Agent Garbo (16 page)

To assemble their sprawling organizations, the SD and the Abwehr began looking for men as World War II approached, just as the British had. First the new recruits had to pass a loyalty test. In one of his speeches, Himmler declared that an intelligence agency “must found itself
upon a race, upon a people of the same blood.” This was Aryan boilerplate, but later in the speech he dictated not only who should staff the service but what its work product should reflect. Not objectivity or imaginative brilliance, but “unconditional obedience . . . certainty of German strength and the final German victory.”

If London culled its operatives from the universities and their arts and sciences faculties—and more generally from among the intelligentsia and cultural elite—the Germans took a very different tack. They recruited staunch bureaucrats, military careerists and scions of old Prussian families. Far from pursuing eccentricity and daring, as the British had done out of necessity, the Abwehr and the SD chose men who were loyal and dependable. They didn’t want communes or coffee klatches for arts faculty; they wanted a combination of an export-import firm and a military division. Efficiency trumped eccentricity.

Germany’s attitudes toward spies were even more toxic than they were in England in the early part of the war. The SD manual distributed to intelligence officers admitted this up front: “The Germans consider espionage
to be work for criminals and adventurers.” Military officers from ancient Prussian families who’d served the country for centuries regarded intelligence officers not only as beneath them but also as interlopers out for their jobs. The German army “ostracized officers who dealt with spies
on the ground that association with these deceivers had tainted them.”

Hitler hated secret agents. He claimed he would never shake the hand
of one. When two spies were killed in a failed mission, Hitler was grieved that they had been good German boys. “In the future, you will use Jews
or criminals for missions of that kind.” Part of the German disdain for espionage came from Hitler’s own sense of his infallibility. Time and again, his generals and spy chiefs had advised him against offensive action and been proven wrong. When the Führer was considering an attack on Holland and France, General Franz Halder, the head of the army’s General Staff, wrote in his diary: “No one among the staff
thinks that the offensive has the slightest chance of success.” They were, of course, proven wrong. Before the attack on Czechoslovakia, the Abwehr’s Canaris told Hitler that the Czech defenses were formidable and that the panzer divisions would not be able to crack them; Hitler ignored him and won. When the SS was rampaging across Poland, Canaris warned his chief that the British and French were poised at the German border near Saarbrücken with 110 divisions against the Germans’ 23, and that the enemy was going to invade. Hitler brushed him aside, and the invasion never came. It was the Führer
who, often alone, again and again saw through the enemy’s bluster to its hidden intentions.

Hitler regarded himself as a genius surrounded by bureaucrats who were “dumb as a carp,”
winsome intellectuals, eggheads and cowards. Either his men exhibited the “sparrow-like brain of mediocrity” or they talked defeat. He steered only by an inner light, and as the war went on he was increasingly shielded from any report that conflicted with what he wished to be true. When the SD’s Schellenberg compiled a carefully researched report on America and its awesome capacity for making war, it was returned with this comment: “Everything you’ve written is pure nonsense.
You’d better see a psychiatrist.” When he did the same thing a year later—report truthfully on an enemy, the Soviets this time—Hitler blew up, ordering that the analysts quoted in its pages be arrested and charged with defeatism. “He closed his mind against the truth,”
Schellenberg said, “but thought he could draw important conclusions from . . . random observations.”

And yet at the same time Hitler was a voracious consumer of the intelligence reports that reached his desk, and he constantly asked for more and better information. He gave Canaris an unlimited budget and took the reports that reached him seriously—as long as they didn’t contradict one of his core beliefs. When his megalomaniacal tendencies were not at play, Hitler used intelligence well.

In the early months of the war, the Abwehr was focused on France, considered to be Germany’s most formidable military opponent on the Continent. Canaris poured resources and men into Paris, but London was kept off-limits. Hitler believed that, once he overran the Continent, he could negotiate a peace with Churchill. “I don’t want any wretched spies
creeping about in England,” he told his staff officers, “and jeopardizing my plans.”

That all changed in the summer of 1940, when Churchill’s obstinacy and the RAF made it clear that England would never surrender. The chief of the German army’s Operations Staff, General Alfred Jodl, demanded Canaris get a network up and running in London. “Send them into England as quickly as possible.
The landings may take place as early as September 5, but not later than the 15th. We need these wretched people in England well before then.” The original aim of the German intelligence effort in Britain was to lay the groundwork for an invasion. When Operation Sea Lion—the German assault on the island fortress—was finally abandoned, its double agents switched their attention to the Allied war effort. And then, particularly, to the coming invasion of France.

