The Spy with 29 Names (33 page)

There was nothing but praise for Pujol. Kühlenthal regretted that he was not able to give him his Iron Cross. There had been some bureaucratic complications which meant that it had never arrived in Madrid. Hitler himself had been involved in the matter, and had insisted that the medal be sent, but the end of the war had intervened in the meantime.

Kühlenthal was keen to know what Pujol planned to do now; perhaps his super-spy could help him get out of Spain. Like Knappe, he was anxious not to be sent back to Germany. Pujol said he would talk to his sub-agents and see what they could do.

He, meanwhile, was going to leave Spain as quickly as possible. He told Kühlenthal that he thought that British spies were already on to him, and that he intended to cross into Portugal.

‘How are you going to do that?’ Kühlenthal asked him as Pujol was about to leave. ‘How are you going to get over the border?’

Pujol gave him an enigmatic look, and simply said: ‘Clandestinely.’

Pujol travelled back to Madrid, then on to Lisbon, where he met up once more with Harris. They flew to London, where Pujol was debriefed on what he had learned from both his meetings with his former German case officers.

His time as a double agent had come to an end; it was time to make his goodbyes to those who had been part of the Garbo operation. To Charlie Haines the radio operator; to Tar Robertson and John Masterman; to Hilda, Harris’s wife; to Sarah Bishop, who had spent so many hours with him at the Jermyn Street office; and to Harris himself, the other half of Garbo: over the years the two men had become the best of friends.

MI5 were not ungenerous. Garbo had brought them some £31,000 in funding from the Germans, providing the final irony that the enemy had ended up paying several times over for the very service that had been used to fool them. Now a portion of that money was given to Pujol to help him start his new life.

It was September 1945. Just as, four years previously, he had popped up magically out of nowhere, now Pujol – like his namesake Greta Garbo – simply vanished.

‘A tale, fictitious or otherwise, illuminates truth.’

Rumi

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.

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?