Agent Garbo (12 page)

Dennis Wheatley’s Jesus-in-Berlin idea was nothing of the sort. But, astonishingly, an even more bizarre variation of Wheatley’s plot was adopted by British intelligence. In April 1942, the British secret service
began putting out rumors of a “mysterious personality,” now called simply Z, who instead of resembling Jesus Christ looked “a little like Bismarck when he was young” and had formed a secret underground organization to take back Germany. Prominent Germans, including the airplane designer Willy Messerschmitt, were said to be supporting him and had been “buying up corner houses to be used as machine-gun posts that would dominate the main square of cities when the time came to rise against Hitler.” For some inscrutable reason, only people who spoke perfect English could join the clandestine group.

The Z craze failed to catch on in Berlin and Düsseldorf. When he heard about the operation, Wheatley was appalled. “Obviously, [they] missed
the whole point of my paper,” he lamented. “I have rarely heard anything more crazy.”

Though Juan Pujol had an image of suave MI5 officers effortlessly bamboozling their opponents, in reality British deception often struggled to find a way into the German military mind.

MI5 managed the agents. It assigned a case officer to each double agent and saw to his day-to-day needs. It screened the candidates for the double life, including real German spies who’d entered England, weeded out the venal and the stupid ones, of which there were many in the four hundred or so candidates, chose the best and provided them with everything they needed to become conduits to the German High Command. If the incoming spies couldn’t be turned, they were often imprisoned and used as “reference books,”
living encyclopedias on German spy techniques. MI5 kept secret offices throughout London, disguised as legitimate businesses, where agents could interview recruits; it arranged for apartments for the double agents to live in and provided housekeepers, guards, clothing coupons, ration books, identity cards, a wireless operator to transmit messages and even female companionship (case officers sometimes hired prostitutes
for their lonely operatives). Then there was the matter of the “appointed scribes,”
active British soldiers who were asked to write the letters of any imaginary subagents; if a subagent’s handwriting looked the same as the spy’s, Berlin would grow suspicious. When a scribe died—taking with him his inimitable longhand—the fake subagent often had to be killed off, unless a man with the exact same cursive style could be found quickly. (This would later happen to Pujol’s “Agent No. 6,” whose real-life letter writer perished in a plane crash.)

Obtaining all these things—from real soldiers to whores—in wartime London required great imagination and secrecy. “The running of double-cross agents
entailed not only the deception of the Germans,” said the spymaster Sir John Cecil Masterman, “but often and in many cases the deception of people on our own side.”

The Twenty Committee, signified by “XX,” for double-cross, supplied the agents with information. It was formed in January 1941, and its members included representatives of all the relevant agencies that would contribute to its mission: GHQ Home Forces, the War Office, Air Ministry Intelligence, MI6 and MI5. The committee was headed up by Masterman, an academic in civilian life. Tall and donnish, Masterman was a cricketer at heart. He’d had a high-flying career in the late 1920s with the cricket bat—which he wielded from a left-handed stance, though he bowled right-handed at a “medium pace”—for teams like the Free Foresters and the Harlequins. A former provost at Worcester College, Oxford, Masterman was also an author of crime fiction: one of his books, the crackling murder mystery
An Oxford Tragedy,
featured a Sherlock Holmes–like detective “of European reputation.” The spymaster’s novels revealed his interest in what he called “pre-detection”—that is, how “to work out the crime
before it is committed, to foresee how it will be arranged, and then to prevent it!” It was the criminal equivalent of what the double agents were being asked to do: to imagine and construct an event before it happened and to predict against every possible response to that event. And then to game those responses, too.

Masterman’s last gift was that he knew what people wanted: the only way to get all the heads of departments to attend his meetings, he decided, was to offer them a freshly baked bun, something almost unobtainable in wartime London. At more than 226 weekly meetings of the XX Committee,
the attendance was a perfect 100 percent.

