Agent Garbo Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Cast of Characters

  Introduction

  I. The Making of a Spy

  1. Tom Mix in Barcelona

  2. The Training Ground

  3. Araceli

  4. The White City

  5. The Game

  6. The Snakepit

  II. Garbo’s Rise

  7. A Fresh Riot of Ideas

  8. The System

  9. The Debut

  10. The Blacks and the Santa Clauses

  11. The Rehearsal

  III. The Far Shore

  12. The Dry Run

  13. An Intimate Deception

  14. Haywire

  15. The Interloper

  16. The Ghost Army

  17. The Backdrop

  18. The Buildup

  19. The Prisoner

  20. The Hours

  21. The Weapon

  IV. Breakoff

  22. The End

  23. The Return

  Appendix A: Organizations

  Appendix B: The Garbo Network (Entirely Fictitious)

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Copyright © 2012 by Stephan Talty

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Talty, Stephan.

  Agent Garbo: the brilliant, eccentric secret agent who tricked Hitler and saved D-Day / Stephan Talty.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-547-61481-6

  1. Pujol, Juan. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Secret service—Great Britain. 3. Spies—Great Britain—Biography. I. Title.

  D810.S8P883 2012

  940.5‘8641092—dc23

  2012005470

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Alfie Wright,

  teacher and friend

  Cast of Characters

  The Axis

  Alfred Jodl: Chief of staff of the German High Command, tasked with implementing Hitler’s strategic orders. Executed for war crimes after a trial at Nuremberg.

  Friedrich Knappe-Ratey: Codenamed Federico, the Abwehr agent who vetted Juan Pujol and was one of his two main contacts in the Madrid station.

  Karl-Erich Kühlenthal: The second-in-command of the Abwehr’s Madrid station and the man who effectively controlled Garbo.

  Colonel Baron Alexis von Roenne: The chief intelligence officer for Foreign Armies West.

  Erwin Rommel: Nicknamed the Desert Fox, field marshal in the German army who led the Afrika Korps in the Middle East and Army Group B in the defense of occupied France.

  Gerd von Rundstedt: Prussian aristocrat and field marshal of the German army who commanded the forces in the West.

  The Allies

  Johnny Bevan: Former stockbroker and head of the London Controlling Section (LCS); known as the Controller of Deception.

  Desmond Bristow: MI6 operative in the Iberian section and the first man to debrief Juan Pujol in London.

  Brutus: Roman Garby-Czerniawski, Polish air force captain who became a double agent for the Allies. A key operative in establishing the false Order of Battle during Fortitude South.

  Dudley Clarke: Brigadier in the British army, founder of the commando unit A Force and the man who developed many of the theories and practices used by the Allied deception forces.

  Tommy Harris: MI5 officer who worked closely with Pujol on the Garbo operation.

  Edward Kreisler: Politically connected American entrepreneur and art gallery owner who became Araceli Pujol’s second husband.

  Guy Liddell: MI5’s head of counterespionage.

  J. C. Masterman: Oxford don and head of the XX—or Double Cross—Committee.

  Cyril Mills: MI5 officer who was first assigned to Pujol, before being replaced by Tommy Harris.

  Kim Philby: MI6 officer who served as head of the Iberian section. Later revealed to have been an agent for the KGB.

  Araceli Pujol: Juan Pujol’s wife and his early coconspirator.

  Juan Pujol: Spanish double agent who worked for MI5 under the code name Garbo.

  Gene Risso-Gill: MI6 officer in Lisbon who first interrogated Pujol in 1941.

  T. A. “Tar” Robertson: Intelligence officer who headed up MI5’s BiA unit, which managed all double agents in England.

  Lieutenant Colonel Robin “Tin-Eye” Stephens: Head of Camp 020, the interrogation center for suspected Axis spies in south London.

  David Strangeways: British army colonel and head of R Force during World War II. Rewrote the Operation Fortitude cover plan and implemented many of its components.

