Operation Garbo (13 page)

Pujol's most experienced agent, and future deputy, was designated Agent
THREE
, a wealthy Venezuelan student named Carlos. In order to protect his identity, the Abwehr always referred to him in their secret communications by the code name
BENEDICT
. These, of course, were routinely intercepted at Hanslope Park and decrypted.
BENEDICT
allegedly lived in Glasgow and had promised to recruit his own subagents
in the north of England. According to Pujol (and this was subsequently confirmed by
ISOS
decrypts),
BENEDICT
had first materialised in a message from Lisbon dated 7 October 1941. His brother, Agent
FIVE
, was also a student and was
supposedly
based in Aberdeen. He was reported as having joined his brother on 14 June 1942, was sent on a special
intelligence-gathering
mission to the Isle of Wight, and then on another to the West Country, but was then forced to travel to Ottawa later in the summer. In reality, this involved Cyril Mills's moving to Canada, and will be described in detail later.

The KLM steward (Agent
ONE
) and William Maximilian Gerbers (Agent
TWO
) proved less satisfactory, and in due course each had to be dispensed with. Agent
ONE
eventually resigned in November 1942 after having been caught up in a disastrous deception plan, code-named
COCKADE
, which will be covered shortly. William Gerbers, who lived in Bootle, was obliged to contract a serious illness during the preparations for
TORCH
, the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942. He had been credited with reporting
ARABEL
's infamous Maltese convoy, which had never existed and had caused the German admiralty so much difficulty. Gerbers's failure to notice or comment on the unmistakable military build-up in the Liverpool docks prior to embarkation would be stretching German credibility. It was reluctantly agreed that his absence could only be
plausibly
explained by his transfer into a hospital, and he eventually succumbed, after a lengthy illness, on 19 November 1942. A suitable obituary notice was placed in the
Liverpool Daily Post
on Tuesday 4 November 1942:

The newspaper cutting was promptly sent to Lisbon. MI5 subsequently took advantage of the tragedy to arrange for
TWO
's widow to continue her late husband's good work in London.

Having heard much of Pujol's story, Harris recognised that the first priority was to allow
ARABEL
to find some truly important sources who were sufficiently well placed to supply some information of better quality. MI5 feared that unless
ARABEL
developed some useful contacts the Germans might be prompted to review the material they had so far received. Harris was convinced that an analysis of any depth would inevitably conclude that
ARABEL
was manufacturing his own intelligence and probably had never visited England. After consulting with the Twenty Committee, he obtained permission for
GARBO
to recruit his best source yet, a non-existent character, designated J(3), who occupied a senior position in the Ministry of Information. This news was sent to Lisbon, buried in the text of a typically long-winded report from
ARABEL
, on 16 May 1942.

J(3) was
ARABEL
's first source of any significance, and was entirely the product of the Harris/Pujol collaboration. He was generally rated very highly, although he never suspected (or so claimed
ARABEL
) that he was collaborating with a Nazi spy ring. When J(3) came to be described by Harris in a secret, internal report, he commented that J(3)

J(3) was quickly followed the next month by
CHAMILLUS
(Agent
FOUR
), who was portrayed as a Gibraltarian waiter working in the NAAFI (Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes) at a secret, underground establishment in the famous caves at Chislehurst. Pujol described how the agent had become increasingly
anti-British
,
having been forcibly evacuated from the Rock along with the rest of Gibraltar's civilian population. He apparently found the climate in Kent very disagreeable and was a willing recruit.
CHAMILLUS
was to prove an exceptional spy, not so much because of his access to the secret work being undertaken in the caves or his observation of army units passing through the depot, but because of his many useful contacts. In fact, soon after the introduction of Agent
FIVE
, the Gibraltarian
master-minded
the recruitment of Pujol's wireless operator.

The necessity of wireless communication had become apparent to Harris and MI5 after Pujol had been in harness for just three months. The decision to develop
GARBO
's network so dramatically was only taken after
ISOS
decrypts had been
examined
and had been found to indicate that the improvement in
ARABEL
's information had not gone unnoticed in Madrid and Lisbon. The escalation was well-justified, and also allowed MI5 to exploit the network more effectively. Pujol's letters to Lisbon usually took a minimum of a week for delivery, and often took longer if a king's messenger was not scheduled to visit Lisbon or Gene Risso-Gill was otherwise occupied. A swifter means of communication offered more opportunities, not the least of which was the acquisition of some valuable signals intelligence.

Once the Twenty Committee had given their consent, Pujol informed Madrid that
CHAMILLUS
, the Gibraltarian waiter, had befriended an enthusiastic supporter of the Spanish Republican Party who, before the war, had held an amateur radio
operator's
licence. Apparently, he had served as an ambulance driver during the Spanish Civil War and was now a convinced pacifist. He was classified as a conscientious objector who lived alone on a farm, and therefore presented an ideal candidate for the post of
ARABEL
's wireless operator. Pujol explained that his new recruit, designated Agent 4(1), had retained his wireless illegally and was perfectly willing to transmit messages to Spain. Pujol had neglected to tell Agent 4(1) that he was a German spy, and had instead fed him a story about a group of Spanish
Republicans in London, led by Dr Juan Negrín, who
supposedly
wished to keep in touch with the communist underground movement in Spain. As
GARBO
pointed out, the advantage of this ploy was in the extra protection it offered. Even if the British traced the transmitter and closed it down, none of the rest of Pujol's ring would be endangered, and the
likelihood
was that the police would accept the cover story at face value. In any event, the agent would never learn the text of his signals as Pujol proposed only to supply him with enciphered messages. As expected, the Abwehr was delighted with Pujol's proposal and quickly gave its approval to the plan. It also provided a transmitting schedule, a set of variable
transmitting
frequencies and, perhaps most importantly of all, a newly introduced cipher, which was received with delight by the Radio Security Service.

