Tommy Harris and I then stayed in New York for a few days, after which I left him there while I went on to visit Cuba, Mexico and several other countries in South America. I was looking for somewhere which appeared safe and comfortable, free from nationalist extremism, and whose future looked prosperous and likely to become democratic, a country where I felt I could settle down permanently; finally, I chose Venezuela.
In 1945 Caracas, a true ‘Sultana del Avila’, had about 400,000 inhabitants and was a peaceful city, except for the appalling traffic. The traffic was so bad, even then, that when President Roosevelt’s wife was asked what she thought of the city by a local journalist, she replied: ‘Caracas? Oh, it’s just a huge garage.’ General Medina was governing the country, although he had originally been a member of the dictator General Gomez’s government, but he was gradually allowing the country to become more democratic.
The first thing I did on arrival was to go to the Spanish consulate in Caracas and obtain a resident’s permit, an identity card, a driving license and all the other essential documents which would enable me to settle down there for good. I wanted to be forgotten, to pass unnoticed and to be untraceable. I therefore pretended that my passport had been stolen and asked if I could have a new one. I did this so that I could destroy my old passport; then no one would be able to see all the visas in it and so find out where I had come from. The Spanish consular offices in Caracas quickly furnished me with a brand new passport and, armed with this and all my other documents, I embarked on a liner for Barcelona. I wanted to see my family again and I had arranged to meet Tommy Harris in Madrid.
The ship was called the Cabo de Buena Esperanza and, after various stops, it eventually reached Barcelona. I found that my brother Joaquin had married after the civil war and now had two sons. Sadly, he never lived to enjoy the company of his grandchildren for he died at sixty-two, a victim indirectly of the privations he had undergone during his months in the front line, spent wandering up and down the mountains with his Republican unit, retreating toward France. Elena was still single, while Buenaventura was still happily married to the most sensible, hard-working, honest and affectionate man ever to be wished for by any woman. Although she and Frederic had no children, God had blessed this union from the start with love and harmony.
I then went to Madrid to join Tommy Harris, who now introduced me to Desmond Bristow, an MI6 officer who had spent the war in Gibraltar and North Africa. Both of them now put forward a new project which they had thought up: they suggested that I renew my contact with members of the German Secret Service still in Spain and offer to continue to work for them, so that eventually I could get in touch with those Germans who were in Soviet-occupied Germany. At that time all the Allied intelligence services were on the lookout for German intelligence officers who were thought to be roaming around Europe, the idea being to penetrate the Soviet Secret Service through those Germans whom the Soviets had recruited. I volunteered to go ahead with this plan though, thinking back, it showed alarming temerity on my part, for no one knew how the Germans in Madrid would react to seeing me again. But, anyway, I agreed to do it: I made contact again.
In the end I telephoned Madrid 333572 and asked for Gustav Knittel – the real name of the Abwehr agent Federico – who lived at Plaza Aunos 6. A voice answered that he wasn’t there, but now lived outside Madrid, and the person to help me was Eberhardt Kieckebusche, who lived in Calle Sil 5 in the El Viso quarter of Madrid.
I had never had direct contact with Kieckebusche but, when I arrived at his house, he seemed very pleased to see me and invited me in for a meal. He looked like a Prussian, had been a commander in the Abwehr and a very good friend of Admiral Canaris. Kieckebusche had been in Spain ever since the civil war; he’d arrived at the same time as the Kondor Legion.
We shut ourselves in his office and he began to show me the greater part of all the messages I had sent him; he even produced the book which we had used for sending objects in, which had had its centre pages cut out in order to turn it into a secret box. He talked to me about ‘our great task’ and explained to me that things were difficult for the Germans in defeat. He told me that he was running an import/export business, which was doing quite well, and offered to help me in any way he could; he then handed me 25,000 pesetas in gratitude for all that I had done for the Reich. He also gave me Federico’s address and told me that he was hiding in a little village in the Guadarrama Mountains.
