Agent Garbo (13 page)

Before the war, his son Tommy, a “brilliantly intuitive” artist, joined his father in the gallery. Tommy Harris would travel the English countryside, getting himself invited into mansions and Edwardian castles and charming the resident dowagers into selling him their treasures for a song. Tommy married an English girl, Hilda, and their home, at Chesterfield Gardens in London, became a salon steeped in art, alcohol and good food. “During my occasional visits
to London,” Kim Philby wrote, “I had made a point of calling at Tommy Harris’s house,” where he lived “surrounded by his art treasures in an atmosphere of haute cuisine and
grand vin.
” The house next door
was owned by the chairman of Sotheby’s, who often dropped by. Rothschilds rubbed elbows with Bond Street art dealers and half-soused earls. When war came, the basement served as a bomb shelter,
with London swells sleeping off the champagne and canapés in the semidarkness. Upstairs, a strange constellation of future spies came together, drawn by the warm light of Harris’s hospitality. Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby all gossiped and networked at Chesterfield Gardens. (The three, along with Donald Maclean, had already switched their allegiances to Moscow, forming what became known as the Cambridge spy circle, a revelation that would shock the British spy establishment in the early 1950s—and cause Tommy Harris much heartache.)

Harris loved champagne and wild parties, but there was always a part of him that remained shuttered and off-limits, accessible only through alcohol or painting. His art was striking and often jaggedly intense. A reviewer of his work in a London newspaper wrote: “These paintings do have an intriguing, disturbing vibrancy.
Stabbing brush-technique; our old friend ‘the nervous line’ hepped up to hecticness.” But whatever his inner tensions were, early on it became clear that Harris was the right man to guide his new recruit through the labyrinth of the spy game. “Pujol’s genius was Latin
but the plan was Anglo-Saxon,” a Spanish journalist would later say. It was true enough. Pujol contributed cunning and a sense of style, Harris strategic brilliance and order.

Together these two men sat down in a small office in London and endeavored to defeat the Third Reich, largely through the use of their overheated brains.

8. The System

T
HE DOUBLE AGENT SYSTEM
inspired a raft of metaphors to explain it: it was like an orchestra, with “first violins” playing the main theme, “second violins” supporting them, and the conductor—in this case, J. C. Masterman, head of the XX Committee—blending the dissonant chords of sabotage, political disinformation, rumors and physical deception into a single symphony that was then broadcast to the Germans. Or it was a cricket side—a description favored by the sport-mad Masterman. There was only one crucial difference between the game and espionage, he argued: “our best batsmen
. . . might be past their best or even deceased before the date of the final game.”

But neither orchestras nor cricket teams involve the one thing that made spy operations click: artifice. In fact, the thing the double-cross effort resembled most was the Hollywood studio system. The double agents were the actors, the public face of a huge undertaking designed to entrance an audience. Their case officers were their managers, and there was in fact heated competition among people like Tommy Harris to get their agents big roles in upcoming operations. MI5 was the studio, developing projects and doling them out to the right actor, tailoring the message to that agent’s image with the Germans. (Like many Hollywood stars, Pujol could never be allowed to break character or his career would be ruined.) There were scriptwriters—MI5 literally thought in terms of long-form narratives—and stories in which imaginary characters were introduced and then killed off at the right moment. The British army had “production teams”
that supported the agents with fake wireless traffic, with the assets referred to as “Lighting, Scenery, Costumes
and Property.” They even wrote “scripts” and chose actual troops to serve as extras and provide crowd noise. When they wanted to simulate an amphibious landing, for example, the sounds of a real landing were taped on wire recorders and played back during the actual battle.

Reviews, as in classic Hollywood, were important. The Allies had the Bletchley Park codebreakers, which meant that MI5 could listen to their critics in Berlin. If a report was relayed to Germany’s Foreign Armies West, then to Tokyo and Sofia, Bulgaria, and Istanbul, or if a fleet of Luftwaffe bombers was repositioned based on an agent’s flash message, that particular agent and script were judged a hit. The ultimate critic, of course, was Hitler himself, who signed off on only the most important Abwehr messages, indicating that he’d seen them and absorbed their content.

