Agent Garbo (21 page)

As the fake invasion, now scheduled for September 8, drew nearer, Garbo grew worried. “It appears that the situation has become worse,”
he wrote Federico. Agent 4 (a) scouted the port at Dover and “reported” back: “Large scale preparations for attack are coming to a head. Assault barges concentrating Dover and Folkestone. There is talk of large aerial attack and bombardments over the Channel intended to destroy your defenses and at the same time to facilitate large concentrations of barges and small boats there.” That was the bait for the Luftwaffe, intended to lure them out to open skies where the RAF would send their planes burning into the English Channel. Garbo’s bulletins continued: “Agent 1b in Portsmouth reported
: Many invasion barges have arrived by road. Also in anticipation of heavy raids the AA and National Fire Service had been reinforced, being moved from other places. There are numerous corvettes and destroyers in the harbor.” And another: “About 70 assault craft for transporting troops are in Hamble river. Convoys of Canadian troops and armored vehicles are continually arriving. Predominant insignia dark blue square.”

Garbo’s fake subagents were pointing the Germans toward the port of Southampton in southeastern England. It was the likeliest jumping-off point for the invasion on Pas de Calais. Then they cut off communication: they’d dropped the strongest hints they could, and now it was time to let the Germans draw their own conclusions. All mail from the agents stopped, and Garbo reported that the British were hunting for his men. Finally the authorities expelled all foreigners from the area—in actuality, not just in a Garbo message. Something big was obviously coming.

Operations like Cockade were incredibly complex, equivalent to stage-managing an epic action film, with thousands of soldiers from different armies, stationed from Glasgow to Dakar, and involving the planting of rumors as far away as Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo. Bombers flew raid after raid over Calais to soften up the defenses. Landing craft were built and delivered to the embarkation ports. Fake tank carriers, known as Bigbobs, and dummy troop carriers, known as Wetbobs, were placed in the waters of British ports. Forty thousand tents were erected
in assembly areas in Portsmouth, Dover and other port cities, to give the Luftwaffe’s reconnaissance planes the impression that soldiers were going to be pouring in shortly. Notices were slapped on the walls of the London Underground
telling commuters that visits to southern England were now illegal. Furious hotel owners—it was the height of the summer holiday season—were actually forced to call their guests and cancel all reservations. Guards on key roads stopped anyone carrying cameras or telescopes. Mobile telephone-eavesdropping units prowled the streets of Canterbury and Brighton, listening in to ordinary conversations. If you told your Aunt Nelly about the handsome Canadian sergeant you’d met at the pub the night before, you might hear a knock on your door minutes later.

The public was allowed, intentionally, to see certain things: landing craft pulling into Richborough and Rye harbors, for instance. Fifty new wireless stations were quickly erected, and the amount of traffic the German monitors picked up in southern England spiked (it was coded gibberish, meant to look like doubly encrypted, opaque messages). Gliders disappeared from airfields in the north and reappeared on ones in the south. It was all timed and plotted to sync up with the reports coming from Garbo and the other agents.

Luftwaffe planes went back to Germany or occupied France with their belly cameras full of crisp photos showing crowded ports and new camps bulging with decoy tents. The skies over the Pas de Calais erupted in machine-gun fire as Luftwaffe fighters fought duels with the RAF; British pilots shot down 45 enemy aircraft while losing 23 themselves. In the nine days before the operation kicked off, the RAF flew 6,115 sorties, their fighters and bombers diving through antiaircraft fire, to give the impression that Calais was being readied for the Big One. German and British gunboats dueled in the choppy English Channel, shooting torpedoes and raking each other with machine-gun fire.

The media was roped in with leaks engineered by the black-propaganda agents. Soon the BBC was broadcasting reports like this one: “The liberation of the occupied countries
has
begun . . . We are obviously not going to reveal where the blow will fall.” The news traveled all over the world. The French Committee of National Liberation told its members
that the first step in their liberation “may come any day now.” The United Press crowed that “zero hour for the assault on Western Europe is approaching.” Even the Archbishop of Canterbury was drafted into the effort. During one of his sermons, he asked believers to pray for the soldiers and sailors who would soon be fighting and dying to liberate Europe.

