Artillery of Lies

by Derek Robinson

Genres: World War II; War & Military; Spy Thrillers; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

1943. British Intelligence has finally got to grips with the Eldorado Network, Germany's most successful spy ring. It turns out to be one man in a small room in Lisbon, inventing phoney (but convincing) reports. For two years he has pulled the wool over German Intelligence's eyes, and made a killing. The British soon find that Eldorado's a real handful. They bring him to England, so they can manage his dispatches, and discover that living with a genius can be a headache. Eldorado rapidly creates a team of top sub-agents around him. None of them exists. But power - even imaginary power - is intoxicating, and he begins to treat his fake sub-agents as if real. Big trouble ahead. Artillery of Lies is the hair-raising sequel to The Eldorado Network, all the more funny for being soundly based on the true story of a real Second World War spy.

Release date: March 1, 2012

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 353

Sample

‘And there’s no fog,’ Luis complained. ‘You said there would be fog.’ He managed to make his voice both sour and savage.

‘Not all the time,’ said Templeton. ‘I never said England was foggy all the time.’

‘Damned swindle.’

‘I could sing you a bit of fog,’ Julie said. Luis was standing at the window with his hands deep in the pockets of his greatcoat. She stood behind him and slid her hands into the pockets, but he refused to link fingers. She rested her chin on his shoulder and crooned: ‘A foggy day … in London town … It had me blue … It had me down …’ He hunched his shoulders and frowned even harder at the shifting image of parkland. The rain blurred the glass and made the bare black branches twitch and flicker like bits of early cinema film. He blinked, changed focus, and saw his own reflection. Handsome young devil, he thought. Dark eyes, high cheekbones, strong brows: thank God for a bit of Moorish blood in the family. He flashed his shy smile, just to keep in practice. Irresistible.

‘No orange juice for breakfast either,’ he said bitterly.

‘For God’s sake, Luis, there’s a war on,’ Julie said, and walked away.

‘Nobody told me I wouldn’t get any orange juice. I always have orange juice for breakfast, I’m no good without orange juice, I can’t work.’ He kicked a radiator. ‘Wouldn’t have left Lisbon if I’d known it was like this.’

‘Tell you what, I’ll lay on some nice juicy prunes tomorrow,’ Templeton said.

‘I shit on your prunes,’ Luis said.

‘No, it’s the other way around,’ Julie told him.

‘I suppose the shortage of fog is also because there is a war on,’ Luis said.

‘Be fair, old chap,’ Templeton said. ‘You can’t expect to have fog and half a gale of wind and rain.’

‘You will tell me next there is no pageantry in England. No pomp and ceremony. Because there is a war on.’

‘I’ll take you to the Changing of the Guard,’ Templeton promised. ‘Just as soon as it stops raining.’

Luis sighed and took his hands from his pockets to raise them, palms upwards. ‘I should live so long,’ he said.

Templeton looked to Julie for help, but she shook her head. ‘He wasted his youth in the cinema,’ she told him. ‘He thinks life is a B-movie. Does this thing work?’ She had found a gramophone and was sorting out the records.

‘This severe shortage of fog and orange juice,’ Luis said, ‘is very significant and I shall inform Herr Hitler at the earliest possible opportunity.’

‘I’ll go and organise some tea,’ Templeton said.

As he went out, Julie was dancing to a slow foxtrot with Luis, her arms inside his greatcoat.

‘Earl Grey!’ Luis called out.

‘Wrong,’ she said. ‘Duke Ellington.’

Which at least made him laugh. I suppose that’s your volatile Latin temperament for you, Templeton thought. Give me good old English phlegm every time. You know where you are with phlegm.

Templeton needed a stiff cup of tea.

Julie Conroy was American and she could take the stuff or leave it alone, especially before lunch; Luis Cabrillo was Spanish so his choice was simpler: he left it alone. Templeton was English and in the face of adversity he automatically thought of tea. There had been no lack of adversity on the journey from Lisbon.