It takes years to develop a well-founded and flourishing spy network in an alien country, and Canaris didn’t have that kind of time. The delay in inserting agents had left him exposed. This led to a gold rush of agents into England and the countryside that at times became a slapstick adventure in how not to insert a spy. For example, the Belgian Four were sent to England in the late summer of 1940 by minesweeper and dinghy, arriving on the Kentish coast. The original purpose of their mission, to gather information for Operation Sea Lion, was no longer valid, but the spies were sent anyway. Two of them understood English only if spoken very slowly. Another didn’t speak it at all. When they landed, one of the spies hooked up an aerial on a bush and sent word: “Arrived safely, document destroyed.
English patrol two hundred meters from coast . . . No mines. Few soldiers.” He signed it with his real name, Waldberg. Only a few hours into his mission, he sent his second message: “Meier prisoner, English police searching for me, am cornered, situation difficult.” The Abwehr had failed to give their agents even basic information about life in England, such as the fact that one should not wander into an English pub and ask for a glass of cider at nine in the morning. When Meier did just that, the pub owner reported him and he was arrested. The other three were soon rounded up. All but one were hanged that winter on the scaffold at Pentonville Prison.

Its high attrition rate made the Abwehr’s success stories rare. It was one reason Garbo was such a valuable agent: there were so few others like him. His competition was either dead or working for the Allies.

But there was another reason that Garbo ascended so fast in the German intelligence world. Canaris considered Spain his spiritual home and General Franco his brother and pet political project. The Abwehr chief had been Hitler’s liaison with the Spanish fascists, arranging for a military aid package worth 5 billion reichsmarks and assembling plane convoys to ship 14,000 Spanish troops, along with their artillery guns, from Morocco. When it became necessary to choose a station for spying on England, Canaris selected Madrid to head up this all-important mission. Spain became the keyhole into England and the Allied mind.

For this sensitive post Canaris chose Wilhelm Leissner, a naval officer turned publisher who’d moved to Nicaragua after World War I. Canaris brought him back, reenrolled him in the German navy, gave him the rank of commander and packed him off to Madrid as head of the “Excelsior Import and Export Company,” dealers in zinc, mercury and cork. The old-fashioned front for the Madrid station reflected its boss. A stolid, old-school navy man who wore high starched collars and funereal suits, “he looked like the man
in the old ads selling pomade for moustachios,” of which he had one, a fine Teutonic handlebar. A dynamo when it came to paperwork, Leissner lacked the suppleness of imagination required to see into the intricacies of wartime Britain.

That was left to Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, the man who’d “discovered” Pujol and who was grooming him for bigger things. Kühlenthal was the son of a distinguished German officer and diplomat who’d risen to the rank of general and had served as a military attaché in Paris and Madrid. His wealthy family was related to Canaris, who’d shepherded the young man through the intelligence services and, when Kühlenthal was thirty-five, expunged the one thing that could have doomed him in Hitler’s Germany. In his MI5 file, the British noted an anomaly: Kühlenthal was “a half-blood Jew.” Canaris had him legally declared an Aryan in 1941, but the conversion didn’t sit well with Kühlenthal’s peers. The Madrid spymaster was aware that any slip-up could mean a demotion or being sent to the Eastern Front. “It is known that [he] is trembling
to keep his position so as not to have to return to Germany and serve in a workers’ battalion,” said an informer. “He is therefore doing his utmost to please his superiors.” It was no wonder Kühlenthal had dubbed Juan Pujol’s network Arabel; in Latin the name means “prayerful” or “answered prayer.”

Kühlenthal was consistently rated the best mind in the enormous Madrid station: MI5 described him as “a dangerous man, one of the most efficient German intelligence chiefs in Spain.” But looking through the reverse telescope from London, Tommy Harris believed he’d spotted the man’s Achilles’ heel. “His characteristic German lack of sense of humor,
in such serious circumstances as these, blinded him to the absurdities in the story we were unfolding.” That is, Kühlenthal couldn’t conceive of someone actually creating a Garbo; he was so extravagant he
had
to be real. Tommy Harris had worked and socialized with people like Garbo; his salon before the war was crawling with weirdoes and misfits. The outrageous was fairly normal in his world. But not in Kühlenthal’s. From Harris’s point of view, the Germans were culturally and institutionally handicapped when it came to deception, because they’d closed their minds to the irrational.

