36
Britain, Spain and Venezuela, 1945–84
FOR THE MAJORITY of people after the war the name ‘Garbo’ referred to one person: the actress whose films thrilled audiences with scenes of rumba dancing and skiing while German bombs were falling on London. Only a very select number – members of the intelligence community – had any inkling of another, secret ‘Garbo’, a Spaniard who had played a crucial role in defeating the Nazis. And of these, a mere handful knew his real name.
There were rumours – stories of a double agent who had done incredible things. It was too good a tale to suppress completely. But who was this Garbo? As the years passed, no one could say for certain that he was even alive any more. Something about him succumbing to malaria in Angola. Or was it a snake bite? Others insisted he had died in the jungles of Mozambique.
Then in 1972 the general public was alerted to the existence of this other Garbo when John Masterman, former head of the Twenty Committee, published a book on the Allies’ deception work during the war. The Double-Cross System was a bombshell, outlining as it did for the first time how the wool had been pulled over the Germans’ eyes, how the entire German spy network in Britain had been either neutralised or turned and controlled by the British themselves, and how the Allies had then used this to great military advantage for D-Day and the Normandy campaign.
It was something of a sop to help bolster the image of the British intelligence services, whose reputation by this point lay in tatters after the scandals of the Profumo Affair and Kim Philby’s defection to Moscow. We are good at spy work, Masterman wanted to say. The Soviets may be getting the better of us now, but look at this great success we enjoyed during the war.
Many players were mentioned in Masterman’s book – the double agents, all referred to by their code names. There had been almost forty double agents at one time or another. It was a team effort, and ever the sport lover, Masterman revelled in drawing comparisons between his task in charge of the Twenty Committee and running a cricket eleven. But even the most integrated teams have their stars. For Masterman and the entire deception operation, it was clear who that star player had been: Garbo, the Spaniard, a man who, in Masterman’s words, ‘turned out to be something of a genius’.
Masterman’s book came out at around the same time that the journalist Sefton Delmer published The Counterfeit Spy, an account of the Garbo case. Delmer had worked as a propagandist against the Germans, a role which had allowed him to meet some of the intelligence officers who could tell him the story of the great deception that had helped win the war.
Delmer changed all the names in his book, even that of Garbo, which became ‘Cato’. Neither did he give away the double agent’s real name: Pujol was referred to throughout as ‘Jorge Antonio’, while Harris became ‘Carlos Reid’.
The story was now becoming popularly known, but the mystery remained. Who was Garbo? Was he still alive? If so, where was he?
Could anyone find him?
One man was determined to seek Garbo out. Inspired by Masterman and Delmer’s accounts of the story, the writer and historian Nigel West began a search in the early 1980s to discover his true identity. The tales of snake bites and malaria did not ring true, he thought. Somewhere, Garbo was out there, and he was determined to find him. All he knew was that he was Spanish.
The problem was that many of those who might have helped in his quest were now dead. West knew that Harris had been Garbo’s case officer during the war, yet Harris was killed in a car crash in Mallorca in 1964. Hilda, his wife, had been with him at the time, and although she was unharmed in the accident, she died not long after without revealing the secret of Garbo’s identity.
Whenever he had the chance, West asked former officers about the Spanish double agent. They had all heard of Garbo, but none knew his real name. It seemed as though the man might never be found after all.
But then, in 1981, West was given the opportunity to interview Anthony Blunt. Two years earlier Blunt had been publicly exposed as the fourth member of the Cambridge spy ring. A former member of MI5, he had been Guy Liddell’s assistant for much of the war, as well as a close friend of Harris.
There was much to talk about – his spying for the Soviets, his relationship with the other Cambridge spies, Burgess, Maclean and Philby – but during the interviews, the subject of Garbo came up. West was surprised when Blunt told him that he had met the Spaniard on one occasion.