As in Hollywood, money mattered. The amount of cash each agent cadged from the Germans indicated how seriously he or she was taken. (Over his career,
Pujol would exceed every other MI5 agent many times over, earning $1.4 million [at today’s value] and single-handedly bankrolling much of the double-cross system with his “earnings.”) Finally, the spies were given code names when they entered the system: as Issur Danielovich became Kirk Douglas, so did an underfed Welshman named Alfred George Owens become the dashing agent known as Snow.

Pujol was the promising new face who’d arrived from the boondocks of Lisbon. But he needed to be trained in the system. As they sat in their bare-bones office in Jermyn Street, breaking for meals
at the Martinez Restaurant in Swallow Street, where they could indulge in authentic Spanish dishes, Pujol and Harris began to untangle the sprawling espionage machine that Pujol had so far kept only in his head.

Harris bent over a desk as Pujol talked, entering into a new logbook
the numerous minute details of the imaginary subagents that the Spaniard had created. The fake subagents were given their own individual code name. The first agent became “J (1),” for “Juan’s Agent One,” and Harris opened a new file for each so that their imaginary lives could be recorded and no mistakes made. Pujol and Harris drew up a “character study” for all twenty-seven agents Pujol would eventually summon up, “realistic enough to create a clear picture
in the minds of the recipients,” noting their every quirk and flaw. To flesh out the lives
of these fictitious men and women, British intelligence employed a location scout, an officer whose job it was to drive around England writing down bits of local color for them to use in their travels: ice cream shops for them to stop in, hotels near military encampments for them to stay. Everything else was up to the spy and his case officer. Harris and Pujol had to choreograph every movement of every member of their network: their KLM pilot-courier,
for example, couldn’t be represented as being in Lisbon when a letter from a different subagent claimed he was in London. It was a whole universe that needed to be constructed and rigorously maintained.

The thirty-eight messages Pujol had sent from Lisbon were sorted and catalogued, as well as the German responses. From now on, all of Pujol’s outgoing messages
would be printed on pink paper, and all the incoming German messages would be on green. Harris finalized a delivery method for future texts: he and Pujol would write and encode the outgoing messages, then send them to Section V of MI6 in London, where they would be placed in a diplomatic bag and taken to Lisbon. Risso-Gill, the man who’d brought Pujol in from the cold, would have an agent deliver them to the poste restante box, where the Germans would pick them up. The Abwehr was encouraged to believe that the letters were still being delivered by the imaginary KLM pilot Pujol had recruited months earlier.

By April 27, 1942, everything was ready to go, except for one last piece of business. Pujol needed a new code name. Arabel was the name the Germans had given his network, but of course MI5 needed a new moniker. When Pujol had arrived in England, an MI6 officer had dubbed him Bovril, the meat extract that the English had turned into a hot drink. But now that Harris had taken the measure of the man, the name no longer fit.

Double agents were usually shifty or revoltingly needy, cornered into working for their enemies because of money trouble, homosexual blackmail or vanity. They were often bad spies and worse human beings, and their controllers usually gave them disparaging names, perhaps as a way of distancing themselves from the craven lot. There was Agent Careless, “an extremely indiscreet
and truculent fellow.” There was the Snark, a Yugoslavian maid of no real account who once hatched a plan to have an enemy eaten alive by rats in order to get information from him. There was a pair of newlyweds and their dubious friend code-named the Savages. The list went on: the Weasel, Cocaine, Slave, Washout, as well as the Worm and BGM (Blond Gun Moll), a Cretan woman and low-level spy who carried a gun in her handbag “and knew how to use it.”
(It was said she’d once used the pistol to kill a man, though another theory said she’d actually thrown him off a roof.) Only a select few were given honorable names that suggested a real interest in the person.

But Pujol fell in the latter category. Because he struck MI5 as “the best actor in the world,” he was rechristened Garbo, after the actress. Like his namesake, Pujol seemed to have an unapproachable core that remained elusive no matter how long one studied him. The code name might also confuse the Germans
into thinking that Garbo was a woman, giving Pujol an extra layer of security.

