The Spy with 29 Names (3 page)

The question was, who was he?

Desmond Bristow spent most of his day checking hotel registers sent over by agents in Madrid and Lisbon. His job was to look for anyone suspicious – a name that did not tally, or that had cropped up somewhere before. Still, he told himself, it beat being an infantryman. Back in May 1940, while waiting for a train at Oxford station, he had caught sight of badly wounded soldiers returning from Dunkirk: that had rid him of any ideas about fighting on the front line.

He had not imagined that being a spy would be quite so dull, though. Betty was pregnant, and he missed her. Worcester was a long way from St Albans. At least he had his beloved Matchless motorbike and could use spare petrol coupons to drive over to see her occasionally. But apart from the odd pint at the King Harry pub with his boss, there was little to break the tedium.

After two and a half years of war there were plenty of reasons to be spying abroad, which was what MI6 – the Secret Intelligence Service – concentrated on. But there were no foreign postings for Bristow. Not even in Spain, where he had been brought up. Yes, they valued his knowledge of the language and the culture and that was why he had been taken on. But he had been placed in Section V of MI6, the branch that dealt with counter-espionage, and Section V had moved out of London to Glenalmond, an Edwardian red-brick town house in the sleepy town of St Albans.

He was still only twenty-six, too young to enjoy drinking pink gins with the others after work in the conservatory. The ‘snakepit’, they called it.

At least there was Philby.

His boss had a bit of a stutter, but knew and loved Spain as Desmond did, having been
The Times
’s correspondent there during the Civil War. Older than Bristow by about five years, he was easy to talk to. Before long they became friends and Bristow would take him around St Albans on the back of the motorbike, heading out to the pub after work. Kim Philby made life in Glenalmond that bit more bearable.

Colonel Felix Cowgill was part of the problem. Formerly of the Indian Police, the head of Section V treated Glenalmond like a medieval castle. He was a suspicious man and had fallen out with most of the other chiefs in the intelligence services. His department’s role was
to work through counter-intelligence reports from foreign countries – information about attempts to spy on Britain – and, where necessary, pass them on, not least to the other major counter-intelligence organisation, MI5, the Security Service. Where Section V of MI6 dealt with ‘abroad’, MI5 handled Britain and the Empire, with a large degree of overlap between the two. This should, in many people’s minds, have led to high levels of cooperation. But Cowgill thought otherwise: he suspected MI5 wanted to take over his territory. Citing a need to protect MI6 sources, he only allowed a portion of his material to be passed on.

Philby hated him.

‘Lack of imagination, inattention to detail and sheer ignorance of the world we were fighting in . . .’ he wrote. ‘Glenalmond . . . felt like a hedgehog position; Cowgill revelled in his isolation.’ What was the point of receiving so much intelligence if they were not going to share it? Now that the Abwehr codes had been properly cracked, Cowgill was becoming more difficult than ever. Philby had to resort to passing information on to friends in MI5 verbally, informally, ‘to avoid needless trouble’.

Decrypted German messages were referred to as ISOS, standing for ‘Illicit Services Oliver Strachey’, after the GC&CS man in charge of breaking Abwehr messages that had been enciphered by hand. ISOS had been online since April 1940, before Bristow had joined. More importantly, though, the new German messages coming through had been enciphered not by hand, but using Enigma machines. These messages were far more complex and useful than previous ones, and had only recently been broken by the GC&CS team headed by Dilly Knox. They had started arriving properly on Christmas Day 1941, and were officially referred to as ISK – ‘Illicit Services Knox’. Like many people, however, Bristow did not differentiate between the two, and ended up referring to all the deciphered Abwehr material as ISOS.

The messages were biked over by special courier to Glenalmond in the morning, arriving at 10.30. It was foggy and icy the day that they first heard of ‘Arabal’. Bristow had just lit the fire and Philby was sitting by the bay window wearing a scarred leather jacket he had picked up during the Civil War in Spain. Tim Milne, one of their colleagues, read through the intercepts dealing with the Iberian Peninsula.

‘This sounds very odd,’ he said, staring at one of them.

Bristow looked up from his hotel registers. From the window, Philby glanced over.

‘What does it say?’

