Artillery of Lies (50 page)

He could not chew. Anything like chewing set up a chain of pain in his shattered jaw that made him cry out. In any case he had little food and no ration book to buy more, even if he had the money. Most of his coins had spilled from his pockets in various parts of 22A Buccleuch Avenue.

He found the pillbox while he still had enough strength to climb to it and to drag open the small steel door at the back. He left it only once, to steal potatoes from a clamp. On his way back he washed them in a stream and drank from the stream too, sucking up the cold water with the unbroken half of his mouth. He paused for breath and saw himself reflected. He looked like his father in the year he died.

Half a mile upstream from the place where Laszlo drank, the water was used by pigs. He carried his potatoes back to Larbert 17, picking up a couple of ripped and useless sacks on the way. Inside the pillbox he examined the potatoes. They were not big. If he could cook them he might be able to swallow the soft centers. He had no matches. It was a very difficult problem, an exhaustingly difficult problem. He fell asleep.

What woke him was the burning ache in his belly. That and the lunging throb in his head. It was night. He was shuddering from the cold and sometimes he could not find the strength even to shudder. He lay under the sacks for three days. Once, a field mouse came in and took a very long look at him. On the fourth day Laszlo died.

José-Carlos Coelho squatted and examined the face. He ran his forefinger down the jawline, tracing the zigzags of the fractures. “I find it utterly astonishing that he got through that window,” he said. “I thought I'd killed him when I hit him.”

“Desperate fellow,” Hogg said. “He was certainly out to kill you. The gun was loaded.”

“If you'd caught him, what would have happened to him? Eventually?”

“He would have been hanged.”

“I see he left his trademark,” Coelho said. “Small potatoes.” He looked up at Hogg. “Joke,” he said.

D-Day was June 6, 1944. The event came as a great surprise to Luis and Julie, as it did to most people. “It's a ruse,” Luis said. He had only recently discovered this word and he enjoyed it. “You watch. This is a tremendous ruse. Invading Normandy is absurd, it's far too far away and we haven't even tried to capture a port, so there's no hope of reinforcing the first wave of troops fast enough. Normandy …” He shook his head. “It's got to be a ruse.”

“You're just pissed off because Eisenhower hasn't taken your famous short route,” Julie said. They were in Freddy's office, drinking tea.

“Not at all. The ruse will serve its purpose, you watch.”

“What is that?” Freddy asked.

“Hitler will detach some of his defensive units from the Pas de Calais area and send them off to Normandy,” Luis declared. “When
this so-called invasion, which is really a ruse, has distracted a large amount of German tanks and artillery, Eisenhower will make his
real
move. You wait and see.”

“I don't think you should wait,” Freddy said. “Not too long, anyway.”

The following day, Eldorado signaled Madrid that the Normandy landings were only a diversion, a ruse. He warned that the real attack was poised to be launched against the Pas de Calais area at any moment. He repeated this warning twice in the next seven days, with supporting evidence from Haystack and Pinetree.

“I thought you hated Haystack,” Julie said. “I thought you told me he was an idiot.”

“Can we discuss this in bed?” Luis asked. “I'm feeling rather weary. It's very tiring, holding back half the German army.”

Two weeks after D-Day, Freddy told him to forget about the Pas de Calais landings. “It seems Hitler is now convinced that it's Normandy after all,” he said. “He's just taken six or seven divisions out of the Pas de Calais and sent them westward.”

“Very ill-advised,” Luis said. “He'll regret it.”

“Lucky for us he didn't do it on D-Day. Our chaps might have been booted off the beaches.”

Luis took Julie out to lunch. “Eisenhower was lucky. Freddy told me as much. The Allies never expected to be so successful in Normandy, that was just supposed to be a decoy landing to confuse the Hun. When it went so well, Eisenhower canceled his main attack. Obvious, isn't it?”

“I don't suppose Freddy told you where the main attack was going to be,” she said.

“I told Freddy.”

“Fine. Now you can tell me.”

