The Spy with 29 Names (11 page)

Peiper was no ordinary member of the LAH. From before the war, and during the first years of the conflict, he had been adjutant to Himmler himself, and the Reichsführer had come to value the young man who was bright, ideologically passionate and obedient. ‘My dear Jochen’, he called him in his letters. Peiper had married Sigurd Hinrichsen, one of Himmler’s secretaries, who was best friends with
Hedwig Potthast, Himmler’s mistress, and with Reinhard Heydrich, his deputy.

Working so close to Himmler was second only to being adjutant to Hitler himself. But Peiper had craved the life of a soldier from a boy, inspired by his father’s experiences as an officer in the Imperial Army. Himmler had allowed his adjutant a brief stint away to fight with the LAH during the conquest of France. Now, however, Peiper had been on the Eastern Front for months, proving that he was more than a mere desk officer, that he could also fight and lead men. And his superiors were pleased with him. Hauptsturmführer Joachim Peiper – Jochen to those who knew him – was still only twenty-six, yet was already a captain, decorated with an Iron Cross, First Class.

Now it was Christmas. His wife Sigi was pregnant with their second child and a new year was about to begin, one that would put the failures of 1941 behind them. They had not taken Moscow, but once the Russian winter came to an end they would strike again.

And they had something important to tell Himmler.

Heinz Seetzen was commander of Einsatzkommando 10a, a sub-unit of the SS death squads sent in behind the front-line troops. He was wintering near the LAH, and while the fighting continued he and his men were kept busy. The LAH had helped where it could: tank-trap ditches were useful for disposing of corpses. Seetzen was even using a new machine to carry out his work – a
Gaswagen
, a truck on which the exhaust was piped back into the body of the van. The screaming could still be heard from outside, and the truck had to drive a few kilometres around the city before everyone inside was dead, but by the time it returned to Taganrog the job was done, and it prevented some of the stress that the task could cause Seetzen’s men. Thousands had already been killed using this method: Communist Party members, the mentally ill, and particularly Jews. The fact was – and this was the news they could tell Himmler on his arrival – with the work of the
Gaswagen
, Taganrog was now
Judenfrei
– free of Jews entirely.

Peiper had not seen Himmler since the late summer. It was possible, he knew, that the Reichsführer would ask him to return as his assistant. The two men got on, and he had heard that his replacement was not doing well. He enjoyed soldiering, yet being next to Himmler allowed him to witness the inner workings of state. There was little he did
not know about the Reichsführer’s plans for their struggle against international Jewry and communism. And it had allowed this Berlin boy from a middle-class family to see more of the world than he otherwise might have: there had already been official visits to France, Greece, Norway, Italy and Spain. Franco had treated them to a bullfight in Madrid, before Himmler’s entourage had moved on to Barcelona. They had visited a monastery in the mountains – Montserrat. Obsessed with his search for ancient sacred relics, Himmler thought he might find clues there to the location of the Holy Grail.

Now there was talk of a new move, a new chapter. Not just
Gaswagen
, but other, bigger machines that could do the work of thousands of men. Heydrich would be put in charge; it would only be a matter of time before their final objectives were met.

Peiper took his place, ready to welcome his chief and mentor.

A salute:
Heil Hitler
. Arms outstretched.

And Himmler in front of him, thin mouth, weak chin, eyes black and still behind circular glasses.

A smile.

‘My dear Jochen.’

^fn1
Later renamed the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, LSSAH. For the sake of simplicity I refer to it as the LAH throughout.

THE CHANGE FROM
sifting through hotel registers was more than welcome. Bristow spoke fluent Spanish, and although MI5 was taking over the case, MI6 still needed a man there before handing over ‘Bovril’. Besides, there was plenty of legwork to be done, translating messages to the Abwehr into English from the original Spanish – copies that Pujol had brought with him from Lisbon. Then there would be many days of hearing the man’s story over and over again, cross-referencing, looking for possible inconsistencies.

Bristow, posing as ‘Captain Richards’, caught the train down from St Albans early in the morning on 28 April 1942, before taking the Tube to Hendon, and 35 Crespigny Road.

