Agent Garbo (22 page)

Liddell laid out the plan: “It is now proposed
that Len Burt should take a letter to Mrs Garbo after 5pm when the Spanish Consulate would be closed, telling her that her husband had been arrested and asking for his pajamas, toothbrush, etc. Tomorrow, if she appears to be in a repentant mood, she will be taken to see Garbo either in a cell at Cannon Row or at Camp 020.” Before she arrived, MI5 would give her the disturbing news: earlier, they’d brought Pujol to see their chief, who’d informed the Spaniard that his mission was being terminated. The chief then demanded that Pujol send a final communiqué to Federico, making some excuse as to why he was breaking off contact. An outraged Pujol had refused and demanded to know why he was being deactivated. Liddell had told him it was because Araceli had apparently gone out of her mind and threatened to expose everything. At that insult to his wife, Pujol had “completely lost his temper,” tried to attack the MI5 head and his fellow agents and, all in all, “behaved so violently” that he’d been arrested and thrown in jail along with various spies and malcontents headed for long prison stays or execution. Pujol had sabotaged his career—maybe his life—to defend Araceli’s honor.

Camp 020 was a grim place, a former asylum for shell-shocked World War I troops, ringed by a barbed-wire fence. It was filled with prisoners undergoing harsh interrogations and ruled over by Lieutenant Colonel Robin “Tin-Eye” Stephens, a man of violent prejudices who strutted through the camp’s hallways grumbling about “loathly Germans” and “scrofulous Bosches.” Stephens despised Spaniards especially, seeing them as “stubborn, immoral and immutable.”
He never removed the monocle from his right eye, through which he fixed a menacing stare at the prisoners; he was even rumored to sleep with it in place. And though it was never specified to Araceli that her husband would be hanged, that had been the fate of fourteen German spies who came through Camp 020. The place fairly reeked with menace. MI5 hoped she would repent, protest her husband’s innocence and admit that “the whole crisis has been due to her stupidity.”

It’s no wonder that Harris thought Pujol’s plan drastic. Araceli would be led to believe that her tantrum had earned her husband a possible death sentence. Harris, no friend to Araceli, asked Pujol if he was sure he wanted to put her through it. Pujol didn’t flinch. “He took full responsibility for all possible reactions which his plan might produce on his wife,” Harris wrote. MI5 agreed that Pujol would have control of the operation and could change tactics at any moment if he thought the scheme was going south. “Had it failed,” Harris wrote, and had Araceli found out that it was Pujol who’d thought up the plan, it “would have ruined forever his matrimonial life.”

The scheme was quickly put into action.
An MI5 agent delivered the note about Pujol’s arrest to Araceli. She immediately fell into a “hysterical outburst” and refused to get her husband’s pajamas and toiletries. Then Araceli phoned Harris, as Pujol had predicted she would. Harris relayed the story of her husband’s arrest: the meeting with MI5’s commander, Pujol’s refusal to write the breakoff letter to Federico, the violent struggle and the clank of the jail door.

Araceli heard him out and, calmer now, replied that Pujol “behaved just as she would have expected him to. She said that after the sacrifices he had made, and her knowledge that his whole life was wrapped up in his work, she could well understand that he would rather go to prison than sign the letter we had asked for . . . She was convinced he had behaved in this way to avoid the blame . . . falling on her.” Pujol had predicted his wife’s reaction precisely. Now to see if she would take the bait.

As badly broken down as the marriage was, as lonely and neglected as Araceli felt she was, she clearly still had deep feelings for Pujol. “In tears,” she told Harris that MI5 was wrong to arrest her husband, that Pujol would give everything for the Allies, including his life. She begged him to release Pujol. Then she hung up.

Success. But Araceli wasn’t finished. A few minutes later, she called Harris back, now “in a more offensive mood,” and threatened to take her two children and disappear into London’s back streets. Next she phoned Pujol’s wireless operator, Haines. The startled officer reported that Araceli was “apparently in a desperate state, and asked him to come by the house in thirty minutes.” If MI5 had thought Araceli wasn’t capable of stratagems as maniacal as her husband’s, they were wrong. Alarmed, Haines rushed over to the Pujols’ house.