This was December 1942. Portugal was neutral, perched uneasily on the elbow of Spain, which was also neutral but not too neutral to send a division of troops to fight for Hitler on the Russian Front.

Because nearly all the rest of Europe belonged to Hitler, neutrals like Portugal and Switzerland and Sweden were immensely useful to both sides. Portugal was especially popular with the various intelligence agencies. The climate was pleasant, you could get a decent cup of real coffee for next to nothing, and the Portuguese secret police didn’t throw their weight about. Not unless you were stupid enough to embarrass them by not even pretending to be, for instance, the Assistant Cultural Attaché at your nation’s embassy. There were more spies in Lisbon than in any other capital. Demand attracted supply: detailed and startling information, some of it quite accurate, came from a shifting army of paid informants. In particular the Lisbon agents of the Abwehr, German Military Intelligence, always got advance notice of arrivals and departures by boat or plane. Despite the war, there were scheduled commercial flights between Portugal and Britain. If Luis Cabrillo had taken one of those planes, the Abwehr would have known and would have been painfully surprised, since they believed he had been in Britain for many months, working for them.

The British embassy had a department called Quarantine Control to handle this kind of problem. At three in the morning, during a cold drizzle, in a sad and semi-derelict corner of Lisbon docks, Quarantine Control smuggled Luis, Julie and Templeton on to a rusting gutbucket of a British freighter only minutes before she sailed. It was a three-day voyage to Gibraltar. The weather got worse. The boat lurched and plunged and thumped and butted the Atlantic as if looking for a fight. She was loaded and overloaded with a cargo of carob pods, her skipper taking the view that if you were going to be torpedoed you might as well go down big. The carob pods put out an overblown supersweet smell that no gale could disperse. Luis had never been to sea before, and he was very sick. He lay in his bunk, a martyr to every heave and shudder, and raged feebly against the British government. ‘Is this the best you can do?’ he demanded of Templeton. This slow death?’

‘I’m afraid it is, old chap.’ Templeton had once served in the Royal Navy, and now he was enjoying a thick ham sandwich with plenty of mustard. Julie slumped in a chair, pale as an empty plate.

That filthy stench …’ Luis clung to the bunk as the freighter groaned under the wallop of another wave. ‘It chokes me.’

‘I’m told carob makes splendid animal feed. Cattle fight each other for it, apparently.’

‘Eldorado Network,’ Luis whispered. ‘Best damn network in Europe. All that work. Suppose I die?’

‘Oh, can it, Luis,’ Julie said. ‘D’you think I’m enjoying this?’ Against all advice from her stomach she had eaten a bowl of stew and she knew that if she relaxed her attention for an instant, her stomach would send it back. ‘Anyway, the Eldorado Network doesn’t exist, so you can go right ahead and die and see if anyone cares.’

They glared at each other. Templeton sighed. He was a bachelor; he had never understood love.

‘Think I’ll take a turn about the deck,’ he said. ‘Can I get anyone anything?’ Neither of them even looked at him.

Quarantine Control had a man waiting for them at Gibraltar. ‘Good news,’ he said. ‘I’ve got you on a plane for England tonight.’ The plane was a Sunderland flying-boat and it took off as soon as night fell, carrying them high above the route the freighter had taken. When Luis discovered this he took malevolent pleasure in telling Templeton.

‘Only a couple of hours and we shall be back exactly where we started,’ he shouted. (The Sunderland made a lot of noise.) ‘Isn’t progress wonderful?’

Templeton nodded and got on with his leg of cold chicken. He had made this flight before and he knew that the best approach was to fill yourself up with food and drink and hope to sleep the rest of the way. Julie was already wrapped in blankets with a bottle of wine for company.

Luis had never been up in an aeroplane before and he could not rest. On the other hand there was nothing to see, nothing to read, nothing to do, and the booming roar of the engines made conversation difficult. The fuselage was dimly lit. As the plane climbed the temperature fell. He couldn’t find anywhere comfortable to sit or lie or sprawl. His eardrums hurt.

