Agent Garbo

by Stephan Talty

  The second great post-D-Day crisis concerned the state of Pujol’s marriage. And that would prove harder to fix than the locations of bombs falling on London or the possibility of a Fourth Reich.

  Pretending to be writing from his hideout in southern Wales, but actually still in London, Garbo asked the Germans to forward a few letters to Araceli and to help him convince her that he was now in Spain. They were cover messages but, as always, Garbo’s spycraft seemed to contain little hints of his real life. He wrote:

  At present I am a man unaware of life and its pleasure. I am disillusioned because I see the misfortune which has dogged my footsteps. My only desire is to behave as well as possible in the future in order that all the bad memories which you have of the past are wiped out.

  Again and again I ask you to forgive me for what I have made you suffer. I know that you held no spite and this relieved me.

  Goodbye my dear with many kisses from your, José.

  And a month later, supposedly from Granada, in southern Spain:

  It is only a few days since I arrived here. This city which I always thought of with pleasure now appears sad and bitter. I remember the many times we came to visit it together and the happy days we spent.

  How much I think of you, my dear. At every moment and every instant you are in my mind.

  … When I think of our sorrowful position I am truly repentant of the steps which brought about your perdition and mine. I feel I shall never enjoy peace of mind again and that calm will never reign over me. Only you with your tenderness and feeling could cure the trouble, which is known as “remorse” for all I have made you suffer.

  Was Juan feeling guilty over the fake arrest that had caused her so much pain? Even though they were meant to deceive the Germans, the letters seem rooted in strong emotions of remorse and foreboding about the future of his marriage.

  Evidence that the marriage was in trouble can be found in a report in the MI5 files. Later in 1945, with her husband still “in hiding” (actually he was by then in Venezuela), Araceli, who had returned to Spain earlier that year, went to see Kühlenthal. She hoped to collect the last of the money due her husband, though Pujol had warned her not to make contact with the Germans. The spymaster paid her what he called the “debt of honor,” then asked if he could hide out in her family home in Lugo. When Pujol found out that she’d gone to see Kühlenthal against his instructions, he exploded. The MI6 representative in Madrid then met with her, and reported on her state: “I interviewed Mrs Garbo myself and found her in a most difficult mood. Swearing that Garbo had said the most unpardonable things to her over the telephone and that she would not stand for that, that she would sever all connection with him and with us and would in future go her own way. She further added that it was a pity there was no divorce in this country.”

  Despite their battles in the past, Tommy Harris defended Araceli —at least partially. “I do not feel that Mrs. Garbo had any ill intentions towards us,” he wrote on November 1, “though I think it highly probable that should she start to mix with Kühlenthal and his friends she will, either inadvertently or in a spirit of adventure, come to harm and thus compromise us.”

  Telegrams flew between Madrid and London. One draft, which bears the marks of Pujol’s now vitriolic attitude toward his wife, called her “an adventuress” who was “likely to attempt to renew adventures with Germans, possibly influenced by the idea that she may extract more money from them if she breaks with Garbo.” Clearly, Pujol suspected his wife of going behind his back to blackmail the Abwehr, a very dangerous game for both of them.

  Eventually the matter was smoothed over and the pair reunited. Araceli had only been seeking what was owed her family, and there is no evidence she was trying to extort more or cut a separate deal. But the suspicion between two people who had once trusted each other with their lives was now palpable.

  IV. Breakoff

  22. The End

  ONCE HE HAD TYPED UP his notes on his meetings with the Abwehr men, Pujol ceased to be Garbo. And having shed the character he’d inhabited for the past four years, he wanted to shed his surroundings as well. He was determined to leave Europe. “I was afraid the Germans would take revenge. They must have thought I was one of their biggest traitors.”