There he found a frightening scene: Araceli in the kitchen, incoherent, the house filled with the rotten-egg smell of gas. Apparently MI5 had driven her to suicide. Haines shut off the gas and picked Araceli up off the floor. Luckily, she was still breathing.

No one close to her believes this was a suicide attempt. “Was she capable of pretending
that she wanted to kill herself to make a point?” asks her granddaughter, Tamara. “Absolutely. Would she really have done it? With her two children in the house? Absolutely not.” Liddell agreed. “This was clearly a bit of play-acting
for [the agent’s] benefit.” Araceli had one-upped the British spooks with a little drama of her own. But in staging it, she had underestimated Pujol.

Haines tried to calm Araceli down, but that evening she tried the gas trick again. MI5 was forced to station an agent to watch over her all night, to see that no harm came to her. The next morning, Tar Robertson arrived and listened to Araceli plead for her husband’s life. It would seem that the incident was over and that Pujol’s plan had worked. Araceli was repentant and had been “weeping incessantly for hours.” Harris demanded she sign a document promising never to try to leave England again, and to leave Pujol free to do his work. She signed it. With the document in MI5’s files, Pujol could now, as per his agreement with MI5, call off the final and most painful act.

But he didn’t. Knowing how tough and wily Araceli was, Pujol wanted to drive his point home. Perhaps he wanted to punish his wife, too. She’d nearly sunk Garbo and put the lives of thousands of Allied soldiers at risk. So he decided to give her a day she’d never forget.

The finale went ahead. Araceli was loaded into a Black Maria—a secure police van—and brought to Camp 020. She was blindfolded and led into the interrogation center, where Tin-Eye Stephens was waiting for her in his Gurkha Rifles uniform. The blindfold was removed and Araceli found Tin-Eye glaring at her through the monocle, most likely with visible disgust. He turned and led her to Pujol, who’d been dressed in the clothes of a common prisoner.

The spy was now in control. As Araceli sat in front of him, weeping, Pujol asked his wife, “on her word of honor,” whether she’d gone to the embassy to reveal his secrets. (He knew she hadn’t, thanks to the MI5 agent posted by the embassy door.) She told him no, it had all been a cry for attention. “She promised him that if only he were released from prison, she would help him in every way to continue with his work with even greater zeal than before.” Then Pujol broke the bad news: he was to stand trial the next morning. The chief of MI5, the man he’d tried to attack, would meet with her tomorrow at the Hotel Victoria to give her the verdict.

The next morning, Araceli met with the chief—played masterfully by an intelligence officer named Cussen—who told her that she “had only avoided being arrested
by a hair’s breadth.” As for Pujol himself, MI5 had decided on mercy. He’d be allowed to continue his work and return home. But Cussen emphasized that any repeat of her threats could jeopardize his stay in England and perhaps his life. “Thoroughly chastened,” Araceli went home to wait for Juanito to come back to her. He was released that night, his prison stay marked by the beginnings of a thick beard, which made him look “rather like Lenin.”

Harris found the whole affair fascinating, a glimpse inside the private life of the voluble but secretive man he’d worked with elbow to elbow for two solid years. To see how well Pujol had read Araceli, and how he’d neutralized her outbursts with a plan that relied on all the tricks of the spy trade, was to Harris truly impressive. It confirmed “that the conclusion which Garbo had drawn
before putting the plan into operation had been correct.”

But MI5’s Guy Liddell saw another side to the episode. “I gather that [Pujol] is somewhat shaken
by his experience of the last forty-eight hours,” he wrote in his diary for June 24, “and that although the plan was of his own making it was one of the most distasteful things that he has had to do in his life.” Pujol knew that Araceli was really homesick and miserable, while he was having the time of his life living out his boyhood dreams. There’d been rumors of trouble in their marriage—Guy Liddell at one point refers to a naval officer “for whom some considerable time ago
[Araceli] formed an attachment,” though there is no further mention of the officer in the records.

Yes, Araceli had been outrageous. But her pain was real. And instead of taking her side, Pujol had tricked her so that he could continue his personal war with Hitler.

