couldn’t be sure; he hadn’t so much as identified Arabel yet.
MI5 chimed in with a theory:perhaps Arabel was working at the Spanish embassy in London, a well-known rat’s nest of pro-Nazi Francoists; it was even believedthat one Spanish diplomat sat every day in the bay window of Boodle’s, the gentlemen’s club in St. James’s Street, across from the entrance to MI5 headquarters, and noted down the comings and goings of all the visitors for the Abwehr. Other analysts suspected that Arabel had to be working out of the anti-British stronghold of Ireland.
Philby and MI6 sent out the equivalent of an all-points bulletin on Arabel. During the war, thousands of foreigners entering the country were questioned at the Royal Victorian Patriotic School in Wandsworth, and now MI5 began questioning the refugees about Arabel. But even though the interrogators were exceedingly thorough, no likely suspects emerged.
The supposed date of the Gibraltar ambush came and went. New ISOS intercepts revealed, of course, that no convoy had been spotted. The German submarines and Italian fighter planes were sent home. Astonishingly, however, the Germans blamed the fiasco not on Arabel but the notoriously erratic Italians. The agent’s stock was still sky high.
Arabel disappeared from Section V’s screens as the winter of 1941 passed. Then on February 5, at 10:30 in the morning, the ISOS courier again appeared at Glenalmond, the tires of his motorcycle slipping on the ice as he pulled to a stop. Kim Philby was in London for the day, meeting with MI5. It was left to Bristow to sort through the telegrams, and he quickly spotted one postmarked Lisbon. He tore it open, saw that it was from MI6, and read that a Spanish national named Juan Pujol had approached a Lieutenant Demarest,the American naval attaché in Madrid, with a curious offer: he wanted to spy for the Allies in London. Pujol also mentioned that he’d been sending the Germans messages from Lisbon.
A thrill ran through Bristow. He was convinced they’d finally found Arabel and that the spy was trying to switch sides. He ran upstairs to the office of Colonel Felix Cowgill, head of MI6’s Section V. Cowgill thought the telegram intriguing, but he didn’t want to alert the Nazis that their codes had been broken and that Section V was reading their communications, nor did he want to hand Pujol over to his rivals in MI5. He told Bristow to wait until Philby returned. When the lanky spy walked through the door of Glenalmond, knocking the snow off his shoes, Bristow buttonholed him and showed him the telegram. “I think it might be Arabel,” Bristow said excitedly.
“By God, Desmond,” Philby exclaimed, “I think you’re right.” He agreed to send an agent to meet with this Spaniard and entice his story out of him. After months of trying, Pujol had gotten the Brits’ full attention.
The German reaction to Pujol’s fake convoy had impressed everyone. “If it was within Pujol’s powerto cause such mischief unwittingly,” wrote the espionage historian Nigel West, “what might be the results if his efforts were directed in concert with other weapons of deception?” Back in St. Albans, Philby contacted MI6’s head of station in Lisbon, asking him to set up a “discreet interview”with this Juan Pujol. MI6 chose its most effective Lisbon officer, Gene Risso-Gill, a well-bred Portuguesewith a thick, short-cut beard, to conduct the first interview.
On an unseasonably hot February evening,Risso-Gill waited for Pujol at a horseshoe-shaped café overlooking the white sands of Estoril beach. “Never before or since have I been so nervous,” he remembered. “I thought every German agent was watching me, [that] everybody around the area and in the café was a German agent.” As the seagulls swooped and cried overhead and the sardine fishermen dressed in their brightly patterned homemade sweaters pulled in the day’s catch on the broad beach in front of him, Risso-Gill
MI5 chimed in with a theory:perhaps Arabel was working at the Spanish embassy in London, a well-known rat’s nest of pro-Nazi Francoists; it was even believedthat one Spanish diplomat sat every day in the bay window of Boodle’s, the gentlemen’s club in St. James’s Street, across from the entrance to MI5 headquarters, and noted down the comings and goings of all the visitors for the Abwehr. Other analysts suspected that Arabel had to be working out of the anti-British stronghold of Ireland.
Philby and MI6 sent out the equivalent of an all-points bulletin on Arabel. During the war, thousands of foreigners entering the country were questioned at the Royal Victorian Patriotic School in Wandsworth, and now MI5 began questioning the refugees about Arabel. But even though the interrogators were exceedingly thorough, no likely suspects emerged.
The supposed date of the Gibraltar ambush came and went. New ISOS intercepts revealed, of course, that no convoy had been spotted. The German submarines and Italian fighter planes were sent home. Astonishingly, however, the Germans blamed the fiasco not on Arabel but the notoriously erratic Italians. The agent’s stock was still sky high.
Arabel disappeared from Section V’s screens as the winter of 1941 passed. Then on February 5, at 10:30 in the morning, the ISOS courier again appeared at Glenalmond, the tires of his motorcycle slipping on the ice as he pulled to a stop. Kim Philby was in London for the day, meeting with MI5. It was left to Bristow to sort through the telegrams, and he quickly spotted one postmarked Lisbon. He tore it open, saw that it was from MI6, and read that a Spanish national named Juan Pujol had approached a Lieutenant Demarest,the American naval attaché in Madrid, with a curious offer: he wanted to spy for the Allies in London. Pujol also mentioned that he’d been sending the Germans messages from Lisbon.
A thrill ran through Bristow. He was convinced they’d finally found Arabel and that the spy was trying to switch sides. He ran upstairs to the office of Colonel Felix Cowgill, head of MI6’s Section V. Cowgill thought the telegram intriguing, but he didn’t want to alert the Nazis that their codes had been broken and that Section V was reading their communications, nor did he want to hand Pujol over to his rivals in MI5. He told Bristow to wait until Philby returned. When the lanky spy walked through the door of Glenalmond, knocking the snow off his shoes, Bristow buttonholed him and showed him the telegram. “I think it might be Arabel,” Bristow said excitedly.
“By God, Desmond,” Philby exclaimed, “I think you’re right.” He agreed to send an agent to meet with this Spaniard and entice his story out of him. After months of trying, Pujol had gotten the Brits’ full attention.
The German reaction to Pujol’s fake convoy had impressed everyone. “If it was within Pujol’s powerto cause such mischief unwittingly,” wrote the espionage historian Nigel West, “what might be the results if his efforts were directed in concert with other weapons of deception?” Back in St. Albans, Philby contacted MI6’s head of station in Lisbon, asking him to set up a “discreet interview”with this Juan Pujol. MI6 chose its most effective Lisbon officer, Gene Risso-Gill, a well-bred Portuguesewith a thick, short-cut beard, to conduct the first interview.
On an unseasonably hot February evening,Risso-Gill waited for Pujol at a horseshoe-shaped café overlooking the white sands of Estoril beach. “Never before or since have I been so nervous,” he remembered. “I thought every German agent was watching me, [that] everybody around the area and in the café was a German agent.” As the seagulls swooped and cried overhead and the sardine fishermen dressed in their brightly patterned homemade sweaters pulled in the day’s catch on the broad beach in front of him, Risso-Gill
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