  MI5 gave Pujol half of the money that the Abwehr had paid him to spy on England, a total of 17,554 pounds (about $1 million today) and offered him more from its own funds; he refused the latter. Pujol also turned down a job with the Eagle Star insurance company that MI5 had arranged. He and Araceli—their marriage hanging by a thread—would fly to Venezuela with their two young boys. Harris and Anthony Blunt formulated a cover story for their friend: Pujol would move to Caracas and advertise himself as an art expert peddling works of the Spanish masters: Goya, Velázquez and El Greco. Pujol and his family made the trip and settled in a luxurious house on the Avenida de Bolivia. Harris supplied his coconspirator with a number of paintings from his own collection to sell, perhaps to the Venezuelan government as the basis for a national art museum.

  The venture began badly. The chargé d’affaires of the Spanish embassy in Caracas noticed a newspaper announcement of Pujol’s arrival in the capital—along with his valuable artworks—and alerted the Spanish government that objects of the “public artistic treasure taken out of Spain during the Civil War” were possibly going to be sold. An investigation was launched. One investigator reported on Araceli’s presence in Caracas: “This lady is attracting extraordinary attention due to her eccentric ways and the kind of life she leads. She frequents leisure societies, trying her best to move in the most select circles; she dresses elegantly and adopts gestures in order to attract the looks of the people around her.” Araceli had a “splendid automobile” and apparently plenty of money, but as to her husband, he “was nowhere to be seen.”

  Desmond Bristow would later claim that Pujol and Harris had cooked up a scheme to sell forged masters in Caracas, the fakes to be dumped on unsuspecting Latin American collectors. But there’s no proof to back up the claim. The Spanish government found nothing suspect in Pujol and Harris’s business and closed the investigation.

  After two years in Caracas, Pujol had had enough. He moved the family to Valencia, three hours from the capital, and bought a large farm. The erstwhile chicken farmer poured 100,000 bolívares into the estate, proceeds from his work with MI5, buying farm equipment and modernizing the facilities around the stately home. “No one in Venezuela had seen anything like it,” his son says. “It had the latest technology, the latest irrigation systems.” But in 1948, protests swept the country as a group led by Carlos Delgado Chalbaud, Venezuela’s minister of defense, overthrew the elected government and installed a military junta. Rich landowners became a target; Pujol’s Valencia estate was attacked and destroyed. Forced to sell the property, he earned back only 25,000 bolívares, a quarter of his investment.

  Pujol was devastated. First Franco, then Hitler, now Chalbaud. “It was as if the dictators were following me.”

  That same year, Araceli left him, taking the children, including their infant daughter, Maria, and returned to Spain.

  There are two stories to the end of every marriage. Some say that Pujol sent Araceli home for a visit and callously “abandoned” her there. The MI6 officer Desmond Bristow certainly saw it this way. But Araceli’s family strongly believes the decision was hers. Sophisticated and ambitious, Araceli hated farm life and the Venezuelan boondocks. She saw no future for herself in Valencia, and having sacrificed her relationship with her family for World War II, she was in no mood to do it again. The trust between her and Juan had broken down long ago. So it is likely that she left of her own free will, taking her two boys and her baby daughter, Maria, with her to Spain.

  The break was bitter and deep. After Araceli arrived in Madrid, Pujol wrote to his children on occasion, but the correspondence faded away over time.

  Pujol made his way alone. Araceli struggled to make a new life in Madrid, working as a tourist gu
ide and translator. She rented a boarding house and let out rooms to diplomats from the nearby British embassy; MI5 had not completely forgotten her, and the British government sent lodgers her way so that she could survive. Money was scarce, and the balls and parties and evening dresses of Caracas were now distant memories. “When the world war was over, the personal war against hunger and poverty began,” she wrote, decades later, in a remarkable letter to her grandchildren. “My husband left me, money left me, my social position was difficult. I carried on with the dignity of a lady who would rather die than ask for help.”

  In 1949, a year after Araceli left Venezuela, the British ambassador to Spain came calling with official news: Juan Pujol had died of malaria in Mozambique, in East Africa. What he’d been doing there nobody could say for certain: perhaps seeking his way in a new land, perhaps chasing another fortune like the one he’d lost in Venezuela.

  Araceli was now a widow. Pujol, whom she had once called her “destiny,” was dead.

