Harris was a gifted artist, born in 1908, who had transferred to MI5 from Special Operations Executive (SOE), the sabotage organisation created in July 1940 following the fall of France. Harris had joined SOE on the recommendation of Guy Burgess, one of SOE’s earliest recruits, and had been posted to SOE’s first special training school, which had been established at Brickendonbury Hall, a large country house set in woodland near Hertford. Harris and his wife Hilda remained at Brickendonbury for six months, and then, in the words of Kim Philby, he ‘was soon snapped up by MI5, where he was to conceive and guide one of the most creative intelligence operations of all time.’
Harris possessed great imagination combined with a very practical talent. He had won the Trevelyan Goodall Scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art at London University. His achievement was all the more remarkable because he had gained the award when he was just fifteen years old, which, in theory at least, disqualified him from receiving it. Having been educated in Spain, where his mother had been born, Tomás knew the country well and spoke Spanish virtually as a first language. After attending the Slade, he had spent a year at the British Academy in Rome studying painting and sculpture. His father, Lionel, was an English Jew and a renowned Mayfair art dealer. His Spanish Art Gallery concentrated on the sale of the work of Velázquez, Goya and El Greco, and in 1930 Tomás joined his father’s business and scored several saleroom coups. Tomás was highly regarded by critics, and his expertise extended quite beyond painting and etching. He was also a sculptor of some merit and occasionally worked in ceramics, stained glass, tapestry and engraving.
As well as Tomás, Lionel Harris had three daughters, Conchita, Enriqueta and Violetta, who followed Tomás into MI5 as a Spanish-speaking officer serving in B1(a). The Harris home, 6 Chesterfield Gardens, which Tomás subsequently inherited from his father, was a magnificent house, rich with oriental carpets and medieval tapestries. It also doubled as Lionel’s place of business, and eventually became a favourite meeting place for MI5’s and SIS’s few Bohemian employees. Both Tommy and his wife Hilda were lavish entertainers and acquired a well-deserved reputation for producing fine wine and gourmet meals for their friends, in spite of wartime rationing.
Later in the war they moved away from Mayfair into an even bigger property, Garden House, Logan Place, but their home still retained the easygoing atmosphere of an informal intelligence officer’s club, with youthful MI5 and SIS men drifting in and out. The Harris galère of wealthy, university-educated young men included Guy Burgess, David Liddell, Victor Rothschild and Anthony Blunt from MI5, and Dick Brooman-White, Kim Philby, Tim Milne and Peter Wilson from SIS. Most of these individuals (with the exception of Philby and his successor as head of Section V’s Iberian unit, Tim Milne) distinguished themselves in various other fields after the war. Burgess went from the BBC into the Foreign Office, and later defected to Russia; David Liddell became a successful artist; Victor Rothschild became a scientist; Anthony Blunt returned to the Courtauld Institute; Brooman-White was elected Conservative Member of Parliament for Rutherglen; Peter Wilson became chairman of Sotheby’s.
Late in 1941 Brooman-White transferred to SIS to run Section V’s Iberian unit, known as V(d), and Tomás Harris was appointed to succeed him as head of B1(g). By this date B1(g) had undergone some expansion because of its increasing responsibilities. Initially, the subsection had operated a couple of agents inside the Spanish embassy in London, had interrogated espionage suspects wishing to enter Britain and had investigated suspected breaches of censorship to Spain and South America. B1(g)’s workload was escalating daily, an Paul Matthews was not in good health. In addition, there was too much for just three secretaries to cope with. Accordingly, Harris began looking for an extra member for his section. One morning he met Sarah Bishop, whom he knew spoke fluent Spanish, on the stairs of St James’s Street, so he asked her to join them.
Sarah Bishop had started her secretarial duties in the Cabinet office, but had asked to move elsewhere when her immediate superior had switched from political work to the preparation of economic statistics. Thanks to the intervention of friendly MI5 officer (and future high court judge) Toby Caulfield, Sarah Bishop was offered a post in MI5’s French section, which was then headed by a youthful Peter Ramsbotham (who was subsequently knighted and became Britain’s ambassador in Washington). After a brief spell learning about the role of the Security Service, Sarah now moved on to join Tomás Harris in B1(g). Here she was told that the ISOS analysts had spotted a new Abwehr personality, whom the Germans thought was reporting from England under his code name ARABEL but whom Herbert Hart’s analysts believed was a Spaniard still in Portugal.