Milne handed it to him. Bristow walked across and looked over his shoulder. He saw a typed message written in capital letters, and there, in front of them, was the text from the Abwehr’s station in Madrid to headquarters, telling their Berlin masters about a new
Vertrauungsmann
– a ‘trusted man’, or spy – reporting from London. This agent, this
V-mann
code-named ‘Alaric’ by the Germans, was being run by the Abwehr station in Madrid. What was worse, as Bristow and Philby read on it appeared that this new enemy spy was not alone. Alaric claimed to have recruited three sub-agents to work with him: ‘Senhor Carvalho’, a Portuguese travelling salesman based in Newport, south Wales, where he spied on shipping movements in the Channel; ‘Herr Gerbers’, a German-Swiss businessman based in Bootle, near Liverpool, spying on the Mersey; and a wealthy Venezuelan student based in Glasgow.

The Germans were referring to this spy network as ‘the Arabal undertaking’.

‘Alaric’? ‘Arabal’? None of them had seen the names before. Yet here, on the decrypted Abwehr message in front of them, this new Nazi spy was reporting the formation of a shipping convoy in the bay of Caernarfon, clearly with a view to alerting German U-boats for an attack. What should Section V do?

Philby wasted no time. He picked up the green scrambler phone to warn their colleagues at MI5: the spy was on home turf and the Security Service needed to be informed.

Bristow, like everyone else in the office, stopped what he was doing and listened in on the conversation. This was by far the most interesting thing that had happened since his arrival at Glenalmond. Philby got through to Herbert Hart, the head of MI5’s research department. Bristow noticed how Philby clicked his fingers while he spoke, trying to control his stammering.

‘Have you seen his message from M-M-Madrid on the Caernarfon convoy, Hart?’

It appeared that MI5 had also seen the Arabal message, and were equally worried and perplexed.

‘Get Scotland Yard on to it,’ Philby said.

The spies had a lead, but the police were the best people to start a physical search for any German agents. Meanwhile, MI5 would talk to their liaison officer at the Admiralty about the Caernarfon convoy.

‘We’ll go on watching and see what comes of it. Bye for now.’

Philby put down the phone, and the office became a buzz of conjecture.

Who was this new enemy agent?

‘Surely he must be a Spanish sailor off one of those merchant ships tied up in Liverpool?’ Jack Ivens, another member of the team said.

‘Why should he or she be a Spaniard?’ Bristow replied, playing with a cigarette. ‘He could be a Dutchman or woman, Swedish national or whatever.’

They all looked at each other. None of them had any idea.

‘I wonder what means of communication our mysterious Arabal used?’ Bristow asked.

Philby shook his head.

‘We must not get c-c-carried away on a guessing game,’ he said. ‘It wastes time, and if this character is important there will be another reference from ISOS soon enough.’

Bristow and the others took the hint: they went back to their work, wondering in silence.

The following communications only deepened the mystery.

First was a written report sent through from Commander Ewen Montagu, MI5’s liaison officer with the Admiralty, who had been asked about the reported Caernarfon convoy. To their surprise, Montagu told them categorically that no such convoy existed.

A few days later, Scotland Yard’s Special Branch also reported back. After a thorough search, no trace of an enemy agent had been found.

There was, it seemed, no German spy, and no Caernarfon convoy, yet the following week Alaric and the Arabal network were mentioned once again by the Abwehr in the Bletchley intercepts, the Madrid station telling Berlin that according to their man, ‘CONVOY SAILED FOUR DAYS AGO IN SOUTHERLY DIRECTION.’

Philby became exasperated when he saw it.

‘What’s going on? We know there is no bloody convoy.’

He looked at Bristow.

‘Who is Arabal? Why is he so obviously lying?’

Major Thomas Argyll Robertson, head of MI5’s B1A section, was a busy man. For ten days Luis Calvo, Spanish journalist and member of a pro-Nazi spy ring operating under orders from Madrid, had been locked up in MI5’s interrogation centre, Camp 020 on Ham Common. Within twenty-four hours the Spaniard had confessed. Stripped naked, he only had to catch sight of camp commander ‘Tin-eye’ Stephens cracking his swagger stick against his riding boots to break down.