  Araceli’s feelings at the news of her first love’s passing aren’t recorded. Did she regret their ugly separation? Was she relieved, perhaps, that she hadn’t followed him on his last, fatal quest? Whatever she was feeling, Araceli kept it to herself. She wouldn’t speak of Pujol for many years to come.

  Through hard work and sheer force of her remarkable personality, Araceli pulled through. She began to work in a souvenir shop owned by a Jewish-American expat, Edward Kreisler, a handsome former stunt double for the silent-screen star Rudolph Valentino. Soon she was acting as his translator and secretary. Love bloomed, and the two married in Gibraltar in 1958. Araceli helped Kreisler run the shop in Madrid, which was a fabulous success, and they later expanded into Spanish art. The Kreisler gallery became one of the premier art dealers in the country, and Araceli was finally at the center of Spanish high society. She entertained Charlton Heston, Sophia Loren, Frank Sinatra and Roger Moore at her home at 8 Calle de Pedro de Valdivia, and she helped recruit the most exciting young painters to the gallery. Kreisler, closely allied with the American embassy, became a player in Spanish politics; after an attempted coup on February 23, 1981, he was the mediator who brought two right-wing factions together in a posh Madrid hotel, in a failed attempt to guide Spain down the road to full democracy. Araceli’s dream—love, family, wealth, parties, glamour—had at last come true.

  When asked about Pujol and that phase of her life, Araceli would grow silent, then say, “If I could only tell you.” Instead, she began writing a memoir of her adventures with a fellow gambler, the Spanish writer Raúl del Pozo—who confesses that he was half in love with her, though she was in her seventies—but their relationship never progressed very far. Araceli did have a few fabulous stories of life in wartime London. She talked about meeting with Churchill in his Whitehall office, and how, when the ashes of his cigar fell to his lapel as they chatted, she reached out and brushed them away. And how the Duchess of Kent came calling one day at her home to pick up a package.

  They were wonderful stories, but they represented Araceli’s wishful life more than her actual one. Churchill’s secretary kept a record of all his visitors during the war, and Araceli’s name doesn’t appear in it. Churchill’s official biographer and other experts doubt the meeting ever happened. “The Pujols were kept very, very, very isolated,” says the son of a Spanish journalist active in the expat scene in London. The idea that the Duchess of Kent would come out to the home of an obscure Spanish couple is simply not credible.

  But when Araceli told her stories, people say, you could almost see the gray ashes on Churchill’s dark wool suit.

  After the war, Tommy Harris retreated to his villa, Camp de Mar, on the island of Mallorca, off the coast of Spain. Though he’d been awarded an OBE for his service to the crown, he wanted to forget all about MI5 and the war and espionage in general. “Mallorca was a perfect place for him to disappear,” his nephew says. Harris wanted to think about art, to make art and to live well. Whether he was able to is another story.

  Harris’s home life was often tense. His wife, Hilda, hated the solitude and boredom of Mallorca, and the pair engaged in epic, drunken fights that terrified their friends. After one plate-throwing blowout, his friend Desmond Bristow recalled the scene: “Hilda began crying hysterically … Tommy was sitting on a stool, running his hands through his hair. ‘Oh Christ, Desmond, I’m sorry about this.’” They asked Hilda what the fight had been about, and she replied enigmatically, “Philby.”

  Art was his solace, his refuge. He wrote penetrating essays on Spanish masters; his “Goya, Engravings and Lithographs” is still considered one of the finest studies of the artist’s graphic works. And he painted, often from seven in the morning until eleven at night. The work was often stark: dead bodies, Jesus on the cross, landscapes in sickly greens, beautiful but almost nauseating in their effects. At a 1954 show of his work, the critic for the Scotsman found the paintings’ bleakness to be a challenge. “If the works had been painted in crushed glass, they could scarcely have suggested a greater degree of brittleness.”

  But something else besides a failing marriage was bothering Tommy Harris. He’d gone to Mallorca for the light and the solitude, but the war had followed him. When his villa needed to be rewired, the electrician who arrived turned out to be the Abwehr radio operator who’d received Garbo’s messages in Madrid. The Spanish secret service had reportedly been keeping a close eye on the Brit, suspecting he was spying for the Russians and had chosen his seaside home not for the ocean breezes but for the views it afforded of the American Sixth Fleet steaming along the coast.