It was 1944, and Harris and Garbo had met Blunt for lunch at their usual haunt close to the office on Jermyn Street, the restaurant Garibaldi’s. Almost forty years had passed since that day, and now in his mid-seventies Blunt had only a couple more years to live. And yet his memory was still good, and he told West that Garbo’s name had been something like Juan or José García.
It was a start, if not a promising one: in Spanish it was about as unusual as ‘John Smith’. Yet at least West had something to go on.
Then some time later West met Desmond Bristow, the Section V officer who had been one of the first to deal with Garbo on his arrival in London.
‘Tell me about Garbo,’ West said. And before Bristow could clam up, West added: ‘It’s all right, I know his name. It was Juan or José García.’
Bristow took the bait and corrected West.
‘Juan PUJOL García,’ he said.
West finally had Garbo’s name.
Bristow went on to tell him that Garbo had dropped his first surname during his period in London to protect his identity. The former MI6 officer had no idea whether Pujol was still alive, but he suggested trying in the Barcelona area: Pujol was a Catalan surname and that was the city where he had been born.
West hired an assistant to call up all the Pujol García households in the Barcelona phone book, asking them whether there was a member of the family called Juan, and if so whether he was about seventy years old and had spent time in England during the war.
The answers were all negative. Only one family stood out – the man who answered the phone had been defensive, wondering what the questions were about. After further calls, however, he opened up, finally admitting that his uncle Juan had spent a lot of time in London during the war. He had gone to live in South America, however, and his nephew had not heard from him for over twenty years. The last time they had had news from him he was living in Venezuela.
West was now convinced that he was on Garbo’s trail, and the focus of his search moved to the other side of the Atlantic. A researcher was hired in Caracas, and after ten days searching the country for a ‘Juan Pujol García’ he called West telling him to ring a certain number at a certain time.
When he rang, a man answered at the other end. West had prepared a number of questions: whether the person answered them correctly or not would tell him if he had found Garbo. It was a nervous moment.
The Juan Pujol García at the other end of the line answered West’s questions without hesitation, confirming that he had spent a good deal of time in London during the war, and adding that he had been in Hendon. He had also known Tommy Harris, and still kept a medal that was awarded to him by the British government in 1944.
This was the proof that West needed. Far from having died in Angola of malaria, Garbo, he now knew, was alive and well, and living in Venezuela. What was more, the former double agent agreed to meet West the following week in New Orleans.
West dropped everything and caught a plane. The venue was the Hilton Hotel. West was told to show up at a certain time. It was 20 May 1984 and the celebrations for the fortieth anniversary of the Normandy landings were only days away.
When he arrived, West realised with some horror that the lobby of the hotel was vast. Not only that, it was full of people. He had no photo to help him identify Pujol, and for an hour he walked around, looking in vain for the man he had spent so many years trying to track down. Giving up, he went back to his own hotel, having concluded that Pujol had decided not to show up. Pujol had, after all, escaped detection almost his entire life,
turning evasion into something of an art form. Perhaps he had had second thoughts and did not want to be discovered after all.
West’s then wife, however, had travelled to New Orleans with him, and now she – Araceli-like – saved the day. Go back, she told West. We haven’t come all this way for nothing. Go back and find Garbo.
So off to the Hilton went West for a second time. On this occasion, a short bald man accompanied by his wife crossed the lobby and introduced himself.
The prey had found the searcher.
37
Venezuela and Spain, 1945–84
THE FORTY YEARS since leaving Britain had been eventful for Pujol. After an intense career as a double agent he might have been seeking a quieter life, but such was not to be his fate. His life in Venezuela had brought much pain and many failures. Like Oskar Schindler, his luck appeared to be concentrated in one specific moment in his life – the war – with the result that, in hindsight, few of his ventures either before or after enjoyed great success.
Things appeared to start well in Venezuela. Flush with his pay-off from MI5, Pujol took a grand house on Avenida de Bolivia in Caracas. There he housed not only Araceli and his two sons, but also his brother-in-law and his family, as well as his own mother Mercedes for a while. Pujol, it seemed, had great plans.
