Operation Garbo (8 page)

We then started to talk about the possibility of my taking up residence in Britain and I told him how easy that would be for me now that I had a new passport with a valid visa; all I needed was a motive for being there, such as a job as correspondent for a Spanish newspaper or magazine. He agreed to study my suggestions in depth and we made a new appointment to meet at a later date. In the end we had more than five interviews.

However, it was clear from these interviews that I would have great difficulty in becoming the British correspondent of a Spanish newspaper: most papers already had people
accredited
to London as it was the nerve centre for Allied news. I decided I would have to think up some other idea.

Frederico seemed to be utterly convinced by my Portuguese stories, so I decided to explore this seam in greater depth. As I have already explained, many people at this time were involved in dubious currency deals which creamed off the escudo at the expense of the peseta, so I decided to tell Federico that, as I was already an old hand at catching such people, I had offered to go to Britain for the Zulueta brothers in order to hunt down those gullible and naive enough to carry out such deals. I said that I was waiting for their answer and asked him what mission
the Abwehr would entrust me with if my deal with the Zuluetas came off and they sent me to England.

More meetings followed; I think I visited more cafés at this time than during the whole of the rest of my life. If I wasn’t meeting Federico in the Aquarium, it was at Calatravas or the Maison Doré, or one of the many other cafés in the centre of town. He was becoming increasingly interested and spent hours advising and training me. After a month, however, it was clear that I was the one making the running.

As I was anxious to speed things up and finalise our deal, I told Federico that I had an important document to show him. We were sitting in a café so, feigning extreme caution, I slid a piece of paper out of my pocket and pushed it toward him under the table, making sure that no one else in the café saw it. It was one of the bits of paper I had had specially printed in Lisbon, now filled in with my name and giving me a diplomatic assignment to travel to London on a special mission for the commercial administrative department. I let Federico have a quick glance at it, then folded it up and put it back in my pocket. I asked him to keep my mission a secret as it was confidential and the government did not want anyone else to get involved. Finally, I told him that I was expecting to leave in about ten days’ time. Federico swallowed the story, hook, line and sinker.

Looking back on this period of my life and analyzing the steps I took, I cannot but reflect that I was playing an extremely complicated and dangerous role. Either I was a great actor, as one of MI5’s officers, Cyril Mills (known to me as Mr Grey), later suggested, or Federico was exceptionally naive. But I don’t think Federico was on his own; he must have had encouragement and support from people high up in the German Secret Service. I was personally convinced at the time that he had recruited me on the advice of his superiors; I am equally convinced that, intoxicated by my verbosity, he personally fought for all my suggestions, projects and plans and warmly recommended them to his superiors. But why he had such blind faith in me
I do not know. Whatever the truth of the matter, a few weeks after our first meeting, he brought me a bottle of invisible ink, some secret codes and the sum of $3,000, making sure that I had them in good time before I left for Britain. Then he briefed me about the kind of reports they expected me to send them.

Now that I had the invisible ink and the codes, I realised that it was dangerous for me to remain in Spain as any unexpected chance meeting could easily expose me. At first I thought of going to the British embassy in Madrid and showing them my new acquisitions to prove to them how wrong they’d been to brush me off, for I had no doubt whatsoever that these secret items would make it absolutely clear to the British that I had a valuable contribution to make to the democratic cause. But I was afraid of meeting someone I knew at the embassy, where so many of the staff were Spaniards. How could I be sure that the Germans had not planted an informer inside the British embassy?

In July 1941 I left Spain for Portugal, temporarily renting a room in Cascais from a poor fisherman and his wife. Later, I moved to a house in Estoril so that I could be more
independent
, but kept moving around so that I could not be traced, for it should not be forgotten that in those days Lisbon was the nerve centre for European espionage and counter-espionage: British, French, American, Italian and, of course, German intelligence agents were everywhere. Taking the most careful precautions, I now tried to contact the British again through their Lisbon embassy.

