The Spy with 29 Names (21 page)

Peiper took this seriously and upheld the ‘moral’ values of the SS more than other commanders. Sexual relations were only for breeding purposes, to preserve the race. For Peiper there was none of the ‘Jewification’ –
Verjudung
– of the soul by giving in to the sex drive. He was even abstemious towards drink, following Himmler’s example of avoiding alcohol and prostitutes. The Reichsführer had trained as a young man in a Jesuit seminary and had taken many of the ideas of the Society of Jesus and applied them to his ‘Black Order’.

But the pep talks and air of monasticism were not enough for Peiper. Some of the new recruits were not up to standard. They needed teaching a lesson, an experience that would turn them into the ruthless, brutal and indoctrinated fighters that the SS expected them to be. An opportunity arose in May. Five young new soldiers were caught shirking their duties. The boys admitted, in addition, that while away from their posts they had stolen food, including some chickens and a ham. It was a relatively minor offence.

Nevertheless, a court martial found them guilty, and Peiper was merciless. On 28 May he had the five recruits executed by firing squad in front of the entire regiment. Afterwards, every man in the unit was forced to walk past the dead bodies where they had fallen to the ground. Some of them, then still in their teens, never forgot the experience.

It was an important moment for Peiper. When the war had started five years earlier, he had witnessed mass shootings in Poland. Now he was giving the same lessons to his men. The boys who had been shot were, in his mind, mere
schlechtes Menschenmaterial
– ‘bad human material’. They could be dispensed with. Meanwhile he had shown his soldiers the kind of mentality that was expected of them now that they were in the Waffen-SS, now that they were Peiper’s men.

Fully armed and psychologically prepared, the 1st SS Panzer Regiment, the leading tank formation within the LAH, with Peiper at its head, was now ready for anything that the Allies could send its way.

‘A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets a chance to put its pants on.’

Winston Churchill

IN THE SPRING
of 1944 Pujol and Araceli were keeping their marriage going, but only just. Sexual fidelity had become a problem, with Araceli forming an attachment to an Allied naval officer later captured in action and made a prisoner of war. Pujol himself may also have been unfaithful. Real people were now playing the roles of some of the Garbo network’s fictional characters: Harris was effectively Pedro, Agent 3; Cyril Mills was Agent 5 in Canada; and Charlie Haines was Agent 4(1) the radio operator. Was there any parallel between Garbo’s mistress Agent J(5) and Sarah Bishop? Both of them were former War Office secretaries. Certainly Pujol had never had any difficulty finding girlfriends before meeting Araceli. His wife’s letters from Lisbon showed a jealous side to her – did Pujol give her reason to suspect him?

The complications of their sex life aside, Pujol and Araceli were no longer living in Hendon. In December 1943, after rumours had circulated of new secret German weapons designed to terrify Allied civilian populations, Kühlenthal warned his London agent to move out of the capital. No reason was given, but MI5 assumed that it was a reference to the imminent arrival of whatever the Germans had been cooking up over the past months. Pujol packed his bags and took his wife and two boys down to a hotel in Taplow, Buckinghamshire.

Others took the hint, and moved out of the centre, including Harris, who left his Mayfair home for Logan Place, a house with a large
garden in Earl’s Court. But so far, no mysterious new bombs had fallen on London, and everything appeared set for Operation Fortitude.

Something was bothering Harris, however, a niggle in the back of his mind that refused to go away. There was a weak link in the Garbo chain, indeed in the entire double-cross system. In a bizarre role reversal, in 1943 Dusko Popov – MI5’s agent Tricycle – had asked his own Abwehr case officer, Johannes ‘Johnny’ Jebsen, to work for the British with him. Jebsen was an old friend of Popov’s, based in Lisbon, a chain-smoking, champagne-drinking devotee of P.G. Wodehouse who shared Popov’s penchant for the high life.

Like Popov, Jebsen was also anti-Nazi. It was becoming increasingly evident by this stage which way the war was going, so he agreed to Popov’s proposal – he too would become a double agent, still working for the Abwehr, but in reality acting for MI5 with the code name ‘Artist’.

