The Spy with 29 Names

by Jason Webster

  The two events – first with Bristow and then with Knappe – made him decide, however, that he needed to cut his links with the British. His wife and family had gone; he had lost all his money: this was a perfect opportunity to start life anew.

  ‘Garbo’ had to die.

  It was the last contact there would ever be between Pujol and Harris, the two men who had created the characters and network of imaginary Nazi spies. As a final favour to his double agent and close friend, Harris now spread the rumour that Garbo had passed away in southern Africa. Perhaps through a case of Chinese whispers, different versions of what had actually happened began to emerge. Even the British Ambassador to Spain helped confuse things by telling Araceli that her husband had died in a Mozambique jungle. Struggling financially in Madrid, Araceli did not believe a word of it.

  But for Pujol it must have been a relief. He was still only thirty-six and he could begin again.

  By now he had started a relationship with a Venezuelan woman, Carmen Cilia Alvarez. They opened a newsagent in Maracaibo, but the wealth they had expected to earn from the expanding oil industry in the area failed to materialise, and so Pujol found work as a language teacher for Shell – giving Spanish lessons to the new arrivals, and English to the locals. Putting some money aside from his new job, he and Carmen got rid of the newsagent and opened a gift shop in the luxury Lagunillas Hotel instead.

  Their first children were born in the early 1950s – a daughter and a son. And for a while Pujol was happy with his life, forging new friendships, stamp collecting, reading.

  In the late 1950s Araceli got in touch: she wanted a divorce. She had met an American – an art dealer – called Edward Kreisler, and they wanted to get married. Pujol signed the necessary papers and Araceli got her final wish – living the high life that she had dreamed of for so long. Kreisler moved in top circles, and their friends included the US Ambassador as well as celebrities such as Charlton Heston and Sofia Loren. Francoist Spain did not allow divorce, so Araceli and Kreisler were married in Gibraltar in 1958.

  In the early 1960s Pujol ventured back to Spain for the first time since his meeting with Bristow and Harris in 1948, taking his new family with him for a holiday. He wanted to fulfil a promise he had made back in 1938, when he had jumped out of his trench on the front lines in the Spanish Civil War, and crossed over to the Francoists. The Republican search party had almost found him hiding at the bottom of a valley, but a cloud had covered the light of the moon just at the right moment and he had managed to escape. He had attributed his luck at the time to the aid of the Virgen del Pilar – the patron of the city of Zaragoza. Now, at last, he wanted to visit the city’s cathedral and thank her.

  The trip to Spain gave Pujol a new idea, though. He saw the beginnings of the mass tourism boom in the country and thought he should try something similar in Venezuela.

  Soon after they returned, he packed in his teaching job with Shell and invested their savings in a hotel in Choroní, his wife’s beautiful home town on the coast. The Hotel Marisel was created with grand ideas: Pujol offered tourists package deals, driving people in from Caracas, giving them full board, entertaining them with films shown from a projector at weekends, and generally providing them with everything they could want.

  The location was perfect, and today it is a prime resort. But Pujol was ahead of his time. The roads to Caracas were mud tracks and were often flooded in the rainy season: a one-way journey could take anything up to three hours. Like his previous plans, the hotel was destined to fail, and within a few years he had to sell up and return to the only thing he had left – the gift shop. His wife and their three children went to live with relatives while, for the next two years, Pujol worked, ate and slept surrounded by nick-nacks. The family were not reunited until 1968, when they could finally afford to rent a small flat.

  Outside Venezuela, however, people were beginning to talk about Garbo, speculating about whether this mysterious double agent was still alive, and if so what his true identity was. Some of the stories were repeated by local journalists, and Pujol started to feel insecure. When the British got in touch with him again in 1973, he could not be sure if it was a set-up, and took his son, Carlos, along with him for the meeting in Caracas, telling him to wait outside and call the police if he had not come out within half an hour. Carlos was nervous – all his father told him was that it had something to do with his wartime activities, and he borrowed a gun from a friend to take with him in case he needed it.