In practice, the new wireless operator was Charles Haines, a French-speaking field security NCO who had indeed taken an interest in becoming a ‘radio ham' before the war. He was not, however, a communist sympathiser. In reality, he had worked as a clerk in Lloyds Bank, an occupation he was to return to after the war. Since Juan's English was still rudimentary, and MI5 had no radio operators fluent in Spanish, the two men conversed in French. The Radio Security Service gave him a crash course in Morse and a transmitter was set up in the back garden of Crespigny Road. Once the link between Hendon and Madrid had been opened on a regular basis, the RSS was provided with a veritable flood of valuable intelligence. Continuous
monitoring
of the Abwehr channels revealed that
ARABEL
had risen in the Germans' esteem, and also betrayed some of the Abwehr's internal code names.
ARABEL
, for example, was sometimes referred to as V-man (for ‘Vertrauensmann' or confidential agent) 319. The Venezuelans were referred to as V.373 and V.374, while Haines was given the code name
ALMURA
. His
principal
contact in Madrid signed off the wireless net as
CENTRO
. All this information was registered on card indices at Section
V headquarters, while MI5 authorised Tommy Harris to
separate
the
GARBO
operation from the rest of the Iberian section. Accordingly, Harris and Sarah Bishop moved into a tiny new office in MI5's headquarters and set to work developing the network further.

By the end of 1942
GARBO
had only lost Agent
TWO
(William Gerbers), but had gained its ninth source, code-named
DAGOBERT. DAGOBERT
was an ex-seaman living in Swansea, and was described by
GARBO
as ‘a thoroughly undesirable
character
' who worked only for money. Nevertheless, he was later to acquire a further seven subagents and thus became
GARBO
's link with an important, self-contained, network. When seeking Madrid's permission to go ahead with
DAGOHERT
's recruitment,
GARBO
pointed out that his addition would give the network greater geographical coverage. He also suggested that, as a seaman who occasionally visited neutral ports,
DAGOBERT
was in a position to smuggle documents and other items of espionage paraphernalia which were too bulky for his regular K LM couriers to handle. As predicted, the Abwehr responded positively, and the scene was now set for large-scale
exploitation
of a widely spread spy ring.
GARBO
had achieved everything hoped for and was now basking in the praise of no less than two contented and opposing intelligence organisations.

Having established
GARBO
as a reliable source for the Abwehr, the Allies were anxious to flex their muscles and demonstrate the scope of their powers. Unfortunately, the first
opportunity
to participate in a major deception campaign proved less than satisfactory.

The major military preoccupation of 1943 was defensive in nature, in anticipation of the two huge, long-term Allied
operations
planned for the future: the invasions of Italy and France. The chiefs of staff were agreed that despite demands from Moscow there was no likelihood of marshalling the necessary forces before 1944, so the deception planners were instructed to make the enemy believe that the Allies were planning no less
than three amphibious landings during the summer of 1943:
STARKEY
was to be across the channel in the Pas-de-Calais region,
WADHAM
was an American attack on Brittany, and
TINDALL
was a supposed invasion of Norway. All three deception plans, known collectively as
COCKADE
, were designed to bottle up German troops in Norway and keep the enemy guessing about the exact target of the landings in France. The basic objective was to keep the enemy contained in northern and western Europe and the Mediterranean, in the hope of easing the burden of the
hard-pressed
Red Army. In addition to
STARKEY
and
WADHAM
, fourteen raids were to be conducted along the coast to capture prisoners. Code-named
FORFAR
, these brief incursions were supposed to unnerve the defenders and convince them that their kidnapped sentries had been taken prisoner so they could be interrogated about the local troop strengths.

Another of
COCKADE
's optimistic objectives was to lure the Luftwaffe into a series of air battles over the Channel. The idea was to promote belief in an invasion, thus forcing the Germans to deploy their aircraft at particular moments when the RAF could press home their advantage. In the event these aerial ambushes failed to materialise.

COCKADE
was approved by the chiefs of staff on 10 February 1943 and the Twenty Committee enthusiastically committed
GARBO
and his network to playing their part. No time was wasted, as can be seen by the claimed recruitment by
BENEDICT
, just three days later, of a source reported to be an airman. He was followed on 10 April by
GARBO
's
introduction
to a censor in the Ministry of Information, designated J(4). Finally, the NAAFI waiter at Chislehurst announced on 25 April 1943 that one of the soldiers on guard duty at his depot had started to provide some useful information. These were the individuals chosen by the Twenty Committee to perpetrate the most ambitious deception yet on the enemy's intelligence service. It was to be the forerunner of many more successful schemes.