Agent Garbo (35 page)

On July 29 came news from Kühlenthal that “with great happiness and satisfaction” they could announce that Garbo had been awarded the Iron Cross. The medal was usually given only to front-line combatants, but the High Command had made an exception for its star spy. Garbo wrote back effusively: “I cannot at this moment,
when emotion overcomes me, express in words my thanks for the decoration conceded by our Führer . . . I must state that this prize has been won, not only by me, but also by Carlos [Agent No. 3] and the other comrades . . . My desire is to fight with greater ardor to be worthy of this medal which has only been conceded to those heroes, my companions in honor, who fight on the battlefield.”

By August 1944, the end of Garbo’s career was in sight. Scores of former Abwehr agents were turning themselves over to the Allies, and in their debriefs a few of them referred to the miraculous Garbo, who’d managed to report from London throughout the war. It was only a matter of time before the Germans realized that, with this new information, Garbo should have been shut down. The British failure to catch him would reveal that Garbo was a double agent. A Spanish informer named Roberto Buénaga even called the Madrid office of MI6 and volunteered to give up the most powerful German spy in London if the British paid him a large amount of money. The MI6 officers questioned the Spaniard, and it soon became clear that the man knew enough about Pujol to blow his cover. MI6 considered sending an agent to kill Buénaga, but that might have drawn yet more suspicion to the Garbo operation.

There was only one solution: Garbo had to disappear, permanently. The spy’s deputy, No. 3, would wrap up the remaining business of the network. Garbo would “leave” London (in reality, he didn’t go anywhere). He told the Germans he’d fled to a hideout
in southern Wales, a farm miles from any town, which he shared with “an old Welsh couple, a Belgian deserter and a half-witted relative of the owners.”

Back in London, MI5 pretended to conduct a search for him. As the details of his nefarious work emerged, the police closely interviewed a supposedly terrified Araceli,
and the British embassy in Madrid filed a protest, shocked to discover that a German spy ring had been operating in London for the whole course of the war.

Months passed, with Garbo sending occasional messages to Madrid and supposedly hiding in the countryside. But as World War II ground to a close in the spring of 1945, MI5 was faced with a dilemma: whether or not to deactivate once and for all one of the most effective spies in their history. The specter of Nazism was fading, but Stalin loomed in the East. MI5 began to explore the idea of running Garbo against the Russians. Guy Liddell recorded the details in his diary: “[Tommy Harris’s] plan is to get [Garbo] to write
to the Soviet military attaché in London anonymously before he leaves for Spain. He would tell the latter the whole of his story and give them his code. He would tell them that he had been working for the English against Franco and that if they liked they could monitor communications between ourselves and the Germans to get what information they liked and incidentally to satisfy themselves as to his bona fides.”

The plan seemed like a natural, but it was quickly nixed by Pujol’s old pursuer Kim Philby. Years later it would become clear why. Philby, of course, was spying for the Russians and had been ever since his days as a newspaper correspondent in the Spanish Civil War. He knew Garbo’s skills well enough; he didn’t want the Spaniard playing in his garden.

Back in December 1944, in recognition of his services, Pujol had been awarded the MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), the first British agent to be so honored. A formal investiture at Buckingham Palace was impossible because of the need for secrecy, but the key players—Harris, Guy Liddell, Masterman, Tar Robertson and a few others—celebrated with Pujol. The director general of MI5, Sir David Petrie, gave a “nice little speech” at agency headquarters, and afterward his friends took Pujol for lunch at the Savoy, where he stood up and thanked them in halting English. “I think he was extremely pleased,”
wrote Liddell in his diary. The men banged on the table and cheered as Pujol finished his short monologue. “It was a very moving moment,”
he remembered.

To the Germans, Garbo predicted that a “world civil war”
was coming and it would result in the “disintegration of our enemies.” Five days after he wrote that message, on May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered to what Garbo called (to the Abwehr) the “Anglo-American-Bolshevik onslaught.” The moment Pujol had worked toward for so long had arrived. “London exploded with joy,”
Pujol recalled. “People invaded Piccadilly Circus and Regent Square, and traffic came to a standstill; everyone was drinking beer, singing and dancing.”