  In the end the British approach turned out to be legitimate. The embassy officials merely wanted to tell Pujol that certain papers relating to his work for MI5 were now going to be declassified. There was nothing to worry about, however, because the story that he had died had been circulating for some time. It may not be accidental that the meeting coincided with the publication of both Masterman’s and Delmer’s books.

  With the threat of discovery hanging over him, Pujol now passed through some of his unhappiest years. In 1975 his daughter with Carmen Cilia, María Elena, died in childbirth at the age of only twenty-two. The news shocked Pujol so much that he lost his Catholic faith and became agnostic.

  A couple of years later he himself came close to death due to heart problems. His family raised some money, and he was flown to Houston where a quadruple heart bypass was performed.

  In time he recovered and was well enough in 1979 for the family to take another holiday to Europe, this time visiting Germany and Italy as well as Spain. It was the one and only time that Pujol visited the country he had done so much to defeat in the war. Hiring a car in Luxembourg, they crossed the border and drove towards Bonn. After only a few kilometres, however, he was pulled over by a police patrol, who immediately asked him for his identity papers. Pujol nervously obliged, and then through sign language the German policeman indicated that he was giving him a ticket for speeding. Pujol simply smiled to himself and handed over the money.

  By the early 1980s, Pujol had sold the gift shop and he and Carmen Cilia were living in Caracas with their son. Then, in May 1984, there was a phone call from London: a man named Nigel West wanted to ask some questions about the war . . .

  38

  Spain, Germany, France, Canada and Britain, 1945–Present

  TOMÁS HARRIS’S DEATH in a car crash in Mallorca on 27 January 1964 came just a year after his close friend Kim Philby disappeared from Beirut and defected to the Soviet Union. Months later, another friend, Anthony Blunt, admitted to the British authorities that he too was a Soviet spy.

  Given his connection with the Cambridge Five and the timing of his death, some have speculated whether Harris might not also have been working in some way for the Soviet Union. In the paranoid years of the Cold War, with the growing recognition that respected and leading members of the British intelligence community were secretly working for Moscow, accusations were made against many people. Some of the claims were substantiated, others were not. In Harris’s case, nothing has ever been proven.

  Harris’s detractors included the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who had worked in MI6 during the war. Muggeridge appears to have been the one who began a rumour that Harris acted as a paymaster for the Cambridge Five, although he did not know Harris very well and no evidence was forthcoming to back the claim.

  For some historians, however, Harris’s art dealings with Blunt after the war help to cast doubt on his true loyalties. Nigel West has speculated about the ‘paymaster’ theory. One possibility, he says, is that the Soviets passed on paintings looted during the Spanish Civil War from Republican-held territory to Harris. He would then have sold them and the money would have been used to pay the Cambridge spies.

  Juliet Wilson-Bareau, who worked closely with Harris for the last ten years of his life, rejects the idea that he might willingly have been involved in any art scam, although, she says, ‘he was persistent and adept at following trails, and took risks as a collector.’

  After the war, Harris was awarded an OBE and wrote up a repor
t on the Garbo case for MI5, which he finished in November 1945. He left the Security Service, sold the art gallery (his father Lionel had died in 1943) and moved to Spain with his wife Hilda, staying initially in Malaga before, in 1947, moving to a large house in Camp de Mar, Mallorca, where he concentrated on his art – including sculpture, ceramics and designs for stained glass and tapestries, as well as paintings, prints and drawings. He kept his print collections in London and travelled back regularly to the studio building that he retained at his Earl’s Court addressfn1 (with the large house let to Sotheby’s director Peter Wilson). But Spain was now his home.

