Agent Garbo
Authors: Stephan Talty
Table of Contents
10. The Blacks and the Santa Clauses
Appendix B: The Garbo Network (Entirely Fictitious)
Copyright © 2012 by Stephan Talty
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Talty, Stephan.
Agent Garbo: the brilliant, eccentric secret agent who tricked Hitler and saved D-Day / Stephan Talty.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-547-61481-6
1. Pujol, Juan. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Secret service—Great Britain. 3. Spies—Great Britain—Biography. I. Title.
D810.S8P883 2012
940.5'8641092—dc23
2012005470
Printed in the United States of America
DOC
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Alfie Wright,
teacher and friend
Cast of Characters
The Axis
Alfred Jodl:
Chief of staff of the German High Command, tasked with implementing Hitler’s strategic orders. Executed for war crimes after a trial at Nuremberg.
Friedrich Knappe-Ratey:
Code-named Federico, the Abwehr agent who vetted Juan Pujol and was one of his two main contacts in the Madrid station.
Karl-Erich Kühlenthal:
The second-in-command of the Abwehr’s Madrid station and the man who effectively controlled Garbo.
Colonel Baron Alexis von Roenne:
The chief intelligence officer for Foreign Armies West.
Erwin Rommel:
Nicknamed the Desert Fox, field marshal in the German army who led the Afrika Korps in the Middle East and Army Group B in the defense of occupied France.
Gerd von Rundstedt:
Prussian aristocrat and field marshal of the German army who commanded the forces in the West.
The Allies
Johnny Bevan:
Former stockbroker and head of the London Controlling Section (LCS); known as the Controller of Deception.
Desmond Bristow:
MI6 operative in the Iberian section and the first man to debrief Juan Pujol in London.
Brutus:
Roman Garby-Czerniawski, Polish air force captain who became a double agent for the Allies. A key operative in establishing the false Order of Battle during Fortitude South.
Dudley Clarke:
Brigadier in the British army, founder of the commando unit A Force and the man who developed many of the theories and practices used by the Allied deception forces.
Tommy Harris:
MI5 officer who worked closely with Pujol on the Garbo operation.
Edward Kreisler:
Politically connected American entrepreneur and art gallery owner who became Araceli Pujol’s second husband.
Guy Liddell:
MI5’s head of counterespionage.
J. C. Masterman:
Oxford don and head of the XX—or Double Cross—Committee.
Cyril Mills:
MI5 officer who was first assigned to Pujol, before being replaced by Tommy Harris.
Kim Philby:
MI6 officer who served as head of the Iberian section. Later revealed to have been an agent for the KGB.
Araceli Pujol:
Juan Pujol’s wife and his early co-conspirator.
Juan Pujol:
Spanish double agent who worked for MI5 under the code name Garbo.
Gene Risso-Gill:
MI6 officer in Lisbon who first interrogated Pujol in 1941.
T. A. “Tar” Robertson:
Intelligence officer who headed up MI5’s BiA unit, which managed all double agents in England.
Lieutenant Colonel Robin “Tin-Eye” Stephens:
Head of Camp 020, the interrogation center for suspected Axis spies in south London.
David Strangeways:
British army colonel and head of R Force during World War II. Rewrote the Operation Fortitude cover plan and implemented many of its components.
Tate:
Wulf Schmidt, the original MI5 double agent, who parachuted into England before being sent to Camp 020 and agreeing to spy for the Allies.
Nigel West:
British author and espionage expert, real name Rupert Allason, who rediscovered Juan Pujol in 1984.
Introduction
I
N THE MIDDLE
of the snowless English winter of 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied commander overseeing the forthcoming invasion of Europe, was anxious to get the hell out of London. It was January, less than six months before D-Day, and it seemed to him that every Allied officer and VIP in the capital felt personally entitled to barge into his bustling office and bend his ear. The visitors never stopped, interrupting him and his staff, whose typewriters and footsteps and male voices created a constant, purposeful buzz in the rooms at 20 Grosvenor Square. The American ambassador, John Winant, was forever knocking on his door. Churchill was incorrigible. Today—he glanced down at his appointment book—Noel Wild of Ops (b) was due in, the head of an obscure sector in Eisenhower’s sprawling command: deception.
The general had been an early skeptic of deception, the shadow bureau of spies running around the Continent claiming they could fool Hitler and turn the tide of war. General George S. Patton, who much to his own disgust had been drafted into the effort as head of an imaginary one-million-man army called
FUSAG,
summed up the initial feelings of Eisenhower—and the current attitude of many other military and political leaders: “This damned secrecy thing
is rather annoying,” he wrote, “particularly as I doubt if it fools anyone.”
Eisenhower had changed his mind about deception after witnessing its effectiveness firsthand in the Mediterranean. But in January 1944 he had many
actual
objects to worry about: destroyers and French railroads and the landing vessels called LSTs, which were maddeningly scarce and threatened to sink the invasion before it began. These very real and important things, not espionage, were what consumed his days.
As he strode through his headquarters, bald, handsome and electric with physical vigor, Eisenhower appeared confident, “a living dynamo
of energy, good humor, amazing memory for details, and amazing courage for the future.” His staff loved his relentless optimism, but inwardly and in his private letters to Mamie, the general agonized about what was about to happen. He was smoking four packs of Camels a day,
and a journalist would later describe him as “bowed down with worry . . . as though each of the stars on either shoulder weighed four tons.”
