The Spy with 29 Names (34 page)

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 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 . . .

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.