To turn Garbo into a full-fledged Abwehr star, Harris and Pujol began to fill their Berlin-bound messages with “chicken feed”—basic military information, accurate, but of little value. Access to the truth was the great advantage that Pujol had gained by entering the double-cross system; he’d make no more mistakes about wine-drinking Scots. Every week, if not every day, the XX Committee sent a fresh batch of material that could safely be woven into Garbo’s sprawling narratives, encoded and sent across to the Germans. This was known in the service as “buildup”: the Abwehr would slowly be convinced that Garbo had access to better and better information, most of which checked out. Some of the letters were sent directly to Madrid with a London postmark, to prove Garbo was really living in the British capital.

Garbo’s “agents” were now roaming all over the country, and their reports read like a spy’s Baedeker of small towns and harbors: “The beach here is mined.
There is a very large gun in Singleton Park, but I could not find out if it is for A.A. [antiaircraft] or coastal defenses . . . Several large hangars.
15 barrage balloons—A.A. placed to the north and west of the aerodrome. Many sentries . . . The small port of Irvine
is now being used for assault barges. I saw ten anchored.”

The correct handling of the delicate secret inks was a major area of concern. On November 11, 1942, the Abwehr spy-runner in Madrid, Federico, wrote instructions for the latest inks:

You moisten
a sheet of paper for a few minutes in a bath of plain water until the paper is well saturated. Then get rid of the surplus water you then put the sheet on to glass so that it should adhere completely to the surface without forming air bubbles. On this moistened sheet you put another dry sheet which must adhere completely to the first. On this second sheet the secret text must be written with a hard pencil well sharpened and pressing fairly hard on the paper without breaking its surface. Then one must take off the dry sheet and the writing will appear on the first sheet in transparent form.

Many of Garbo’s letters were sent to cover addresses in Lisbon and appeared to be normal correspondence between friends or family members; the real message, of course, was between the lines in invisible ink. For this, Pujol and Harris had to invent a host of fake civilians to cover for their fake agents. One such family—two brothers and their wayward sister “Maria”—wasn’t particularly happy.

My dear Maria

Obviously, as an affectionate brother,
I hate to think of you being ill, but my other reason is purely a selfish one. Perhaps you have forgotten what Mother is like when one of her precious children is ill . . . These last ten days . . . have been sheer hell for me . . .

My dear Maria—

I have been asked
by the family to write you the Xmas letter . . . I cannot say that I am feeling in a particularly festive mood yet but I dare say it will come . . . I am going to do the decorating this year, not that I particularly like doing it, but I have had enough of people falling off ladders like Joe did last year when he spent the rest of Xmas lying on a sofa with a sprained ankle and concussion.

Pujol and Harris had to keep straight the workings of their fake English family and the other civilians, adding to the soap opera’s complexity. Vacations, birthdays, illnesses, shared gossip—it all had to mesh perfectly.

Fortunately for Pujol, “the greatest burden of the work”
—thinking up the information to put across—“had been removed from his shoulders” when he came to London. Yet Harris made it clear that Pujol was still an essential part of the operation. He wrote, “It is . . . true to say that Garbo personally played a very material part throughout . . . He was allowed to supervise and help develop the unique and fanciful espionage organization which had been the creation of his imagination.”
Pujol, in Harris’s portrait, “jealously examined the development of the work lest we should choose to pass material to the enemy . . . which should result in discrediting the channel . . . We could not have desired a more able or clear-sighted critic.” Pujol’s role in making Garbo into a force would become more evident as the game became infinitely more complex.

In those early days, Garbo’s network of agents had to be “recruited” and then distributed around England and across the globe, giving Garbo the ability to report on almost any Allied military operation. He began inventing spies at a fast clip, the biggest coup being Carlos, a rich Venezuelan student in Glasgow who showed talent as an agent-runner himself. Carlos even brought aboard his own brother, who hated the Americans because “according to him
[they] have killed the most sublime thing in his country,” namely, its Spanish heritage. Then came Agent J (3), a senior official at the Ministry of Information in London. Tommy Harris pushed to add this character to Garbo’s portfolio—they needed a big fish, and this oblivious chap was it. Pujol supposedly did some translation work for the official, and the two bonded over Pujol’s memories of the Spanish Civil War and the bureaucrat’s Republican leanings. The ministry official was a loyal subject of his majesty the king, an unconscious collaborator “suited for the passing
of high-grade information of a political or strategic nature.” Garbo now had a pipeline to the heart of British decision-making.