The Spy with 29 Names (15 page)

‘That’s good,’ Harris said. ‘David can be the first of the group to be recruited.’

‘Stanley already has one sub-agent,’ Sarah Bishop said. ‘Agent 7(1), the soldier in the notional 9th Armoured Division. David can be Agent 7(2).’

Pujol outlined other members of the group for them. It was straightforward from there, he said, to get more Welshmen from within the Brotherhood to act as sub-agents. But while the next three characters were all Welsh and more or less of the same type, Pujol had a surprise for them when he mentioned the fifth member.

‘There is also an Indian,’ he said.

Harris tried to stifle his laughter. At her desk, Sarah Bishop was shaking her head.

‘Are not Indians also considered Aryans?’ Pujol asked.

‘They are,’ Harris said.

‘This man,’ Pujol said, ‘is a dreamer, a poet.’

‘I know!’ Sarah called out. ‘We’ll call him Rags, or something.’

‘Rags it is,’ Harris said.

‘Right,’ Pujol continued. ‘Rags joined the Brotherhood to uphold his fanatical belief in the superiority of the Aryan race.’

‘Naturally,’ Harris grinned.

‘And what’s more, he’s fallen in love with the group’s secretary.’

Sarah Bishop threw him a glance.

‘Who is . . .?’ Harris asked.

‘An Englishwoman.’

‘English?’

‘She’s become Rags’s mistress,’ Pujol explained. ‘And now she’s joined the Brotherhood because she’s attracted to Indian men.’

‘All Indian men? Or just Rags?’ Sarah asked.

‘Something about the physical and moral supremacy of the Aryan races,’ Pujol said.

‘She’d be very useful,’ said Harris. He knew that someone like this could be sent to India. There was an opportunity here to spread the Garbo network into Asia.

‘She needs a name, too,’ said Sarah.

‘Theresa Jardine,’ The name had popped spontaneously into Harris’s head.

There was a moment’s pause before they all nodded. Yes, it worked. It was so mad there was no chance that it could not work.

‘We might want to conscript her into the WRNS.’ Harris looked across to Sarah and she began taking notes. ‘And on account of her predilection for Indians, she should do everything in her power to get a posting to the subcontinent.’

Harris checked the time: he had a meeting to attend. He left Pujol and Sarah in the office to flesh out more details. The Allied invasion of France was only months away – their new additions to the Garbo network could come in handy. He would mention them to Tar Robertson and Masterman when he saw them. His superiors would welcome the new recruits, he felt sure. David, Rags and Theresa Jardine were typical Garbo characters, existing in some borderland between the unbelievable and the credible, so odd that they had to be real. Or at least in the Germans’ minds.

And was it really so strange to dream up something like the Brothers in the Aryan World Order? Real life could throw up equally curious
organisations. In fact it was almost as if the Garbo team had clairvoyant powers. Later, in his offical report, Harris would write the following conclusion to his chapter about this particular episode of the Garbo story:

Lest the reader should consider these recruitments too fantastic he should be reminded that the truth is often stranger than fiction. This was subsequently to be proved to us, for several months later the activities of a Welsh seaman who had been arrested were brought to the notice of M.I.5. It transpired that he had been detained for spreading subversive propaganda among his fellow seamen. He had been circulating subversive typewritten leaflets and had spread anti-Semitic propaganda in the name of a small organisation which, from the material discovered amongst his property, ornamented with swastikas and other Nazi emblems, was the ‘ARYAN WORLD ORDER’.

^fn1
The twenty-seven fictional members of the network, along with the German code name ‘Alaric’ and the British code name ‘Garbo’, make Pujol ‘the spy with 29 names’.

‘It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction.

Fiction has to make sense.’

Mark Twain

FAR FROM JERMYN
Street, the war on the Eastern Front ground on.

After guard duties on the Azov Sea came to an end in July, the men of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler – LAH – were sent to France, where their swelling numbers were converted into a Panzergrenadier Division – motorised infantry equipped with armoured personnel carriers and half-track fighting vehicles.