The pilot flew far out over the Atlantic in order to avoid German aircraft operating from France. The Sunderland was not built for speed. It cruised at 150 or 160 miles an hour, churning stolidly through the night, hour after hour. Luis had never been so bored in his life. This was worse than prison; if he were in prison he could make trouble; inside this deafening, freezing machine was nothing, nothing. He found his penknife and began scraping his initials on a black box while thinking savage and brutal thoughts about Templeton for persuading him to leave Lisbon. A crewman came and shouted and took the penknife away. Luis hated the crewman too.

The flight lasted ten and a half hours.

It was still night when they landed at Plymouth harbour. They were given breakfast – charred bacon and a slab of reconstituted dried egg – and then put in a car. Luis fell asleep. The first time he saw England by daylight it was grey with rain. He asked Templeton where they were. ‘Salisbury Plain, I think,’ Templeton said. ‘Not far now.’ Luis asked him where they were going. ‘Big house called Rackham Towers, just outside London. You’ll like it there.’

‘Don’t bet your pension on it,’ Julie said.

It was mid-morning when they arrived. Rackham Towers was a Victorian pile set in five hundred acres of parkland and built of rain-blackened granite. It had battlements. It had round turrets with arrow slits, and overhanging square turrets with cannon ports, and smaller square turrets growing out of the bigger square turrets. A besieging army would have died of hunger until it worked out how to get in through the french windows.

They stood in the rain and looked at it.

‘Fortunately, the light is bad,’ Luis said.

‘Unusual place, isn’t it?’ Templeton said. ‘I’m told the architect shot himself.’

‘Before or after?’ Julie asked.

‘It’s quite nice inside.’ Templeton and Julie made for the door, leaving Luis standing and staring at the house. ‘Why on earth is he being such a pig?’ Templeton murmured.

‘Why not? There he was in Lisbon, having a lovely war, running the whole show, praised and admired by all and making a killing too, when down came the British Secret Service and took all his toys away.’

‘Not quite. We just want him to let us play with them.’

‘He says it’s a rotten swiz. Is that the phrase?’

‘In my country,’ Luis shouted at them, ‘in Spain, we would pay our enemies to come and bomb a thing like this.’ He turned ‘thing’ into a piece of airborne graffiti.

Templeton carried in a tray of tea and biscuits, and found Luis and Julie on the sofa, reading the morning papers. Her eyes were half-closed. ‘If you want to go to bed,’ Templeton said, ‘your rooms are ready. Just say.’ She smiled, looking as lazy as a cat in the sun.

‘Listen,’ Luis announced, ‘I didn’t realise this Stalingrad business was so awful.’ He winced as he read on. ‘My God,’ he muttered.

‘I haven’t seen a paper.’ Templeton looked over Luis’s shoulder and scanned the story. ‘That’s not so bad, is it? I’d say it was quite good. German Sixth Army’s still trapped and the Russians are breaking out on all sides. Nothing for us to worry about there.’

‘What? It’s a disaster. It could become a catastrophe.’ Luis gave him the newspaper and began bouncing on the sofa, using up his excess of nervous energy, until Julie complained and he stood up. The OKW must be desperately worried,’ he said. ‘I mean, where is it going to stop?’

Fatigue was beginning to catch up with Templeton. ‘Sorry, old chap,’ he said. ‘Not quite with you. O K What?’

‘Oberkommando der Wehrmacht.’ Luis snapped out the words. ‘Hitler’s High Command.’ Templeton put milk in his tea, and waited. ‘You remember Hitler?’ Luis said. ‘Looks like Charlie Chaplin, only not so funny?’

‘With you now, Luis. So tell me why I should worry about OKW’s ulcers.’