His personal war with Hitler was over. All that he’d worked for and all that he’d sacrificed was reflected in the faces of those delirious Londoners.

Still, he kept up the charade. “I am certain that the day will arrive in the not too distant future when the noble struggle will be revived,” he wrote Madrid, “which was started by [Hitler] to save us from a period of chaotic barbarism, which is now approaching.” Madrid responded in a final message, setting up a meeting between Garbo and Federico in the Spanish capital: “We ask you to frequent the Cafe Bar la Moderna,
141, Calle Alcala, every Monday between 20 hours and 20:30 hours, starting on June 4th. You should be seated at the end of the cafe and be carrying the newspaper
London News.
”

MI5 decided that Pujol should make the rendezvous. Before he disappeared forever, the Spaniard had one last mission to complete.

The British wanted Garbo to meet with Federico and Kühlenthal to see if the Nazis were “proposing to carry on any form of underground organization in the post war.” But to get to Madrid, Garbo first had to “escape” from England clandestinely. It was too dangerous to allow him to travel on his own passport, especially since the Brits were supposed to be checking every airplane and merchant ship for him.

In June 1945, Pujol left his adopted homeland and flew on a Sunderland seaplane to Baltimore, Tommy Harris sitting beside him. By then, though unknown to the public at large, Garbo was a private legend among the initiated on both sides of the Atlantic. One captain in Luftwaffe intelligence, bitter about the way the spy had hornswoggled the entire German intelligence community, put forth the theory that Garbo had been so successful . . . because there was no Garbo. “He . . . had been invented by the Abwehr
so that they could pretend they were doing important work, justifying their comfortable jobs . . . far from the fighting fronts and the bombs and hardship of war.” It was perhaps better to believe that he was a German fantasy than a British double agent.

But the Americans were in awe of him. Mickey Ladd, an assistant to the FBI director, sent a message to one of the agency’s operatives in London “instructing him to give every assistance
with regard to Garbo.” J. Edgar Hoover himself demanded to shake the hand of the man who’d fooled Hitler, and arranged for Harris and Pujol to be brought to Washington as soon as they arrived in the United States. “[He] wanted to meet me personally,”
Garbo wrote. “He invited both Tommy and me to his house, where we had dinner in an underground room.” Though Hoover was “most affable throughout,” he didn’t ask Pujol to work for the FBI, which seemed to surprise him. The Americans gave him some much-needed travel documents, and he flew to Cuba alone to establish the alibi that he’d been smuggled out of London to Havana.

Getting the right entry and exit stamps on his papers took longer than expected, and Garbo didn’t reach Madrid until September 8, well after the date specified in the letter. He reunited with Harris and Desmond Bristow, the two men who’d debriefed him at the house on Crespigny Road more than four years earlier, and together they worked out how he’d approach Kühlenthal and Federico.

Garbo went to La Moderna and sat at a table, holding a copy of the
London News,
as the Abwehr had instructed. The contact never showed, so using his local contacts, Garbo tracked Federico down to a house in a small village near the Guadarrama Mountains, which ring Madrid to the north. “Very overcome” by the sight of the master spy standing in his doorway, Federico nervously told Pujol to follow him to a nearby woods where it would be safe to talk. They hiked up to the treeline,
and Federico explained that he was now living in fear of being deported back to Germany, or even kidnapped and shot by the Allies. “Speaking of the future,
he prophesied utter misfortune for himself and his family.” Federico had lost contact with Kühlenthal, the whole Abwehr apparatus was in disarray, and he feared everyone around him.

Federico, who’d once been for Pujol the very image of the tough, cosmopolitan spy, was close to being a broken man. As the wind sighed through the trees, Federico rather pathetically asked if Garbo could use his skills in deception to get him out of Spain. Garbo told him he would do what he could. As he left, the double agent told Federico that the German cause was not yet finished. They would work together in the future, when Nazism rose again.

“He fell for it completely,”
Garbo later said.