  Tate: Wulf Schmidt, the original MI5 double agent, who parachuted into England before being sent to Camp 020 and agreeing to spy for the Allies.

  Nigel West: British author and espionage expert, real name Rupert Allason, who rediscovered Juan Pujol in 1984.

  Introduction

  IN THE MIDDLE of the snowless English winter of 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied commander overseeing the forthcoming invasion of Europe, was anxious to get the hell out of London. It was January, less than six months before D-Day, and it seemed to him that every Allied officer and VIP in the capital felt personally entitled to barge into his bustling office and bend his ear. The visitors never stopped, interrupting him and his staff, whose typewriters and footsteps and male voices created a constant, purposeful buzz in the rooms at 20 Grosvenor Square. The American ambassador, John Winant, was forever knocking on his door. Churchill was incorrigible. Today—he glanced down at his appointment book—Noel Wild of Ops (b) was due in, the head of an obscure sector in Eisenhower’s sprawling command: deception.

  The general had been an early skeptic of deception, the shadow bureau of spies running around the Continent claiming they could fool Hitler and turn the tide of war. General George S. Patton, who much to his own disgust had been drafted into the effort as head of an imaginary one-million-man army called FUSAG, summed up the initial feelings of Eisenhower—and the current attitude of many other military and political leaders: “This damned secrecy thing is rather annoying,” he wrote, “particularly as I doubt if it fools anyone.”

  Eisenhower had changed his mind about deception after witnessing its effectiveness firsthand in the Mediterranean. But in January 1944 he had many actual objects to worry about: destroyers and French railroads and the landing vessels called LSTs, which were maddeningly scarce and threatened to sink the invasion before it began. These very real and important things, not espionage, were what consumed his days.

  As he strode through his headquarters, bald, handsome and electric with physical vigor, Eisenhower appeared confident, “a living dynamo of energy, good humor, amazing memory for details, and amazing courage for the future.” His staff loved his relentless optimism, but inwardly and in his private letters to Mamie, the general agonized about what was about to happen. He was smoking four packs of Camels a day, and a journalist would later describe him as “bowed down with worry … as though each of the stars on either shoulder weighed four tons.”

  If and when the Allies took the beaches of Normandy, Eisenhower hoped to join them. Going to France would return him to an old haunt. He’d spent a year there that few of his visitors knew about, the idyllic seasons of 1928–29 when Eisenhower—somewhat slimmer and with more hair—traveled the roads of Bordeaux and Aquitaine with an army driver, eating pi
cnic lunches on the grass borders of country lanes and grating the ears of the farmers with his rudimentary French before winning them over with a flashing smile. That year at the end of the Roaring Twenties had been one of the best of his life. The career officer had been in France to write a guidebook for World War I battlefields and the graveyards of American troops, austere places where the soldiers’ families came to honor their dead.

  It had seemed a pleasant assignment then, but Eisenhower’s memories of France had lately attained a darker shading: if D-Day wasn’t successful, American cemeteries would sprout around the hills and hedgerows of Normandy like the native wood hyacinths. The French would need acres and acres of rich farmland for the graves of the 101st Airborne alone, more for the young men of the Big Red One; the white crosses would blanket the Norman countryside. Western France would become the graveyard for an entire generation of American GIs, the men that Eisenhower made a point of dashing out to visit every chance he got.

  The invasion numbers were daunting. Eisenhower hoped to land five divisions on the first day of the operation. Waiting for him in France and the Low Countries would be fifty-six German divisions. The Fifteenth Army was perhaps the most crucial: it was strung out from Turhout in Belgium (the 1st Panzer Division) to Amiens (the 2nd Panzer Division) and Pontoise in France (the 116th Panzer), place names that Eisenhower knew well. There were ten German armored divisions that were “thought to be held as a centrally controlled mobile reserve, whose function would be to drive any invading force back into the sea before it had time to establish a lodgment.” The Allies would calculate that most of those reserves would be sent to the Normandy bridgehead within one week of the invasion. That one week, however, was critical.