Federico was not at all at ease when I met him. He gave me the impression that he was a very frightened man. Spain was a relatively safe country for Nazi officers to hide in, but many members of the intelligence service seemed to fear that they might be kidnapped or eliminated by their opposite numbers on the Allied side. Federico was greatly saddened by Germany’s defeat, so I continued to play my role of a Nazi sympathiser and told him that better times lay ahead. I offered my services and said that I would be glad to continue to work for him. He fell for it completely – he believed me – and advised me to tie everything up with Kieckebusche.
I went back to Madrid and had another meeting with Kieckebusche, during which he said that all the members of the German Secret Service in Spain were either disbanded or out of touch with one another. He said that his old friend Canaris had been executed by the Nazis themselves and that most of his superior officers were either dead or had been arrested. It was therefore difficult for him to plan anything at the moment, as there was no organisation left; he would have to wait a while. I told him that I was thinking of settling down in South America and he gave me the Barcelona address of some people he thought I might find helpful, should I think of importing Spanish goods. Federico had been quite critical of Hitler and his conduct of the war, but Kieckebusche was much more prudent and suggested that the Nazis had been defeated by bad luck.
From Madrid, I went on to Lisbon. No doubt thanks to Risso-Gill’s careful handling of the Portuguese authorities when I had left the country so precipitately in 1942, I had no difficulties with the Portuguese border police. Once in Lisbon I rejoined Tommy Harris, who took me to see Gene Risso-Gill. Neither of them could believe that I had really just been to see my German contacts in Madrid; they found it utterly incredible and were amazed at my audacity. To me, it had been final irrevocable proof that my double identity, ARABEL–GARBO, had been an impeccably kept secret right to the end.
I found Lisbon as charming and welcoming as ever, filled with happy memories and of people I will never forget. Portugal has always been England’s faithful ally and has always cooperated loyally. I like saying this for I believe it and it is true.
While I was away, political changes were taking place in Venezuela. A military triumvirate overthrew General Medina and, after a failed attempt at democracy, Brigadier General Marcos Pérez Jiménez set up a dictatorship which lasted for seven years. Jiménez directed all his hatred against the very politicians with whom he had joined forces in order to overthrow General Medina, which was a hard lesson to swallow for all those who believed in democracy; but it was a lesson which the present political leaders have learnt well, since Venezuela has been living in peace now for some thirty years.
During Jiménez’s dictatorship I was never harassed, questioned or harmed in any way, thanks to my customary stand of never, ever interfering in politics. I did not have to live the life of a recluse, but could continue with my job as a language teacher for Shell Oil on the eastern shores of Lake Maracaibo. I was never molested. No one knew about my past. Nobody knew what I had done during the Second World War.
Sometime around 1948 I made a trip to Spain to see my old friend Tommy Harris at his villa in Camp de Mar in Majorca, where he was living with his wife Hilda. It was to be the last time I saw him before he died. He told me that he had written a book about all our MI5 activities and that he had kept a copy for me should I decide one day to publish my memoirs, but I begged him to tell anyone who asked after me that I had died, leaving no trace, as I still wished to be protected from the Nazis. He
obeyed me to the letter, for after this visit of mine MI5 spread a rumour that GARBO had emigrated to Angola and had eventually died there from malaria.
For the next thirty-six years I lived peacefully in Venezuela; it was a quiet time for me, for my life of action, of fighting for freedom, for my ideals, was over. Then in 1984, when I was least expecting it, Nigel West broke the cover that I had so successfully maintained and, through painstaking research and careful investigation, tracked me down.
A few days before the fortieth anniversary of the D-Day landings, he called on the telephone from London. He said how glad he was to be able to talk to the person whom everyone had thought to be dead.
Even though I wanted to forget all about the war, he was so insistent that I relented; he persuaded me that I would enjoy seeing old colleagues again and I was flattered at the thought of being introduced to HRH the Duke of Edinburgh, who, he said, was very keen to meet me. So many promises and offers were made that I agreed to think it over. After I was sure that all my German contacts had either disappeared or died, I decided that the time had come for my family to learn about my past, to hear about that part of my life which I had concealed from them up until now for security reasons.