Jochen Peiper did not rush to rejoin his men, spending time with his wife in Germany and visiting his mentor, Reichsführer Himmler, at his headquarters. It was an important moment for the head of the SS. His leading subordinate, Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Final Solution, had recently been wounded in an assassination attempt in Prague by Czechoslovak resistance fighters. Heydrich had not been killed in the attack itself, but debris had been blown into his abdomen and he would later die from his infected wounds.

It was a questionable victory for the Czechoslovaks. Nazi retribution for Heydrich’s death was massive and brutal, and, if anything, his murder sped up the process of the Holocaust. In the May of 1942 the gas chambers at Auschwitz became fully operational and Himmler spent part of the summer visiting the site to ensure that his new installations were running as efficiently as possible.

Staying close to the centre of these developments, Peiper did not make it to France to join his unit until August. There, in September, he was made commander of the III Battalion – a fighting unit comprising almost a thousand men organised into five companies. It was an important step in his already rapid rise through the ranks.

One of his first acts as commander was to forbid his men from having relationships with French girls or visiting the local brothels. It made a poor initial impression and later, on the recommendation of a medical officer concerned, perhaps, by the consequences of imposing monastic rules on fighting men, Peiper rescinded the order.

The autumn was spent getting used to the division’s new military equipment. The armoured personnel carriers came with machine guns or anti-tank guns, and could travel off-road, transporting an entire squadron and protecting it from enemy infantry fire. By the winter, they were ready to be used.

Things were developing rapidly in the east. The situation in the southern sector of the front, in and around Stalingrad, was becoming desperate: it was time for Hitler’s crack troops of the SS to be brought in to show their worth. On 30 December, the LAH received orders to prepare for deployment to the Ukraine.

The first units were already heading east when, still in France, Peiper was promoted to Sturmbannführer – the equivalent of major. It was 30 January, the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s coming to power, and Peiper’s twenty-eighth birthday. The next day his battalion caught the train and headed east, just as, in Stalingrad, General Friedrich Paulus surrendered the German 6th Army to the Soviets.

The defeat at Stalingrad was a shocking blow for the Germans. The 6th Army, a fighting force that had once numbered 300,000 men, had been destroyed and the Wehrmacht’s air of invincibility, earned after years of spectacular victories across Europe, had been lost.

The LAH – now also known as the 1st SS Division – was joined by the 2nd SS Division, Das Reich, on the southern sector of the Eastern Front, and together with the 3rd SS Division, Totenkopf (Death’s Head), they made up the SS Panzer Corps. Their objective was to retake territory lost in the wake of the Stalingrad defeat.

Peiper and his men were in action as soon as they got off the train, arriving near the city of Kharkov. It was cold and many Wehrmacht units were demoralised. The German 320th Infantry Division – which
had once numbered some 20,000 men – had become trapped behind enemy lines. Peiper’s III Battalion was given the job of rescuing it, and with only a few hundred soldiers under his command he completed the job in less than two days, destroying the Soviet forces he encountered and fighting his way back to the German lines the long way round because the river ice could not hold the weight of his equipment.

The action won him the German Cross in Gold, one of the highest honours in the Wehrmacht. But as if rescuing an entire infantry division was not enough, Peiper continued over the coming days and weeks with more heroic and daredevil exploits, punching deep into enemy territory and inflicting heavy losses. He gained a reputation for leading from the front, issuing orders calmly and with tactical precision.

Yet there was a price to be paid for his style of leadership – Peiper was becoming known for suffering high casualties among his troops. He admired commanders like Georg Preuss, a first lieutenant who became company commander under him. Preuss not only obeyed orders to the letter, he also used to comment with a grin that the more of his men were killed ‘the more women will be left for me’.

Peiper’s scant regard for human life was extended many times over when it came to the enemy – both soldiers and civilians. The Germans had abandoned Kharkov on 15 February, yet fighting around the city continued as they tried to retake it. On 3 March, Peiper’s battalion invented a new weapon designed for combat in enemy-held villages: the blowtorch.

Taking the heaters that were used to warm the engines on their vehicles in the sub-zero temperatures, Peiper had them modified and turned into flame-throwers that could spew out a jet of fire of up to 15 metres long. He soon had a chance to test them out. The next day they were used for the first time when the village of Stanichnoye, and anyone left inside it, was reduced to ashes. The nearby village of Staraverovka soon suffered the same fate. Anything – and anyone – that got in the battalion’s way was incinerated.