As the pieces of the ARABEL jigsaw were put together, it seemed likely that the man who had come to the British embassy in Madrid and later in Lisbon to offer his services to the Allied cause, Juan Pujol García, and ARABEL were one and the same person. It was also evident to MI5 that ARABEL’s information was fictitious, although ISOS monitored a distinct increase in the Abwehr’s estimation of him. Incredibly, the Germans seemed to swallow every one of his lies, and even approved the bizarre expenses demanded on behalf of his obviously notional agents. ARABEL had been unable to master the predecimal English currency of £ s.d. and therefore submitted some very unusual accounts, which were always listed in shillings. ARABEL also seemed to believe that the Portuguese legation, with the rest of London’s diplomatic missions, moved to the coast at Brighton in order to escape the intolerably hot summers in the capital. On one occasion he reported that dockers in Liverpool became usefully in discreet about shipping movements when brought a litre of wine. In spite of these glaring errors, ARABEL’s fraudulent messages sometimes prompted considerable military undertakings by the Germans, and it was also true that ARABEL sometimes hit on the truth or came uncomfortably close to it.
A lengthy debate followed Juan Pujol’s approach to the British embassy in Lisbon: should ARABEL be accepted and taken into MI5’s fold of double agents or not? Was he genuine or a plant by the Germans? Would it be best to leave him alone?
The head of Section V, Felix Cowgill, pointed out that very little was known about Pujol apart from information that he had volunteered himself in Madrid and Lisbon, and his ISOS dossier, which contained copies of his three decrypted messages and several appreciations of him as a reliable source that had been intercepted between Madrid and Berlin. Having once been deputy commissioner of the Calcutta Special Branch (before his recruitment into the Secret Intelligence Service in February 1939), Cowgill was acutely anxious to preserve security and, in particular, to protect the integrity of ISOS. In the realm of intelligence gathering there will inevitably arise a conflict between the desire to avoid compromising existing sources and the need to develop new ones. Such conflicts had hampered Section V’s operations because Cowgill had been reluctant to exploit new channels of information if there was any risk to the mother lode, the flow of signals intelligence from GCHQ. The debate over Pujol simply reopened many of the old disputes. Did he represent a genuine offer, which should be taken up before he changed his mind, or was he something more sinister? The Abwehr’s internal communications, which had also been intercepted, revealed ARABEL to be highly regarded by the Abstelle in Madrid and Abwehr headquarters in Berlin. Such opinions might, in some circumstances, have counted against him, but there would have been little logic in ‘turning’ an agent who did not enjoy the enemy’s full confidence. Indeed, counter-intelligence officers argued for his recruitment, pointing out that Pujol’s recruitment would enhance B1(a)’s existing double agents and provide an unrivalled conduit for misinformation. After all, they insisted, Pujol had got over the first hurdle, that of establishing himself with the enemy as a credible source. The controversy over the advisability of accepting Pujol raged on, with the more experienced members of Section V taking the safer line. Some of V(d)’s younger staff, such as Kim Philby and Desmond Bristow, were determined to seize an opportunity which, they felt, might never be repeated.
Pujol’s approaches were debated in London, St Albans and all the meeting places where Britain’s counter-intelligence experts gathered. On the whole, the opinions divided along organisational lines. Section V was against taking on a relatively unknown agent in a neutral environment where no physical control could be exercised over him; MI5 advocated his being brought to England so he could complete his mission before the Abwehr tripped him up and discovered how easily they had been duped. The concluding factor in the decision to recruit Pujol was a series of decrypts from Bletchley which showed that the Germans were planning to ambush an Allied convoy in the Mediterranean that had apparently left Liverpool bound for Malta. Although plenty of convoys had attempted the perilous journey to relieve the siege of Malta, then at its height, none sailed from England. Most of the ill-fated supply ships had come from Alexandria and had been sunk by German and Italian bombers. The hard-pressed island was enduring constant air bombardment and, during the first thirty days of 1942, Malta endured more than two thousand attacks from enemy aircraft. During February 1942 more than one thousand tons of bombs were dropped on the island. On 7 February Malta underwent a record thirteen hours of air raids, involving sixteen separate enemy sorties. The RAF had only a handful of fighters to defend Malta, so even a few hours’ respite was welcomed by those on the ground.