Nineteen forty-one had been a year for experimentation in the double-cross system, which meant not only churning out dozens of plots but coming up with a philosophy of espionage: what worked, what didn’t and why. The year 1942 was supposed to be the flowering of that philosophy, but most of the operations simply didn’t pan out. Plan Machiavelli, for example,
involved the passing of confidential charts of minefields off the east coast of Britain; the Serbian double agent Tricycle transported the plans, but the Germans ignored them. Plan Guy Fawkes was
a fake mission to attack a food dump in Wheatstone, England, in order to build up the sabotage credentials of British-controlled operatives by sending authentic newspaper clippings recounting their deeds to the Germans (this was formally known as “double-cross sabotage,” and Plan Guy Fawkes was the first example of it during the war). After long negotiations with Scotland Yard, the operation was given the green light. But the intelligence officers had trouble rousing the two elderly men who were guarding the dump, which delayed the planting of the incendiary devices, and then the officers were almost collared by an annoyingly efficient bobby. In Plan Brock,
MI5 plotted to blow up Nissen huts in Hampshire for the same reasons that motivated Fawkes, but the Norwegian compass that had been left as evidence was stolen by some local thief, and a flock of sheep wandered too near the explosion site, nearly causing the planners to abort.
Even when deception plans made sense, they were tricky to pull off. And even when they were executed, the enemy might not believe them, or might ineptly ignore them.

As Pujol was shown the ropes, it was felt inside the British High Command—and within the XX Committee itself—that the leaders of the deception operations were playing it too safe, afraid to reveal too much to Hitler, which was the risk of any truly ambitious deception plan: the nefarious plots cooked up in London could reveal as much about the Allies’ war plans as they did the Germans’. The XX Committee, it was widely believed, had deteriorated into a bunch of nitpicking censors, cutting the information to be passed down to the least dangerous level (called “tonic” or “chicken feed”) and vetoing everything that involved significant risk.

Many observers worried that a group of men who were having trouble blowing up a couple of Nissen huts in lonely Hampshire wouldn’t be ready for far more ambitious missions. “How should we feel
if the whole of the double cross system collapsed,” Masterman worried, “before it had been put to the test in a grand deception?” At one point,
the Home Forces even suggested to Masterman that the dozen or so double agents be abandoned and their operations shut down.

Pujol’s first great challenge in joining the deception effort in England was the state of the deception effort in England.

There was at least one promising indicator within the system, however. Juan Pujol had been a risk, a walk-in; earlier in the war, the British had made an even more unorthodox bet that was beginning to pay off. The wager was on human capital. Highly eccentric human capital, to be specific.

When war was declared, the British intelligence services went on a hiring binge. There simply weren’t enough experienced secret service officers to go around; one branch, the Naval Intelligence Division,
went from fifty staffers in 1939 to more than a thousand by 1942. And to fill the offices of MI5, MI6 and the other outfits involved in the double-cross campaign, the British made a conscious decision to leave tradition behind: they recruited not from the usual sources—the colonial services in India and Burma, and the British military—but from the universities and the intelligentsia. This search for warm bodies led to some memorable job interviews. Bickham Sweet-Escott, an applicant to MI6’s Section D (for “Destruction”), the group that specialized in sabotage, was told by his interviewer, “I can’t tell you what sort of job it would be.
All I can say is that if you join us, you mustn’t be afraid of forgery, and you mustn’t be afraid of murder.” He signed up and found the explosives expert he was working with was a former boxing promoter and test pilot who spoke in bizarre rhyming couplets. Writers seemed to be special favorites of the intelligence branches, especially those who pumped out thrillers: Geoffrey Household, the author of the minor classic
Rogue Male,
was sent to Bucharest, where he alarmed his office mates by drinking too much and “playing casually with detonators.”
A Force, the Middle East deception unit,
featured a chemist, a merchant banker, a music hall illusionist, a screenwriter and a handful of painters and other artists. “We were complete amateurs,”
said Christopher Harmer, a British lawyer turned spy-runner, “not much more than overgrown schoolboys playing games of derring-do.”