  Nigel West points to a further ‘coincidence’ between Harris in this latter period of his life and the story of the Cambridge Five, however. In 1951 Burgess and Maclean defected to Moscow and the story of the Soviet moles began to emerge. On fleeing to the USSR, Maclean had been forced to leave his American wife, Melinda, who was then pregnant with their third child. Sometime later Melinda moved to Geneva to get away from the public eye. Then in 1953, supposedly under surveillance by the British, she too vanished and showed up some time later in the Soviet Union. Her escape route had been complicated, involving a number of trains and pick-ups by people helping her and her children get to the East. How had the details of what to do been passed on to her?

  According to West, a possible clue was spotted in the fact that only days before leaving Geneva she had been on holiday in Mallorca. The place where she stayed was at the other side of the island from Harris’s home, but he speculates about whether instructions for her escape been given to her while she was there. And if so, whether Harris had anything to do with it.

  To this day no one can say, but at the time the coincidence further fuelled suspicions against Harris – suspicions that were compounded by Philby’s defection in 1963. Was Harris’s death in a car crash a year later also just a coincidence? Or had he been assassinated by the Russians to silence him, as some later suggested?

  Desmond Bristow was one of the first to hear about Harris’s death. The phone rang at his home and Hilda, Harris’s wife, told him about the car crash. Bristow immediately flew out to be with her.

  Hilda told Bristow that she and Harris had both gone to Palma on the day of the accident so that Harris could visit an antique dealer. Hilda had gone shopping, and after the meeting Harris had met up with her at the port for lunch. They had a few drinks, and an argument began.

  ‘Don’t ask me what about,’ she told Bristow. ‘I haven’t a clue: most probably I was angry with him for being late.’

  After lunch they set off to visit a pottery, where Harris wanted some of his recent ceramics to be fired. But angry and slightly drunk, he drove his new Citroën DS too fast. Heading down the Lluchmayor road, they went over a humpbacked bridge, Harris lost control of the car, and they hit an almond tree. Hilda was thrown clear by the impact, but Harris died instantly.

  ‘When I came to, he was still in the car, not moving or breathing or anything.’

  Bristow checked the police report on the accident and everything tallied with Hilda’s account. Inevitably, though, questions have been asked about it, particularly given its timing. Had someone tampered with Harris’s car? Why else should he crash on a straight road that he had driven down so many times before?

  Given the circumstances it seems reasonable to accept the official version of what happened. The combination of alcohol and a row with his wife might have been enough for him to lose control of the car in the first place. Add to this the fact that they had just gone over a humpbacked bridge at speed, thereby losing traction on the road, and one might almost be surprised had they not crashed.

  Wilson-Bareau recalls comments that owing to the bouncy suspension of the Citroën, Harris had hit his head on the roof – perhaps going over the bridge – and had been knocked out, thus causing the crash. He was under enormous strain at the time, she remembers. He had curated a major exhibition of Goya’s prints and drawings at the British Museum, which opened just a few weeks before on 12 December 1963. He was also involved in a parallel Winter Exhibition at the Royal Academy devoted to Goya, as well as rushing to finish the publication of his catalogue raisonné of Goya’s prints, which was planned to coincide with the two events. He had returned to Mallorca, intending to go back to London for the end of the exhibitions in February and continue work on the final catalogue proofs (dummy volumes had been provided for display at the British Museum). It finally appeared, posthumously, that autumn – a major work in two volumes. It is still considered the ‘bible’ for the study of Goya prints.fn2

  At the time of his death Harris was only fifty-five. His wife Hilda returned to England shortly afterwards, where she died in December 1972.

  Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, not all the KGB files have been opened. Some have, however, and those that mention Harris refer to him simply as an MI5 officer. There is nothing in the documents that have been seen in the West so far to suggest that he was ever working for the Soviets.

  In her last interview before she died, Harris’s sister Enriqueta, who had collaborated in a minor capacity on the Garbo case and had worked for MI5, insisted that her brother had never betrayed his country.

  Wilson-Bareau was introduced to Harris in 1954 when Blunt, her director of studies at the Courtauld, responded to Harris’s request for help editing his Goya catalogue. She worked as Harris’s assistant and carried the catalogue through to its publication after Harris’s death. Today she remains uncertain, although unconvinced, about a possible Soviet connection.