If and when the Allies took the beaches of Normandy, Eisenhower hoped to join them. Going to France would return him to an old haunt. He’d spent a year there that few of his visitors knew about, the idyllic seasons of 1928–29 when Eisenhower—somewhat slimmer and with more hair—traveled the roads of Bordeaux and Aquitaine with an army driver, eating picnic lunches on the grass borders of country lanes and grating the ears of the farmers with his rudimentary French before winning them over with a flashing smile. That year at the end of the Roaring Twenties had been one of the best of his life. The career officer had been in France to write a guidebook for World War I battlefields and the graveyards of American troops, austere places where the soldiers’ families came to honor their dead.
It had seemed a pleasant assignment then, but Eisenhower’s memories of France had lately attained a darker shading: if D-Day wasn’t successful, American cemeteries would sprout around the hills and hedgerows of Normandy like the native wood hyacinths. The French would need acres and acres of rich farmland for the graves of the 101st Airborne alone, more for the young men of the Big Red One; the white crosses would blanket the Norman countryside. Western France would become the graveyard for an entire generation of American GIs, the men that Eisenhower made a point of dashing out to visit every chance he got.
The invasion numbers were daunting. Eisenhower hoped to land five divisions on the first day of the operation. Waiting for him in France
and the Low Countries would be fifty-six German divisions. The Fifteenth Army was perhaps the most crucial: it was strung out from Turhout in Belgium (the 1st Panzer Division) to Amiens (the 2nd Panzer Division) and Pontoise in France (the 116th Panzer), place names that Eisenhower knew well. There were ten German armored divisions that were “thought to be held as a centrally controlled mobile reserve,
whose function would be to drive any invading force back into the sea before it had time to establish a lodgment.” The Allies would calculate that most of those reserves would be sent to the Normandy bridgehead within one week of the invasion. That one week, however, was critical.
If Noel Wild and his deception outfit failed to deceive the enemy about the true target of the invasion, those German divisions would begin to flow south and attempt to destroy the Allied invasion force on the roads and in the small towns of Normandy. If the deception succeeded, the panzers would stay right where they were, waiting for the “real” landing. But how could that be achieved? Who could disguise the largest invasion force in history from Berlin’s watchful eyes?
Finally, Lieutenant Colonel Wild knocked on the door. He was a “slim, elegant little man”
and—though this didn’t impress Eisenhower much—an Old Etonian. The two men chatted for a few moments, then Eisenhower made a very modest request. “Just keep the Fifteenth Army
out of my hair for the first two days,” he said. “That’s all I ask.”
Wild saluted and walked out.
His chat with Noel Wild was one meeting among the many that Eisenhower held that day and he probably forgot about it almost immediately. If he thought about it at all, the commander most likely believed his request—forty-eight precious hours free of the Fifteenth Army—was asking too much.
On the same day, approximately two miles from Eisenhower’s frenetic headquarters, a rather ordinary-looking man named Juan Pujol was taking the Underground to work at a nondescript office on Jermyn Street. Though short and thin, Pujol carried himself like a member of the unseated European royalty that had found themselves at loose ends in London during the war. His shoulders were thrown back and a winning smile arced across his lips. The young Spaniard had an almost boyish face, a wide forehead, a prominent nose and a strong chin. The dominant feature of his face were the warm hazel eyes, flecked with green, that occasionally flashed with amusement and hidden depths. Pujol commuted to work every day from his house in Hendon, where he lived with his glamorous but unhappy wife and his two young children.
Dwight Eisenhower was the all-powerful commander of the Allied forces in Europe; every ship’s quartermaster, every tank gunner, every medic was technically under his command. Pujol, on the other hand, was the emperor of an imaginary world. He was the linchpin in the plan to fool Hitler into believing the attack was coming not at Normandy but up the French coast at Calais. His mission was to keep the Fifteenth Army that was causing Eisenhower such deep worry out of the action. Only a handful of men, such as Lieutenant Colonel Wild, even knew who Juan Pujol was; he walked the London streets unrecognized and unprotected. But this brilliant spy, who three years before had been a failed chicken farmer and hotel manager at a one-star dump in Madrid, was the jewel of the Allies’ counterintelligence forces. Churchill avidly followed his adventures; J. Edgar Hoover would one day clamor to meet him. His code name was Garbo; a British officer had given him the name because he considered Pujol “the best actor in the world.”
In his quest to fool Hitler, Garbo was surrounded by a rather bizarre supporting cast that included a handful of other double agents, a mysterious half-Jewish case officer nicknamed Jesus, a vast supply of props and specially trained commandos, his own invented army of some twenty-seven nonexistent subagents, even an advance man who scoured the country looking for places Garbo’s specters could stay while on their espionage missions to Dover and Edinburgh. But mostly, he had the Germans’ confidence. The Führer’s intelligence agency, the Abwehr, believed in Garbo above all others. They were convinced he was their secret weapon inside England, a spymaster who had sent them so many invaluable reports (carefully crafted with MI5’s help), who had recruited so many valuable sources (all pure inventions), and who believed in fascism so fervently that he could hand them the time and place of the invasion. And if Hitler knew when and where Eisenhower would land his troops, the Führer believed that the Nazi victory was assured.