For years, the intelligence services had been the home of clubbable young society men and veterans of the Indian colonial police force; “eggheads” were looked down upon and rarely hired. Now the British government began signing up academics at a furious clip: historians, linguists and classicists for the spy services, and mathematicians and scientists for analytical jobs like codebreaking. Oddballs, such as the almost unfathomably brilliant Alan Turing, became the order of the day. Turing bicycled to work at Bletchley Park, the headquarters of the cryptanalysts who produced the famous Ultra intercepts, wearing a bulky gas mask to avoid pollen. Earlier, he’d converted all his money into silver ingots, in preparation for a Nazi invasion, then dug a hole in a nearby forest and stashed the bullion there. (After the war, he failed to find it again.) Bletchley Park became a cross between an arts commune and a Bloomsbury party. When Winston Churchill toured
the facility, he told its director, “I told you to leave no stone unturned to get staff, but I had no idea you had taken me literally.”

The spy services were less overtly eccentric, the private lives of officers hidden behind good pedigrees and dark Savile Row suits. Tommy Harris was a successful art dealer with a specialty in Goya. His fellow spy Anthony Blunt was an art historian. Kim Philby considered his best officer to be Paul Dehn, an entertainer who “bubbled and frothed
like a trout stream” and would later write the screenplay for
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
Many of these men had no intention of working in intelligence after the war, and so they didn’t feel that one bad idea would ruin their career. Pujol, who was a kind of refugee of the imagination—uncomfortable in Franco’s straitjacketed society—fit right in.

Many of the men who eventually led the deception effort against Hitler were outsiders, with a strong element of veteran intelligence men thrown in to provide balance (and who immediately began to complain about the strange people down the hall). A number of staffers in MI5—including some Jews and homosexuals—would have found themselves in concentration camps had they been raised in wartime Germany; certainly the casual atmosphere that reigned, with ideas “whizzing up and down the corridors,”
wouldn’t have worked at Abwehr headquarters in Berlin. It was a different mindset, another world. With the enemy poised opposite its shores, England didn’t have the luxury of playing conservatively, and the British felt that intelligence was one area where they had an almost inborn advantage.

When Pujol arrived, the double-cross initiative was just beginning to sputter to life. Anachronisms like Lieutenant Colonel Lumby—the man who’d burned a sensitive file when it got too bulky—were shipped off to less important spheres and bright young men were brought in to lead the effort. Tommy Harris was one of them.

In their tiny office on Jermyn Street in St. James’s, Juan Pujol studied his new partner and was instantly struck by Harris’s intensity: “He smoked like a chimney
and the fingers of his right hand were almost chestnut colored as he never put out a cigarette until it was about to burn him.” Pujol thought Harris a kindred spirit. Kim Philby once described the atmosphere in certain British intelligence agencies as fostering “a fresh riot of ideas.”
That was true about the office on Jermyn Street. In Harris, Pujol found a more calculating and far-seeing version of himself.

The two men were enigmas even to those who knew them best. In Harris’s looks there was a whiff of mystery. One intelligence officer called him “a casting director’s ideal choice
for a desert sheikh or a slinky tango lizard.” But there were hidden depths behind the good looks. “There are many questions about him
which are and will probably remain unanswered,” wrote the MI6 officer Desmond Bristow. “It is true to say that I knew Tommy Harris well; on the other hand, there is part of him I perhaps knew then, and know now, but did not and do not wish to believe.” Andreu Jaume, a family friend of the Harrises who now lives in the spy’s house on Mallorca and has been researching a biography of him for years, has never been able to wrap his mind around the man. “He’s like a runaway figure for me.
The more I pursue him, the more he eludes me.”

Harris was thirty-four at the time he met Pujol, the only son of an observant Jewish art-dealer father who had married a Spanish woman from the southern city of Seville. Tommy’s grandfather and his great-uncle on his mother’s side had, in the 1800s, revived the art of the toreador by appearing in the bullring dressed in the costumes of El Cid and other Spanish heroes; they kept horses in stables
at their Madrid home and became famous as the “gentleman bullfighters.” His father, Lionel, opened an art gallery specializing in Spanish greats like El Greco and Velázquez in London’s fashionable Conduit Street. There his business flourished. Dukes, foreign dignitaries and members of the royal family would come by and chat with Harris about the latest Spanish trends in chiaroscuro.