Pujol never spoke about the incident and never wrote down his version of the events. The motives for his icy resolve remain unknown. But perhaps, along with his anger that Araceli was risking the lives of thousands of men with her dramas, he was indignant that she’d violated that part of himself that he’d long considered almost sacred: his imagination. Just as Operation Cockade was playing out, she’d tried to tell people that his greatest creation, Garbo, was a fake, to suggest that the British could pull the character’s strings and speak with his flamboyant voice as well as Pujol could. She’d tried, in effect, to separate Pujol from Garbo.

In response, he’d played Araceli like a violin. They might have started out as equals in deception, but by now he’d surpassed her in every way. His mastery of the game was complete, even when he used it against someone he loved.

14. Haywire

I
N THE SUMMER AND
early fall of 1943, Operation Cockade’s planners, along with Pujol and Harris, began to experience what John Masterman called a “gnawing anxiety”
in their collective gut. It became clearer and clearer in those months that the planners had underestimated what it took to get commanders and thousands of soldiers in far-flung encampments organized into an invasion force, albeit a fake one. Plans began to be whittled down, resources withdrawn. On June 17, the Joint Planning Staff crossed out a provision in the plans that would allow Cockade to become a real invasion if the defenses looked weak. From then on, it would be a pure deception exercise,
all bark and no bite. Four days later, the Royal Navy protested that using the powerful R-class battleships for a fake invasion was unacceptable. What if they were hit by the coastal batteries and sunk in the English Channel? The propaganda victory for the Germans would be huge. The idea quietly went away.

Reports came back that most of the American officers who were supposed to be involved in the invasion weren’t even aware that such a thing as Cockade existed. The U.S. Navy, which was supposed to be supplying ships and personnel, told the planners that they couldn’t so much as talk to them until two weeks before the fake D-Day, and none of the units they donated to the effort had any amphibious training, making them essentially useless. And no one realized until August, a month before Cockade went operational, that the plans called for a formidable naval convoy to leave the East Coast of the United States in support of the feint. That idea, too, was scrapped in frustration. The planners went looking
for one of the U.S. Navy units that would supposedly cross the English Channel on September 8 and found that it hadn’t been at its given encampment for over two years, and the unit couldn’t even be located in time to be asked to take part. The leader of the operation also found himself at sea: “Will someone kindly tell me what I am to say,”
General Frederick Morgan barked to his subordinates, “when I am to say it, and to whom I must say it?”

A closer examination of one of Cockade’s main aims—to lure Luftwaffe planes out of their hangars—would have revealed that it was well-established Luftwaffe policy to hold back its pilots until
after
the expected D-Day, and kill the regiments as their trucks and jeeps clogged the roads inland. Even if the Germans believed the invasion was real, there was a good chance that no Luftwaffe planes would be available to shoot down. The basic research behind Cockade was flawed.

The high of Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa, dissipated and all the old prejudices about deception returned. It was a waste of time. It was a waste of good diesel fuel. Privately, many in the Allied command felt that it was ungallant and its results hard to measure.

If deception, in its structure, was like the Hollywood studio system, its vulnerabilities were more like an ecosystem’s: each event impacted every other event across a wide area. If the physical deception faltered or a rumor was poorly placed, the reputation of the double agents suffered, and vice versa: bad work flowed throughout the system, corrupting everything. Something that happened at an embassy in Ankara could make one of Garbo’s messages obsolete. In Cockade, several networks—mostly involving the hardware needed to back up the narrative—were going bad, causing the survival of the ecosystem itself to be called into question.

The notoriously fickle British weather failed to cooperate. Rain and storms meant canceled sorties,
and the Luftwaffe was unable to send reconnaissance planes over to verify the buildup. Churchill was unhappy. “I cannot feel,” he wrote
after seeing the plans, “there is enough substance in this . . . Even at some inconvenience, a much larger mass of shipping should be assembled.” The prime minister’s note resulted in a small fleet of twenty vessels suddenly becoming available; they were quickly formed into a second prong
of the attack to head out from the Solent eastward toward Beachy Head, to give the raid additional heft. But it was too little, too late.

From every quadrant the evidence built up that a deception operation of this magnitude might simply be beyond the powers of the Allies. “A mounting wave of desperation rose”
over Cockade. The press was pumping expectations too high. “An unofficial source states that the Allies will move against Germany by the autumn,” the United Press reported in late August, “and the race for Berlin is on with Anglo-American forces poised to beat the Russians. Signs multiply that the Allies may land in Italy and in France within the next month.”