“Dieppe. Hitler would never in a million years expect us to attack twice in the same place … Anyway, none of that matters anymore. There's obviously no future in working for the
Abwehr,
is there? So I've found a new client. Well, two new clients, actually. The Russians and the Americans. They each think they've turned me.”

For a moment Julie thought he was joking; then she recognized the suppressed pleasure in his voice. “How did you do it?” she asked.

“Usual way. Walked into their embassies and made a deal. The pay's good. Especially from the Reds.”

She sipped her drink while she studied his contented face.
“Haven't you any sense of loyalty at all, Luis? I mean, how can you go on working for Freddy while you're betraying MI5?”

“It was Freddy who suggested it. He said the Yanks have started spying on the British, the Russians have been spying on them for years, and since neither of them trusts anyone to tell the truth, Eldorado could be a useful way of passing information which they'll believe because they know they shouldn't have it.”

“Now you're a quadruple-agent,” she said.

“And very strenuous it is. A chap has to keep his strength up. I wonder if they have any roly-poly pudding today? If there's one thing in this dreadful country worth fighting for, it's roly-poly pudding.”

“You don't really mean that.”

“No,” Luis said. “It's a double-bluff. I really want apple pie.”

At last, on July 20, 1944, somebody had the courage and the competence to blow up Adolf Hitler. The man was Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg, not only a regular officer and a Catholic but a patriot who had lost one eye and two fingers while fighting for his country. He was now involved in the raising of new divisions—urgently needed following catastrophes on the Eastern Front—and he came to a conference at the Fuehrer's headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia in order to present his report. This was in his briefcase along with a packet of British plastic explosive, captured the previous year.

The first thing he did when he reached Hitler's headquarters was to visit the lavatory. There he broke open the tiny container of acid which activated his time bomb. He entered the conference room and was briefly presented to Hitler. An officer then continued describing the latest grim developments in the east. Hitler stood at a map table. Von Stauffenberg put his briefcase under the table, near to Hitler. After a few moments he murmured that he had to make a telephone call, and he left.

Hitler was six feet from the bomb when it exploded. The blast was so violent that an adjutant got flung through a window. One general had a foot blown off. Two generals were injured so badly that they died. By then von Stauffenberg was in a fast car to the plane that would take him to Berlin and Operation Valkyrie, codename for the
state of emergency that should ensure the success of the coup. But Hitler was not dead.

He was deafened, his face was cut, and he was badly peppered about the legs with splinters; but after treatment he ate lunch as usual, and in the afternoon he went ahead with a scheduled visit from the Italian dictator Mussolini. Hitler even showed Mussolini the ruins of the bombed hut. Meanwhile his orders were going everywhere to reverse Valkyrie. By evening the coup was dead (as was von Stauffenberg) and all over Occupied Europe, men were hastening to reaffirm their loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi regime.

One such was Admiral Canaris. In fact Canaris had not known in advance of von Stauffenberg's attempt. That did not save him. He escaped the first wave of arrests but was detained on July 23. Oster had been taken two days earlier. They were part of a round-up that went on and on, circles ever-widening, until perhaps five thousand had been arrested. Few survived. Canaris and Oster lasted longer than most. They were hanged on April 9, 1945.

*

There is much fiction in this novel, but it is built on a framework of fact. The reader is entitled to know which is which.

Artillery of Lies
is a sequel to
The Eldorado Network,
now reissued in Pan paperback. Luis Cabrillo, the central character of both books, is based on a young Spaniard who in fact went into hiding at the end of the Spanish Civil War, emerged in January 1941 and offered himself to the British as an intelligence agent, was rejected, and thereupon joined the Germans—meaning (he later claimed) to double-cross them in order to improve his prospects of employment by the British.

The
Abwehr
codenamed him “Arabel,” trained him in Madrid, and in July sent him to spy in Britain. He arranged to travel there on a Spanish diplomatic mission. Actually he went to Lisbon where, with the help of a few books and a skilled imagination, he supplied Madrid
Abwehr
with long reports (all supposedly sent from England) which they came to value highly. As his efforts increased he created sub-agents to help him.