It seemed a good idea, but brought a new problem: Jebsen’s recruitment meant that for the first time a fully paid-up member of German intelligence knew that Popov was a double agent. In addition, Jebsen had given indications to MI5 through Popov that the Abwehr in Madrid had a large spy network operating across Britain with its head – a Spaniard – based in London.

This was a clear reference to Garbo. Yet MI5’s failure to act on Jebsen’s intelligence meant that Jebsen would now have deduced that Garbo as well as Popov – Tricycle – was a front man for a British scheme to fool the Germans. In March 1944 he told the British that he thought that all of Kühlenthal’s ‘spies’ were in reality British double agents.

Jebsen knew too much. He might have changed sides by this stage, but he posed a threat. Could he really be trusted? What if he let slip a piece of information that led the Germans to unravel the vastly complex deception puzzle that MI5 had built up? His own position was under threat at times. What if he were suspected by the Germans themselves and forced to talk, perhaps under duress?

The British had to limit any potential damage, but there was not much they could do. They tried telling Jebsen that Kühlenthal was the kind of spymaster who frequently made up much of his ‘intelligence’. It was not MI5 who was feeding disinformation to him, but the Abwehr official himself who was liberally peppering his reports to Berlin with ‘facts’ drawn from his own imagination.

It worked, to a degree, but there was no guarantee that Jebsen would believe them. Harris in particular was nervous about the threat Jebsen posed.

‘Unless steps are immediately taken to cease contact with Artist completely or evacuate him forthwith from Spain, then grave risks of blowing the Garbo case are inevitable.’

So much was riding on the success of Garbo and the double-cross system as a whole, that he even suggested ‘liquidating’ the Garbo case before it was too late, otherwise all the double agents might be in danger.

The men in charge of double-cross – John Masterman of the Twenty Committee, Tar Robertson of B1A, and the head of MI5’s B section Guy Liddell – refused. They should wait and see, they said. Best not be too hasty.

The blow came in early May.

Jebsen was not feeling comfortable with his Abwehr masters. Doubts had been raised about some of his financial dealings while he had also been putting his nose into internal affairs that they thought did not concern him. So when he was asked to travel to Biarritz to meet a superior officer for a meeting about Popov’s expenses, he smelt a rat and made his excuses.

Soon after, however, still in Lisbon, Jebsen visited the German Embassy to collect a medal for his war work – the Kriegsverdienstkreuz First Class. This was meant to be a moment of vindication, when all doubts about him within the service were expelled. Instead, once inside, he was punched unconscious, sedated and thrown into a trunk placed in the back of a car with diplomatic plates. The car was then driven over the border, across Spain to France. From there he was taken to Berlin, and placed in the Gestapo prison on Prinz Albrecht Strasse for interrogation.

MI5 first became aware of Jebsen’s disappearance on 6 May, when Bletchley transcripts showed that the other German intelligence agency in the city, the SD, was getting worried about the fact that they could not find him. The following day, the British learned that he had been kidnapped and taken to Berlin.

For MI5 it was a crisis: their worst fears had come true. Johnny Jebsen, the man who knew too much, was now in the hands of the Gestapo, almost certainly being tortured to make him talk. The
question was, would he blow Tricycle, Garbo and the entire double-cross operation?

Harris was beside himself. After years of preparation, and less than a month before D-Day, everything hung in the balance. He suggested liquidating Tricycle immediately. That way, he said, a cut-out could be placed between Popov and Garbo. The assumption was that Jebsen would betray Tricycle at the very least. And once the Germans started comparing Tricycle and Garbo’s intelligence, they would quickly see that the two agents were saying virtually the same thing – namely that the build-up of Allied troops in south-east England was for a major assault on the Pas-de-Calais. The natural conclusion, according to Harris, would be that if Popov was feeding them misleading information, then so was Garbo.

There was a long meeting in St James’s Street involving John Masterman, Tar Robertson, Guy Liddell and Harris. Harris put forward his act-now proposals, but Masterman and Liddell were more circumspect. Better, Masterman said, to carry on as if nothing had happened. Only if and when concrete evidence came through that either Tricycle or Garbo had been blown should they close those agents down. In the meantime, it was better to leave them alone. Liddell agreed. There was a strong chance that Tricycle might be blown by the Germans, but then again Jebsen may simply have been taken in for questioning about his irregular financial dealings.

