Operation Garbo (10 page)

Two days later I left Gibraltar in an extremely
uncomfortable
military plane that had no seats, just long benches, which made me think that it was meant for transporting paratroopers. There were two other passengers, but we were never
introduced
, nor did we speak to each other throughout the long eight-hour journey. They were carrying mail so were probably diplomats or special couriers.

In order to avoid German fighter planes, we headed far out into the Atlantic and so did not reach Plymouth until late afternoon, when we arrived tired and hungry as all we had had during the flight was tea. I don’t think I’ve ever drunk so much tea in all my life as I did during that long, cold journey, not even during the London Blitz when we used to spend hours on end in underground shelters. I must have had more than twenty cups in a desperate attempt to keep myself warm.

I caught a glimpse of Plymouth from the plane and was suddenly acutely aware that I was away from home and about to enter an alien land. Would the English be friendly toward me? Would they believe my story about the tussles I had had with their embassies in Lisbon and Madrid, which showed how
inefficiently
these places were being run? Would they understand my motives for all that I had done and honestly believe that I wished to work for the good of mankind?

I thought about the city states of ancient Greece, of Cleisthenes’s Athens, or Pericles and of the beginnings of democracy. I reiterated to myself my firm belief that
individuals
should have a say in their own government and knew that I had been right to put all my efforts into upholding such a doctrine. I entered England full of restless anticipation. What would my future hold?

My first recollection of England on that calm, clear day in April 1942, as I walked down the steps of the plane, was of the terrible cold – cold outside and icy fear inside. At the bottom of the steps stood two officers from MI5, who would shape my destiny. The one who introduced himself as Mr Grey didn’t speak a word of Spanish; I didn’t say anything to him in my faltering English. The other, Tomás Harris, whom everyone called Tommy, spoke perfect Spanish.

W
hat Juan Pujol could never have anticipated was the British reaction to his three messages to Madrid, which were included in routine Abwehr transmissions to Berlin. Nor could he have guessed that the British were intercepting and
decrypting
a substantial part of the Abwehr’s wireless traffic to and from Madrid.

The German intelligence organisation in Madrid was impressive: some eighty-seven Abwehr personnel were directly attached to the German embassy, along with a further 228 other assorted intelligence staff. The full total of 315 greatly outnumbered the genuine foreign ministry diplomats, of whom there were only 171. The Abwehr contingent was believed to control no less than 1,500 senior agents spread throughout Spain. Headed by Commander Gustav Leisner, this remarkable network produced such a volume of information that some thirty-four wireless operators and ten female cipher clerks were required to handle the radio traffic. Madrid was a sufficiently important cog in the German intelligence machine to keep up an hourly wireless schedule with an Abwehr relay station near Wiesbaden. As well as intercepting this radio traffic, the Allies were also monitoring the signals passing between the Abwehr representatives in Lisbon and Madrid.

Literally translated as ‘defence’, the Abwehr was centred in a four-story office block in Berlin’s elegant, tree-lined Tirpitzufer Street, overlooking the Landwehr Canal. The organisation was divided into three main branches, dealing with
espionage
, sabotage and counter-intelligence. Within those three divisions there were numerous subsections, but most of the
Abwehr’s work was conducted by twenty-three overt suboffices spread throughout Germany’s military districts. Each of these ‘Abstelles’ (usually abbreviated simply to ‘Ast’) had
responsibility
for particular foreign countries. Abstelle V, located in Hamburg’s residential Sophienstrasse, was the headquarters of those groups targeted against Britain and the United States. Although the work of the Abstelles was secret, their physical presence in each German military district was not concealed. However, in neutral and allied countries the Abstelles were known as Kriegsorganisationen (literally, war organisations, and invariably abbreviated to KO). By 1942 the Abwehr had established ten KOs, each with an internal structure divided into three branches, mirroring the headquarters in Berlin. They were located in Lisbon, Berne, Stockholm, Helsinki, Zagreb, Ankara, Casablanca, Bucharest and Shanghai, the first and
largest
being in Madrid.

The Madrid KO or Abstelle had been established in 1937 by Leisner, who had been recruited into the Abwehr the
previous
year by his former brother officer in the navy, Wilhelm Canaris. Soon after the First World War, Leisner had emigrated to Nicaragua to open a small publishing house, but on the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Canaris had persuaded him to go to Spain as his personal representative. With the blessing of General Campos Martínez, the head of Franco’s intelligence service, Leisner the publisher was transformed into ‘Gustav Lenz’, an apparently respectable businessman operating from the offices of the Excelsior Import and Export Company, a commodity brokerage firm dealing in strategic metals, which, in reality, was a front for the Abwehr’s undercover operations. On the outbreak of war, Leisner transferred his activities to the German embassy, situated at 4 Castellana, and eventually built a huge network, incorporating some thirty suboffices spread throughout Spain. Where possible, these field sections were housed in German consulates, thus giving a measure of
diplomatic
protection to the Abwehr’s personnel. By detailed
analysis
of the wireless signals passing between the suboffices and Madrid, the British succeeded in identifying all the permanent members of the Madrid Abstelle and all their duties. They also knew all about the officers who came into contact with
ARABEL
.