What follows may seem unbelievable but it is true. All my attempts to hand over my valuable new acquisitions, my ink and my codes, failed; I was quite unable to reach anyone of importance whom I felt I could trust at the British embassy. After all that I had done, all that I had gone through, all the subterfuges I’d invented, the deceptions and the chicanery, the tension and the strain, let alone all the time I had spent, I was no further forward than I had been when I made my first attempt.
It seemed utterly incredible and was the most bitter
disappointment
to me. I just could not understand why the British were so difficult when the Germans were so understanding and
cooperative
. Why, I kept on asking myself, was the enemy proving to be so helpful, while those whom I wanted to be my friends were being so implacable? However, I’ve always had a stubborn streak: I was determined not to give up but to continue my own bizarre form of espionage on my own; perhaps things would eventually change for the better.

J
uan Pujol’s rejection by the British embassy in Madrid was not, as he suspected, an instinctive, bureaucratic refusal to get involved in espionage. In fact, the refusal had been motivated by altogether more complicated considerations.

In January 1941, when Juan approached the embassy, the British ambassador was Sir Samuel Hoare, formerly the home secretary in Chamberlain’s government. His principal mission was to keep Spain out of the war, and he was so determined to avoid any diplomatic incident in the capital or elsewhere that he imposed severe restrictions on the work of the local British Secret Intelligence Service representative, Captain
Hamilton-Stokes
. Hamilton-Stokes was allowed very little discretion by Hoare, who made it perfectly clear that he strongly disapproved of SIS’s activities and would not hesitate to send anyone home who breached his injunction. It was in these circumstances that Juan Pujol’s offer to help the Allies had been turned down. No doubt Hamilton-Stokes had labelled the Spaniard a probable agent provocateur. Certainly, the primary function of the Nazi embassy, under Baron Eberhard von Stohrer, was to accommodate a substantial German intelligence presence. In contrast, the British contingent was tiny.

This is not to say, of course, that British Intelligence was inactive in Spain and Portugal. On the contrary, both of Britain’s intelligence gathering agencies took a close interest in everything that went on in the Peninsula. The Security Service, known as MI5, maintained a Spanish counter-espionage section which identified enemy agents visiting the United Kingdom and the colonies, while SIS, its overseas counterpart, operated from
a series of stations around the world. Most of these stations gave their staff cover as passport control officers, a
manoeuvre
which sometimes afforded them a measure of diplomatic protection and gave an opportunity to examine the credentials of those wishing to visit England. Although Sir Samuel Hoare had put an embargo on any potentially embarrassing secret service work in Madrid, the SIS station in Lisbon was able to conduct their affairs with the blessing of the
ambassador
, Sir Ronald Campbell. There the SIS head of station was Commander Philip Johns, a Royal Naval officer who, before the war, had served at the SIS station in Brussels. Johns’s office was located on the second floor of the British embassy in the Rua do Sacramento à Lapa, and he operated under the cover title of the financial attaché, with the rank of second secretary.

Before returning to Juan Pujol’s narrative, we should briefly examine the work of the wartime British intelligence apparatus and, in particular, the background of its ring of double agents. The fact that the British had gained experience in running such a system in the First World War had become known publicly in March 1920, when Captain Ferdinand Tuohy, a former British Intelligence officer, gave an account of a double agent
operation
in
The Secret Corps
. He described the case of a German spy named Carl Muller and revealed that ‘after we had shot Muller we continued for three whole months to draw funds from Muller’s German employer’. Tuohy’s indiscretion was widely circulated, but it seems to have had little impact on the Germans. In any case, the Security Service, perhaps a little optimistically, had prepared the foundations of a repeat performance.

The first spy to join MI5’s stable of double agents was Arthur Owens, a Welshman who had professed nationalist sympathies to the Abwehr while on a pre-war business trip to Germany. Owens subsequently reported his illicit contacts to the Naval Intelligence Division in London and was passed on to the Secret Intelligence Service. Codenamed
SNOW
by SIS, Owens was considered to be of doubtful reliability, even after
he had surrendered a German wireless transmitter. The Security Service responded by adding Owens’s name to a list of suspects who were to be detained upon the outbreak of hostilities in 1939. Owens was highly indignant at his arrest and suggested to his MI5 case officer, Major T. A. Robertson, that he be allowed to transmit messages, under supervision, to Hamburg.