  If Noel Wild and his deception outfit failed to deceive the enemy about the true target of the invasion, those German divisions would begin to flow south and attempt to destroy the Allied invasion force on the roads and in the small towns of Normandy. If the deception succeeded, the panzers would stay right where they were, waiting for the “real” landing. But how could that be achieved? Who could disguise the largest invasion force in history from Berlin’s watchful eyes?

  Finally, Lieutenant Colonel Wild knocked on the door. He was a “slim, elegant little man” and—though this didn’t impress Eisenhower much—an Old Etonian. The two men chatted for a few moments, then Eisenhower made a very modest request. “Just keep the Fifteenth Army out of my hair for the first two days,” he said. “That’s all I ask.”

  Wild saluted and walked out.

  His chat with Noel Wild was one meeting among the many that Eisenhower held that day and he probably forgot about it almost immediately. If he thought about it at all, the commander most likely believed his request—forty-eight precious hours free of the Fifteenth Army—was asking too much.

  On the same day, approximately two miles from Eisenhower’s frenetic headquarters, a rather ordinary-looking man named Juan Pujol was taking the Underground to work at a nondescript office on Jermyn Street. Though short and thin, Pujol carried himself like a member of the unseated European royalty that had found themselves at loose ends in London during the war. His shoulders were thrown back and a winning smile arced across his lips. The young Spaniard had an almost boyish face, a wide forehead, a prominent nose and a strong chin. The dominant feature of his face were the warm hazel eyes, flecked with green, that occasionally flashed with amusement and hidden depths. Pujol commuted to work every day from his house in Hendon, where he lived with his glamorous but unhappy wife and his two young children.

  Dwight Eisenhower was the all-powerful commander of the Allied forces in Europe; every ship’s quartermaster, every tank gunner, every medic was technically under his command. Pujol, on the other hand, was the emperor of an imaginary world. He was the linchpin in the plan to fool Hitler into believing the attack was coming not at Normandy but up the French coast at Calais. His mission was to keep the Fifteenth Army that was causing Eisenhower such deep worry out of the action. Only a handful of men, such as Lieutenant Colonel Wild, even knew who Juan Pujol was; he walked the London streets unrecognized and unprotected. But this brilliant spy, who three years before had been a failed chicken farmer and hotel manager at a one-star dump in Madrid, was the jewel of the Allies’ counterintelligence forces. Churchill avidly followed his adventures; J. Edgar Hoover would one day clamor to meet him. His code name was Garbo; a British officer had given him the name because he considered Pujol “the best actor in the world.”

  In his quest to fool Hitler, Garbo was surrounded by a rather bizarre supporting cast that included a handful of other double agents, a mysterious half-Jewish case officer nicknamed Jesus, a vast supply of props and specially trained commandos, his own invented army of some twenty-seven nonexistent subagents, even an advance man who scoured the country looking for places Garbo’s specters could stay while on their espionage missions to Dover and Edinburgh. But mostly, he had the Germans’ confidence. The Führer’s intelligence agency, the Abwehr, believed in Garbo above all others. They were convinced he was their secret weapon inside England, a spymaster who had sent them so many invaluable reports (carefully crafted with MI5’s help), who had recruited so many valuable sources (all pure inventions), and who believed in fascism so fervently that he could hand them the time and place of the invasion. And if Hitler knew when and where Eisenhower would land his troops, the Führer believed that the Nazi victory was assured.

  For Eisenhower, Hitler was a cipher, quite possibly mad: “a power-drunk egocentric … one of the criminally insane.” Pujol had less experience with military leaders than the American general but more with fascists: he had actually met and fought with them. And he’d spent months trying to get inside Hitler’s mind, to imagine what the German leader was thinking and then, from six hundred miles away, to obscure entire divisions and armadas from the Führer’s eyes. Pujol’s view of Hitler reflected the spy’s Catholic boyhood and the scenes of executions he’d witnessed as a young soldier in the Spanish Civil War. “I had the idea that this man was a demon, a man who could completely destroy humanity.”

