The Spy with 29 Names (16 page)

Towards the end of May, an even greater success came for Garbo. Some weeks earlier, suspecting that the British might have broken them, the Abwehr had changed their Enigma codes. The code-breakers at Bletchley thought they could crack the new ones eventually, but that it could take some considerable time. In the meanwhile they were temporarily blind, unable to read the Abwehr traffic. Help came, however, when Kühlenthal sent Garbo seventeen miniature photographs containing the new cypher tables. These were sent to Bletchley and within a couple of months – a far shorter time than it would have taken otherwise – the code-breakers were back in, reading the Germans’ messages once more.

On sending the cypher tables, the Germans wrote to Garbo: ‘We trust that you will be able to guard all this material which we confide in you conscientiously and prevent it at any time from ever falling into the hands of the enemy.’

The word came back from a delighted Bletchley – it was the highest-grade cypher used thus far by the German secret service. Harris was in no doubt that it was ‘the most important development’ yet in the Garbo case.

Garbo was proving useful in other areas as well. On 1 June a KLM plane on the civilian route from Lisbon to Britain was shot down by the Luftwaffe over the Bay of Biscay, killing all seventeen people on board. One of the passengers was the actor Leslie Howard, who had starred in films such as
Gone with the Wind
and
The Scarlet Pimpernel
, and was returning to Britain after a lecture tour in Spain and Portugal.

There have been many theories about the shooting down of Flight 777, including that the Germans mistakenly thought that Churchill
was on the plane and were trying to assassinate him. From Garbo’s point of view, however, the event was significant – his fictional courier, taking his letters back and forth to Lisbon, worked on that route. He had not been on Howard’s flight – luckily – but he might have been.

The Germans were putting a line of communication with Kühlenthal at risk. There could be no more attacks on these civilian planes, Garbo told his spymaster. They had to stop.

And stop they did. Whether or not because of Garbo’s intervention is not certain – the planes were re-routed after the attack and henceforth only flew at night. Garbo’s message, however, may well have influenced the German decision to leave the planes alone.

It was clear that within a year of arriving in Britain, Garbo had become a star player in the double-cross system. Some of those involved were even beginning to think that Prime Minister Winston Churchill might be interested to hear about this new, very useful agent of theirs. But then, just as the operation was starting to show real promise, a crisis emerged.

Araceli was unhappy. Brought over to London shortly after her husband had finally been taken on by MI5, she struggled to settle in her new home. She had two small boys to look after now – Juan and Jorge – and was forced to live largely isolated from the Spanish community for fear of inadvertently giving the Garbo secret away. The language, the weather, separation from her mother back in Spain, the domestic arrangements at their house in sleepy Hendon, her husband’s long hours – all these became sources of tension and stress.

She and Harris did not get on; in fact they disliked each other intensely. From being her husband’s collaborator in Spain and Portugal, Araceli had now been reduced to the role of supporting housewife, Harris taking over her position as Pujol’s partner in deceit. For his part, Harris appreciated that Araceli was intelligent and astute, but also condemned her as ‘hysterical, spoilt and selfish’.

Deeply homesick and unhappy with her new life, Araceli longed to go back to Spain, even for a short visit. MI5 refused, fearful for the security of the Garbo operation.

After many arguments and tense words, things came to a head on 21 June 1943.

Pujol and Araceli used to spend time occasionally with one Spanish couple, known to MI5 as Mr and Mrs Guerra. They were members
of a social group called the Spanish Club, and invited the Pujols to join them one evening at one of their functions. There was a problem, however: staff from the Spanish Embassy would also be there for the dinner – people who worked directly for Franco, neutral yet still friendly with the enemy. It would be far too dangerous for Pujol to show his face in such company and he had to insist that they could not go.

It was too much for Araceli – she was perfectly aware of her husband’s real work and therefore of the dangers, yet, lonely and isolated, she felt that this was a refusal too far. A violent argument began during which she threatened to go the Spanish Embassy and tell officials there all about Pujol’s work for the British. Such a move would not only have brought the Garbo operation to a swift end, but also most, if not all, of the double-cross system itself.

