Artillery of Lies Read Free Page A

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 traveling 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 togive 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, traveling 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, traveling alone, on July 23, 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 firstarrived 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