‘Because the largest office in OKW is the Abwehr. When OKW catches a cold, the Abwehr runs a fever. It needs to be soothed.’ Luis was pacing up and down, gesturing. ‘Luckily I have just the medicine. The British War Cabinet is unhappy about this Soviet success, very unhappy.’

Templeton was more tired than he knew. ‘Where does it say that?’ he asked. He gave the newspapers a shake.

‘Perhaps not the entire War Cabinet. No. But a powerful minority is very, very apprehensive. The danger is …’ Luis walked all around the sofa and ended up looking at Julie. ‘What is the danger?’ he asked, like an actor at rehearsals, seeking a cue.

Julie yawned and curled herself around a cushion. ‘I guess the danger is the Bolsheviks will sweep across Europe like a red tide,’ she said sleepily.

Luis clicked his fingers. ‘Of course. And we don’t want that, do we?’ he said to Templeton. ‘So we’re going to reduce the number of Arctic convoys we send to Russia. We must stop feeding the bear before he gets too big and gobbles us all up. That’s it. That’s what several influential members of the War Cabinet are demanding. Yes. Far too many ships are being sunk in the Arctic. Britain must stop bleeding herself white for the greater glory of Uncle Joe Stalin. Ha!’ He jumped in the air, clicked his heels and clapped his hands. ‘You see? Stalingrad is not all doom and disaster. There is a bright and optimistic side to Stalingrad, if you know where to look. Where to listen.’

‘And where exactly did you see and hear all this?’ Templeton asked.

‘Um …’ Luis gave it some thought, pursing his lips and shrugging as he selected his source. ‘Pinetree,’ he said at last.

‘Pinetree? Refresh my memory. Whose codename is Pinetree?’

‘British civilian employee in the American embassy.’

Templeton finished his tea. ‘Well, Pinetree would know, if anyone does.’

‘Exactly. I’ll draft something for transmission. The Abwehr will love it, they must be gasping for good news. Can we get it out tonight?’

‘I’ll see.’ Templeton heard the crunch of tyres on gravel and he went to the window, in time to see a man in a blue raincoat run up the steps. Freddy Garcia. Thank God. For the first time in a week, Templeton felt he could afford to think about relaxing. Eldorado was Freddy’s pigeon now.

‘How is Lisbon? Don’t tell me, I can’t stand to know,’ said Freddy Garcia. ‘London’s ghastly. The Americans have got all the taxis and ever since we had a bomb in the back garden, I can’t make the hot-water system work. Not that it matters, because I virtually live in the office, which is another madhouse. The Director won’t hire a secretary unless she’s in Debrett or Burke’s Peerage; he says in this racket loyalty counts more than efficiency, so there are debs everywhere. Charming gels with perfect manners but the files are in chaos. You don’t know how lucky you are, Charles.’

‘Actually, it was raining in Lisbon too. I think it’s raining everywhere. Not in North Africa, perhaps.’

‘What? It rains harder and colder in North Africa than anywhere outside Burma.’

‘I’ll take your word for it, Freddy,’ Templeton said. ‘I mean to say, you’ve been everywhere, haven’t you?’

They were warming their backsides at the library fire. Garcia was about forty years old. He was Anglo-Spanish. His face was olive-skinned, smooth, straight-lipped, with a polished axe-head of a nose and black hair that he brushed straight back, no parting. But he dressed like an English countryman, perhaps a successful vet or a stud-farmer: whipcord trousers, tweed jacket of a soft and faded pattern with leather patches on the elbows, rust-red woollen tie. His father had been a minor Spanish diplomat, his English mother a very good painter of watercolours. For work and pleasure the family had travelled around the world, ending up in London, where MI6 (the public label of the British secret intelligence service) recruited Freddy the day after Hitler invaded Poland.

He was recruited in a fashion typical of the day. He was in Brown’s, a club which had a lot of members who were obviously decent chaps, and someone he occasionally played backgammon with came up to him at the bar and asked him if he might be interested in doing something interesting. Freddy said he might. It all depended on what and where and why and how long. Hard to say, the man said. We do lots of different things in lots of different places, all for the same reason, and we’ll go on doing them as long as this war lasts. It’s not boring. They had lunch, then Freddy went with him, and by teatime he was a spy.

