Agent Garbo (18 page)

MI5 would later be given a quantifiable estimate of just how valuable Garbo’s services were to the Third Reich. An internal message from Madrid to Berlin contained this startling line: “[The] activity of Arabel”—i.e., Garbo—“in England
constantly at the price of his life was just as important as the service at the front of the Spanish members of the Blue Division.” It might have been a bit of hyperbole on Kühlenthal’s part—puffing up his best boy—but the Spanish Blue Division had sent 45,000 volunteers to the Eastern Front over the course of its service. They’d fought bravely at Novgorod and frozen to death while fighting at Leningrad. By the war’s end, 4,594 members of the division had been killed and 8,700 wounded.

So Madrid had set Garbo’s worth at 45,000 soldiers. But what is a relationship if it isn’t tested every so often? In June 1943, Garbo decided to flex his muscles in an incident that made headlines around the world.

The vital air link between Portugal and London had remained open that summer of 1943. The British Overseas Airways Corporation flew planes from Poole Harbor in Dorset to Cabo Ruivo, near Lisbon, and a second route from Sintra in Portugal to Whitchurch in Somerset. The London-bound planes left Portugal daily, the eyes of ten thousand refugees looking longingly on their silver fuselages as they headed north. The two routes were crucial, giving British intelligence a link with the spy capital and maintaining the leading air connection with Europe (there was a nighttime flight from Scotland to Stockholm, but the route was more dangerous and the schedule more erratic). Luftwaffe fighters ruled the airspace over Europe, and sometimes attacked the aircraft; a burst of machine-gun fire from a Messerschmitt 110 once left a bullet hole in the hat of a Swiss diplomatic courier. But Flight 777A kept flying, often with a cabin populated by spies and top-secret envoys.

Until June 1, 1943. A camouflaged DC-3 named the Ibis was flying a roundabout route to London over the Bay of Biscay, hoping to avoid the Luftwaffe. Suddenly a
schwarm
of eight Junkers Ju 88s from the Kampfgruppe 88 fighter wing, based in Brittany, appeared in the blue sky and began making strafing runs, the bullets thudding into the DC-3’s fuselage. The Ibis desperately tried to evade the German fighters as they blasted away with their wing-mounted guns, but on the third pass, the passenger plane began to smoke, then crashed into the bay in a ball of flame, killing everyone aboard.

The incident made headlines because of who was on board: Leslie Howard, the British star of Broadway and Hollywood, who’d played Ashley Wilkes in
Gone With the Wind,
reportedly bedded Tallulah Bankhead and Myrna Loy and moonlighted for MI6.
LESLIE HOWARD IS LOST
IN AIR LINER SHOT DOWN BY NAZIS,
London’s
Daily Mirror
screamed. Before boarding the flight, Howard had been traveling across Portugal and Spain giving lectures on the modern cinema while secretly meeting with anti-Nazi activists and firming up support for the Allies.

Garbo couldn’t let the incident pass. One of his imaginary subagents could have been on that plane, and his KLM pilot-courier could have been flying it. He sent a blistering message to Federico demanding to know what the Luftwaffe was thinking. The Portugal–London planes were never attacked again.

Pujol was growing confident enough in his abilities to outsmart the Abwehr that he and Harris began to amuse themselves by dreaming up cryptic messages to drive their opponents batty. After the “death” of William Gerbers, Garbo claimed to have discovered a cache of notes made by the operative just before his illness struck. Garbo examined the scribblings and “decided that they were certainly annotations made during the course of the agent’s espionage travels.” But the code was unknown to him; perhaps the Germans would have better luck?

Pujol and Harris must have cackled with delight as they batted ideas back and forth in their little office in Jermyn Street, one-upping each other with fiendishly tantalizing cryptograms. First they decided to compose the “notes” in German, since Gerbers had come from a Swiss-German family. Some of the messages they cut off just as they were getting interesting: “
Grosse olbek zwischen Birkenhead e—,
” which meant that large
olbeks
had been spotted near Birkenhead—but no German-English dictionary lists the word
olbek.
They hinted in another that the British battleship
King George V
was being fitted with torpedo tubes when in fact it had none. Harking back to his Lisbon days, Pujol drew up detailed diagrams of airfields, sketching in everything from the exact position of unidentified aircraft to the location of enormous hangars. But he failed to say where these airfields actually were.

“It is true to say,” Harris admitted, “that the only virtue in passing on these notes was that they were a satisfactory leg-pull.” Pujol had infected the normally serious Harris with the joy of the flimflam.