Once established, Arabel again approached the British. Again they rejected him. Then, in February 1942, British Intelligence learned that the enemy was wasting his time trying to intercept a non-existent convoy from Liverpool to Malta. Arabel had invented it. At last they recognized his value. He was smuggled to England, given the codename “Garbo,” and made part of MI5's Double-Cross section, which operated German agents who had been caught and “turned.”

Starting with this improbable but historically true outline, I wrote
The Eldorado Network.
It is a bizarre yarn, and even more surprising was the discovery that Garbo/Arabel was still alive. Juan Pujol—his real name—made his home in Venezuela after the war. He visited London in 1984, and revealed details of his wartime network of phantom agents and sub-agents. Readers who
find Eldorado's codenames a little fanciful—Nutmeg, Wallpaper, Knickers and so on—might like to know that two of Garbo's agents were called Moonbeam and Dagobert. Another agent, Benedict, was a Venezuelan student in Glasgow.

When I wrote
The Eldorado Network,
my slim knowledge of Garbo came from J. C. Masterman's excellent book,
The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939-1945
(Yale, 1972), which describes Garbo as “the most highly developed example of the art” of double-cross. Masterman also said: “By means of the double-agent system we actively ran and controlled the German espionage system in this country.” MI5 operated about 120 double-agents; certainly the operation was a considerable triumph.

However, it has been suggested more recently that maybe the enemy was not as gullible as he seemed. Did the
Abwehr
really believe that so many of its spies survived for so long, never got caught, and were able to uncover and transmit so much secret information? Or did some
Abwehr
officers know very well that their agents had been turned by MI5, but preferred to let this arrangement continue because they could exploit it to their own advantage? We know that Admiral Canaris, General Oster and other senior
Abwehr
officers were involved in plans to overthrow Hitler, in which case a direct line to MI5 would have been very useful. Heinz Höhne, the biographer of Canaris, gives evidence of a meeting in the summer of 1943 between the Admiral and the heads of Allied Intelligence—Menzies for Britain, Donovan for the United States—at Santander, in northern Spain, where the
Abwehr
leader argued for a separate peace in the west. Stranger things have happened.

My account of Eldorado's prolific skill is true to the facts of Garbo's phenomenal output. By 1944 Garbo headed a network of fourteen active agents and eleven valuable contacts. He had sent four hundred secret letters and transmitted about two thousand radio reports, for which the
Abwehr
paid some £20,000. Since I completed
Artillery of Lies,
the final volume of the official history of British Intelligence in the Second World War has been published.
^*
Its author, Michael Howard, describes Garbo as the agent “who was almost single-handed to provide a justification for the existence of the Twenty Committee.” Probably his greatest contribution to the Allied cause 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. Michael Howard quotes a message from Berlin to Garbo's
Abwehr
case officer on June 11, five days after the landings: “The reports received in the last week from Garbo have been confirmed almost without exception and are to be described as especially valuable.” To the end, it seems, the Germans were convinced that the only reason the Pas de Calais attack never took place was because the Normandy landings were unexpectedly successful. Not surprisingly, Arabel/Garbo was awarded both the Iron Cross and the MBE.

Historical facts such as these I was happy to incorporate in
Artillery of Lies.
Similarly, details of the anti-Nazi conspiracies, of rivalry between the
Abwehr
and the SD, of Albert Speer's colossal architectural plans, of the Hamburg firestorm, and of Jeschonnek's suicide are all authentic. The Double-Cross System operated broadly as described. Some of Eldorado's military “secrets” had their roots in reality. For instance, the US Air Force experimented with remote-controlled Flying Fortresses, each packed with TNT and directed to crash on its target—the basis of OWCH—and the idea of GABLE (a ski-jump takeoff for bombers) was confidently reported by a wartime magazine. The rest I made up; which is not to say that it could not have happened.