Next the Spaniard went to Ávila, where Kühlenthal was living with his wife in reduced circumstances. When Garbo knocked on the door, Kühlenthal was “overcome with emotion”
and told him that he’d always visualized this reunion. Kühlenthal sat in his humble living room and told Garbo his life story, including the difficulty of being half-Jewish in Hitler’s Germany and his dedication to the cause—if he could bring about the Fourth Reich, he told the spy, he wouldn’t hesitate, though “he did not believe that it would be possible to rebuild Germany again.” The pair talked about possibly going into business together, selling information and splitting the profits fifty-fifty, but the German spy-runner was, at present, deactivated: “I was able to deduce that he was at present out of touch with all Service matters.” Garbo asked his Abwehr control if the wild letters he’d sent from London had made him sound crazy. Kühlenthal confirmed what MI5 had always suspected, that “on the contrary those letters had in themselves been evidence of Garbo’s good faith and honesty.” But above all, Kühlenthal marveled at the superagent who had represented the pinnacle of his career in the Abwehr. “He thought me almost a God,
saying that he still did not know what advice to give me.”

The second great post-D-Day crisis concerned the state of Pujol’s marriage. And that would prove harder to fix than the locations of bombs falling on London or the possibility of a Fourth Reich.

Pretending to be writing from his hideout in southern Wales, but actually still in London, Garbo asked the Germans to forward a few letters to Araceli and to help him convince her that he was now in Spain. They were cover messages but, as always, Garbo’s spycraft seemed to contain little hints of his real life. He wrote:

At present I am a man unaware
of life and its pleasure. I am disillusioned because I see the misfortune which has dogged my footsteps. My only desire is to behave as well as possible in the future in order that all the bad memories which you have of the past are wiped out.

Again and again I ask you to forgive me for what I have made you suffer. I know that you held no spite and this relieved me.

Goodbye my dear with many kisses from your, José.

And a month later, supposedly from Granada, in southern Spain:

It is only a few days
since I arrived here. This city which I always thought of with pleasure now appears sad and bitter. I remember the many times we came to visit it together and the happy days we spent.

How much I think of you, my dear. At every moment and every instant you are in my mind.

. . . When I think of our sorrowful position I am truly repentant of the steps which brought about your perdition and mine. I feel I shall never enjoy peace of mind again and that calm will never reign over me. Only you with your tenderness and feeling could cure the trouble, which is known as “remorse” for all I have made you suffer.

Was Juan feeling guilty over the fake arrest that had caused her so much pain? Even though they were meant to deceive the Germans, the letters seem rooted in strong emotions of remorse and foreboding about the future of his marriage.

Evidence that the marriage was in trouble can be found in a report in the MI5 files. Later in 1945, with her husband still “in hiding” (actually he was by then in Venezuela), Araceli, who had returned to Spain earlier that year, went to see Kühlenthal. She hoped to collect the last of the money due her husband, though Pujol had warned her not to make contact with the Germans. The spymaster paid her what he called the “debt of honor,” then asked if he could hide out in her family home in Lugo. When Pujol found out that she’d gone to see Kühlenthal against his instructions, he exploded. The MI6 representative in Madrid then met with her, and reported on her state: “I interviewed Mrs Garbo myself
and found her in a most difficult mood. Swearing that Garbo had said the most unpardonable things to her over the telephone and that she would not stand for that, that she would sever all connection with him and with us and would in future go her own way. She further added that it was a pity there was no divorce in this country.”

Despite their battles in the past, Tommy Harris defended Araceli —at least partially. “I do not feel that Mrs. Garbo
had any ill intentions towards us,” he wrote on November 1, “though I think it highly probable that should she start to mix with Kühlenthal and his friends she will, either inadvertently or in a spirit of adventure, come to harm and thus compromise us.”

Telegrams flew between Madrid and London. One draft, which bears the marks of Pujol’s now vitriolic attitude toward his wife, called her “an adventuress” who was “likely to attempt
to renew adventures with Germans, possibly influenced by the idea that she may extract more money from them if she breaks with Garbo.” Clearly, Pujol suspected his wife of going behind his back to blackmail the Abwehr, a very dangerous game for both of them.