The Spy with 29 Names (10 page)

Knappe and Kühlenthal had given Pujol 3,000 dollars, which he had smuggled over the border hidden inside two condoms – one stuffed inside a tube of toothpaste, the other in a tube of shaving cream, both opened at the bottom and resealed.

His first move, once established back in Portugal, was to approach the British again. His hopes were not high, and indeed he failed even to get a hearing. He would have to collect more proof that the Germans considered him one of their spies before he could make another attempt.

He therefore sat down and wrote his ‘first letter from London’ to his German controllers. Dated 15 July, he sent it from Lisbon on the 19th. To get around the fact that it clearly did not have a British postmark on the envelope, he came up with an elaborate tale. He had, he said, made contact with an official in the airline company flying from Lisbon to Portugal, which he had used on the 12th to fly out from the country. This was BOAC, but the staff on the flights were Dutch
as four of the planes used were KLM DC3s. The official, Pujol told the Germans, thought that he was a Catalan exile sending urgent letters home, and agreed to take them on the flights, charging a dollar each time, posting them from Lisbon and so bypassing the British censors. The Germans were to send their return letters to an address in Lisbon, where the airline official would pick them up and take them back to Pujol ‘in London’. This courier, code-named J(1), was the first member of a large network of collaborators and sub-agents that Pujol would eventually invent, becoming in time what the Germans would refer to as the ‘Arabal undertaking’. Some appeared as willing helpers, aware of Pujol’s work for the Nazis, others aided him unwittingly. All of them, however, were mere figments, the fruits of his powerful imagination.

Sending and picking up letters from the poste restante office in Lisbon, by the end of July he received his first reply from the Germans, confirming receipt of his letters and stating that they were eager to hear further news from him.

Pujol now thought that he had all the proof he needed, and he made yet another approach to the British in Lisbon. After some difficulty he was interviewed by someone in the Military Attaché’s office. Pujol explained that he could provide secret inks and questionnaires from the Germans to back up his claims. He pointed out, however, that it was extremely dangerous for him to keep coming to the British Embassy, and that should he hand over the material he mentioned, he would never be allowed back into Spain, and would probably have to leave Portugal as well. So he insisted that the British could only have the material which would expose the German spy network in Madrid in exchange for helping him leave and get to the United States.

The British official said he would discuss the matter with his superiors and agreed to meet Pujol the following day at the English Bar in Estoril at 7.00 in the evening. Pujol duly showed up, but after a long wait it was clear that the British were not coming. Furious, he returned to the British Embassy, where the official told him that he had not been able to locate the superior whom he had intended to bring along for the meeting. Eventually Pujol left in disgust. There was no one, he concluded, among the British delegation in Lisbon who was at all interested in what he had to offer. If he was to make
any progress at all, it could only be through the British Embassy back in Madrid.

Pujol was in a difficult situation: the Germans thought he was in England and were demanding intelligence reports. Yet the British, the people he was trying to help, wanted nothing to do with him. If the Germans found out that he was lying, and worse, that he was trying to make contact with the British, his life would be forfeit. He was twenty-nine years old, living in a foreign country, and his wife had just given birth to their first child. Resourceful and imaginative as he was, the danger involved was all too clear.

He had to do something, so he fell back on Kühlenthal’s orders – to build up a network of sub-agents. He had already started with his KLM courier. Now he would begin creating new characters. In his second letter back to Madrid, he introduced the first two. Agent 1 was a Portuguese citizen living in Newport, South Wales, called Carvalho, who had agreed to watch the shipping convoys coming in and out of the Bristol Channel. Agent 2 was a German-Swiss named Gerbers, based in Bootle, keeping an eye on the Mersey. In a later letter, he created a third sub-agent, a Venezuelan student based in Glasgow who eventually became known as Pedro. These were the characters appearing on Bletchley intercepts read by Philby and Bristow at Section V, who would cause British Intelligence so much concern.