A visitor to the Caracas home in these early days was Tomás Harris. Harris, it will be recalled, as well as being an artist, had directed the Spanish Art Gallery in London, where works by the great Spanish masters were exhibited and sold. Now that the war was over, he gave that up to return to his career as an artist as well as starting a collection of prints, but he was still looking out for his friend Pujol.
News about a big art exhibition in Venezuela, including paintings by El Greco, Velázquez and Goya, appeared in the local papers in December 1945. The artworks, the reports said, were being shipped from London, had a value of around £200,000 and were the property of a Spaniard resident in Venezuela by the name of Juan Pujol García. The idea was to try to sell the paintings to the Venezuelan government, thereby creating at a stroke the greatest art collection in the whole of Latin America.
The news did not go unnoticed by the Spanish Embassy in Caracas, and soon a secret investigation was launched. Who was this Juan Pujol, and where had these paintings come from? Were they artworks that had been looted during the Spanish Civil War?
For the following months, the Foreign Ministry in Madrid looked into every document in the possession of the Spanish State referring to Pujol, trying to find out about him. They discovered a lot – about his time as an officer in Franco’s army during the Civil War, his time at the Majestic Hotel, his move to Lisbon in 1941. Even that he had lived in London for much of the war. But they never found anything to make them suspect that he had been an MI5 double agent.
Nonetheless, questions about the art collection remained. Araceli, Pujol’s wife, was also investigated. She was reported by the Francoist authorities as being back in Spain in 1946, travelling with her brother in an expensive car and attending the most select ‘society’ parties. Was this part of the art dealing that her husband now appeared to be engaged in? No one could say for certain.
In the end, however, the deal never went ahead. Still keeping their eye on him, by 1947 the Spanish authorities reached the conclusion that Pujol himself was not the owner of the paintings, rather that they belonged to persons unknown in Britain. Pujol was merely acting as an intermediary, and the Spanish State had no legitimate claim over the collection. The Venezuelan government did not buy the paintings in the end; the investigation was dropped.
It was the first of the series of failures that now characterised Pujol’s life. But what was really going on?
Given the close relationship that he had built up with Harris in London, Harris’s visits to Venezuela at the time (at least twice, according to someone who was there), and the art angle to the story, it seems more than likely that Harris had a part to play in Pujol’s brief reinvention as a member of the art world.
‘No other source in London could have provided a “collection” of major Spanish works’ at the time, says art historian Juliet Wilson-Bareau.
Was it a cover story concocted by Harris to give Pujol a new persona for his life in Venezuela? It is a possible explanation, and Harris’s trips to Caracas may simply have been part of the narrative that was being built up around Pujol at the time. Wilson-Bareau also suggests a link with Harris closing down his Spanish Art Gallery at the end of the war.
‘It was at that time that he began what must have been a major operation to close the London gallery and dispose of the stock.’
So a cover story with a large element of truth in it, perhaps, with Pujol acting as a middleman in Venezuela for a potential art deal involving Harris’s merchandise.
Nonetheless, allegations have been made that something more sinister was afoot. In the 1980s, back in Spain and long divorced from Pujol, Araceli became friendly with Desmond Bristow and his wife. She told them that Pujol and Harris had been involved in faking paintings of the old masters. They had even, she claimed, managed to sell some of them in Caracas before a local art expert spotted them and blew the whistle. Bristow believed the story and concluded that Harris’s friend Anthony Blunt would have acted as authenticator of the ‘forgeries’.