And so I returned to London to receive personal thanks from the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace, my acknowledgment from the people of Britain of all that I had done to help them retain their democracy and their freedom, and an example of their gratitude for backing their courageous fight against the Nazis. For it was their resolute stand and their humane conduct which had driven me all those years ago to offer to help, so that we could work hand in hand for victory in the battle of good against evil.
But my main pride and satisfaction, now I look back, has been the knowledge that I contributed to the reduction of casualties among the thousands – the tens of thousands – of servicemen fighting to hold the Normandy beachheads. Many, many more would have perished had our plan failed and the Germans counter-attacked in force.
EPILOGUE
The entire GARBO episode gave an eloquent demonstration of the value of strategic deception. The use of double agents was well established as a vital part of any sophisticated operation to mislead the enemy. Certainly, the British and the American intelligence agencies had learned all the relevant lessons through the FORTITUDE campaign, and had achieved extraordinary success by carefully coordinating the differing elements involved: signals intelligence, camouflage and the overall manipulation of the opposition’s information-gathering networks.
At the conclusion of the war in Europe the various participants went their separate ways, GARBO himself to Caracas, where employment was found for him as a language teacher for an international oil company. Tommy Harris left MI5 at the end of hostilities and retired with Hilda to paint at his luxurious villa at Camp de Mar in Majorca. His sister, Violetta, remained in the Security Service for a further twenty years. Desmond Bristow also stayed in the intelligence field, and was eventually appointed head of the SIS station in Madrid, with responsibility for operations in his old stamping grounds of Spain, Portugal and North Africa.
It was not until 1951, when GARBO had settled down in his new life, that certain members of the British Intelligence community who had been involved in his wartime operation came under suspicion of having worked as Soviet spies. Neither Burgess nor Maclean, the two foreign office diplomats who defected to Moscow in May of that year, had played any part with GARBO during the war, but a number of their closest friends had. Principal among the remaining suspects was Kim Philby, who had headed Section V’s Iberian subsection until late in 1944. He had been intimately involved with the GARBO case, especially after Desmond Bristow had been posted to Algiers. By 1951 he had been promoted in his chosen career, and had been posted to Washington, DC, as head of the SIS station at the British embassy. While in that sensitive position, he had been informed that Donald Maclean was under investigation by MI5. Philby communicated a warning to Guy Burgess, thus enabling Maclean to make his escape at the very last moment before he was due to be interrogated. A slight departure from the plan was Guy Burgess’s decision to accompany him. It was immediately obvious that both had been tipped off by a fellow conspirator, and Kim Philby was one of the few people who had the necessary advance knowledge. Also high on MI5’s list of possible Soviet spies was another close friend of Guy Burgess, the art historian Anthony Blunt. He had not been privy to the closely guarded secret of Maclean’s impending arrest, but he might have acted as a conduit for the warning message. Documents left in Burgess’s flat in London eventually incriminated another Cambridge graduate and former MI6 officer, John Cairncross, who was then working as a civil servant in the Treasury. He steadfastly denied having committed any offense, but wisely decided to resign and live abroad. The MI5 investigators were convinced that both Blunt and Cairncross were, or had been, important Soviet agents.
Apart from being covert Soviet agents, Burgess, Philby and Blunt all had another thing in common. They had been close friends of Tommy Harris, who, in an act of characteristic generosity, had actually paid for the education of one of Philby’s sons. Although there was insufficient evidence to arrest and charge either Philby or Blunt, the Security Service remained convinced of their guilt. Harris was simply regarded as an innocent acquaintance of all three, for he had no known connection with Donald Maclean and, unlike the others, had not been educated at Cambridge, where the Russian recruiters had been so active. But, at the end of July 1953, the situation was to alter dramatically.
Even though it was generally believed that Burgess and Maclean had gone to live behind the Iron Curtain, there was no definite news of their whereabouts until April 1954, when Vladimir Petrov, a Russian diplomat and undercover NKVD officer, defected in Australia. Petrov confirmed that the two missing diplomats had led a secret life since leaving Cambridge. In the meantime, while there was still considerable speculation on the subject, Donald Maclean’s American-born wife Melinda suddenly disappeared.
