Agent Garbo (17 page)

When Roenne had first become head of intelligence for Foreign Armies West, he’d naturally gone to Canaris to ask about German spies in England. The answer surprised him. “The fact,” Canaris boasted,
“that we have any V-men at all in Britain, and have had several for as long as three to four years, is undoubtedly the most remarkable feat in the history of espionage . . . We have succeeded in sustaining them so well that we are receiving even at this stage . . . an average of thirty to forty reports each day from inside England, many of them radioed directly on the clandestine wireless sets we have operational in defiance of the most intricate and elaborate electronic countermeasures.” He was describing Garbo’s network, and only a few others, all run by double agents. They were the eyes and ears of the German High Command inside the enemy fortress. And they were all controlled by England.

In one of the drawers of his desk at Zossen, Roenne kept a small map of Europe. Periodically he’d take it out, his clear gray eyes slowly tracing the rocky coastlines and mountain routes of the Continent, imagining the Allied divisions, the convoys, the supply trucks moving toward Norway or departing from Southampton. Just as Garbo and Harris were probing the mind of the German High Command, Roenne was trying to picture where the Brits were placing their armies and how many American soldiers were dawdling at that moment in Piccadilly Circus.

And, of course, what it all meant.

11. The Rehearsal

T
HE DECEPTION GAME
was based on a series of arcane techniques, many dating back to the time of Sun Tzu or before, which had been only slightly refined for modern warfare. The fact that the basic methods were well known to the operatives on both sides didn’t stop them from being used and reused constantly; even a chess grandmaster who knows the Sicilian Defense by heart will still fall victim to a particularly ingenious or convincing variation. There was the classic bluff, telling a false but highly detailed story to cover a real operation; the bluff was the common coin of every nation’s espionage arsenal and the basis for most of Garbo’s schemes. Then there was the rarely tried, forbiddingly intricate and gaspingly dangerous double bluff (“We should never resort to it
unless in absolute despair,” the British spymaster Sir Ronald Wingate gravely opined), in which an agency put forth the details of the real operation and hoped the enemy would come to believe, partly because of the scheme’s sudden appearance in their hands, that this was in fact a false cover story, planted by their opponents, which would convince the enemy to look elsewhere for the attack. If the double bluff failed, of course, the entire game plan had been exposed to the enemy and disaster awaited. There was the fine art of “coat-trailing,” offering up one’s own agent to the opposition in hopes he’d be recruited, thereby planting a mole deep in the enemy’s ranks. And the “breakoff,” also known as the “get-out,” was the name given to one of the most important maneuvers in all double-cross operations: explaining to the enemy why the fake story didn’t turn out to be accurate, in such a way that he doesn’t lose faith in your agent—or in his own spy-runners.

Pujol had intuited many aspects of the game even before coming to England, simply by using his own highly developed sense of guile. But now he had to hone other skills, and scale them up to global range, using the worldwide assets of the British empire as his tools. One of the first things he was asked to master was how to make something—in this case a 23,000-ton aircraft carrier—disappear.

In December 1942, a request came in from the XX Committee to “cover” the repositioning of the HMS
Illustrious,
the last flattop patrolling the Indian Ocean. The enormous ship was being routed to more urgent war duties, but the Admiralty wanted the Germans to believe it was still lurking near the Horn of Africa. Garbo was given the job. He dreamt up a report from Agent No. 3 in Glasgow, who “spotted” three aircraft carriers in the waters of the river Clyde in Scotland, one of which was the brand-new HMS
Indefatigable.
(Actually, that ship had been launched just a week earlier, on December 8, but would need a year of fitting out before it would enter active service.) Agent No. 3 made friends with an officer of the crew who let it slip that the carrier was soon to sail for the Indian Ocean, “with specially equipped aircraft for tropical flights.” After a suitable delay, which would have given the
Indefatigable
time to sail to the Horn of Africa, the radiomen of the
Illustrious,
still off the African coast, began to send messages identifying their ship as the
Indefatigable.
The Abwehr’s agents picked up the traffic and reported it to Berlin. The
Illustrious
then went quiet and sailed north for its new assignment.