The SS was no stranger to atrocities, but this was eye-catching even by their standards. Peiper’s cachet was raised even more by his innovation and his unit earned itself the nickname the ‘Blowtorch Battalion’ – a moniker his men were proud to bear, painting blowtorches on their vehicles as an unofficial symbol.

Meanwhile, Peiper continued in his relentless progress, often reaching his daily objectives early in the morning and then continuing further into enemy territory on his own initiative. Such an action won him another medal – this time the highest in Germany: the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross.

His greatest moment, in the Third Battle of Kharkov, was yet to come.

Again on his own initiative, by 9 March Peiper’s Blowtorch Battalion had reached the western outskirts of the city as the Germans pushed to retake it and the stage was set for a full assault against the Soviet positions, using all three SS divisions available. At the start of the offensive, Peiper was ordered to advance along the main street and reach Red Square in the centre. After seizing a small bridge of the River Lopan, he used his new heavy Tiger tanks with their powerful 88mm guns to achieve his objective. Fighting was fierce and the losses, again, were high, with over 4,500 LAH casualties, but by 14 March Peiper’s men had pushed through and the defenders were beaten. Kharkov was back in German hands and the Waffen-SS had achieved one of its greatest victories.

The city may have been recaptured, but Peiper wanted more. Acting independently, and turning off the radio so as not to hear the orders calling him back, he continued to push repeatedly against Soviet positions, breaking through with no protection on his flanks or to the rear. He did not care: Peiper was racing north from Kharkov at breakneck speed, pushing through towns and villages without stopping.

The result was that, at 1135 hours on 18 March he was able to declare that he had single-handedly taken the nearby city of Belgorod as well. The Third Battle of Kharkov had ended.

The Germans were ecstatic. After the disaster at Stalingrad only weeks before they now had something to celebrate on the Eastern Front. And victory had come thanks to the fearless efforts of the three Waffen-SS divisions of the SS Corps. Of these, the LAH, the 1st SS Division, received the largest share of the medals that were subsequently handed out.

Triumphant, they carried out a massacre of Soviet prisoners, murdering hundreds of wounded soldiers in Kharkov’s hospitals. Officers and commissars were also executed as a matter of course.

Jochen Peiper, meanwhile, the glorious commander of the III Battalion and the victor of Belgorod, was now a hero of the Reich and one of the most dangerous men in the German armed forces.

AFTER MONTHS OF
hesitation, Kühlenthal finally gave permission for Garbo to communicate with Madrid by wireless in March 1943. Pujol was sent the Abwehr cypher table – one that Bletchley had already broken – and was able to put the machine he had ‘bought on the black market’ into operation. A friend of Fred the Gibraltarian acted as wireless operator, thinking, as Garbo explained to the Germans, that he was sending secret messages on behalf of a clandestine Spanish Republican group. In fact, the man tapping away in Morse code was a real, not fictional, new member of the Garbo organisation: Charlie Haines, a former bank clerk who had failed to get into the armed services owing to a limp brought on by polio.

Harris and the Twenty Committee were pleased: the transmissions and codes that the Germans provided were a clear indication of the value they put on Garbo’s material. And the more they trusted him, the greater the opportunities for MI5 to use the channel to deceive the enemy.

The Garbo operation appeared to be going very well. A plan for the Germans to pay Garbo through Spanish fruit merchants as intermediaries was up and running, and several thousand pounds had already been received. By June the figure had reached £7,000, with the added irony that the Abwehr was effectively paying to be deceived.

Meanwhile the Germans had fallen for a new story that Garbo had been working on – a secret arms depot being set up in the Chislehurst
Caves, in the south-eastern suburbs of London. From his waitering duties, Fred had been transferred to a job helping to dig and expand the underground chambers as ‘all Gibraltarians should have a natural aptitude for tunnelling’. The arms and ammunition stored there would, according to the story, be used once the Allies opened up the Second Front, and by the speed at which the caves were opened and filled, it was hoped that the Germans would come to an erroneous conclusion as to the date of such an operation. The fact was that there were no weapons being kept in the Chislehurst Caves. The tunnels had served as an arsenal during the First World War, but were now acting as a large-scale air-raid shelter.