This timely offer was MI5’s first chance to lay the foundations of what was to become a massive deception campaign. Four months before the German invasion of Poland a French expert from the Deuxième Bureau had lectured a selected group of MI5 officers about the advantages to be gained from the development of a ring of plausibly run double agents. The audience had been suitably intrigued, but to date no suitable candidate had presented himself for recruitment; and the entire proposition rested on the ‘turning’ of an agent who had already established himself as a trusted source with his Abwehr masters. Arthur Owens qualified on every count and, under the supervision of a prison warder who happened to hold an amateur radio licence, made contact with an Abwehr station in Hamburg.

The Abwehr welcomed the dialogue with Owens, whom they had code-named
JOHNNY
, and the radio exchanges that followed seemed so promising that MI5 collaborated in the recruitment of two assistants to help Owens gather information. Both
G.W.
and
CHARLIE
were accepted by the Abwehr as members of
JOHNNY
’s network, although both were MI5’s nominees. Gwilym Williams, whose initials made up his Security Service code name, was in reality a retired police inspector from Swansea who had proved useful to MI5 while serving in his retirement as a court official in London. Owens introduced him as a trusted member of the Welsh Nationalist Party and, late in October 1939, the deception was completed when
SNOW
and
G.W.
kept a rendezvous with their Abwehr controllers in Antwerp. One of the first results of this historic collaboration was the identification of the Abwehr paymaster
in Britain, Mathilde Krafft, a German woman who had been living near Bournemouth. No time was wasted in arranging her arrest, although MI5 subtly ensured that the Germans could not blame
SNOW
for her detention.

In the months that followed,
SNOW
’s spy ring expanded and more double agents were added to MI5’s growing pack, although in reality most of them were entirely ‘notional’. Instead of trying to find enough suitable nominees, a task hard enough in peacetime but fraught with extra difficulties during a war, MI5 opted for the more convenient arrangement of simply inventing plausible but non-existent personalities. This expedient gave MI5 total control over their reported
activities
, and would work so long as the enemy continued to trust
SNOW
and never demanded to meet their newly recruited spies. The Abwehr seemed delighted with
SNOW
’s progress, and MI5 were equally pleased. Robertson’s B1(a) section also grew, and a number of new MI5 officers were let into the secret of the double agents. Among them was a solicitor, John Marriott, and Cyril Mills, member of the famous Bertram Mills circus family. Both were to play important roles in the development of the
GARBO
case. In spite of the scale of their achievements, B1(a) operated with a relatively small staff, numbering some eight case officers (including one woman, Gisela Ashley, to handle any difficult female double agents) with a similar number of secretaries.

During the late summer of 1940, when a German invasion seemed imminent, the Abwehr stepped up their infiltration of agents into the British Isles and gave MI5 plenty of opportunities to capture the spies and ‘turn’ them. A special detention centre was discreetly established in an old nursing home in south-west London, where recent acquisitions could undergo the ‘turning’ process with the minimum of bureaucratic interference from the Home Office or military authorities. Designated Camp 020, Latchmere House provided a secure environment in which espionage suspects could be interrogated in complete isolation.
Among the first Nazi spies to be dealt with by the Camp 020 staff were
SUMMER
and
TATE
, two Abwehr volunteers who
parachuted
into England in September 1940, equipped with
wireless
sets, and were arrested almost immediately. After a brief period of resistance, both were persuaded to join the
double-cross
system, and
TATE
continued to deceive his controllers in Hamburg until the end of hostilities. Precise details of their cases are not relevant here and their full story can be found in
MI5: British Security Service Operations 1909–1945.

In recent accounts of the double-cross system
insufficient
distinction has been made between those agents who volunteered their services, and were therefore trusted entirely, and those who had operated after a measure of duress, and were therefore kept in secure accommodation under constant surveillance. Considerable attention has been given to the latter variety – such as
SUMMER
and
TATE
, who were offered an unpleasant (and conclusive) alternative – because of the
challenge
they had initially presented to their interrogators. Of the four most successful MI5 double agents,
BRUTUS, MUTT, TATE
and
GARBO
, only
TATE
possessed the motivation to resist. All the others were already ideologically suited to the turning process and had never intended to genuinely complete their mission for the Abwehr.
GARBO
’s case was to be unique because he had specifically set out to become a double agent. None of the others nurtured such a dangerous ambition and only stumbled into the espionage arena unintentionally.