The MI5 safe house was an unremarkable late-Victorian place, painted white and with brick-red roof tiles, on a street of houses all quietly distinct yet essentially the same. Inside, behind the lace curtains, it was sparingly decorated: chairs and tables had been set in a back room where the interviews took place. The window looked out on to a small garden. Mrs Titoff, an elderly Russian émigré and MI5 employee, was the housekeeper.

Cyril Mills, from MI5, had been named the new man’s case officer, and made the introductions. Bristow’s impression of Pujol was favourable from the start. The small Catalan appeared relaxed. His brown eyes had a warmth about them, with something of a mischievous glint.

After the first day at Hendon, Bristow rushed back to Glenalmond from the train station, wanting to tell Philby and the others about the mysterious Nazi agent who had kept them guessing for so many months.

‘Well, Desmond, h-how is our friend?’ Philby asked.

It was getting late, and his colleagues were already in the snakepit, sipping after-work cocktails.

‘Very well,’ Bristow said. ‘Surprisingly relaxed. Seems to enjoy answering any questions I put to him. Without any doubt it is he who sent the notes to our opponents in Berlin. He is Arabel.’

‘No doubt in your mind at all, Desmond?’ Philby asked.

No, there was none.

‘He knows the dates and the contents of the messages,’ Bristow said. Pujol could recite almost word for word the reports he had written in secret ink in the letters forwarded to the Abwehr spymaster in Madrid.

‘And I don’t think he is a German agent,’ he added. ‘It seems as though he has invented himself out of some romantic notion about spying, or else just for the money. Apparently the Germans were paying him quite well.’

Everything pointed to Pujol being who he said he was: a Spaniard, pretending to work for the Germans, who really wanted to work for the British.

For the following few days, Bristow continued his new routine of heading down to Hendon in the mornings. Cyril Mills was always there, but he did not speak a word of Spanish and could not make anything of the man. Too pompous by half, Bristow thought; it was not the best of arrangements.

And then, on 1 May, as he turned up for another day’s interviewing and debriefing, a different, happier face opened the Hendon door to him.

There was someone else in MI5 much better suited to the job of running this potential new agent, a Spanish speaker, a good friend of Philby and the man who had been with Mills to pick Pujol up at Plymouth: Tomás Harris.

Bristow had met Harris a couple of times before, the first a few months previously when Philby had invited him down to London for dinner. Driving in the dark after the headlights on Philby’s Vauxhall
car fused, they had arrived at Harris’s Mayfair home. Tommy and his wife Hilda – an attractive and impulsive woman who became renowned among their friends for her cooking skills – were wealthy, and the food and wine they served were of a quality that was becoming increasingly rare in wartime. Philby had spoken openly about service matters in front of them, which had perplexed Bristow until it was explained that Harris was in MI5. His mother was from Seville, and he had spent a good deal of time in Spain collecting works of art. Much of the collection was in the Mayfair house. Bristow ended up staying the night, sleeping in a room with a seventeenth-century Spanish wardrobe, brass-studded latticework decorating the doors. Much of the furniture on the landings seemed to have come straight from a museum.

He liked Harris; he was a talented and charming man. Like Philby, Harris shared a love of Spain, which felt so far away as the snow began to fall on London and Philby drove Bristow back to St Albans.

Now, though, a little part of Spain – a curious Spaniard – had come to them. Bristow was delighted that Mills had stepped aside. Harris would be the perfect case officer.

At Hendon, the two men greeted each other warmly. Bristow had heard most of it already, but Harris needed to listen to Pujol’s story in full.

Pujol was in the back room, waiting. After drinking some of Mrs Titoff’s coffee, Harris and Bristow went through, and the interview began. Pujol was cold, unused to the British climate, and Mrs Titoff made sure the fire was lit. He was enjoying her English breakfasts: he had not eaten bacon for years.

It took several days. Bristow and Harris were in and out of Crespigny Road for over a week, going over the story time and again. Harris was soon convinced that Pujol was indeed who he said he was, that he was, at least in the Germans’ eyes, a genuine agent.

