Operation Garbo (26 page)

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.

T
he 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 and 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.

Philby’s guilt again raised the spectre of an extensive,
deep-rooted
network of ideologically motivated Soviet agents in the very heart of the British establishment. A massive molehunt followed, but inevitably, and in the absence of Kim Philby, MI5 was forced to return to its first suspects after the
defection
of Burgess and Maclean: John Cairncross and Anthony Blunt. Cairncross underwent a further interrogation at his new home in the United States late in March 1964, and was a lot more forthcoming about his own activities, although he denied knowledge of any other Soviet agents. That left only Anthony Blunt. Coincidentally, Michael Straight, Blunt’s former pupil at Cambridge and a one-time recruit, volunteered a highly
incriminating
statement to the FBI in Washington, which finally led to the interrogation and confession of Sir Anthony Blunt on 22 April 1964. Then the keeper of the Queen’s pictures, he had not had access to any official secrets since his retirement from MI5 in 1945, but he did confirm that a large spy ring had been created by Soviet recruiters in the mid-1930s, and that many
of its members had achieved positions of authority within Whitehall and the intelligence community. Although he knew the names of many Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates who might have been approached, he merely confirmed the guilt of those like Cairncross who were already well known to the Security Service. In the months that followed dozens of leads were pursued, and two more friends of Tommy Harris came under suspicion: Lord Rothschild and Peter Wilson.

Lord Rothschild had been a member of the famous Apostles, the secret society at Cambridge that had nurtured so many Soviet agents. Among them had been Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, Leo Long and Alistair Watson. The latter two had been identified as Soviet spies by Blunt. Long had been a wartime military intelligence officer and, after a fruitless attempt to join MI5, had worked for a film company in London. Alistair Watson, on the other hand, had been an admiralty scientist specialising in antisubmarine warfare. He later gave a partial confession: he admitted being a covert communist and having conducted covert meetings with Soviet intelligence officers, but denied ever having passed on classified information from the admiralty. He was promptly moved into a less sensitive position.

In 1940 Rothschild had joined the Security Service, and had subsequently recommended Blunt for a transfer into MI5, but had returned to scientific research at the end of hostilities. When questioned by MI5 in 1964 he had ‘felt it essential to help them in every possible way’ and successfully cleared himself of any suspicion.

Before the war, Peter Wilson had been appointed a director of the art auctioneers Sotheby’s, and had later served in MI6. He had been a regular visitor to Tommy Harris’s gallery home in Chesterfield Gardens and had known Philby, Blunt and Burgess both professionally, while a serving MI6 officer, and socially. Like Blunt and Burgess, he was an active homosexual. But had he also been a Soviet spy?

The one person who seemed to be at the centre of these
events, Tommy Harris, was killed in a car accident in January 1964, a year after Philby’s escape from Beirut and three months before Blunt was induced to confess his treachery. Harris had been driving Hilda from Palma, where they had been seen to argue at a restaurant, and both had consumed a great deal of alcohol. Instead of heading toward his home at Camp de Mar, Harris had turned inland in the direction of a pottery which he had commissioned to glaze some of his latest ceramics, and he lost control of his new, powerful Citröen on a
humpback
bridge on the notorious Lluchmayor Road. The car had spun off the road and had hit an almond tree, killing Harris instantly. Miraculously, Hilda had been thrown clear and had suffered only minor injuries. A discreet but necessarily
superficial
investigation had followed, and such evidence as could be found had pointed toward the crash having been entirely accidental. However, not everyone had been convinced, and more than one intelligence officer has commented on the fact that Harris had driven along the Lluchmayor Road many hundreds of times before the crash occurred. Although the road has some tortuous bends, the bridge where the car ran off the road is actually quite straight. Was it likely that such an experienced driver would lose control of his car on a perfectly straight road? Or had alcohol, combined with a domestic
argument
, stolen his judgment?

Of the very few Allied intelligence officers who were allowed to learn
GARBO
’s full story, it is extraordinary that at least two, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, should have turned out to be very senior Russian spies. The fact that Tommy Harris, the genius who masterminded the operation, should have been killed in such circumstances and at such a time is remarkable. Although Hilda survived the car crash, she never fully recovered her health and, unable to live alone, died not long afterward. Forty years after
GARBO
’s departure for Venezuela, most of the principal participants have either departed to Moscow or died, and the conundrum remains as insoluble as ever.