  Was Harris the notorious “fifth man” of the Cambridge spy circle, along with his friends Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby and the other two traitors? He’d paid the school fees for Philby’s son, and even returned a 3,000-pound advance to a British publisher when Philby was unwilling to complete a memoir. He’d also had contact with Melinda Maclean, the wife of the Soviet spy Donald Maclean, before she defected to the USSR. London gossip fingered Harris as the paymaster for the Cambridge group. “As an art dealer he had the perfect cover,” said one art expert. “He could be seen to be handling a lot of money and it would not look strange.” Harris’s exhibitions were thronged with journalists, not because of the paintings but because of his notoriety.

  The rumors were untrue; Harris wasn’t the fifth man. But the suspicion hounded him. He consulted a psychiatrist, and as payment gave him Goya lithographs. “He was restless, altered,” says Harris’s nephew. “What Hitler did affected him deeply.” Andreu Jaume, a family friend, says, “I think the war destroyed him.”

  It was an art-related errand that led to his death. Harris and Hilda left a drink-soaked lunch at a Mallorca restaurant with the poet and novelist Robert Graves and drove their brand-new Citroën to get a piece of his pottery fired. The couple began to argue, as they often did. Harris lost control of the car, veered off the twisting road and smashed into a tree, a favorite almond that he’d often used as a subject in his paintings. The elegant ex-spy was thrown from the car. Hilda found him, his shoes knocked off, bleeding from the mouth and ear, near death. “I just cannot say how it happened,” she said.

  The mysterious death only fed the anti-Red hysteria surrounding Harris. He died still enmeshed in the world that he and Garbo had created. Some in the intelligence community suggested that someone who was so good at espionage could never really give it up.

  One of the things left behind in his papers was a review of a painting in white and green. One critic testified that the work “astonishes with its electric and dazzling precision.” It was called Portrait of Juan. Harris had probably painted Pujol in South America, where he visited him at least twice.

  The painting is now lost.

  23. The Return

  IN 1984, AN AGING MAN strolled through the La Trinidad neighborhood of Caracas. He was a balding seventy-two-year-old retiree with warm eyes, often accompanied by his much younger wife, mild and a little chubby. Together they would wal
k in the middle-class neighborhood of unpretentious, low-rise houses. The man was well known among the locals, a doting father who regularly filmed the family’s excursions to the Venezuelan coast, waving at the camera and skipping with his young children, a smile on his face. In the evenings, he sometimes watched sports on TV—he loved soccer and the Olympics especially, but would follow anything, as long as it was competitive—or met with other Spanish exiles in Caracas. There, because of the wild and unorthodox nature of his politics, he was known as “the Anarchist.” Cheerful and almost courtly, he liked to meet friends on sultry evenings and, after dinner and a glass of anisette, to play canasta, a game he’d learned from his father.

  Buried nearly forty years before by MI5, Juan Pujol was actually alive and well and living in Venezuela.

  The death of Pujol had been a fake, Garbo’s last operation. It was meant to throw off the trail any Nazi loyalists who might want to take revenge on him, something that worried Pujol throughout his postwar life. Federico, his former handler in the Abwehr, had caused his pseudo-death. In May 1948, Pujol’s brother-in-law had received a letter from the spy-runner, asking to get in touch with Pujol, giving no explanation. Araceli’s brother passed on the message.

  Pujol wrote Federico back but never received an answer. This worried him, and he got in touch with Tommy Harris to see what he could do. (Pujol had never believed the Harris-as-Russian-spy rumors, by the way: “If he’d worked for the USSR, I would have known it.”) “I begged him to tell anyone who asked after me that I had died,” Pujol recalled, “leaving no trace, as I still wished to be protected from the Nazis.” So Harris killed off Garbo with a bout of malaria in Angola (not Mozambique, as the English ambassador to Spain had told Araceli); later rumors attributed his demise to a bite from a poisonous snake. He’d spread the word through the ranks of MI5 and the British diplomatic service.