The invention of the sub-agents had a double benefit: firstly, by passing on information to the Germans as having come from them, Pujol put in a safeguard should ‘their’ intelligence prove to be wrong: any mistakes and he could easily liquidate them. Secondly, these agents demanded money for their reports: Gerbers wanted 2 dollars a day, plus 25 dollars for any important information that he passed on. The more ‘sub-agents’ he had, the more money Pujol could ask of the Germans.

Kühlenthal was delighted. But still the demand came for real information that the Germans could use. From making up characters, Pujol had to start inventing ‘intelligence’.

By now it was September 1941. Pujol did not have any English, but he could check newspapers written in French. He travelled into Lisbon city centre, visiting libraries to pick up whatever information he could from reference works about shipping and military matters. From
British newspapers he gleaned information about certain firms – their names and addresses – with which he could pepper his reports to add to their realism.

His letters to the Germans were verbose – a ruse that he later claimed to have adopted deliberately in order to say as little as possible with a maximum number of words. The truth was that it was his natural prose style.

I had an agent near Avonmouth. Unloading was mostly of foodstuffs. This I gathered from a dock worker who said: ‘Fortunately a hungry winter is finished for us.’ From the information from North America it is judged that this convoy is that indicated by Churchill when he referred in his speech to the largest convoy which has ever crossed the Atlantic . . .

Number Three agent reports the following: The latest recruits called up a few days ago in the Glasgow area go out every morning in formation to effect military exercises on the Rangers football ground. This ground is on the left bank of the Clyde near Broomstown Street
[
sic
] . . .

In his third letter he talked about convoys arriving in the Clyde. The last thing he wanted was to unintentionally endanger any real convoys, so he said that before docking, the convoy broke up and dispersed all around the coast, thus making themselves more difficult targets for German U-boats. It was a good plan, so good that a couple of years later the Admiralty in London adopted it in all reports about convoys fed back to the Germans through double agents.

For the time being, however, Pujol was on his own and living by his wits. He made a further attempt to approach the British, this time through a passport official in Madrid. Araceli went with him, but again it came to nothing: Mr Thompson, he was told, was away.

It was even more dangerous for him to be in Madrid than in Lisbon; he would have to return as soon as possible. In the meantime, he wanted to confirm that the Germans believed in him as their spy in London. What if they were deceiving him just as he was them?

He concocted another plan: Araceli was to deliver a letter by hand to Knappe in Madrid. This she then did, and at the meeting she started quizzing the German, wondering about her husband’s unusual behaviour. What was this letter about? What was going on? Why was she passing it on to him, a man she had never met before? Eventually she confided that she thought her husband was having an affair. Knappe,
anxious to get his hands on Pujol’s letter, told her everything. He was actually working for them, he said, spying for the Germans from inside Britain. Feigning doubt at first, Araceli finally accepted the story, handing a photo of her little son to Knappe to pass on to her husband.

Araceli was as good an actor as Pujol, and had secured the proof that the Germans did indeed think that her husband was genuine. Their minds could be put at rest on that point, at least. Yet still Pujol was getting nowhere with the British, and still he had to produce intelligence for his controllers.

In Lisbon he bought a
Blue Guide to Great Britain
and a Portuguese book on the British fleet. The reports began to flow – often concentrating on shipping, but also talking about troop movements that he observed as he pretended to travel about the country:

Along the Windermere – Barness
[
sic
, presumably Bowness]
road, and along the road which follows the shores of the lake to where it crosses the Windermere – Ambleside road (at a point called the Wood where there is a small chapel of Santa Catalina) there are camps full of troops. These forces are excellently equipped and have modern weapons.

The Germans swallowed it all, even the pieces about non-existent minesweepers and the summer heat in London.

Months passed, and Pujol’s situation became more desperate. He would not be able to sustain the pretence indefinitely, yet already, in one of their replies, his controllers had told him that his mission in Britain would be a long one, and that on no account should he try to return to Spain. There was no option but to carry on. Eventually the British would have to listen.