‘Desmond,’ he told Bristow after his first day with Pujol, ‘he is obviously Arabel, but I do find it hard to believe such an outwardly simple man still has the Germans fooled and had us worried for so long. He is such a dreamer, and so willing, he is going to be a marvellous double agent to operate with as long as the Germans continue to swallow his communications.’

The MI5 man and his Section V colleague were convinced. The job
now was to persuade those above them that Pujol was worth adding to the double-cross team. Bristow was asked to report first, joining the Thursday afternoon meetings of the Twenty Committee at MI5 headquarters on St James’s Street. Later, on his recommendation, Harris came along as well, soon becoming a regular member. Bristow would leave shortly after to become MI6’s man in Gibraltar.

The room where the meetings were held was ‘square, bare and cold’. The chair was held by John Masterman, with John Marriot, a former solicitor, as secretary. Tar Robertson was present, as head of MI5’s B1A section, as were various representatives of MI5 and MI6, directors of intelligence for the Army, Navy and Air Force, and delegates from the Home Forces and Home Defence.

Harris and Bristow had heard Pujol’s long and involved tale: they also studied the copies of the letters that he had brought with him from Lisbon, replicas of the messages he had been sending over the previous months to the Germans. Thanks to the Bletchley intercepts, they were able to cross-check what Pujol showed them with what the Abwehr in Madrid were reporting back to Berlin about Arabel. The texts matched.

There was a letter missing from Pujol’s collection, however, the one about the Malta convoy. When it was mentioned to him, Pujol wrote out the letter again, matching the original almost word for word. This was proof, as far as Harris was concerned, that he really was who he claimed to be. Later, the original letter emerged – it had been mislaid by MI6 when they transferred Pujol and his materials from Portugal.

The question was whether Harris and Bristow could convince the members of the Twenty Committee of Pujol’s usefulness. They would be the ones to decide to take him on or not for double-cross work. The problem was that not everyone on the committee had access to the Bletchley decoded transcripts, or were even aware of their existence. The Twenty Committee may have been one of the secret services’ most secret organisations – the ‘club’, as Masterman called it – but secrets were being kept from at least some of its members; not least the fact that the British had cracked a good number of the German Enigma codes, including that used by the Abwehr.

Not having access to this material meant that, on hearing Pujol’s story, many committee members refused to believe it. It was, quite
simply, preposterous. How on earth could they take such a man seriously? Surely he was a fantasist, or a German plant. It would be impossible to use him as a double agent.

Only a handful of members – those from the Admiralty and MI6 – knew, thanks to Dilly Knox and Mavis Lever’s decoding work at Bletchley, that almost everything that Pujol said could be confirmed by what German intelligence was reporting about him in its internal communiqués.

The situation became untenable. The Twenty Committee was close to rejecting a man who had the potential to become an invaluable double agent. Members from MI5 had some knowledge, at least, of Bletchley, but representatives from the Services were in the dark, and if they could not believe in Pujol it would be impossible to come up with false or misleading material for him to pass on to the Germans. Finally, in desperation, Masterman wrote to MI6 chief Sir Stewart Menzies explaining the situation. A few days later Menzies wrote back, reluctantly clearing all members of the committee to receive Bletchley material relevant to the work of double-cross. The doubters could finally see the proof: Pujol was genuine.

Now word quickly came back from the Twenty Committee: yes, they would take the Spaniard on as a double agent.

At long last, under Harris’s guidance, Pujol’s work as Garbo could begin.

GARBO IS COMMONLY
thought of as one man – Juan Pujol. ‘Garbo’ was the code name MI5 gave Pujol and that was how he was referred to in official documents – always in the singular. Yet in reality the double agent was a double act: the character of Garbo was forged by two men. Putting Pujol and Harris together might have appeared the obvious thing to do, given the Spanish connection, but it was an inspired decision by ‘Tar’ Robinson.

‘Harris and Pujol worked very well together,’ said Sarah Bishop, who later acted as their assistant.

The little Catalan and the brilliant, half-Spanish half-Jewish artist were an ideal, Quixotic match, with echoes of Cervantes’s duo in both of them. Hands-on and highly creative, Harris had the flair to mould the raw material of Pujol into what Garbo would eventually become. And both of them were keen storytellers.