ARABEL’s non-existent convoy offered just a pause in the Axis onslaught. According to his messages, he had recruited a spy who worked in Liverpool. This notional agent, who later took the identity of a certain William Gerbers, eventually was to succumb to a convenient illness when his continued presence in the area was considered too dangerous. But, in the meantime, Gerbers reported regularly to ARABEL and described the tempting convoy apparently bound for Malta. This news was relayed to the Abwehr, causing elaborate plans to be made in the Mediterranean. Subsequent decrypts confirmed that the German admiralty had prepared their attack on the basis of information received from ARABEL via the Abwehr. U-boats were diverted to an ambush site just east of Gibraltar and Italian planes armed with torpedoes were transferred to Sardinia. The Axis amassed an impressive force with which to sink the British shipping, but they achieved precisely nothing. Even when the long-awaited convoy failed to materialise, having wasted thousands of man-hours and tons of valuable fuel, the blame for the operations failure was left with the Italians and not the Abwehr. Indeed, the intercepts proved that no one had actually doubted the veracity of ARABEL’s messages. The entire exercise, which resembled a fiasco from the German viewpoint, was an eloquent demonstration of ARABEL’s standing with the enemy. In Malta the brief respite was an opportunity to regroup the defences and provide a well-deserved breathing space.
If it was within Pujol’s power to cause such mischief unwittingly, what might be the result if his efforts were directed in concert with other weapons of deception? This was the carrot dangled by MI5, although Section V of SIS seemed reluctant to grasp the opportunity. When the idea was originally proposed by MI5 it was formally rejected on security grounds, and MI5 concluded that SIS was reluctant to cope with the logistics of giving Pujol a means of surreptitious exit from Portugal, perhaps thereby compromising their secret fishing-boat ferry service. Throughout the war SIS ran a very useful, very illicit shuttle between Lisbon and Gibraltar. Did their refusal to deal with Pujol conceal an unwillingness to provide valuable covert transport facilities for an untried agent? Did they still fear penetration by an enemy agent provocateur who might denounce the boat service to the PVDE (Polícia de Vigilância e de Defesa do Estado)? Was the possible prize of a direct line into the enemy’s intelligence and decision-making structure not a worthwhile risk? Might Pujol, who was, after all, already well established, deliver an invaluable insight into the Abwehr? Such tempting imponderables won the day and it was agreed that Pujol should be invited to travel to London and continue under MI5’s supervision. The Secret Intelligence Service eventually agreed to this idea and nominated a Spanish-speaking Section V(d) officer, Desmond Bristow, to supervise the case for SIS and liaise with MI5 and the Twenty Committee. He, more than any other Section V officer, had been in favour of pursuing Pujol’s offer, and he accepted the task with enthusiasm. SIS also agreed to convey the invitation to Pujol, so a coded message was sent by courier to the SIS station in Lisbon. Delivering the message was one thing; executing it under the watchful eyes of the Germans and the Portuguese was quite another.
At this time, in March 1942, the situation was extraordinarily complicated. Although Portugal was Britain’s oldest ally, the president of the council of ministers, Dr António Salazar, showed a distinct reluctance to honour his obligations and oppose the Axis. The 500-year-old mutual defence treaty of 1373 required Portugal to support the Allies and declare war on Germany, and a somewhat half-hearted offer to this effect had been made in 1941, although the War Cabinet in London had decided that it would be more advantageous not to invoke the ancient treaty and let Portugal retain its neutrality. However, it was suggested that the Portuguese government might grant the RAF permission to base aircraft in the Azores so the Atlantic convoys could be protected. (In August 1943, after many lengthy negotiations, Dr Salazar secretly gave his consent to the plan and allowed the RAF facilities on the strategically located islands.)