But, Harris countered, Bletchley had not been able to warn them that Artist was about to be arrested; the code-breakers might not give them any forewarning that he had told his interrogators what he knew either. Artist had informed the British that he thought all of Kühlenthal’s spies in Britain were double agents. Everything, the whole of double-cross, was at stake. They could not wait for Jebsen to break under torture and for the Germans to work things out for themselves; MI5 had to act now.

Harris had overstepped the mark. He was Garbo’s case officer, but now he was making suggestions about the running of other double agents. Liddell told him as much.

‘Don’t endanger your position by poking your nose too much in other people’s affairs,’ he said.

Carry on like that and he would be sacked.

Harris could do nothing. This time his famed powers of persuasion
were not enough. He was outnumbered and outranked. All they could do was continue as before, monitor the information from Bletchley for any sign that Jebsen might have talked, and then take things from there.

MI5 would adopt a calm, steady British approach to the problem.

But Harris was still concerned.

What if the Germans started playing games with the Allies? If they extracted the truth from Jebsen, they might keep running Pujol as their agent in London, now aware that he was working for the British. Then they would simply take what he said and believe the opposite.

The potential for damage to Overlord was immense. If Garbo was telling the Germans that the Pas-de-Calais was the main target for the invasion, the Wehrmacht would inevitably end up taking its best forces, including the feared SS Panzer divisions, away from the area to make them available for action in Normandy. The future of Europe and tens of thousands of lives hung in the balance, yet the deception plan on which the Allied assault depended was under threat.

D-Day was imminent. Everything now lay with Johnny Jebsen. Would he be able to withstand the horrors that his torturers would inflict?

MAVIS RARELY READ
the full texts of the messages that she deciphered at Bletchley Park. A sentence, or half-sentence – that was enough to break into the coded text and then the rest would be passed on to the analysts. And she did not ask questions: it was not how things were done. But she saw enough to get some idea of what was going on – aspects of the war that ordinary civilians and even the majority of fighting men were unaware of.

It was the first week in June and the weather had been nice over the weekend, although storms were predicted for the coming days. She was on a train, heading to London from the station that sat at the bottom of the hill from Bletchley Park.

Dilly Knox, her beloved mentor, had died a year before, shortly after Mavis had married. Keith Batey was one of the code-breakers in Hut Six working on the German naval Enigma. She and Keith had tried to hide their relationship from the others at Bletchley for as long as possible, until some sharp-eyed colleague noticed that, mysteriously, the two always managed to coincide for mealtimes in the canteen. Dilly had joked that mathematicians were not much fun, but Mavis had gone ahead with the wedding anyway. She was Mavis Batey now, sharing a passion for crosswords and puzzles with her husband.

There were plenty of people in the carriage that Monday, gazing out at the budding green countryside through the grimy windows: mothers, businessmen in suits, servicemen and women in uniforms of many shades, from many parts of the globe. The war was now in its fifth year and the world had changed – even here, rolling over the quiet fields. The Luftwaffe was not dropping quite so many bombs over English cities as it once had, but there were rumours of a new terrifying Nazi weapon to come. She worried about her parents; their house to the south-east of London was in the direct firing line of whatever it might eventually turn out to be.

The Germans were no longer triumphant as they had been, however. In North Africa, on the Eastern Front, and now in Italy, they were slowly being pushed back.

But there was more than enough fight left in Hitler’s forces. The call from Moscow for a Second Front – a real second front; what was happening in the Mediterranean did not count – was finally being heard. Britain was awash with US soldiers, shipped over the Atlantic to help fight the Nazis. A new attack was imminent, almost certainly in France. What no one except a very, very few could say, however, was where in France the attack would come, or more importantly, when. Certainly nothing was being given away on the radio or in the newspapers. But judging by the numbers of GIs around, and the endless manoeuvres and exercises, even the least observant would conclude that it could not be too far off. Some time over the summer, perhaps.