Questions raised in the Canadian parliament in 1980 showed that Harris and Blunt had indeed been involved in the art business together after the war: the National Gallery of Canada had bought Poussin’s Augustus and Cleopatra from Harris in the 1950s, with Blunt certifying its originality (as he did for many other museums around the world). Doubts have been raised in recent years about this attribution, however, and art historians now believe it was done by an unknown Italian artist. An article in the London Daily Telegraph in 2001 also pointed out that two other paintings bought by the Canadians from Harris around the same time on Blunt’s recommendation – St John the Baptist by Jusepe Leonardo and The Three Angels by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo – were later found to have been looted during the Spanish Civil War.
Araceli’s accusations against her ex-husband and his former case officer – a man she did not get on with – have never been proven. They were made to Bristow in 1986, two years after the Garbo story became publicly known. Pujol, by this point, was a hero, but her ex-husband had airbrushed her – and the considerable role that she played in his success – out of his autobiography. Was she bitter? Her recollection of what had been going on between Harris and Pujol in Venezuela forty years before would have been uncertain at the least. Perhaps she wanted to pay Pujol and Harris back for the misery of her London life, even after so much time had passed. In Bristow she found a willing audience. Having been made head of station for Spain and Portugal after the war, Bristow had left MI6 in 1954 after becoming suspicious of many of his former colleagues in the secret service following the defection of Burgess and Maclean. Conspiracy theories about his former friend Harris were grist to his mill, and through him Araceli found a mouthpiece for her attempts to tarnish the Garbo name.
Neither does the Canadian angle to the story do any more than confirm that Harris and Blunt were working together in the art business. Blunt’s attribution has been questioned in recent years but there is nothing to suggest that he did not believe it to be a work by Poussin at the time. Similarly, that two of the artworks sold to the Canadians were later proven to have been looted does not incriminate Harris. The positive identification of looted art began late and is still ongoing.
Whatever Pujol’s role in the matter – as a bona-fide front man for a real art deal by Harris, or simply pretending to be a collector as part of a new cover story – his first venture in Venezuela fizzled out.
His next step was to take the money remaining to him and buy a large farm near the city of Valencia, three hours from Caracas. It was 1947 and Pujol brought in new, modern machinery, some of which had never been seen in the country before; elaborate irrigation systems were set up and the farm
workers were given much better wages and work conditions than on any of the other farms in the area.
But again Pujol’s luck had deserted him. In 1948 there was a revolution in Venezuela, and in the ensuing chaos Pujol’s farm was attacked and destroyed. Financially ruined, he returned to Caracas, but this turned out to be the final straw for the marriage. Whether Araceli left him or he told her to leave is not clear, but she now travelled back to Spain for good, taking their three children (a daughter had been born to them in Venezuela) with her.
It was 1948; Pujol was alone and broke. But news came from an unexpected source: MI5 wanted him to work for them again. Bristow, still in MI6, came up with a plan for Pujol to infiltrate a group of Czech expatriates in Venezuela in the hope of eventually getting inside Soviet spying operations then active inside France. Pujol was keen on the idea, as was Harris, and a meeting was arranged between the three of them in Spain.
Before the Madrid reunion, however, Pujol visited Harris alone at his home in Mallorca. In the meantime, it seems, Harris had mentioned Bristow’s plan to Philby back in London. Philby was now the head of MI6’s anti-Soviet espionage group – irony of ironies – and he, not unnaturally, poured cold water on the scheme. As a result, Harris had become doubtful about the plan, and subsequently so did Pujol. At the Madrid meeting with Bristow they told him that they thought it would not work.
Bristow’s scheme was shelved. Pujol went back to Caracas, but soon he had cause to get in touch with the British again. A letter from his brother-in-law in Spain mentioned that a German called Knappe had been looking for him. At their final meeting in the woods near the Spanish–French border at the end of the war, Pujol had told Knappe that he would try to help him escape Spain. Now, it appeared, Knappe was calling in that favour. Pujol immediately got in touch with MI5, who told him to carry on and make contact with Knappe. But soon afterwards the trail went cold, and the former German spy disappeared. Pujol never heard from him again.
The Spy with 29 Names Page 26