When Maclean had fled in May 1951 his wife had been expecting their third child, and she had been left behind. The following year, after the birth of her daughter, Melinda Maclean went to live in Geneva, to escape the intrusive attentions of the British press. She remained in Geneva until the summer of 1953, when she planned to take a vacation on the Spanish island of Majorca in the Mediterranean with her three children and her wealthy American mother, Mrs Dunbar. All five were supposed to travel to Majorca, where they were to be the guests of an American widower, Douglas MacKillop. The party was booked to travel via Barcelona on 1 July 1953, but shortly before the end of June Melinda Maclean suddenly changed her plans and took her children to Saanenmoser, a small mountain resort above Gstaad. She announced that she intended to stay at Saanenmoser for a fortnight, and then go on to Majorca, but she reappeared in Geneva just five days later. The out-of-season village had not suited her. The original plan, to stay with Douglas MacKillop, was reinstated, and eventually, on 23 July, Mrs Dunbar took her daughter and three grandchildren on their much-delayed trip to Majorca. For the next five weeks they stayed in the tiny seaside village of Cala Ratjada, on the other side of the island from Camp de Mar, and then returned to Melinda Maclean’s flat in Geneva. On 11 September 1953, just three days after her return from Majorca, Mrs Maclean suddenly disappeared, together with her three children. She had made elaborate arrangements to conceal her hurried departure, and the authorities tried in vain to discover where and how she had received her complicated travel instructions. She eventually turned up in Moscow, reunited with her fugitive husband, and it became clear that her own departure to the east had been as carefully orchestrated as that of her husband two years earlier. The investigators noted the coincidence of her recent vacation in Majorca, and the possibility that she might have kept a secret rendezvous with a Soviet courier in Palma.
After her return from Majorca, Mrs Maclean had told her mother that she intended staying the weekend ‘with some old friends from Cairo’, Robin Muir an
d his wife, at their villa in Territet, near Montreux. In fact, Muir did not exist, and Mrs Maclean only drove her children as far as Lausanne, where they all boarded a train for Zurich. On arrival she connected with the Vienna express, but was met by a car at Schwarzach St Viet, some ten miles from Salzburg. From there, evidently, she was driven into the Soviet zone of Austria. When Mrs Maclean had not returned to Geneva by Monday, 14 September, Mrs Dunbar raised the alarm. Three days later she received a telegram, allegedly from her daughter, claiming her absence was only temporary. Subsequent inquiries showed that the telegram had been handed in at Territet by another woman who did not answer the description of Mrs Maclean, who, predictably, was by then reunited with her husband in Moscow.
Mrs Maclean’s exit from Switzerland had been carefully planned, but how and when had she received her instructions? Her mother, Mrs Dunbar, had been with her constantly since the brief trip to Saanenmoser in July, and had denied knowledge of any long-standing escape plan. Presumably the information detailing the rendezvous and confirmation of the train times had to have been passed on shortly before her departure. Her mother had been with her constantly in Geneva, so had she been contacted in Majorca, and why had she cut short her trip to Saanenmoser? It rather looked as though Mrs Maclean had been spirited away from Geneva, right under the noses of any security agencies who were anxious to discover her husband’s fate. After this further embarrassing humiliation, MI5 redoubled its efforts to identify all the members of what appeared to be an increasingly large and powerful Soviet spy network.
The key figure in the ensuing investigation was Kim Philby, who had been sacked from the Secret Intelligence Service in 1951 and had eked out a living as a journalist in the Middle East ever since. Late in 1962 evidence came to light which confirmed his close collaboration with Burgess and Maclean and, in January 1963, he was confronted. In return for formal immunity from prosecution, Philby admitted his treachery and agreed to give a detailed confession. A few days later, on the evening of 23 January 1963, he suddenly vanished from his apartment in Beirut, and was not heard of until he surfaced in Moscow some considerable time later.
Operation Garbo Page 22