Despite the fun and games, Garbo’s first serious attempt to create a D-Day deception ended in abrupt failure. Plan Bodega was a “most complex and elaborate” scheme
to create an imaginary arms depot in the very real Chislehurst Caves, in the southeastern suburbs of Greater London, and to lure Federico to England to inspect them. In the spring of 1943, Garbo put forth the story that his Agent No. 4, a “Gibraltarian waiter,” had gone to London looking for work in one of the posh hotels frequented by diplomats and tycoons. There it was hoped he’d be able to eavesdrop on after-dinner conversations between gentlemen enjoying their Port and forward the news on to Berlin. But the Ministry of Labor had instead sent No. 4 to work in a quarry, in the belief that “all Gibraltarians should have a natural aptitude for tunneling” (because of the many sieges of the island fortress throughout history, which required the natives to dig passageways for supplies and arms). The waiter grudgingly “accepted” the excavation job, thinking he might be able to discover some unknown underground depots. But what he found surpassed his wildest hopes.

Pujol and Harris were deep into spy-fiction territory as they told Federico that No. 4 had been marched down to the London Underground and put to work digging extensions of its tunnels. What the operative found out was this: the British were connecting their subway lines to the enormous Chislehurst Caves, where arms had been stored during World War I. “Immense quantities of small arms munitions” were being shipped by train from armaments factories in the Midlands, switched to secret small-gauge tracks and forwarded on under the feet of unsuspecting London pedestrians to the caves (which were actually empty of all armaments and served as public air raid shelters). This was all going on away from the eyes of the Luftwaffe, with remote-control electric trains that required no personnel, running silently beneath the streets of Soho. After months of digging and investigating, Agent No. 4 “reported” that he had stumbled on nothing less than the network that would supply the D-Day regiments. By finding out when the work was expected to be completed, he could give the Nazis the date of the invasion. And by detecting where the tunnels led, he could tell them where the operation would be launched. From that, the Germans could deduce
the target.

Those were the questions that troubled Hitler in his sleep, that he would have paid millions for. And Garbo was offering the answers on a platter.

Garbo himself offered to take Federico through the tunnels. MI5 operatives started searching for an arms depot where Federico, after being led into a tunnel and bamboozled into thinking he was walking through the London Underground, would have his blindfold removed. “He would . . . have been allowed
to return to Spain from where he would undoubtedly have proceeded to Berlin to report on his extraordinary adventure, full of praise for Garbo’s astuteness and ability, and conscious of the importance of the underground depots.”

The codebreakers at Bletchley Park began picking up traffic on Garbo. Madrid was forwarding the entire texts of his messages about the Chislehurst Caves on to Berlin. Hopes rose.

Then Garbo made a mistake. In a twelve-page letter sent by courier, he laid out a plan—supported by blueprints that No. 4 had managed to smuggle out—to dynamite the tunnels leading to the caves. “It was explained that by blowing up one of the trains
whilst in the main tunnel by means of a time bomb the tunnel itself would collapse and thus the stores would be entombed at the vital moment when they would be required.”

Harris and Pujol waited. They knew the plan would be catnip for Hitler: if the Germans could blow up the tunnels, D-Day would have to be canceled or scaled back. The only thing better than predicting the invasion was stopping it before it ever happened.

Then the answer came back from Madrid: a firm no. It soon became clear why. MI5 had made a crucial miscalculation. Over the past year, Garbo had become such a luminary in Madrid—with both Federico and Kühlenthal hitched to his star—that the suggestion that he turn to bombing tunnels was met with a cold chill. Blowing up the Chislehurst train would mean transferring control of Garbo away from the Madrid station to Division II, the Abwehr agency responsible for “sabotage and special tasks.” Kühlenthal and Federico had found, groomed, paid and staked their careers on Garbo. Why would they now give him up to another division? MI5 hadn’t counted on the intense rivalries inside the German intelligence agencies, a matter of life and death for men like Kühlenthal.

As more messages arrived from Madrid, it became clear that two other factors were at play: Federico had no desire to come to London. If he was caught en route, he’d likely face long months in a brutal interrogation center, and possibly the hangman’s noose. He would let Garbo go it alone. And the Abwehr’s specialists at Zossen, south of Berlin, had gone over Garbo’s excitable twelve-page letter with a fine-tooth comb and found it wanting. Too much opinion, not enough detail.

A lesson had been learned: the Abwehr in Zossen was not the Abwehr in Madrid. Zossen’s agents were tougher, more analytical, less susceptible to Garbo’s special brand of intrigue. It’s unknown whether the cave proposal ever reached the desk of the gray-eyed Roenne at Foreign Armies West, but his highly trained officers had shot down the scheme. Plan Bodega was pure Garbo, wildly colorful, Jules Verne–like in its scale and depth of detail, its talk of winding tunnels and a secret world underneath London. But it hadn’t worked.

Imagination simply wasn’t going to be enough.

Juan Pujol as an infant, with his mother, brother Joaquín and sister Bonaventura.
 

The young dreamer, dressed up in a harlequin costume for Carnival.
 

Pujol (upper right) as a young man with family and friends.
 

Pujol (center) and older brother Joaquín (left) in a light moment.
 

Posing with a friend (left) and Joaquín.