  ‘It’s still an open question,’ she says. ‘I remember that Harris was aghast when Philby defected, and I thought it was impossible that Harris could have been involved as well. But following the shock and disbelief when Blunt was later exposed I felt that you could never be sure.’

  Blunt never forgot his friend. He wrote an entry on him for the Dictionary of National Biography, and in 1975 an introduction for an exhibition of Harris’s work, drawn from his three sisters’ collections, at the Courtauld Insitute.

  Just six months after his withdrawal from the Battle of Normandy, suffering from a nervous breakdown, Jochen Peiper was once more on the front lines with the 1st SS Panzer Division LAH fighting the Allies. The Battle of the Bulge was an audacious fightback by the Germans to defeat the Allies on the Western Front by pushing through the US lines in the Ardennes area and splitting their armies in two. Peiper’s role in the battle would seal his reputation as one of the most effective and ferocious commanders in the Waffen-SS.

  Driving a spearhead of new ‘King Tiger’ tanks – more powerful and dangerous than their already feared predecessors, the Panthers and Tigers used in Normandy – Peiper pushed deep into Allied territory using techniques similar to the Blitzkrieg tactics that had won the Germans so many victories at the start of the war. It was mid-December 1944, there was heavy snow on the ground, and his move caught the Allies by surprise.

  Bold though the attack was, however, it failed, not least because the King Tigers needed a large amount of fuel and the Third Reich was already running out of supplies to keep them moving. By Christmas Eve, Peiper had to give up, and was forced to trudge on foot through the snow with 800 of his men back to the German lines.

  When he was finally captured, Peiper was put on trial by the Allies for what became his single most infamous act of the war – the massacre of over eighty American soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge at Malmedy. The ‘Malmedy massacre trial’, as it became known, was held in 1946 at Dachau, where Peiper had first trained to become an SS officer. He was found guilty along with several others, and sentenced to death by hanging.

  The death sentence, however, was controversial. Already by 1946 there was a growing sense that the wounds of the war should be healed, a call for no more executions or retribution. In addition, doubts were raised about some of the prosecutor’s methods during his interrogation of Peiper and the other defendants, with suggestions of torture and mock trials to get them to confe
ss to their crimes.

  The case was brought to the US senate, and a committee was set up to investigate – interestingly, one of the members was Senator Joseph McCarthy, then a relatively unknown politician. Eventually it concluded that improper procedures had been used by the prosecution – although not torture – and that this had affected the trial process. There was no doubt about Peiper’s guilt, but the result was that after several postponements of his hanging, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

  Eventually, towards the end of 1956, he was released on parole after serving eleven and a half years.

  Through an organisation that helped former SS members, Peiper got a job with Porsche and quickly moved up the company hierarchy. He was forced to leave, however, when union members objected to his being given a senior management role. He later went on to become a car sales trainer.

  During the 1960s he was called to trial in a number of cases involving his activities in the war, including one in which Simon Wiesenthal backed claims that he had deported Jews from Italy, but he was never convicted.

  In 1972, now in semi-retirement, he bought a home in the town of Traves, in the Haute-Saône department of France, just east of Dijon. He still used his given name, and within a couple of years was identified by a former French resistance member in the area. Reports on Peiper were circulated among French Communists, and in 1976 the Communist newspaper l’Humanité published an article on Peiper’s whereabouts.

  Death threats soon followed, and Peiper sent his family back to Germany while he stayed in the house.

  There, on the night of 13–14 July there was a shoot-out and the property was set on fire. Peiper’s burned body was later found inside, with a bullet wound in his chest. No one was ever brought to trial for his murder.

  Karl-Erich Kühlenthal continued to live in hiding in Spain until 1950, when he returned to his native Koblenz. His wife Ellen was the heiress of a clothes and fashion business in the city, called Dienz, and husband and wife took over the running of the company.