The Spy with 29 Names (6 page)

A multi-talented artist, Harris had won the Trevelyan-Goodall scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art when he was only fifteen. He went on to study sculpture at the British Academy in Rome before returning to London. There he set up his own art business on Bruton Street, but later joined his father to run the Spanish Art Gallery, which sold works by the Spanish masters. Lionel Harris was a Jewish businessman who had worked in Spain. He married a woman from Seville – Enriqueta Rodríguez León. Of their seven children, Tomás was the fourth and last son.

When the Second World War started, ‘Tommy’ – as he was usually called by colleagues – took a job with his wife Hilda at the SOE training facility at Brickendonbury Hall after a recommendation from his friend Guy Burgess. In 1940 he moved to MI5.

His self-portraits show a dark, intense side, but outwardly he was a warm, sociable character.

‘He was a wonderful raconteur and was never happier than when telling anecdotes and stories.’

Others were struck by his strength of character.

‘Tommy was a very, very strong personality,’ one colleague said. ‘He was a very persuasive person. If you looked at a picture with him you found at the end of twenty minutes you were thinking the same as him.’

Anthony Blunt, also working at MI5 at the time, was a friend – Blunt had reviewed an exhibition at the Harris gallery – and he, too, held Harris in high esteem.

‘Tomás was one of the most complete human beings I have ever known.’

Harris’s Spanish background gave him a touch of exoticism (his maternal grandfather had been a distinguished bullfighter) and labelled him as something of an outsider – despite his connections he never felt completely at home in British upper-class society. Yet apart from his painting and art dealing, he was also a piano and saxophone player as well being a talented MI5 intelligence officer: there was a whiff of genius about him.

Cyril Mills, from MI5’s B1A section, was next to him as they set off, heading out of London along the A4. Mills was forty and older than Harris by about six years. Before the war he had been a famous circus manager and used to fly a de Havilland Hornet Moth around Europe looking for new acts. Then one day, soaring over Germany in 1936, he had caught sight of a train line disappearing into a mountainside. Mills had studied engineering at Cambridge, and to his technical eye this looked suspicious, not unlike a secret military factory. He told MI5, who asked him to keep snooping for them. When the war started, it was obvious there would not be many more circuses for a while, so Mills swapped his impresario life for a full-time MI5 position.

The two men sat back in the car. It would be late afternoon before they reached Plymouth. Jock Horsfall was reliable, a former racer and the best driver in the service. They could think and talk for a while.

At long last they had found their mystery Spaniard. ‘Arabal’, ‘Alaric’, ‘
V-Mann
316’, ‘
V-Mann
319’: the Germans gave this new man and his
supposed sub-agents many names. MI5 had been chasing him for months. Now he had been located in Lisbon and was being flown over to Britain for interrogation. Some of their questions would be answered on his arrival, but new queries would inevitably arise. Would they be able to trust him? Was he really as good as he appeared?

MI6 had first heard of him way back in December: a Spaniard asking to become a British spy, claiming that he had already fooled the Germans into thinking he was working for them. And it looked as though the same man had made various approaches, not only in Lisbon, but in Madrid as well. On each occasion he had been shown the door, while all the time he was sending false reports to the Madrid Abwehr claiming that he was actually in London.

Now it was late April. Four months had gone by trying to find the new enemy ‘spy’, wondering how he had escaped detection, while all the time he was in Portugal trying to work for the British. Harris repeated the phrase that kept running through his mind: it was a minor miracle he had survived this long. Which only made the sceptics suspect even more. The man must be a plant, otherwise the Germans would have liquidated him by now.

Yet Dilly Knox’s decoded Bletchley transcripts of Abwehr traffic clearly showed the trust the enemy had in Arabel as their man in London. There was no hint there of a set-up.

For MI5 this was a great opportunity. The double-cross system was working well – a nest of German spies now safely working on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, feeding lies to the other side. Could they take this new man on board as well?

