Operation Garbo by Juan Pujol Garcia Page B

disappointment to me. I just could not understand why the British were so difficult when the Germans were so understanding and cooperative . Why, I kept on asking myself, was the enemy proving to be so helpful, while those whom I wanted to be my friends were being so implacable? However, I’ve always had a stubborn streak: I was determined not to give up but to continue my own bizarre form of espionage on my own; perhaps things would eventually change for the better.

5
LISBON
    J uan Pujol’s rejection by the British embassy in Madrid was not, as he suspected, an instinctive, bureaucratic refusal to get involved in espionage. In fact, the refusal had been motivated by altogether more complicated considerations.
    In January 1941, when Juan approached the embassy, the British ambassador was Sir Samuel Hoare, formerly the home secretary in Chamberlain’s government. His principal mission was to keep Spain out of the war, and he was so determined to avoid any diplomatic incident in the capital or elsewhere that he imposed severe restrictions on the work of the local British Secret Intelligence Service representative, Captain Hamilton-Stokes . Hamilton-Stokes was allowed very little discretion by Hoare, who made it perfectly clear that he strongly disapproved of SIS’s activities and would not hesitate to send anyone home who breached his injunction. It was in these circumstances that Juan Pujol’s offer to help the Allies had been turned down. No doubt Hamilton-Stokes had labelled the Spaniard a probable agent provocateur. Certainly, the primary function of the Nazi embassy, under Baron Eberhard von Stohrer, was to accommodate a substantial German intelligence presence. In contrast, the British contingent was tiny.
    This is not to say, of course, that British Intelligence was inactive in Spain and Portugal. On the contrary, both of Britain’s intelligence gathering agencies took a close interest in everything that went on in the Peninsula. The Security Service, known as MI5, maintained a Spanish counter-espionage section which identified enemy agents visiting the United Kingdom and the colonies, while SIS, its overseas counterpart, operated froma series of stations around the world. Most of these stations gave their staff cover as passport control officers, a manoeuvre which sometimes afforded them a measure of diplomatic protection and gave an opportunity to examine the credentials of those wishing to visit England. Although Sir Samuel Hoare had put an embargo on any potentially embarrassing secret service work in Madrid, the SIS station in Lisbon was able to conduct their affairs with the blessing of the ambassador , Sir Ronald Campbell. There the SIS head of station was Commander Philip Johns, a Royal Naval officer who, before the war, had served at the SIS station in Brussels. Johns’s office was located on the second floor of the British embassy in the Rua do Sacramento à Lapa, and he operated under the cover title of the financial attaché, with the rank of second secretary.
    Before returning to Juan Pujol’s narrative, we should briefly examine the work of the wartime British intelligence apparatus and, in particular, the background of its ring of double agents. The fact that the British had gained experience in running such a system in the First World War had become known publicly in March 1920, when Captain Ferdinand Tuohy, a former British Intelligence officer, gave an account of a double agent operation in
The Secret Corps
. He described the case of a German spy named Carl Muller and revealed that ‘after we had shot Muller we continued for three whole months to draw funds from Muller’s German employer’. Tuohy’s indiscretion was widely circulated, but it seems to have had little impact on the Germans. In any case, the Security Service, perhaps a little optimistically, had prepared the foundations of a repeat performance.
    The first spy to join MI5’s stable of double agents was Arthur Owens, a Welshman