Operation Garbo (21 page)

On 3 July
GARBO
made his last contribution to
FORTITUDE
, with a short message from
DORICK
, who had seen the 80th British Infantry Division in Ipswich.

T
he
FORTITUDE
operation had now entered an exceedingly dangerous stage,
GARBO
had initially been brought into detailed communication about FUSAG (as opposed to the overall Pas-de-Calais deception plan) because
TATE
’s lack of credibility might have endangered the entire campaign. Having
participated
directly in putting FUSAG across, MI5 were left with a dilemma.
GARBO
’s subagents were spread generously around the countryside and had begun to make genuine observations.
BRUTUS
, for example, presented none of these difficulties because, as a Polish officer, he could be posted elsewhere and, in fact, he was sent away to Scotland. But there were no such easy options available for
GARBO
’s network. This situation, if left unattended, would bring
GARBO
and Harris into direct conflict with the 21 Army Group. A quick resolution was required, and it was found in
GARBO
’s sudden arrest by the police in London on 4 July 1944.

MI5’s easiest solution to the crisis over FUSAG’s demise lay in
GARBO
’s removal from the stage for a convenient period, but there was another, equally pressing, reason for his
temporary
elimination. This latter motive dated back to a mysterious message received from Madrid on 15 December 1943:

What was this ‘threatened action’? At that time only a few people on the Allied side had any idea of Hitler’s ‘vengeance weapons’, so
GARBO
sought further information. On one
occasion
, on 22 February,
GARBO
complained that
CHAMILLUS
had narrowly escaped death when his rooms sustained a hit during an air raid:

These none-too-subtle attempts to acquire advance warning of any major secret weapon offensive failed, although various
ISOS
intercepts indicated that
GARBO
was being groomed as a kind of advanced observation post, apparently to guide the V-1s onto their targets.
ISOS
showed that once the attack had started
GARBO
’s wireless messages would pass directly from Madrid to Arras, the German centre of operations in control of the V-1 launching sites. This new arrangement was planned to bypass Berlin and demonstrated, once again,
GARBO
’s high standing with the enemy.

The various problems presented by the V-1s remained academic until 13 June 1944, when the first ‘buzz bomb’ or ‘doodlebug’ fell on a railway bridge in Grove Road, Bow, in
London’s East End. Six people were killed and nine were injured.
GARBO
was suitably indignant three days later:

Later the same evening he remarked:

The Abwehr replied the following night:

There was no arguing with the logic behind this explanation, but the Abwehr’s request for his assistance in the bombing led to some agonising debates in St James’s Street. The Germans in Madrid asked
GARBO
to record the exact time and the exact position of as many V-1 hits in London as possible. Their purpose was obvious. The time of each V-1 launch was
carefully
recorded by its crew, and the time and place of impact gave the enemy an invaluable method of checking their
calculations
and improving their aim. The V-1’s navigation system was fairly straightforward, in that the unmanned craft was simply launched off a ramp aligned on a point in the heart of London, but the device which governed the duration of the flight was
rather more complicated. A small propeller on the nose turned in flight and, after a predetermined number of rotations, cut off the engine’s fuel supply. The bomb then plunged to the ground in an eerie silence. The launch crews could only
establish
the required number of rotations by trial and error, and therefore depended heavily on a reliable observer close to the point of impact. With a definite time and location, they could work out exactly which aircraft had been successfully on target and could adjust the others accordingly. Suddenly,
GARBO
had been transformed into a human bombsight, and the realisation made the Twenty Committee distinctly uneasy.