MI6 were calling him ‘Bovril’ because, they said, like the drink, he helped ‘avoid that sinking feeling’. All those messages to Madrid about non-existent convoys had something to do with it, perhaps. It was not clear who had come up with the code name. It was said that MI9’s man in Gibraltar, Donald Darling, who helped Allied soldiers escape from behind enemy lines, had given it to the Spaniard when he arrived from Lisbon a couple of weeks before. But ‘Bovril’ had been used to describe him earlier than that – at least a month before. Were MI6 trying to wash their hands of him, knowing full well they were about to lose him to MI5?

Perhaps Philby, Harris’s close friend in Section V, had something to do with it. Philby was one of the regulars at Harris’s grand Mayfair
home, using number 6 Chesterfield Gardens as a kind of private club, as did Victor Rothschild, Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess – a small set enjoying one of the best wine cellars in London.

Arabel might never have been brought to Britain had it not been for Philby, often acting behind Cowgill’s back. It was now becoming clear quite how much Bletchley material on him Cowgill had been keeping from MI5. The head of Section V saw a threat, knowing perfectly well that the Spaniard might be perfect double agent material. Which is why he had tried to hide him from MI5 for so long.

‘I do not see why I should get agents and then have them pinched by you,’ he told Guy Liddell, Harris’s boss and the head of MI5’s B section. As far as Cowgill was concerned, ‘the Yanks’ had brought Arabel to him. If he was to belong to anyone it was to MI6 – he would be
their
man working from Lisbon.

But double-cross was not about winning battles, it was about winning the war itself. And from operating as a means of controlling and curtailing German espionage work inside Britain (why send any new agents over when the ones they had were working so well . . .?), it would eventually move into a new, more significant phase, that of actually deceiving the enemy.

The car had driven far from London now, with fewer reminders around them of the war, except the military vehicles and lack of road signs. The flying boat from Gibraltar was scheduled to arrive just before sunset. The flight lasted twice as long as in peacetime as they had to fly so far out into the Atlantic to avoid German fighters.

If they could just make things with this new man work . . .

The double-cross system was not without its problems. Many captured spies who were ‘turned’ to work for the British had to be threatened to assure their cooperation. Few were willing double agents, and the business of building them up in the Germans’ eyes, making them increasingly credible so that eventually false and misleading information could be fed through them, was fraught with difficulties.

With Arabel, however, if he was who he said he was, some of the teething problems might be avoided. If he was already trusted by the Germans, MI5 had a chance to use a fully fledged double agent who had been willing to work for the British in the first place.

They would have to proceed cautiously. In the past double agents
had shown promise and then had to be dropped over fears that they might be compromised. Security was paramount, and as with the Bletchley material, double-cross could only work if the enemy suspected nothing.

But still, Arabel, or Bovril, or whatever name they gave him in the end, had promise. He had made it this far on his own. And after the Malta convoy message, what might he be capable of once they finally got him under their wing?

It still was not clear if Arabel had been behind the report on the convoy to the besieged island. The Abwehr report had not said, putting it down to Kühlenthal’s ‘
V-Mann
372’. It was one of the many points that would be covered over the coming days of questioning and interrogation. Bletchley had picked it up on 2 April, over three weeks previously. By then the decision had already been taken to bring Arabel over to Britain. In the meantime, however, while the would-be British agent waited in Lisbon for the territorial battles between MI5 and MI6 to be sorted, he was still sending messages to his Abwehr controller.

That last one had created ripples – in more ways than one. There was, it said, a convoy of fifteen ships, including nine freighters, heading from Liverpool with relief supplies for Malta. Not only food, but war materiel including anti-aircraft ammunition and RAF personnel, were also on board.

Previous aid convoys to Malta had sailed from Mediterranean ports with the loss of many ships, sunk by the Germans and Italians. This was the first such convoy reported to be sailing from Britain itself. The enemy responded to the intelligence handsomely. German U-boats were sent to ambush the convoy as it passed close to Gibraltar on its way into the Mediterranean, while Italian planes armed with torpedoes were amassed in Sardinia for later strikes.

All to no avail. The convoy to Malta never appeared. The Germans were angry – they blamed the Italians. A great deal of war effort – man hours, fuel, supplies – had gone into the operation, with no result.

For there had never been a Malta convoy. It was made up.

Amazingly, no one on the German side blamed the intelligence or the agent who had supplied it. As far as the enemy were concerned, the convoy had existed; they had simply failed to find it. So whoever had sent that report – and there were still doubts about whether Arabel was behind it – had not only proved his credentials with the Germans,
but had single-handedly had an important, if relatively minor, effect on the war itself.

It had been enough to tip the balance in favour of those wanting to get Arabel to London. Even Cowgill gave in eventually. He could still claim it was his idea to bring him over, but no one from MI6 would be there for the reception.

They finally reached Plymouth and Jock Horsfall pulled the car in behind the Mount Batten flying-boat terminal. Rooms had been booked at a nearby hotel where they could have dinner and spend the night before driving back to London the next morning.

It was sunset when the launch finally brought the passengers over from the flying boat. Harris watched as a short Spanish man stepped on to British soil. He looked older than his thirty years – prematurely balding on top – although his small yellow-brown eyes had a keenness about them, mischievous almost. It was extraordinary that someone so unassuming and humble in appearance could have caused so much trouble, for both the Germans and the British.

Harris stepped forward and held out his hand in greeting. Then spoke in perfect Spanish:

‘
Bienvenido a Inglaterra, señor Pujol
. Welcome to England. My name is Tomás Harris, and my colleague here –’ he used the false name they had agreed for Mills – ‘is Mr Grey. We will both be taking you to London.’

Juan Pujol smiled politely at them. He had finally made it – in Britain at last, with the people he had been trying to work with for a year and a half. He shivered, and made a comment about the cold. Harris and Mills grinned. No, Harris said, this was not southern Europe. He would have a lot to get used to.

Pujol chuckled with his characteristic laughter, like a ‘sly rabbit’.

Days later, in London, when they had heard and been amazed by Juan Pujol’s story, Mills spoke to Harris.

The code name Bovril did not fit. Besides, Pujol was their man now, he belonged to MI5. Mills proposed a new code name, one which suited him better. Pujol, he said, must be the ‘greatest actor in the world’ to have fooled so many people and survived. They should name him after that other great actor: Greta Garbo. A film of hers was
showing,
Two-Faced Woman
, about a character living a double life. What could be better?

Yes, it was ideal. Not only because of Pujol’s acting skills, but, Harris also knew, because of an intelligence and liveliness about the man. The Spanish word
garbo
had no direct translation into English, but it could mean ‘graceful’, or ‘panache’, with connotations of perfectionism and generosity.

Mills had no Spanish, but he had found the perfect code name.

‘One’s real life is often the life that one does not lead.’

Oscar Wilde

THE ORIGINAL BUILDING
at 70 Carrer Muntaner was pulled down in the early 1980s and replaced by a modern block of flats, but most of the neighbouring structures from the end of the nineteenth century still stand, and the character of the street, in the heart of Barcelona’s modernist Eixample, remains virtually unchanged from when it was first conceived. It was and remains a residential and shopping district for the wealthy middle classes, Catalan merchants and traders. The Pujol family, owners of the Juan Pujol y Compañía textile-dyeing firm, celebrated for the quality of its black silk dyes, had made their home here.

And it was here, on Valentine’s Day 1912, that Juan Pujol García was born.

Or at least that was what he always said, and 14 February was the day that he celebrated his birthday. His birth certificate in the Barcelona civil record, however, tells a different story. There, his mother Mercedes registered his birth on 1 March 1912, stating that he had been born two days earlier, on 28 February (it was a leap year). The surnames that she gave her baby boy were García Guijarro – her own. Only four years later did Juan’s father legally adopt him, and his surname changed: Pujol from his father’s side; García from his mother’s, as is Spanish custom.

For the first few years of his life, Juan’s parents were not married, and all four of their children were born out of wedlock. It was a
curious, even scandalous, situation for a religious, middle-class family, particularly in such conservative times.