Trying to avoid a crisis, Pujol managed to get out of the house for a few minutes and dashed to a phone box to put a call through to his office. His wife was in a highly excited frame of mind, he said. If she rang up and was offensive they should not take any notice.

As he predicted, later that night Araceli called Harris at his home. Harris made a note of what she said:

‘I am telling you for the last time that if at this time tomorrow you haven’t got me my papers all ready for me to leave the country immediately – because I don’t want to live five minutes longer with my husband – I will go to the Spanish Embassy. As you can suppose, going to the Spanish Embassy may cost me my life – you understand? It will cost me my life – so by telling you that I am telling you everything . . . I shall have the satisfaction that I have spoilt everything. Do you understand? I don’t want to live another day in England.’

Years later, Harris was able to write with English aplomb: ‘Whilst we were not unaccustomed to such outbreaks the present crisis seemed particularly serious.’

The fact was, Araceli’s threat was a major problem for MI5 and they had to come up with a plan quickly. Unfortunately, in their view, there was no way that they could lock her up as the law at the time would not allow it. As a first step, Tar Robertson went over personally to Hendon the next morning to give her an official ticking-off, warning her that she had already committed ‘an act preparatory to an act’ with her threat.

Meanwhile, two proposals were discussed within MI5. The first was intended to distract Araceli and give her something to do: a bogus side-story to the Garbo set-up would be arranged, involving a notional Gestapo officer wanting to get in touch with her husband. They would let her run this mini-operation in the hope that it would cure her of her obvious boredom. The second plan was to warn the Spanish Embassy that a woman of Araceli’s description was planning on assassinating the ambassador – the hope was that she would be thrown out of the building before being able to tell anyone about her husband’s espionage activities.

In the end, however, both these ideas were shelved when Pujol himself came up with a very Garbo-esque solution.

Araceli had been stalled for a while by being told that an answer to her request for travel papers would come the following evening. Shortly before the appointed time, however, after the Spanish Embassy had closed for the day, two police officers knocked on her door. They told her that her husband had been arrested and that they had come to collect his pyjamas and toothbrush.

Araceli reacted exactly as expected. Her husband was loyal to Britain, she insisted. There was no way that he could have been detained. In tears, she called up Harris to find out what had happened. Harris told her the story that Pujol had concocted for them:

Pujol, he said, had been asked to meet section chief Guy Liddell that afternoon. Liddell had told him that he was agreeing to give Araceli and the children their travel papers, but that Pujol would have to go with them as well, and that the Garbo operation was being henceforth shut down. Liddell asked Pujol to write a letter to the Germans explaining away the suddenness of his disappearance.

Pujol, according to the story, refused. He had come to Britain to carry out this work, and his wife could leave if she wanted to, but he wanted to stay. But Liddell explained to him that his wife had threatened to betray everything and so they needed the letter from him to protect themselves.

At the word ‘betrayal’ Pujol had lost his temper. It was impossible, he said, for Araceli to do such a thing. He refused to believe it. The discussion had become heated, Pujol had become aggressive, and the police had been called to take him away to Camp 020, where he was now being held.

Araceli listened to Harris’s tale, believing every word of it. Pujol, she said, had acted exactly as she would have expected – defending her honour, preferring to go to prison rather than write their letter for them.

She seemed a little pacified, and the conversation ended. A short while later, however, she called Harris back, this time in a more belligerent mood, threatening to take the children and disappear. Putting down the phone, she called Charlie Haines, the Garbo wireless operator, in a desperate state, asking him to come round to the house. When he got there, Haines found a distraught Araceli sitting in the kitchen with the gas taps on. She was incoherent, and a little later she made a second attempt on her life.

Haines concluded that she was mostly play-acting. But with a 10 per cent possibility of an accident, he and Harris arranged for Harris’s wife Hilda to go and spend the night with her.