In October he made a last attempt to make contact. Again in Madrid, he got through to the passport official named Thompson, producing German questionnaires and promising to provide evidence of German secret inks and other methods. But Thompson, like so many other British officials, refused to believe him. He failed to even take note of the questions asked of Pujol by the Germans. They included many on the situation in the Pacific, including: ‘How does England expect to resist Japanese aggression? What help is expected from the USA in case of war with Japan?’

A little over a month later, on 7 December 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the world war extended into the Far East.

Meanwhile, in Lisbon, Araceli was worried. There had been so many rejections. Her husband was at a low ebb. He started talking about emigrating to Brazil. They had to get out: there was no way they could carry on as they were.

He was close to giving up. He would, she knew, make the most of a new life in Latin America, but this failure would hang over him for the rest of his life.

It was at this point that she decided she would have to act alone, without his knowledge: a last-ditch attempt to make this work before either the Germans discovered the truth, or circumstances forced them to leave Europe for good. In November she went to the US Embassy in Lisbon, asking for an interview with the assistant naval attaché, a man called Rousseau. She had information, she told him, about a man spying for the Germans from within the United States itself. She had a telegram from him talking about sabotage plans in Chicago.

Would Rousseau listen . . .?

‘And, after all, what is a lie?

’Tis but the truth in masquerade.’

Lord Byron

IT WAS CHRISTMAS
Day. At Bletchley Park Mavis Lever and Dilly Knox were starting to stream the first decoded Abwehr messages to Bristow, Philby and others in British intelligence. At that moment, far from London and the Home Counties, the heaviest fighting in the war was taking place in the Soviet Union, where, on the shores of the frozen Azov Sea, at the southern tip of the Eastern Front, the temperature was dropping to minus 40 degrees.

There the SS troops whose fighting lives would in time be profoundly affected by Pujol’s stories were expecting a special visitor for lunch, flying in from Berlin to celebrate with this elite unit. To insiders like Jochen Peiper, their guest was known as King Heinrich – ‘K.H.’ – the reincarnation of Germany’s first king. Others referred to him by his official title: Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.

The advances of the summer and autumn had now ended, yet vast areas of the Soviet Union had been conquered. To the north, Moscow itself had been within reach only weeks before, while in the south, Rostov-on-Don had briefly been theirs. The Soviets had fought back and pushed them out of the city, westwards to Taganrog, Chekhov’s birthplace. Yet the thaw of spring would see another German offensive. In a short time they would push towards the Caucasus again, with its mineral and oil wealth so important for the Reich.

Conditions at the front line had deteriorated over the past weeks: rations had been reduced to 150 grams of food a day. At the winter headquarters, however, no effort would be spared to make the best Christmas lunch possible for their guest.

There were many sections of the SS, acting as front-line troops, concentration-camp officers and death squads. Yet within the Nazi Praetorian Guard, one unit was held higher than any other, a privileged inner corps: the men of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler – the LAH
^fn1
– were proud to bear on their uniforms the name of the Führer himself, whose life it was their mission to protect. No other body was closer to the top ranks of the Nazi Party.

Despite the brutalising experiences that he had already lived through, Jochen Peiper still had a boyish face, with pushed-back dark-blond hair, pink cheeks, heavy eyebrows, pale eyes, a long straight nose and cleft chin. He had turned eighteen on the day that Hitler had come to power, 30 January 1933. Weeks later he joined the SS. The officer training programme was infamous: people claimed that a recruit had to stand still while a grenade was let off on top of his helmet. The story was untrue, but contained a truth nonetheless – about the commitment required, the importance given to following orders, and a cavalier attitude to physical injury and death. Officers of the Wehrmacht – the traditional German armed forces – might frown at the methods and high casualty rates of SS soldiers, the Waffen-SS, but for Peiper and his comrades theirs was a war of
Weltanschauung
, of ideology, of building the dream of the Reich. They were a new Order of Teutonic Knights, men who one day, in the hall of Valhalla, would reminisce about the battles they had fought and the sacrifices they had made for Germany.