The dream of Cockade—if all went well, a real invasion and a quick strike into France—was exactly what Pujol wanted. “I had the power to advance
the date of the end of the war,” he said. He hoped not only to save Allied lives, but those of German soldiers as well. Pujol was finally at the center of the fight for the ideals he’d believed in since childhood. “There are three kinds of people,” he wrote later, “those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what happened.” Pujol now counted himself firmly in the first category.

The stage for Cockade was set. But would the audience come?

13. An Intimate Deception

A
S HE CLOCKED MIND-NUMBING
hours in the office alongside Tommy Harris, working out the almost infinite complexities of his portion of Operation Cockade, Pujol ran into an unexpected and troubling problem. After two years in England, Araceli was showing signs of mutiny.

Many of the men in MI5 had domestic difficulties. Tommy Harris and his wife, Hilda, had legendary, knock-down drag-out fights after drinking bouts. Guy Liddell’s wife, Calypso, had run off to America with his four children; Liddell learned of their destination only when he glanced at a publicity photo heralding the
Queen Mary
’s docking in New York and noticed his offspring waving from the deck. Dudley Clarke of A Force, the undisputed genius of Allied deception, was a lifelong bachelor who’d once fallen in love with a Russian aristocrat named Nina and agreed to take part in a currency-smuggling operation the “distinctive Slav beauty”
had devised; it nearly cost him his freedom, and did cost him a large chunk of his money. But even in this less-than-traditional crowd, Araceli was a special case. Pujol knew that, when roused, she could be as volatile as nitroglycerin.

Araceli had had her fill of wartime London, a grimy, difficult place to live. In the early months of her stay, the capital had burned nightly; people in the suburbs would go outside to watch “the huge red glow of the distant flames,”
as one Londoner remembered, during which the air could reach 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Death was a constant presence. One evening, a woman was stepping out her front door to walk her white Scottish terrier when a Luftwaffe raid began. After the all-clear signal, her body was “found lodged on top of a telephone box
at the bottom of Dault Road, over a hundred yards away.” Corpses were everywhere—pieces floating in the Thames or deep in cellars, found rotting days after the German planes had left. After a bombing raid, the air had a nasty texture: the smell of cordite from the ack-ack guns, phosphorus from the German bombs, burnt timbers, sewage, masonry dust released from buildings hundreds of years old, the charred sap of trees with their bark blown off
—“dust, dirty water, the cabbagey smell of gas,”
recalled one Brit who spent the war in the capital, “a whole concoction of smells that in those days you associated with newly destroyed buildings.” Glass from windows crunched underfoot, and shrapnel hissed menacingly from the piles of collapsed brick. Londoners learned to fear the “bomber’s moon,” the clear nights with a full orb in the sky, which attracted the Luftwaffe like hornets. Every night was crisscrossed with the beams of four thousand searchlights, many of them mounted on mobile trucks, that guided the British antiaircraft gunners. There was nowhere you could look in London to escape the evidence of war.

The newspapers were hard to stomach, especially for parents of young children such as Araceli. “One by one,”
the
News Chronicle
reported about the aftermath of one air strike, “the tiny victims were recovered. A dark-haired baby boy in a blue knitted bedjacket and a fair-haired girl in pink. Others just as they had been dressed and tucked in for the night. They were identified by the little labels tied to their ankles.”

Araceli navigated this blasted landscape as a stranger, an exile. Her husband was one of the key operatives in the war, but she couldn’t tell anyone this, couldn’t even wear a “sweetheart badge,”
the small lapel pin—a regimental badge or miniature RAF wings—that told other women your boyfriend or husband was doing his part. Neighbors watched from behind their curtains as the telegram boy from the post office turned down their street on his noisy motorcycle, engine thrumming, everyone silently praying the messenger wouldn’t stop at their door—in his pouch was a telegram from the War Office, informing the family their son was dead or missing in action. Araceli, whose husband returned home every night from his mysterious work, couldn’t share any of this with her neighbors, and couldn’t tell of the enormous sacrifice they’d made to be here.