By late 1942, Garbo had won over Madrid. But that was only the first step. The key decisions, of course, would be made 1,200 miles away in Berlin. And it wasn’t just Kühlenthal who was searching for a way into the Allies’ mind. Hitler himself was becoming more and more obsessed with what was happening in London. He complained that his intelligence service couldn’t even provide him with the names of the opposition in Parliament; he’d been reduced to reading the
Guardian
and
The Times
to find out who Churchill’s political adversaries were. “We are separated from England
by a ditch thirty-seven kilometers wide,” Hitler said, “and we cannot find out what is happening there!”

Nevertheless, he had his own ace in the hole, a slim, cold aristocrat named Colonel Alexis von Roenne. Roenne was the descendant of an old family
that had once owned vast tracts of land in Latvia, awarded to them by Frederick the Great for their service in the Prussian wars. Roenne was devoutly Christian, patriotic, often haughty to his peers and subordinates, “impossible to make friends with,”
a perfectionist with a zeal to save Germany from its enemies. Trained as a banker, when war came Roenne had volunteered for the highly regarded Potsdam Regiment and was wounded on the Eastern Front. After recovering from his injuries, he’d joined military intelligence, where he’d advanced quickly by modernizing the service’s information analysis, in part by developing the so-called
Feindbild,
an evaluation of enemy forces pieced together from every available source into a constantly evolving portrait of the Allied armies.

If Kühlenthal was a kind of huckster, Roenne was the real deal, a ruthlessly objective filter of the reams of confidential information that came across his desk. He’d commanded the “big table” during the German invasion of France and had correctly predicted the key episodes of the blitzkrieg. When Hitler was contemplating the attack on Poland, Roenne went against the Abwehr by saying that “the Western allies would protest
a German attack [on Poland] but would take no military action.” This caught Hitler’s eye, as did Roenne’s accurate analysis that the French army was vastly overrated and that the Maginot Line wouldn’t hold. By 1942, when he assumed the top intelligence job at Foreign Armies West, responsible for all intelligence relating to the battle against the British and the Americans, Roenne had the Führer’s full confidence. Roenne wasn’t a mystic or a brown-noser; in fact, he considered himself a knight of ancient Prussia. His family had won battles for Frederick the Great while Hitler’s ancestors were being used as cannon fodder. He refused to tell Hitler what he wanted to hear.

The colonel was installed in German army headquarters in Zossen, about twenty miles south of Berlin, sheltered in a reinforced A-roofed bunker, protected from Allied bombs by layers of concrete. The Abwehr gathered the intelligence and Zossen analyzed it. It was the brains of the High Command: teams of photo analysts spent their days studying blurry black-and-white pictures shot from five thousand feet, rubbing elbows with exhausted codebreakers and the soldiers who manned the fixed intercept posts, which listened in on telephone and wireless communications. Those intercepts give one indication of the breadth and depth of German surveillance: the agency responsible for wiretapping, the Forschungsamt, had six thousand employees, many of whom spent hours crouched over their desks in rented rooms around Germany, monitoring the daily lives of suspicious persons. The staffs of the listening stations would write “Z reports”
on brown paper—the official color of the Nazi Party—and forward them to analysts, who received 34,000 domestic and up to 9,000 foreign messages daily over the war years.

Anything relating to the military situation in the West flowed to Roenne: reams of diplomatic cables, secret letters from double agents like Garbo, Allied magazines and newspapers, wireless traffic and purloined documents came in from all across Europe. Roenne’s analysts pored over each message in detail, checked the new information against the cards in their enormous files, then suggested revisions to the
Feindbild
. The reviews of the spy reports were sometimes harsh: “worthless,” “swindle,”
“absolutely blooming idiotic,” along with the pungent “full of shit.” Roenne would evaluate the day’s harvest, then write daily reports that were sent to commanders in the western theater, with another copy going to Jodl, the army’s chief of operations and its liaison with Hitler. If Jodl thought a message was important, it would be placed on the Führer’s desk.