He had dual nationality, and until the fall of France he floated around Europe on his Spanish passport, doing harm and good by stealth and subterfuge. What he mainly did was help talented Jewish scientists escape from Germany. The man in Brown’s had been right: it was not boring. After the fall of France, he joined MI5’s new B1A section, which ran the Double-Cross System.

They tell me your Mr Cabrillo is a bit of a handful,’ Freddy Garcia said.

‘Two handfuls, actually,’ Templeton said. ‘You don’t get Luis without Julie Conroy. Very pretty, very American, very head-screwed-on.’

‘Damn. Where on earth did he pick up Miss Conroy?’

‘Madrid, and it’s Mrs Conroy.’

‘Double damn.’

‘It’s all in the Eldorado file,’ Templeton said. ‘I suggest you read the file before you make any judgements.’ He hoisted a fat bundle of papers from his briefcase.

‘Crikey.’ Garcia weighed the bundle on his palms. ‘He’s been busy, hasn’t he?’

‘The Abwehr certainly think so. I’ll get the kitchen to send you up some sandwiches at lunchtime. It’s a jolly good read.’

Templeton went out. Freddy Garcia put the bundle on a table and tugged at the ends of the tape around it until they came loose. The first page was headed Origins. He found a deep armchair and began to read.

CODENAME: ‘ELDORADO’

AGENT: Luis Jorge Ricardo CABRILLONATIONALITY: SpanishAGE: 24 (b. 9 September 1918)LANGUAGES: Fluent English (self-taught), some FrenchPOLITICS: None (anti-Fascist and anti-Communist)EDUCATION: Varied. Cabrillo claims to have attended 27 different schools in 13 towns and to have been expelled from 23 of them. (As an employee of Spanish State Railways, his father moved from town to town.)

Spanish Civil War

Having left school at the age of 15 and tried many jobs, Cabrillo was a taxi-driver (aged 17) in Granada, specialising in tourists, when the Civil War broke out. He soon found profitable work as chauffeur/interpreter for English and American war correspondents. Cabrillo claims he became expert at ‘discovering’ appropriate news to suit the political slant of any reporter’s newspaper (e.g. Guernica was destroyed either by German bombs or by the dynamite of Republican saboteurs); for this he got well paid. The work took him back and forth through the Republican and Nationalist lines and grew increasingly dangerous. Both sides suspected him of spying. He was nearly arrested in Guernica shortly after the bombing but escaped. In the course of his escape a Nationalist army officer chasing him was killed (accidentally, Cabrillo says) and Cabrillo somehow acquired a very large sum of money.

He went into hiding for the next four years. The first two, he spent moving about northern Spain, keeping clear of areas of the fighting, always travelling on foot and pretending to be a poor peasant. When the war ended (March 1939) he moved to Madrid and rented a small apartment. He claims not to have left it for the next two years – he was still on the wanted list of Franco’s police in 1939 and 1940 – and spent all his time reading books in English, thus acquiring a huge, if miscellaneous and secondhand, knowledge of life in Britain.

Introduction to intelligence work

By May 1941 Cabrillo’s money had run out. He emerged from hiding and applied to the British embassy for work as a spy. As he had no experience apart from his job with the war correspondents, no contacts in Occupied Europe and no knowledge of German, the embassy turned him down.

Cabrillo immediately went to the German embassy and offered to spy for the Axis cause. (He now asserts that this move was intended to give him valuable inside knowledge of the workings of German military intelligence which he could later offer to British Intelligence.) It seems that Madrid Abwehr were impressed by his initiative and imagination and agreed to train him. This they did, very thoroughly: he learned codes, secret writing, gunmanship, unarmed combat, Morse transmission, radio maintenance and repair, technique of microdots, landing by rubber dinghy, principles of military intelligence, conversion of British systems of weights, measures and currencies, how to recruit sub-agents, the psychology of espionage. According to Cabrillo he scored well in everything except gunmanship and radio.