Leisner himself was assisted by his secretary, Fraulein Haeupel, who handled his mail, and Frau Obermuller, who arranged his appointments and maintained a card index of the Abstelle’s agents. His administrative secretariat was run by Senior Staff Paymaster Max Franzbach, with Staff Paymaster Zimmer and Private Pfau (who supervised the car pool). Leisner’s principal aide was Lieutenant Colonel Eberhardt Kieckebusche, who headed the Abwehr I group, which
supervised
the Abstelle’s general espionage operations. His adjutant was Reserve Lieutenant Wilhelm Oberbeil, who handled any special plans, and Fraulein Meyer-Quittlingen, who maintained the registry and discharged the unit’s secretarial duties.

Under Kieckebusche’s command were seven departments, each with their own clearly delineated responsibilities. The most important of these was the Vertrauensmann section, run by Karl-Erich Kühlenthal. Kühlenthal held the rank of specialist captain and had a personal staff of five: Corporal Gustav Knittel, the office manager, Private Zierath, the
interpreter
, Private Knappe, agent-controller, Fraulein Heinsohn, the secretary, and Fraulein Mann, the confidential clerk who corresponded with the agents and developed any secret ink messages. All of these individuals handled
ARABEL
’s traffic at one time or another, although much of the burden fell on Fraulein Mann and the special documents section headed by a scientist, Dr Kuenkele. This section operated from its own sophisticated laboratory and manufactured all kinds of secret inks, which were later used by
ARABEL
.

The six remaining sections were devoted to particular aspects of intelligence gathering and consisted of Army, Navy, technical and Luftwaffe, air, radio communications, and
documents
. All eventually received information from
ARABEL
.

As we have seen, the British presence in the Spanish
capital
was almost insignificant by comparison, and was inhibited by official Spanish surveillance and an ambassador who was entirely unsympathetic to the small group of intelligence officers attached to his stall. Hoare was determined not to provoke the Generalissimo or give even the slightest excuse for a diplomatic incident, but in spite of his restrictions, Section V of the British Secret Intelligence Service was able to reconstruct a complete order-of-battle for the enemy’s local intelligence establishment. Very little of this would have been possible without
ISOS
, which enabled British Intelligence to monitor all the enemy’s activities in the Iberian peninsula from long distance.

In addition to Section V’s team, there was also a small MI5 section known as special research, and designated B1(b), which analysed the
ISOS
decrypts relevant to German espionage in England. Headed by Herbert Hart, a future professor of jurisprudence at Oxford University, its staff included the art historian Anthony Blunt, Patrick Day, the Oxford philosopher Edward Blanshard Stamp (later a lord justice of appeal) and a peacetime solicitor, John Gwyer. Together they attempted to build a profile of the mysterious
ARABEL
and trace his
movements
. Meanwhile, B1(a) case officers watched their own agents’ traffic for any references to the newly established ring. However, the total burden fell on B1(g), the Iberian section responsible for countering Spanish, Portuguese and South American espionage, headed by a 28-year-old journalist, Dick Brooman-White. Who was
ARABEL
, and how had he got into the country? Answers to these questions were urgently sought by Brooman-White and his three B1(g) case officers, Paul Matthews, Alicia Pitt and Tomás Harris.

Dick Brooman-White was a product of Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, and, in 1938, had been selected as Tory candidate for Bridgeton, Glasgow. In the same year he had been appointed public relations officer of the Territorial Army and, soon after the outbreak of war, he had been transferred to
the Security Service, then housed in Wormwood Scrubs. The other B1(g) officer destined to play an official role in the
GARBO
case was Tomás Harris.

Harris was a gifted artist, born in 1908, who had
transferred
to MI5 from Special Operations Executive (SOE), the sabotage organisation created in July 1940 following the fall of France. Harris had joined SOE on the recommendation of Guy Burgess, one of SOE’s earliest recruits, and had been posted to SOE’s first special training school, which had been established at Brickendonbury Hall, a large country house set in woodland near Hertford. Harris and his wife Hilda remained at Brickendonbury for six months, and then, in the words of Kim Philby, he ‘was soon snapped up by MI5, where he was to conceive and guide one of the most creative intelligence
operations
of all time.’