The identification and arrest of the enemy’s spies was one of the double-cross system’s chief objectives, but gradually it became clear that MI5 had actually scooped up every Abwehr source in Britain. Because there were no independent agents left at liberty there was little chance of the enemy checking the
information
channelled to them from either the remaining spies who were operating under MI5’s control or the non-existent notional agents. This unexpected result presented plenty of
opportunities
for perpetrating elaborate deceptions on the enemy, and
the Germans unwittingly assisted the scheme by giving advance warning to what they supposed was their extensive espionage network of forthcoming additions in the form of parachute agents. In due course, dozens of schemes were devised and executed with considerable success, and a special committee drawn from all the main Allied armed services, known as the Wireless Board, was created to coordinate the activities of the double agents. There was, however, one further, crucial
windfall
, which was to prove extraordinarily valuable. It too was delivered by these early double agents, and was in the field of radio communications.

The one disadvantage of the W-Board was the seniority of its membership, which included SIS Chief Colonel Stewart Menzies, Director of Military Intelligence Major-General Beaumont-Nesbitt and Director of Naval Intelligence Admiral Godfrey. These officers were ideally suited to drawing up policy, but they were too far removed from the field to
contribute
much to the prosecution of B1(a)’s campaign, despite the efforts of Guy Liddell, the imaginative director of MI5’s counter-espionage B Division.

By Christmas 1940 MI5 had been able to analyse the
wireless
traffic of
SNOW, SUMMER
and
TATE
. All were transmitting on a regular schedule, and the Security Service was in the enviable position of being able to construct a message itself, and then watch and intercept its receipt and acknowledgment in Hamburg, followed by its recipherment for further
transmission
to Berlin. Because the exact wording of the original signal was known to MI5’s wireless branch, known as the Radio Security Service, it was a relatively straightforward matter to work backward and decrypt the Abwehr’s own interim
communications
. In the absence of any local illicit traffic, a secret wireless interception station was constructed at Hanslope Park, some ten miles to the north of Bletchley, where huge radio masts were erected to pick up the Abwehr’s signals. The ciphers given to
SNOW
and his companions provided the RSS
with a head start in solving the Abwehr’s most secret messages. And because MI5 had taken every German agent into harness, the RSS were able to focus their resources on the interception and decryption of the Abwehr’s wireless communications. One experienced cryptanalyst, Oliver Strachey, led a team of scholars and academics who concentrated solely on this traffic and gradually succeeded in breaking into many of the signals passing between the Abwehr outposts in Lisbon and Madrid and its headquarters in Berlin. This profitable source, which ran in parallel to other, more famous cryptographic work by the ‘Government Communications HQ’ experts at Bletchley Park, gave MI5’s case officers a unique insight into the standing in Berlin of each individual double agent. Whenever an Abwehr message was solved, it was translated and then passed to the appropriate MI5 section under the code name
ISOS
, which had been formed from the initials of ‘Intelligence Service Oliver Strachey’.

ISOS
proved itself to be better than the information from any single Allied agent. The Germans transmitted huge volumes of signals between their various outposts and evidently believed their ciphers to be inviolate. Much of the traffic was of an administrative nature, but there was also plenty of material relating to future plans and, astonishingly, the movements and activities of individual agents. Naturally, the Germans took the precaution of referring to their sources of information by code names, but there were still useful clues in some of the texts. For example, one message might state that agent number 317 had just arrived in Cádiz and had checked into a named hotel. A quick look at the hotel register would betray the agent.

SIS developed a special organisation, designated Section V, to exploit
ISOS
and follow up any of its leads. For
security
reasons, Section V led a semi-independent existence and was headquartered in a country mansion near St Albans in Hertfordshire. By the end of 1941 SIS had posted specially briefed Section V officers to both Spain and Portugal. Kenneth
Benton was sent to Madrid (in spite of the ambassador’s protests) and Ralph Jarvis, a merchant banker in peacetime and formerly a member of General Templer’s intelligence staff with the ill-fated British Expeditionary Force in France, went to Lisbon. There he established an office in the British Repatriation Office, so as to avoid being too closely associated with Johns’s passport control office.