At first there were plenty of opportunities to delay
reporting
the hits.
GARBO
reported that he had moved away from Hendon and had found lodgings at a small hotel in Bray, a picturesque village on the river Thames in Berkshire. This was indeed true. He moved into a hotel owned by a Spanish couple from Valencia named Terrades, and each morning he commuted up to London on the train from Taplow to go to work at MI5’s little front office in Jermyn Street. For his part, Tommy Harris left Chesterfield Gardens and took temporary refuge at the Bull, a well-known hotel at Gerrards Cross, to the north-west of London. These logistics disrupted
GARBO
’s
traffic
, and other reasons were found to justify the prevarication. One excuse concerned the grid selected for
GARBO
’s use by the Abwehr. It was only to be found in a street map of London published by Pharus of Berlin in 1906. Eventually, after a
time-consuming
search, a copy was borrowed … from the British Museum! Once that matter had been sorted out
GARBO
tried to prevaricate further by delegating the task of spotting the V-1s to
BENEDICT
, his Venezuelan deputy. His initial results were poor, and
GARBO
justified his disappointing performance by insisting that ‘the area affected is so extensive that it embraces a semicircle from Harwich to Portsmouth’. This was not entirely true, and it became clear that
GARBO
would have to take on the job himself. ‘As
BENEDICT
is a little timid, I am going to do this
work myself and make the observations starting from
tomorrow
,’ said
GARBO
in a message at 9.15 p.m. on 30 June.

Thoroughly alarmed, the Abwehr responded forty-five minutes later:

Characteristically, it was Tommy Harris who dreamed up the solution while the bureaucrats and politicians fumbled with the moral issues of directing the flying bombs from one part of London to another. Harris suggested that
GARBO
undertake the enemy’s bidding and then get himself arrested. This would isolate
GARBO
from the field, thus giving everyone a short breathing space in which the matter could be considered, and would also teach the Abwehr not to jeopardise the liberty of their star agent on such risky missions. Harris’s solution also had the virtue of closing down the entire network at the crucial moment of FUSAG’s disappearance. The scheme was very attractive and the Twenty Committee gave it their approval.

According to the Harris plot,
GARBO
had visited a pub on the evening of 3 July and had heard about the massive damage caused by the V-1 in Bow. The following afternoon he had paid a visit to the site in the East End and had started asking
questions
in the locality to determine the exact time of the impact. He had also taken notes of the bomb damage. As luck would have it, one of the onlookers at the bomb site had turned out to be a plain clothes detective, who had become suspicious of the inquisitive foreigner.
GARBO
had taken fright at the police officer’s interest in him and had stuffed his notes into his mouth in a futile attempt to swallow evidence of his mission. The detective had promptly arrested him and had escorted him to the police station, where he had been questioned briefly
by the local chief inspector.
GARBO
had protested his
innocence
and had claimed to have been gathering material for the Ministry of Information, following a conversation he had had the previous day with his section head, J(3), concerning the apparent inadequacies of the capital’s air defences against the V-1. The police had taken their time checking his story and had left
GARBO
to sit in the cells for nearly three days.
GARBO
had eventually been released through the intervention of the contact J(3), who had confirmed
GARBO
’s tale, but in the
meantime
he had received the benefit of some advice from a petty criminal who was something of a barracks-room lawyer. Both men had shared the cell for a while, and the crook had pointed out that
GARBO
had been detained illegally because only the commissioner could sanction the detention without warrant of a prisoner for more than forty-eight hours. As soon as he had been released,
GARBO
had written to the home secretary to complain about his treatment. On 10 July the secretary of state had sent him an impressive apology, which
GARBO
then forwarded on to the Abwehr in triumph. In due course, they returned it to him, through the Espírito Santo bank in Lisbon, in case it came in useful again.

The true story, of course, was rather different. At 8.44 p.m. on 1 July
BENEDICT
reported that
GARBO
had gone missing.

The next day there was still no sign of
GARBO
and
BENEDICT
was showing signs of panic:

On the evening of 7 July the Abwehr made a half-hearted attempt to calm
BENEDICT
, although the net result actually shows that a degree of panic had already set in at Madrid:

While Charles Haines was taking down this message from Madrid, Tommy Harris was preparing
BENEDICT
’s next text, which included a reference to ‘red documentation’, the Abwehr jargon for forged diplomatic papers:

It was not until 12 July that the Abwehr were put out of their misery by
BENEDICT
:

GARBO
himself waited a further two days before writing a
typically
dramatic account of his arrest and detention in a letter, his twenty-first, containing the home secretary’s apology. The Abwehr acknowledged it in a radio message received on 23 July, which instructed him to ‘cease all investigations of the new weapon’ forthwith: