The Spy with 29 Names (35 page)

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 report 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 address
^fn1
(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 confess 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.

Kühlenthal made a better businessman than he did a spymaster.
Dienz flourished, and the Kühlenthals became respectable members of the community. He died in October 1975.

Did he ever know the true story of ‘Alaric’, his top spy in London, who was really ‘Garbo’, a British double agent?

Harris, his British opponent in MI5, was damning in his conclusion: ‘His characteristic German lack of sense of humour . . . blinded him to the absurdities of the story we were unfolding.’

The records suggest that he was fooled; his family insist that he was not.

Today the Dienz company is owned by his son, Edgar Kühlenthal.

Cecil ‘Monkey’ Blacker won the Military Cross following Operation Goodwood and continued to fight with the 23rd Hussars across northern France and Germany, being made regimental commander in 1945.

He stayed in the army, rising through the ranks and serving in Northern Ireland and Yemen. Throughout this time he continued his horse racing activities, riding Sir John in the 1948 Grand National. They fell at a fence before the Chair, and Blacker had to stand at the side and watch as the race was won by Sheila’s Cottage.

After becoming Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1970, his final position was that of Adjutant General to the Forces, one of the highest officers in the Army.

He retired in 1976 and died in 2002. His son is the writer and journalist Terence Blacker.

On the day after the liberation of Paris, Amado Granell and other members of La Nueve escorted Charles de Gaulle in the victory parade down the Champs-Elysées. It was a great moment of pride for the Spanish lieutenant. Soon all France would be free and the eyes of the world could turn to deposing another fascist dictator. Franco.

But while the French gave him honours such as the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’honneur, no one was in the mood to start waging war in Spain by 1944. In Europe, Germany and Hitler were the target, nowhere and no one else.

The political battles within liberated France now enveloped Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division, and towards the end of 1944 Granell decided that he had had enough. He went with the conquering Allied armies
as far as the Rhine, where he washed his hands and face in a symbolic gesture, and then retired from military service.

He was a great loss to La Nueve. His commanding officer, Captain Dronne, wrote that with Granell’s departure his company had lost ‘part of its soul’.

Granell’s dream of re-establishing democracy in Spain did not end there, however, and he became friendly with a number of Republican politicians, including Francisco Largo Caballero, the former Republican prime minister. For a while, in the late 1940s, he provided a line of communication between exiled Republicans and Don Juan, son of former King Alfonso XIII and heir to the Spanish throne, in an attempt at reconciliation. Don Juan, like the Republicans, was also in exile, living in Portugal, forbidden by Franco to return to Spain.

Franco’s own contacts with Don Juan in 1948, in which he promised to pass power to Don Juan’s son, Juan Carlos, on his death, brought the discussions with Granell to an end.

In 1950 Granell opened a small restaurant in Paris, Los Amigos, where known Spanish Republicans often gathered. But within two years he returned clandestinely to his beloved Spain. At this stage death sentences were still being carried out against those who had fought against Franco during the Civil War, and Granell was forced to live secretly in Santander, Barcelona and Madrid.