausted and suggested to Harris that they get a beer at the local pub. The two men said their goodbyes and walked down the path to Crespigny Road, Tommy Harris’s eyes twinkling.

What do you think? Bristow asked.

Harris raised his eyebrows, shook his head and smiled.

“Desmond, he is obviously Arabel, but I do find it hard to believe such an outwardly simple man still has the Germans fooled and had us worried for so long.”

Bristow nodded. He’d wondered the same thing. How could this naïve young man, not quite a rube but no master spy, be conning the best minds in the Abwehr?

As they walked toward the local hotel—Harris, the sophisticate, had suggested to Bristow that they have a glass of wine instead of a lager—the MI5 man gave his verdict. He told Bristow, “He is such a dreamer
. . . but he is going to be a marvelous double agent.”

Upstairs, Juan Pujol took another drag of one of Tommy Harris’s Spanish cigarettes and watched dusk fall across north London. It’s hard to believe, from what we know of him, that he wasn’t smiling.

As Pujol settled into his new role those first few weeks, gorging himself on enormous English breakfasts—he hadn’t tasted bacon in six long years—his hosts were just beginning to find a foothold in the shifting game of espionage.

One of the first requirements of intelligence is to acquire a picture of who the enemy is and what he intends to do. Early in the war, top Allied officers often had little insight into either of those things. One officer recalled a story
about Major General Mason-Macfarlane, director of military intelligence for the aging field marshal Lord Gort, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, one of the most important Allied leaders. One day Gort stuck his head around Mason-Macfarlane’s door.

“Bulgarians?” he asked. “Good chaps, aren’t they?”

“No, sir, not very good,” Mason-Macfarlane said.

“Oh! Bad chaps, eh? Pity, pity!” said Gort before disappearing.

When the old-school officer left, Mason-Macfarlane could only spread his hands wide “in a gesture of resignation.”

This ignorance extended to espionage, at least in the beginning. When the war started, the War Office had only a hazy idea of German strategy or capabilities. This was illustrated when an air raid signal sounded in London on September 3, 1939, the day after the outbreak of hostilities. The War Office’s entire staff descended to their bomb shelter, where a former military attaché who’d been through the Spanish Civil War listened to a series of blasts and told everyone that they were German bombs. The sounds had actually been doors slamming
in the offices above; there’d been no air raid, because the Luftwaffe didn’t yet have the resources to mount one and Hitler’s strategy at the time was to lure England into a peace treaty, not attack it.

Double agents worked in an area of intelligence that fell under the broad name “deception,” which was carried out by a host of outfits with a blizzard of acronyms: BiA, LCS, MI5, A Force, JPS, R Force. Despite the array of outfits, deception wasn’t a popular tactic in the British military at the beginning of the war. “We are bred up
to feel it is a disgrace ever to succeed by falsehood,” stated a plaque on the wall of Churchill’s bunker-like headquarters underneath Westminster. They were the words of Sir Garnet Wolseley, former commander in chief of the British army, from 1869. Wolseley’s point was that anyone who believed those words was doomed to fail, and that deception was essential in all wars. But if falsehood was a necessary part of beating the Germans, few British officers felt that way, at least early on.

It didn’t help matters that, because of the wartime squeeze on office space, the headquarters of MI5 were moved to the moldy cells of Wormwood Scrubs in west London. Common criminals could be seen milling around the prison’s exercise yard as intelligence analysts tried to get inside the minds of the German High Command. “Don’t go near them,”
a warder told female staff about the prisoners. “Some of them ain’t seen no women for years.” The cell—now office—doors
had no handles on the inside, and some MI5 agents spent terrifying hours locked in the malodorous, soundproof rooms.

Britain’s early deception efforts were often comically inept. Dennis Wheatley was one of the first recruits to the effort, a stout, bibulous former wine merchant and successful novelist who wrote tales of intrigue and occult magic with such titles as
To the Devil—a Daughter
and
They Used Dark Forces.
In 1941, he joined something called the Joint Planning Staff, an arm of the War Office, after writing a series of colorful papers on military strategy, some of which were read
by King George VI. Wheatley found the response to this “newfangled business”
of deception to be tepid at best. Generals didn’t want to lend their tanks and regiments to fool the Germans. Admirals blanched when it was suggested they redirect a destroyer or two to support an elaborate “crack-brained” plot that had emerged from Wheatley’s fertile imagination. British officers called the deception schemes “a racket,”
“a lot of nonsense,” “a shocking waste of time and material.” Some generals even refused to believe the Allies were engaged in such a thing, since information was given to the fewest possible decision makers. “The very fact that the Allies
were engaged in deception
at all,
” writes the historian Thaddeus Holt, “was a secret almost as closely held as Ultra or the Manhattan Project.” In fact, Pujol’s secret would be held far longer than J. Robert Oppenheimer’s.

And the original leaders of the deception effort were far from first rate. Wheatley’s first boss was a crusty old one-legged lieutenant colonel named Fritz Lumby, who every morning would limp into the office beneath Whitehall on his wooden leg and spend the first hour doing the
Times
crossword puzzle. Down the hall,
Churchill met with his cabinet in the war room, under huge red-painted steel girders, and in gas-proof, flood-proof offices that featured four-foot-thick concrete ceilings. Close to Wheatley’s office
was the transatlantic phone to the White House and FDR, the world’s first hot line, housed in room 63 with a sign that read “Keep Locked” and connected by cables to the enormous Sigsaly scrambler in the subbasement of Selfridges department store. Everyone believed room 63 was a working toilet for the exclusive use of the prime minister. Down the hall, a sign posted in a hallway noted the “Schedule of Alarms.” If the klaxon sounded for two minutes, a German ground attack was expected. A royal marine in a dark blue uniform and white gun holster and shoulder strap stood guard around the clock. He was there to protect Churchill and the War Cabinet. As for Wheatley and Lumby, they could have expired from sheer boredom in their office and their deaths would barely have been noticed.