The marriage came under increasing stress. “Many tense moments” marked the relationship as Garbo got deeper and deeper into the deception effort. On June 22, 1943, Guy Liddell, MI5’s director of counterespionage, recorded a worrisome development in his diary: “There has been a crisis
in the Garbo case. Mrs. Garbo is extremely homesick and jealous of Garbo who is completely absorbed in his work and has consequently to some extent neglected her. Her one desire is to go back to her home country. She thinks that as the whole of Garbo’s network is notional we have no further use for his services.”

It was an easy inference to make. Why couldn’t MI5 just imitate Garbo’s distinctive voice and let her and Pujol return home? But Cockade would prove that Pujol was the essential guardian of Garbo’s voice, and his ideas and his tenacity in creating the character were invaluable. Araceli’s request that MI5 release her husband was rejected out of hand.

The break came on the night of June 21, 1943. Araceli had arranged to attend a dinner at the Spanish Club with fellow expats she’d recently met. The luminaries of Spanish London would be in attendance, including the staff of the embassy. Araceli was looking forward to dressing in her finest outfit, feasting on some Spanish delicacies and perhaps drinking a glass or two of champagne. She desperately needed a night out. But Pujol said no, the danger was too great. The Spanish embassy was a well-known nest
of pro-Nazi sympathizers, and he couldn’t risk even the tiniest indiscretion.

When Araceli heard the news that she’d be staying home another night, she exploded. The two argued “rather violently.” Unable to stand being in the same house with her, Pujol fled and called MI5 from a local phone box, saying that if Araceli called making outrageous threats, they should just ignore her. Araceli did call Tommy Harris, her rival, the man who’d replaced her as Pujol’s partner, and screeched into the phone at him:

I am telling you for the last time
that if at this time tomorrow you haven’t got me my papers all ready for me to leave the country immediately—because I don’t want to live five minutes longer with my husband—I will go to the Spanish Embassy . . . As I haven’t got any further with threats, even if they kill me I am going . . . I know very well what to do and say to annoy you and my husband . . . I shall have the satisfaction that I have spoilt everything. Do you understand? I don’t want to live another day in England.

Araceli was threatening to expose Garbo. The incident reverberated all the way to the top of MI5—even before Churchill was briefed. “She ought really to be locked up and kept incommunicado,”
growled Guy Liddell. “But in the state of the law here nothing of the sort is possible.”

MI5 had to get Araceli under control. The man tasked with overseeing the double agents, Tar Robertson, hurried over to the Pujols’ home to “read her the riot act,” but Araceli stood her ground. One agent suggested she be told that MI6 had intercepted a message from the Gestapo to one of its sleeper agents in London, telling him “to make contact with Garbo,” an ominous sign that could mean a planned hit on her husband. Another analyst suggested that MI5 call the Spanish embassy and warn them to be on the lookout for a crazy woman who was “anxious to assassinate the ambassador.”
But this would complicate matters by getting the police involved in the drama, “which would be a bore.” Sending Araceli back to Spain was considered too, but Liddell couldn’t trust her not to talk there, especially now that she hated MI5 and Pujol equally.

One can only imagine Araceli’s theatrics. Months before in Madrid, she’d scared the Abwehr agent Federico half to death with her performance as the distraught wife, and then she’d only been
acting.
Now she really was at the end of her rope. Harris, whom Araceli certainly perceived as her rival, called her “highly emotional and neurotic,”
even “unbalanced.” More likely, she was just desperate to go home.

British attitudes toward emotional women in wartime were far from sympathetic. “Causing a scene” wasn’t just bad form, it was endangering morale through pure selfishness. When people’s husbands were dying on the front lines or in the skies above London, missing home didn’t justify screaming at an MI5 officer. But Araceli surely went much further than screaming. “In contrast to her husband,”
Tommy Harris wrote, “Mrs. Garbo was a hysterical, spoilt and selfish woman.”

MI5 had to come up with a plan. Pujol himself masterminded it. During a meeting with Harris, he laid out a bold course of action for preventing his wife from betraying the cause. Harris was taken aback by the “rather drastic” scheme; it was more diabolical than the fake assassination idea. It’s clear from reading the case notes that Pujol was shocked and embarrassed by what Araceli had done, and he wanted to put an end to the threat she posed once and for all. To do so, he decided to use everything he’d learned about deception and intrigue and turn it against his wife.