The following morning, weeping, Araceli was taken to see Tar Robertson. She was more repentant now, and told Robertson that she was to blame for the situation, that her husband was not at fault and pleaded that he be pardoned. In exchange she promised never to interfere with his work, misbehave or ask to return to Spain again. Agreeing, as per the plan, Robertson made her sign a statement to that effect and told her she would be allowed to visit her husband later that afternoon.

At 4.30 she was taken under escort to Kew Bridge. There she was blindfolded and driven in a closed van to Camp 020. When she arrived an officer told her in no uncertain terms that she had escaped being arrested herself by only a hair’s breath.

Pujol was allowed to appear before her wearing prison clothing, and clearly unshaven. He asked her to tell him on her word of honour whether she had been to the embassy. She swore that she had not and that she would never behave like this again, or make any threats.

Pujol was taken back to his cell, to await a ‘tribunal hearing’ the following morning. Araceli was taken home, ‘more composed but still weeping’.

The following morning she was summoned to a further meeting to be ticked off by MI5 staff, this time at the Hotel Victoria on Northumberland Avenue. She was told that the ‘tribunal’ had cleared her husband, but she was warned once again never to repeat her
recent behaviour. As a sop, she was informed that Harris had been taken off the Garbo case. This was untrue, but the plan was that henceforth Araceli and Harris would have as little contact with each other as possible.

The plan had worked. Pujol returned home later that evening for a reconciliation with his wife, shaken by the whole episode, even though the means of resolution had been his own idea. It was, he told Harris, one of the most distasteful things he had done in his life.

Within MI5 there were sighs of relief. The crisis, which had been playing on everyone’s minds for the past couple of days, had been ‘liquidated’ and things across the entire double-cross system could go back to normal.

Thanks to Pujol, they learned that Araceli had never intended to carry out her threat to go to the embassy, that it was merely a ploy to make them take her request to return to Spain more seriously.

And Pujol had risen even higher in their estimation. He had placed his work with the British above his marriage, playing out on his wife the kind of ruse that he usually concocted for the Germans. Surprisingly perhaps for someone who knew him and his ways so well, Araceli never twigged that she was being duped.

The relationship had received a body blow and problems in the marriage continued, but after the crisis of June 1943, as Harris wrote somewhat wearily in his report, Araceli gave MI5 ‘no parallel trouble thereafter’.

FOR GENERATIONS BROUGHT
up on war films depicting great British espionage triumphs, it is easy to conclude that the Germans were a bit dim when it came to spying.
The Man Who Never Was
and
I Was Monty’s Double
show brilliant, creative Brits consistently outwitting the more powerful yet not-so-bright Boche.

This is not simply a rosy take on events years after the Allies won the war. Even at the time, members of the secret establishment were labelling the Abwehr officers as ‘the most inefficient, credulous gang of idlers, drunkards and turncoats as ever masqueraded as a secret service’.

In the immediate aftermath of the conflict, Tomás Harris and John Masterman, separately and secretly writing up their accounts of the Garbo case and the double-cross system, portrayed an enemy that had been no match for British secret services. In hindsight, they both concluded, much more could have been done to fool the Germans given their gullibility.

Easy to say, perhaps, in the initial glow of victory. The truth was that the Germans were no easy opponents in the secret war, and the British were cautious throughout precisely because they knew how formidable they could be. The Venlo Incident, towards the start of the conflict, when German spies had fooled and captured two MI6 agents on the Dutch border, had demonstrated that. Subsequently the limited success of SOE operations in occupied Europe, and the capture
by the Gestapo of many of their operatives, continued to make the point.

German expertise was not limited to counter-espionage. They could carry out deception plans of their own, as the Soviets had discovered in the summer of 1942. Operation Kremlin fooled the Red Army into thinking that the Germans would repeat their push on Moscow that year, having failed to take the city the previous winter. The Luftwaffe increased its reconnaissance flights over the Soviet capital, and maps of Moscow were distributed within the Wehrmacht in preparation for the supposed offensive. All this filtered back to Stalin and his generals, who readied themselves for the attack. When, instead, the Germans launched Operation Blau and pushed south towards Stalingrad and the oil fields of the Caucasus, the Red Army was caught by surprise.