It did not pass unnoticed in London that little progress was made in the diplomatic exchanges until the military balance began to alter in favour of the Allies. Victory in North Africa cemented Portugal’s cooperation, but in the meantime the Nazis never missed an opportunity to woo Salazar. The principal German suitor was Baron von Hoyningen-Huene, an aristocrat who had been born in Switzerland to an English mother and Baltic German father. He was Ribbentrop’s long-serving ambassador in Lisbon, who had deftly courted influential friends among those close to Salazar. And von Hoyningen-Huene’s embassy also housed a very substantial Abwehr presence headed by Major Albrecht von Auenrode, a colourful Viennese intelligence officer who invariably masqueraded as ‘Ludovico von Karsthof’ and kept a pet monkey named Simon in his office. According to rumour, von Auenrode’s secretary, Mausi, was also his mistress.
Responsibility for maintaining surveillance on all the suspect personnel of all the belligerents’ diplomatic missions was left to the dreaded international police, the PVDE. This internal security force, which had acquired a particularly grim reputation during the Spanish Civil War, was headed by Captain Agostinho Lourenço and, in theory, was under the direction of the interior minister. In practice, Lourenço answered only to the premier, Dr Salazar, and was generally considered to be one of the country’s most powerful (and ruthless) men.
Lourenço was a professional army officer and had fought with the Portuguese contingent in France with the Allies during the Great War. He also held a British decoration, having been made an honorary Companion of the Royal Victorian Order for services performed while head of the Lisbon division of the security police during the brief visit in April 1931 of the Prince of Wales. In spite of these apparent qualifications as
an Anglophile, Lourenço and his formidable organisation were regarded by the British as thoroughly hostile. According to a secret
assessment made of Lourenço by the British embassy shortly before the war, he was an extremely energetic and efficient officer, in whom far greater trust is placed than is suggested by his rank. His practical control of the service connected with the suppression of communism, which is regarded as the country’s greatest menace, is smart in appearance, but blunt in manner. At one time threatened to resign because many of the persons he arrested were liberated by the minister of the interior, and only consented to continue in office when it was decided that he should be supported.
One of Lourenço’s senior lieutenants, Captain Paulo Cumano, was believed to be very pro-German, having been trained in police procedures in Berlin before the war. He had also been to a German engineering college, where he attended a mining course with Erich Emil Schroeder who, by coincidence, happened to be posted to the German legation in March 1941 as a scientific aide. In reality, he was the Gestapo’s local representative, with special responsibility for liaising with Lourenço’s PVDE. Another senior PVDE official with close German links was Lourenço’s deputy, Captain Jose Catela, who also headed the security department.
In addition to the dreaded PVDE, there was another, unofficial, intelligence service known as the Legião, or Portuguese legion. This was a powerful paramilitary group run by well-known Fascists who based it on similar blackshirt organisations. By far the most important branch of the Legião was the intelligence section, which was generally regarded as enjoying a fraternal relationship with the German embassy. There was hardly an area of Portuguese life that had not been thoroughly penetrated by the Legião.
Section V’s representative in Lisbon was Ralph Jarvis. London’s order in March 1942 to find ARABEL placed Ralph Jarvis in considerable difficulty. He and his staff at the British Repatriation Office (located on the other side of town from the embassy) were constantly followed by none-too-subtle PVDE agents. It was equally difficult for the head of station to undertake the mission as all the diplomatic personnel were watched and Ambassador Sir Ronald Campbell had already warned Commander Johns not to engage in any activities which might compromise the rest of the embassy. The building itself, in the heart of Lisbon’s old quarter, was surrounded by narrow streets and was quite unsuitable for exotic, clandestine manoeuvres. The PVDE had no difficulty in keeping tabs on everyone, including the Americans who, since December the previous year, had lost their neutral status and were therefore equally vulnerable to Lourenço’s attentions.
Operation Garbo Page 10