There was cleaning up to do, however, after the public exposure of a Spanish reporter with close ties to the embassy. Staff there were anxious to avoid an escalation of the crisis. After this, other countries would take a second look at the Spanish diplomats on their territory.

Nonetheless, it had been a success for MI5: simple counter-espionage, stopping the enemy’s intelligence operations in their tracks. Not that Spain was officially an enemy, but she was certainly no friend.

The case might not have involved Robertson (he was always called Tommy, or ‘Tar’, after his initials) had it not been for the fact that one of his double agents had played a part in exposing Calvo. Gwilym Williams was known by his initials, G.W., the only one in the double-cross pack not to have a proper code name of his own. ‘Snow’, ‘Tricycle’, ‘Tate’ – the others were all part of Robertson’s special club; once they had been taken into the fold, either willingly or not, all were re-baptised. But not G.W.

MI5 had got G.W. in to keep a watch on Arthur Owens – double agent ‘Snow’ – the shifty Welsh nationalist who thought he could play one side off against the other. That was not how double-cross worked, however. To be on Robertson’s team, agents worked exclusively for him, only ever pretending to be working for the Germans. It was a simple and necessary rule. The whole structure, all the double agents they had painfully built up since the beginning of the war, would collapse if the enemy got an inkling that one of ‘their’ agents had been turned and was working for the British.

Hence the use of G.W. to keep a track on ‘Snow’. They could trust Williams, a former policeman. He was also a Welsh nationalist, which helped with the cover story of a man happy to work for the Nazis in the hope of one day liberating his homeland.

Now he had claimed his biggest scalp. G.W. posed as a link man between Calvo and the Abwehr. His efforts had been invaluable in incriminating the Spaniard. But it meant that his MI5 work was finished. His connections to the Abwehr were broken the moment that Calvo was arrested. He could no longer work as an ‘enemy spy’. To maintain the pretence he would have to cease operations for fear of being discovered by the British. Any other behaviour would be out of character. So Robertson would have to close him down as a double agent.

That was a problem with double-cross: the patterns of lies were so complex that success – as with the Calvo case – could also bring loss. Using the system against the enemy often meant that double agents – sometimes carefully nurtured over years – had to be discarded like empty bullet casings. You got one shot, that was it.

The other problem with double agents was that most of them only worked under duress. Captured German spies – pathetic creatures, many of them, trying to move around the country with a few quid in their pocket and heavily accented English – were given a choice: the noose or turn against their former masters. Some chose death but plenty opted for the alternative. Robertson had been the one who suggested the option be given them in the first place. A dead German spy was no use to anybody. But one who continued communicating with the Abwehr yet was actually being controlled by the British? That was different. Using all these agents in tandem, getting them to tell the same story to the Germans, could be very useful indeed. Double agents were as old as warfare itself, but no one had tried to do anything on this scale before.

It needed coordination, funds, organisation, cooperation and a lot of man-hours. Then they had to get the right Whitehall people on board – without telling them too much.

That side of things was John Masterman’s job. As head of MI5’s B1A section, Robertson ran the double agents, each with their minders and housekeepers and wireless operators and whole teams around them, making sure they did what they were told, and told the Germans what they were meant to tell them. John Masterman, meanwhile, a tall, reedy fifty-year-old bachelor don from Christ Church, detective novelist and future Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, was better suited to dealing with the process of deciding how and when the agents were to be
used, working with representatives from the various government authorities. A ‘back-room boy’, Masterman later described himself, the head of the Twenty Committee that oversaw the double-cross system as a whole – ‘Twenty’ because in the playful minds of those who worked on it, the Roman numerals XX formed a ‘double-cross’.

Masterman had been in Germany at the start of the First World War and spent the entire four years of the conflict as a civilian internee, so he knew both the language and the people well. And as a former MCC player he liked drawing parallels between running the Twenty Committee and captaining a cricket XI. His intellect and scholarly manner were perfect for the job.

Robertson was no intellectual, as Masterman and others commented. But he did have nous. The others might be cleverer, but they did not always see things clearly. They needed Robertson for his ability to read people and situations. He got things right, almost always, and sometimes when ‘logic’ suggested otherwise. And he was a natural leader. Masterman and the others respected him for that.