The Eldorado Network (57 page)

'Just as well I never knew that was going on,' Luis said.

'Oh, we always radioed back that your information was good,' Philby told him. 'After all, none of it was correct, so there was no point in denying it, was there?'

Luis finished his drink. Philby gave him another. 'What now?' Luis asked. 'Now that the balloon's burst, I mean.'

'I think you should keep on sending them your misinformation until they stop paving you, Luis. Paying us, that is. I don't suppose they'll sack you overnight. We've found that the Abwehr is remarkably reluctant to acknowledge its mistakes.'

'Luis isn't just a mistake,' Julie said. 'Luis is a total disaster.'

Philby chuckled, and they all drank to that.

As it happened, Eldorado was neither a disaster nor a mistake . After a prolonged and painstaking review of the events leading up to the Anglo-American landings in North Africa, Madrid Abwehr came to the conclusion that the Eldorado Network had honestly and accurately reported a series of actions that had been carefully and deliberately contrived by Allied Counter-intelligence in order to divert German attention to Greece and the Balkans as a probable invasion area.

'Eldorado did a good job,' Richard Fischer decided. 'He and his team saw what there was to see, and reported it accurately. The fact that what they saw was part of a major diversionary exercise by the enemy can hardly be blamed on them. The whole point of such a deception is that it should look like the real thing. The Eldorado team would have been at fault if they had not reported what they found. As it is, my confidence in their diligence, skill and courage is renewed.'

'Bad luck, old boy," Charles Templeton said when he heard that the Abwehr payments were continuing. 'Looks as if you're going to be with us for rather a long time. Will you find it too awfully boring?'

Julie laughed when she heard the news. 'Terrific,' she said. 'You can't quit and they won't fire you. What will you do now?'

Luis wondered. Julie was standing by the window, and the way the light shone through her dress was especially attractive. He went over and put his arm around her. 'I'll just have to go all the way and become a myth, I suppose,' he said.

You may, perhaps, have found this novel rather fanciful, even unbelievable. In fact it was suggested by a true story.

Luis Cabrillo is based upon a Spaniard who, after spending two years hidden in a house during the Civil War, in January 1941 offered himself to the British as an intelligence agent, was rejected, and thereupon joined the Germans--  with the deliberate intention of double-crossing them because he calculated that this would greatly improve his prospects of employment by the British.

The Germans code-named him 'Arabel', and after training he left Madrid in July 1941, having arranged to travel to Britain on a Spanish diplomatic mission which would provide cover for his spying activities.

In fact Arabel went no further than Lisbon. For the next nine months he wrote long and lively letters to German intelligence in Madrid, all supposedly sent from Britain. Arabel had never in his life set foot in Britain. He had only a few elementary documents to help his work --  a Blue Guide, a map of England, an obsolete railway-timetable and the like. Nevertheless, such was his skill, imagination and daring that the Germans came to value his reports highly, and he soon created three sub-agents to help expand his operations.

Once established, Arabel again tried to join the British. Again they rejected him. However in February 1942 British intelligence learned from other sources that the enemy was wasting considerable effort on intercepting a non-existent convoy from Liverpool to Malta. Arabel had invented it. At last his value was recognised. He was smuggled to England and joined MI5, where he was code-named 'Garbo'.

For the rest of the war Garbo/Arabel worked with a prolific skill that verged on genius. By 1944 he headed, so the Germans believed, an organisation in Britain of fourteen active agents and eleven valuable contacts. By then his organisation had sent them about four hundred secret letters and transmitted about two thousand radio reports, for which they had paid some £20,000.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Garbo network was to help persuade the Germans that the main D Day landings would take place in the Pas de Calais area, and that the Normandy attack was only a diversion. The German Secret Service not only believed this; it went on believing it. Three days after D Day, Garbo sent an urgent warning that the real assault was now about to strike the Pas de Calais area. Immediately, two Panzer Divisions were sent there. At least seven German divisions which might have been expected to be sent to Normandy were kept in the Pas de Calais area for two weeks after D Day. To the end, it seems, the Germans were convinced that the only reason why the Pas de Calais attack never took place was because the Normandy landings were unexpectedly successful. This explains the German's continued trust in Garbo's reports. In December, 1944, when the British decorated him with the M.B.E., the Germans were trying hard (despite the obstacle of his Spanish nationality) to award him the Iron Cross, Second Class.

Garbo was only one-- although perhaps the outstanding one-- of many double-agents controlled by the British Secret Service. Astonishingly, MI5 was so successful in intercepting enemy agents and immediately 'turning them around' that before long all German agents in Britain were double-agents, transmitting misinformation to the Abwehr.

In his excellent book, The Double-Cross System, 1939-1945, J.C. Masterman writes: 'by means of the double-agent system we actively ran and controlled the German espionage system in this country.' He goes on: 'This is at first blush a staggering claim and one which in the nature of things could not be advanced until late in the history of the war.' According to Masterman, MI5 controlled about 120 double-agents, 39 of whom were important enough to be described in his book. It is a totally convincing account of a brilliant triumph.

Others characters in my story were also suggested by real people or events. 'Eagle' was based on an individual code-named 'Ostro', one of several Germans living in the Iberian Peninsula who supplied information to the Abwehr which (so they claimed) came from agents in England; in fact their reports were invented. Wolfgang Adler's fate emerged as the logical conclusion of a threat to the Double-Cross system that was, in fact, posed by certain Abwehr officials when they attempted to desert the German cause. If they had succeeded, the Abwehr would naturally have expected its agents to be betrayed and arrested; thus the defection had to be prevented at all costs -- a response which must have considerably depressed and bewildered the would-be defectors.

The man in charge of British counter-espionage in Spain and Portugal for most of the war was Kim Philby, then chief assistant of Section V in MI6. His staff included Graham Greene and Malcolm Muggeridge, and Philby was outstandingly good at his job. I have juggled history by actively involving Philby in the Double-Cross System, which was not his department, and by installing him in Lisbon: he visited Portugal but his office was in England.

As for the earlier episodes in my story: the references to the Visions at Fatima and the account of the Battle of Jarama are substantially accurate, as are the descriptions of the bombings of Durango and Guernica. Everything else I made up; which is not to say that it could not have happened.

D.R