The switch had been made. Intercepts from
ISOS
found that the Germans and Japanese now believed that there were
two
aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean, the
Indefatigable
and the
Illustrious,
when in fact there were none. Garbo had made a carrier disappear and another—which hadn’t been commissioned yet—appear.

Soon after, Garbo faced a sudden crisis. In a message marked “Urgent,”
Federico ordered him to give the Germans the departure times of trains out of London to the south and southwest of the country. Ten lines were specified: Canterbury–Dover, Dover–Deal and Deal–Sandwich among them. Federico indicated that there were more trains that the Abwehr had its eyes on; further requests would follow in the near future. The request lit up the switchboards in the intelligence and defense ministries. Why would the Germans want to know when the Dover train left Canterbury, down to the exact minute? It was a puzzle, and Harris, Pujol and MI5 had to tease it out before they could reply. What was the significance of the south of England? Was something being planned—acts of sabotage, a bridge blown up for a spectacular mass murder?

Finally, an officer in the Ministry of Home Security figured it out. He did this by thinking not about what the Germans were planning to do, but what the Allied Bomber Command was already doing, night after night in the air above the occupied countries. Since late 1942, the RAF had initiated
a policy of “train-busting,” a specialized form of attack by “intruders,” often single-engine Hawker Typhoons, whose expert pilots prowled the skies looking for steam locomotives streaking through the lowlands of Belgium and France. When they found one, the pilot would swoop down and open up on the train—loaded with armaments, food and other vital supplies—with explosive shells. “I saw my cannon shells
hitting the locomotive,” one aviator said after such an attack. “There was a big flash and clouds of steam.” The fighters sometimes flew so low that debris from the exploding trains blew skyward and ripped holes in their wings; others, veering away
from German antiaircraft fire, cut through telegraph lines and returned to base with the wires embedded in their radiators. The operation played havoc with enemy supply lines: the RAF was blowing up engines pulling twenty or thirty cars of badly needed goods. The RAF pilots—especially from the hard-flying 609 Squadron—became heroes in the British press.

What this lone analyst figured out was that the Germans wanted revenge for the train-busting, and they weren’t going to limit themselves to supply routes. Federico’s request could only mean that the Luftwaffe was going to go after passenger trains, and the fliers needed the exact departure times to coordinate the strafing runs. Guy Liddell, head of MI5’s counterespionage division, wrote in his diary: “The Germans’ tactics are apparently to shoot up
the engine and then the passengers if they are foolish enough to get out.”

Garbo was caught. He could easily have walked into a railway station and picked up the timetables, but doing so would mean that innocent civilians would die. It was strictly against MI5 policy to provide the Germans with any information that could lead to direct military action, especially against civilians. But how could he say no and keep the Abwehr’s confidence?

After delaying for weeks, Garbo finally told Kühlenthal that the timetables were unavailable, so he was sending the times for January (which would already be slightly outdated), warning that “my experience when traveling
has been that the trains nowadays do not go with the same regularity as before.” He had provided schedules recent enough to satisfy the Abwehr, but imprecise enough to save English lives. The Luftwaffe was never able to mount the revenge attacks.

All the while Garbo kept the Abwehr on edge with his demands and outbursts. When reporting bomb damage from Luftwaffe attacks, he fumed: “It displeases me very much
to have to do this work as my blood boils when I have to hear nonsense about our attacks. I have done it this time as you asked me to give you the truth about the morale of the people and to find out something about the effects of our bombing.” He was providing reams of information—locations of air bases and ships—but as far as he could tell, the Germans weren’t acting on it. Why weren’t Luftwaffe bombers attacking the ports and blowing the destroyers out of the water? “I have been able to estimate
that possibly from the highest spheres my mission has not been appreciated as it should be, and though the matter has earned your spirited enthusiasm it has become apparent to me that in Berlin they have shown themselves skeptical with regard to my work.” Like a petulant lover, he seemed to want Berlin to love him as much as Madrid did; MI5 knew that the real power lay in the German capital. Kühlenthal wrote back hurriedly, blaming bureaucracy: “We beg you not to be impatient
if the objectives indicated have not been bombed because this is outside our control here.”