The Abwehr must have been confident of Cabrillo’s value because he survived two potential disasters. The lesser involved his friendship with an American woman, Mrs Julie Conroy, whom he met at the German embassy; she was seeking information about her husband, an American journalist, thought to be somewhere in Europe. Their friendship ripened but so did Mrs Conroy’s anti-Nazi views, which she expressed openly. This disturbed Brigadier Christian (then head of Madrid Abwehr); however, Cabrillo persuaded him that a vehemently anti-Nazi girlfriend was excellent cover for an Abwehr agent. In any case Mrs Conroy left Madrid for America (or so Christian believed) and the crisis passed.

More serious was the involvement of Freddy Ryan, an MI6 agent who was infiltrated as a potential Abwehr agent. Ryan trained alongside Cabrillo until something (or someone) betrayed him. The Abwehr shot him, in Cabrillo’s presence. Cabrillo might have been considered guilty (or at least suspect) by association; in the event Christian seems to have decided that Ryan’s death had so frightened Cabrillo that he had been cleansed of any possible disloyalty.

Madrid Abwehr planned to land Cabrillo in England by rubber dinghy from a U-boat. He took strong exception to this, pointing out that since he was a Spanish neutral he could go by ship or air to Britain, travelling as a businessman. He further persuaded them that he had arranged a method of communication which was better than radio: he would use friends in the Spanish embassy in London to send his reports by diplomatic bag to Lisbon, where another contact would forward them to Madrid. Christian agreed to these arrangements and Cabrillo left Madrid for England, travelling alone, on 23 July 1941.

Creation of the Eldorado Network

Cabrillo went no further than Lisbon. He rented an office and an apartment and began sending his reports to Madrid; the first arrived only a week after his departure and was warmly welcomed. As he got into his stride he maintained a steady output of two, sometimes three, extensive reports per week, covering virtually every aspect of the war in which the Abwehr was interested, from Atlantic convoy patterns and scales of food rationing, to secret tank trials and new airfields, as well as political intelligence about the strategic policies of the various Allied governments. Quite rapidly, Abwehr HQ in Berlin began to attach considerable importance to Eldorado reports. Digests and analyses of them were routinely forwarded to the German High Command and even to Hitler’s headquarters.

Cabrillo has described how he was able to maintain such a continuous stream of apparently high-grade ‘intelligence’. He names three factors:

(1) His wide knowledge of English life, the product of two years’ ceaseless reading in Madrid.

(2) His use of three works of reference which he had found in Lisbon, namely: the 1923 Michelin Guide to Great Britain; Holiday Haunts, published by the Great Western Railway in 1937; and a school geography textbook, Exploring the British Isles by Jasper H. Stembridge, Book 4.

(3) His creative formula, which consists of looking at what is actually happening in the war, then asking himself the question: ‘What would the Germans most like to hear?’, and shaping his answer into something that resembles military intelligence.

Cabrillo wasted no time in recruiting sub-agents and communication assistants. The latter were codenamed BLUEBIRD and STORK, minor officials in the Spanish embassies in London and Lisbon; the former were SEAGULL, a Communist foreman in the Liverpool docks, and KNICKERS, a travelling soft-drinks salesman in south-east England. In due course at least seven more sub-agents were supposedly recruited:

GARLIC – a Venezuelan medical student in GlasgowNUTMEG – a retired army officer working for the Ministry of Food in CambridgeWALLPAPER – a lecturer at the University of Birmingham, probably homosexualHAYSTACK – manager of a London hotelPINETREE – British employee in the American embassyHAMBONE – telephone operator in PlymouthDONKEY – telephone engineer in Belfast

Naturally, all these members of the Eldorado Network had to be paid for the information or services they provided, as did Cabrillo himself. Before he left Madrid, the Abwehr had opened accounts for him in Switzerland and Lisbon; now they rewarded him generously. By the end of 1941 he had received almost £50,000.