Harris possessed great imagination combined with a very practical talent. He had won the Trevelyan Goodall Scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art at London University. His achievement was all the more remarkable because he had gained the award when he was just fifteen years old, which, in theory at least, disqualified him from receiving it. Having been educated in Spain, where his mother had been born, Tomás knew the country well and spoke Spanish virtually as a first language. After attending the Slade, he had spent a year at the British Academy in Rome studying painting and sculpture. His father, Lionel, was an English Jew and a renowned Mayfair art dealer. His Spanish Art Gallery concentrated on the sale of the work of Velázquez, Goya and El Greco, and in 1930 Tomás joined his father’s business and scored several saleroom coups. Tomás was highly regarded by critics, and his expertise extended quite beyond painting and etching. He was also a sculptor of some merit and occasionally worked in ceramics, stained glass,
tapestry
and engraving.

As well as Tomás, Lionel Harris had three daughters, Conchita, Enriqueta and Violetta, who followed Tomás into
MI5 as a Spanish-speaking officer serving in B1(a). The Harris home, 6 Chesterfield Gardens, which Tomás subsequently inherited from his father, was a magnificent house, rich with oriental carpets and medieval tapestries. It also doubled as Lionel’s place of business, and eventually became a favourite meeting place for MI5’s and SIS’s few Bohemian employees. Both Tommy and his wife Hilda were lavish entertainers and acquired a well-deserved reputation for producing fine wine and gourmet meals for their friends, in spite of wartime rationing.

Later in the war they moved away from Mayfair into an even bigger property, Garden House, Logan Place, but their home still retained the easygoing atmosphere of an informal
intelligence
officer’s club, with youthful MI5 and SIS men drifting in and out. The Harris
galère
of wealthy, university-educated young men included Guy Burgess, David Liddell, Victor Rothschild and Anthony Blunt from MI5, and Dick Brooman-White, Kim Philby, Tim Milne and Peter Wilson from SIS. Most of these individuals (with the exception of Philby and his successor as head of Section V’s Iberian unit, Tim Milne) distinguished themselves in various other fields after the war. Burgess went from the BBC into the Foreign Office, and later defected to Russia; David Liddell became a successful artist; Victor Rothschild became a scientist; Anthony Blunt returned to the Courtauld Institute; Brooman-White was elected Conservative Member of Parliament for Rutherglen; Peter Wilson became chairman of Sotheby’s.

Late in 1941 Brooman-White transferred to SIS to run Section V’s Iberian unit, known as V(d), and Tomás Harris was appointed to succeed him as head of B1(g). By this date B1(g) had undergone some expansion because of its
increasing
responsibilities. Initially, the subsection had operated a couple of agents inside the Spanish embassy in London, had interrogated espionage suspects wishing to enter Britain and had investigated suspected breaches of censorship to Spain and South America. B1(g)’s workload was escalating daily, an
Paul Matthews was not in good health. In addition, there was too much for just three secretaries to cope with. Accordingly, Harris began looking for an extra member for his section. One morning he met Sarah Bishop, whom he knew spoke fluent Spanish, on the stairs of St James’s Street, so he asked her to join them.

Sarah Bishop had started her secretarial duties in the Cabinet office, but had asked to move elsewhere when her immediate superior had switched from political work to the preparation of economic statistics. Thanks to the intervention of friendly MI5 officer (and future high court judge) Toby Caulfield, Sarah Bishop was offered a post in MI5’s French section, which was then headed by a youthful Peter Ramsbotham (who was subsequently knighted and became Britain’s ambassador in Washington). After a brief spell learning about the role of the Security Service, Sarah now moved on to join Tomás Harris in B1(g). Here she was told that the
ISOS
analysts had spotted a new Abwehr personality, whom the Germans thought was reporting from England under his code name
ARABEL
but whom Herbert Hart’s analysts believed was a Spaniard still in Portugal.

As the pieces of the
ARABEL
jigsaw were put together, it seemed likely that the man who had come to the British embassy in Madrid and later in Lisbon to offer his services to the Allied cause, Juan Pujol García, and
ARABEL
were one and the same person. It was also evident to MI5 that
ARABEL
’s information was fictitious, although
ISOS
monitored a distinct increase in the Abwehr’s estimation of him. Incredibly, the Germans seemed to swallow every one of his lies, and even approved the bizarre expenses demanded on behalf of his obviously notional agents.
ARABEL
had been unable to master the predecimal English currency of
£
s.d. and therefore submitted some very unusual accounts, which were always listed in shillings.
ARABEL
also seemed to believe that the Portuguese legation, with the rest of London’s diplomatic missions, moved to the coast at Brighton in order to escape the intolerably hot summers in the
capital. On one occasion he reported that dockers in Liverpool became usefully in discreet about shipping movements when brought a litre of wine. In spite of these glaring errors,
ARABEL
’s fraudulent messages sometimes prompted considerable military undertakings by the Germans, and it was also true that
ARABEL
sometimes hit on the truth or came uncomfortably close to it.