Garbo’s influence was growing. His dispatches began showing up
in messages out of German outposts in Stockholm and Sofia and as far away as Istanbul and Tokyo. The Abwehr shipped him an improved type of secret ink in cotton-wool balls, disguised as medicine. German and British scientists were engaged in a constantly evolving chemical war: invisible ink vs. reagent. As the British concocted new and more exotic compounds (from methylene blue
to “tetra base”) to uncover the secret writing in letters, the Germans responded by inventing more subtle formulas, including one whose secret ingredient was hemoglobin. For that formula, the spy had to cut his finger
and use drops of his own blood to make the ink.

Along with the ink came a higher-grade cipher in a series of seventeen miniaturized photographs. This was a closely guarded asset, and Kühlenthal asked Garbo to “prevent it at any time from ever falling into the hands of the enemy.” Harris considered this a breakthrough, “the most important development in the case
so far.” The Germans had recently switched to a new ciphering technique, which the geniuses at Bletchley Park had been unable to break even after weeks of effort. The photographs sent to Garbo allowed the British to penetrate the new code “within a very short time.” Later, there would be still more advanced ciphers. “Denys Page tells me that the information
supplied to him about Garbo’s code was of the utmost value,” Guy Liddell wrote. “Before he received this code he was working entirely in the air and says that it is quite doubtful whether he would have ever got on to the right lines.”

It was all excellent buildup material for the spy. But the topper that spring was the cake job.

In March 1943, Garbo excitedly told the Germans that his Agent No. 3 had gotten a glimpse of an RAF “aircraft recognition handbook,” filled with drawings and technical data on the current air fleet. The book belonged to a noncommissioned officer in the air service who was down on his luck. When Agent No. 3 casually mentioned that he’d like to have the book as a souvenir, the NCO said he might let it go for the right price. No. 3 asked Garbo how much he could offer, and Garbo asked the Germans. They came back with the rather exorbitant price of 100 pounds, about $5,200 in today’s dollars. No. 3 drove a hard bargain
and got it for three pounds.

But how to get the bulky thing to Madrid?

Other messages had been inserted into the bindings of books and bunches of fruit, and one “left [the] last days of January
with letters camouflaged in the stomach of a dog.” (The dog was a toy
in the shape of a Scottish terrier.) For the RAF handbook, Garbo hit on an idea: he would wrap the book in grease-proof paper and bake it inside a cake. He got the widow of his deceased “agent” William Gerbers to make the concoction and then wrote in chocolate icing: “With Good Wishes to Odette”—the two
t
’s in Odette
were the prearranged signal that the message was genuine. The cake was sent by the diplomatic bag to Lisbon and delivered by a secret service officer. In invisible ink, Garbo wrote on the cover letter: “Inside the cake you will find
the book on aviation which was obtained by 3 . . . I had to use several rationed products which I have given in a good cause . . . If it does not arrive too hard it can be eaten . . . Good appetite!”

On July 1 at 2121 hours, Garbo read an incoming message: “We have received the cake
in perfect condition.” Kühlenthal was delighted with the caper. The book was authentic—though MI5 had removed all the up-to-date information on the planes, so it was practically useless. A year later, an MI5 informer reported that when Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, was touring Spain, Kühlenthal was “the star turn at this meeting . . . He told a great number of Garbo stories, among them the story of the cake.” The Madrid spymaster ended it by saying that “he had an agent in England
who was also a cook, who made cakes which were unpleasant in taste in spite of the fact that their contents were excellent.”

Each double agent had his specialty. Agent Tricycle, the dashing Dusko Popov, was exceptional at what might be called physical espionage. He was dispatched to foreign capitals to meet Abwehr agents face-to-face, and proved very good in the moment, when one had to outthink a Gestapo officer who might kill you if your next answer was wrong. Garbo, on the other hand, was known for his imagination and daring. “I would never have had the nerve,”
said the intelligence officer Christopher Harmer, “to allow any of my agents to be as audacious as he was.” The cake job was a small example of the theatrical flair that would soon come into play in a major crisis.