During the summer and autumn of 1941, MIS began to receive intercepts of some of the Eldorado reports. At that time, these appeared to be authentic and it was assumed that Eldorado was in fact operating from Britain. All attempts to locate the agent were of course doomed to failure.

Mrs Conroy

In Lisbon there were several interesting developments. Mrs Conroy stumbled across Cabrillo’s path and tracked him down. It says something for the persuasiveness of his reports that when she first read them (after breaking into his office) she was so convinced that he was a German agent that she tried to shoot him, using an old revolver she had found in a file cabinet. Fortunately, she missed; Cabrillo was able to convince her that he was a freelance operator working entirely for his own benefit and that if anything he told the Abwehr was true, this was pure coincidence. Thereafter Mrs Conroy joined him; they lived and worked together. She provided a useful double-check on his reports and was instrumental in detecting and correcting several mistakes which might well have betrayed him.

Bradburn & Wedge

At the same time the Portuguese Ministry of Taxation took note of the fact that Cabrillo seemed to be running a business of some kind, and required him to supply details. To satisfy the Ministry, and to create a cover, Cabrillo and Conroy set up a genuine business called Bradburn & Wedge, a name they had found in the 1923 Michelin, and began trading in such items as lemonade crystals, de-greasing patents, and soap. (An accountant was engaged to handle their tax returns and the company flourished, albeit on a small scale.)

Cabrillo continued to expand his imaginary network. He had every encouragement from Madrid Abwehr whose payments and questionnaires served as guides to those areas of intelligence in which they were especially interested. However, Mrs Conroy became concerned about the mounting risk that the flood of intelligence emerging from Eldorado would sooner or later contain an element of truth (for instance, details of a convoy route) with disastrous results for the Allies (e.g. interception by U-boats). She therefore persuaded Cabrillo to apply again at the British embassy and volunteer his services for the Allied cause.

Rebuffed by MI6

Cabrillo did volunteer. Through sheer bad luck he was interviewed by William Witteridge. We know now that Witteridge was totally unsuited to work in an intelligence agency, given his almost complete lack of imagination and a profound distrust of his colleagues. Shortly after his meeting with Cabrillo he was transferred to the Khartoum office, but from his brief notes of the interview it seems that Witteridge demanded Cabrillo’s undivided loyalty: i.e. if he wished to join the British Secret Service he must first resign from his German employment. Witteridge was apparently incapable of getting his mind around the concept of a double-agent, and so for a second time Cabrillo’s offer was rejected by British Intelligence.

Abwehr agent ‘Eagle’

Meanwhile one of the Abwehr controllers in Madrid, Otto Krafft, had recruited another agent in Britain, an American businessman codenamed EAGLE. This led to a crisis in Cabrillo’s operations when Eldorado submitted a report on the British output of light alloys which directly contradicted a report on the same subject received from Eagle. Brigadier Christian ordered the two agents to meet on a specified date at a given rendezvous – Manchester railway station – in order to resolve their disagreement. This was obviously impossible and at first Cabrillo thought his network had been blown. Then he discovered that someone in Lisbon was trying to intercept the Abwehr’s order to him concerning the rendezvous. Cabrillo succeeded in following the man to business premises in Oporto and asked him to explain his behaviour. The man attacked him and in self-defence Cabrillo killed him. When Cabrillo searched his office he learned that the dead man was Eagle, and that Eagle was the brother of Otto Krafft. It seems certain that Otto Krafft had seen the potential for earning large sums of money by selling invented information to the Abwehr and that he had established his brother as a fictitious agent, supposedly in England but actually in Oporto. (Phoney agents of this kind have, of course, always been the bane of intelligence agencies. Eagle had one great advantage in that Otto Krafft could advise him what to write; it was pure bad luck that he cho