The two deceivers spent hour after sleepy hour waiting for orders in what the novelist called “the lost section.”
To pass the time, Lumby developed an unusual filing method: he gleefully confided to his subordinate that once, when a folder detailing some operation had become too big for his liking, he simply took it out and burned it. One steel filing cabinet was filled not with secret documents but with bottles of gin and Scotch, for the regular afternoon snort. Wheatley, who was a social animal with friends all over London, went out for three-hour lunches with “cloak and dagger men” and plowed through courses of “smoked salmon or potted shrimps
. . . a Dover sole, jugged hare, salmon or game, and a Welsh rarebit to wind up with,” then went back to the office and collapsed for a long nap. On March 28, 1942, Lumby left a despairing memo in Wheatley’s tray: “The day has brought forth nothing
—not even a lemon.”

When the pair did concoct a scheme to fool the Germans, it was often badly misguided. One of Wheatley’s proposals especially seemed to come straight out of one of his garish potboilers. On April 10, 1942, the same day that Pujol was boarding the British merchant ship on his way to Gibraltar, Wheatley submitted a memo
called “Deception on the Highest Plane.” In it, he stated that the Germans had probably lost their faith in Hitler, as he’d failed to conquer England and had added the United States and Russia as opponents. (In reality, Hitler enjoyed wide support in Germany in the spring of 1942.) So the ex-novelist proposed that the deception planners give the enemy a new leader to deliver them out of the darkness. He suggested that British intelligence create a figure who would, like Christ, be the son of poor parents, emerge after a period of seclusion, appear magically in various places all over the German countryside and conduct a “demonstration of supernatural powers” that would rally even hard-core Nazis to his message of “peace, universal brotherhood and passive resistance to all further war activities.” Lumby adored the idea, suggested the name Bote (“messenger” in German) for the imaginary leader and added that, to really whet the Teutonic imagination, Bote should be rumored to be a descendant of the emperor Barbarossa.

MI6 and its informers and spies would then spread stories about Bote, which would force the Nazis to issue denials that such a man existed. The controversy would somehow suck legitimacy away from Hitler and eventually, somehow, lead the Germans to the negotiating table. (In another memo, Wheatley had fixed the date for the Nazi collapse, rather optimistically, at November 8, 1942.) A ridiculous scheme if ever there were one, the plan showed Allied intelligence at its most out of touch.

Deception and “psywar,” which included the spreading of rumors, were separate disciplines. Psywar aimed to sap enemy morale; deception aimed to induce the enemy to do or not do something concrete and specific. But innuendo was used effectively in both crafts. When they were desperately trying
to stave off a German invasion of the island in 1940, the Brits had put out the story that they’d discovered a way to set the English Channel on fire. The idea had come to Major John Baker White, an officer in the Directorate of Military Intelligence, while witnessing a demonstration of a new weapon of war: a kind of sprinkler system where a flammable mix of gas, fuel oil and creosote was fed by underground pipes to sprinkler heads that created a fine mist. Once lit, the mist could turn any beach in England into a searing wall of flames. The device was never used, but the image of a burning beach got inside White’s head. How smashing it would be, he thought, if we could convince the Germans that we could set the entire
ocean
aflame.

Unlike Dennis Wheatley, White began with an insidious, primordial instinct—the fear of being burned alive—and carefully built on it. He went to British scientists and asked if it was possible to set the English Channel on fire. They told him it was, provided that you had almost unlimited amounts of money to spend on equipment and fuel. White didn’t care about that; he only wanted something that was within the realm of possibility. He carefully began feeding the macabre rumor through his network of informants and touts: in the Café Bavaria in Geneva and the Ritz in Madrid, places where spies and diplomats and Germans gathered by night, his agents whispered about this horrible new invention. Next, he spread the story in Cairo, New York, Ankara and Istanbul.

A few weeks later, a German pilot was captured after ejecting from his plane over Kent, and brought to an interrogation center at Trent Park in Cockfosters, north London. He admitted that the pilots and commanders of the Luftwaffe were already familiar with the “burning sea defenses” that British scientists had invented. Three days later, another captured German airman gave up the same details. When some RAF planes dropped incendiary bombs on German soldiers practicing for the invasion of England, the most critically injured victims were sent to occupied Paris for treatment. Suddenly the rumor had undeniable evidence to back it up: French partisans—who’d heard about the burning sea scheme through their own sources—believed the men were part of a secret invasion force that had tried to cross the English Channel and had been broiled alive.

The rumor now spread like crazy. French citizens stood behind German soldiers in the cafés along the Champs-Élysées, rubbing their hands together as if they were warming them over a campfire. A Belgian shopkeeper was brave enough to advertise men’s swimming trunks in his front window “for Channel swimming.” Faced with this fast-moving virus, the Germans panicked. They began to test ways of making their invasion vessels fire-resistant. A barge in Fécamp, Normandy, was lined with asbestos, loaded with German soldiers and pushed into a pool of burning gas. The vessel came through the test; the men didn’t—the entire crew was consumed by the flames and died. Some of the blackened corpses tumbled into the water and drifted to shore, where they gave further evidence of the horrors awaiting any German attackers. Sefton Delmer, a broadcaster who would one day write a thinly disguised account of the Pujol case, even went on the air and gave the German invasion forces some language tips:
Ich brenne
(I burn),
Du brennst
(You burn),
Er brennt
(He burns).

The “flammable sea” idea showed the power of what the Germans called “nerve warfare.” It was, in a way, the perfect rumor, the one every deception officer dreamt of. It was terrifying, scientifically possible, and it spread exponentially.