  That cool January day, Pujol emerged from the Underground station and walked down Jermyn Street. He arrived at his building, ascended the stairs to his office, greeted the young British secretary, Sarah Bishop, who kept the records of his spectral army, and said hello to his MI5 case officer, Tommy Harris, the man they called Jesus, already filling the small room with the smoke of his black Spanish cigarettes. Pujol knew that D-Day, his final test as a spy, was coming, and he was increasingly nervous, even as he looked—like Eisenhower—cheerful and confident.

  Pujol had failed in almost everything he’d tried in his thirty-two years: student, businessman, cinema magnate, soldier. His marriage was falling apart. But in one specialized area of war, the espionage underworld known as the doublecross game, the young man was a kind of savant, and he knew it. After years of suffering and doubt, Pujol hoped he was ready to match wits with the best minds of the Third Reich.

  “I wanted to start a personal war with Hitler,” he said. “And I wanted to fight with my imagination.”

  Pujol sat down at his desk. Perhaps he asked Sarah Bishop about her evening. Or he exchanged a few words with Tommy Harris about lunch at the nearby Martinez Restaurant, one of their favorite haunts. But despite the close bond between the two, forged over two years of creating intrigues and counterplots spread across Europe and roundthe world, the enigmatic Harris was keeping not one but two secrets from his star agent: the deception plan that would hide D-Day from Hitler—code-named Operation Fortitude—was in deep trouble. And, even more worryingly, an Abwehr spy in Lisbon had recently revealed that he knew all about Garbo and could soon expose him to the Gestapo, ending his quest once and for all.

  Unaware, Pujol began to write a message to the Germans in a beautiful, sloping hand. He was acquainted with secrets. He had a few of his own.

  I. The Making of a Spy

  1. Tom Mix in Barcelona

/>   JUAN PUJOL WAS BORN into turmoil, even though no one realized it at the time. The baby boy was entered into the Barcelona Civil Registry as Juan Miguel Valentín García Guijarro and the date of birth given as February 28, 1912, although the baby had actually been delivered two weeks earlier, February 14, the “Day of the Lovers.” What was more troubling was the missing name of his father. In the appropriate box, the registrar listed the baby boy as illegitimate.

  It was a not uncommon story. Pujol’s mother, Mercedes García Guijarro, had grown up near Granada, in the southern region of Andalusia, the beautiful and high-spirited daughter of a family that was so devout they were known to locals as Los Beatos (The Blessed). The family moved to Barcelona when Mercedes was eight, and when she was in her early twenties, the trim-waisted and effervescent woman went to work in the factory of Juan Pujol Pena, who lived at 70 Muntaner Street, a respectable and historic address in the heart of the Catalan bourgeois district. Pujol Pena was a highly successful dye merchant, completely self-made, whose factory was “famous for its dark shades,” especially the deepest jet black, which was an important color in Catholic Barcelona.

  The merchant’s first wife was alive when Mercedes began working in the factory, but passed away soon after the young woman started there. Pujol Pena and Mercedes began a relationship—whether before or after the first wife was dead is unknown. At the age of twenty-two, Mercedes gave birth to her first son, Joaquín, and then a daughter named Bonaventura. Juan followed, and inherited from his mother a “complicit expression in his ironic gaze” that the British operative Desmond Bristow would catch years later. A younger sister, Elena, followed two years later, after Juan Sr. and Mercedes had married.

  The ironic gaze and his small stature were about all Pujol took from his mother. He looked strikingly like his thin, elegant father and he would inherit Pujol Pena’s liberal outlook on the world, as opposed to Mercedes’s stark Catholicism. When Juan was four, his father finally accepted the young boy and his two older siblings as his legitimate children. It was a fortunate moment for Juan: to be a bastard in status-conscious Barcelona in 1912 was a serious matter.