Operation Garbo (25 page)

DONNY
was prepared to carry on, in spite of a severe asthma attack, as was
BENEDICT
, but
DORICK
and
DICK
had already announced their intention to resign.
DORICK
was not convinced that his
continued involvement would help the Welsh Nationalists, and
DICK
, the Indian, claimed that he had only helped in order to assist his mistress and, anyway, intended to return to India at the end of the war. Eventually, on 1 May, the Abwehr were forced to admit that
GARBO
should cease operations altogether:

On 3 May
GARBO
himself admitted defeat and requested Madrid to burn any compromising files they may have accumulated on him or his network. He added:

The Abwehr were suitably impressed with his expressions of undying loyalty and seemed prepared to entertain
GARBO
’s latest idea, that he go back to Spain and start a new spy ring to penetrate the Soviets. Madrid replied on 6 May:

Two days later, in his penultimate wireless communication with the Abwehr,
GARBO
received specific instructions on how to renew contact on his arrival in Madrid. He was to go to La Moderna bar at 141 Calle Alcalá every Monday evening and carry a copy of the
London News
under his arm. Between eight and half-past he would be approached by ‘a friend of Fernando Gomez’. This intermediary would give further instructions.

In his final transmission
GARBO
said:

Some months later, when
GARBO
finally returned to Spain after a brief visit to the United States and South America, he followed the instructions he’d been given and managed to track down his Abwehr case officer to the small Spanish town of Avila. A broken man, desperate not to be deported to Germany, he begged
GARBO
to help his escape to South America.
GARBO
’s reply? He promised to consult
BENEDICT
or
DAGOBERT
.

F
rom the moment I set foot in England in 1942 until I left after the war, I gained great pleasure from the beauty of the countryside, from the lush greenness of London’s gardens and from the great variety of trees which lined the streets and filled the parks. I arrived in April, when the country was just about to appear at its best; the days were getting longer and the sun, the little sun that there is at that time of year, came peeping through the cloudy skies, welcoming me with its warmth and friendliness to a land which was to be a most hospitable host, a land which received me with open arms and often made me feel extremely happy, especially when it allowed me to associate myself with its joys and sorrows.

Although it was April, I found England cold. The day after my arrival I asked Tommy Harris if he would come with me to help me buy some warm clothes, but that had to wait. First I had to undergo a long and detailed interrogation. Mr Grey led the cross-examination, with Harris interpreting.

My English was not just poor, it was almost non-existent, so they suggested that I should, as a matter of priority, have some lessons so that I could learn the basics of the language of Shakespeare. However, I thought it much more important to make immediate contact with the Germans, sending them some really useful information, for I had been silent for some
weeks. Three days later, after consulting various sections of MI5, we sent the Abwehr a juicy letter that, for the first time, included true information about England.

As soon as Colonel T. A. Robertson, who was responsible for MI5’s B1(a) section, dealing with counter-espionage through double agents, and his fellow officers had given me their full backing, Tommy Harris and I concentrated hard on drawing up a short-term and a long-term program of action.

Tommy Harris had endeared himself to me right from the start, not just from the firm way he had shaken my hand but because he had also put his arm around my shoulders in a gesture of protection and friendship. We soon began to confide in each other and I always trusted him completely; my trust was never misplaced. Together, we invented the role of
GARBO
, a creation that afforded us both great pleasure. Someone has said that
GARBO
without Harris or Harris without
GARBO
would have been unthinkable, for both were crucial to the other in carrying out the work that had to be done!

Tomás Harris, or Tommy as we affectionately called him, must have been thirty-five or forty then. Although he loved art and although painting was his dominant passion and his peacetime livelihood, he was no unkempt bohemian but an extremely sensible and capable individual, who always dressed impeccably in an elegant sports jacket, which he wore with a most distinctive air. He smoked like a chimney and the fingers of his right hand were almost chestnut coloured as he never put out a cigarette until it was about to burn him. Always
cheerful
, he had a most attractive smile. His wife Hilda, whom he adored, was also charming and very loving; both were
gourmets
who enjoyed good food and an excellent bottle of wine. Tommy owned an impressive art collection, which included paintings by Velázquez, Goya and Rubens, as well as those by more recent innovative artists. He also painted himself; his early works leant towards the El Greco School but, in the later part of his life, he was influenced by Goya. But he painted almost
nothing during the war as his time was fully taken up with our mutual task. Tommy became a very great friend and a most hard-working and indefatigable colleague for whom I had the greatest admiration.

I continued to live in Hendon, travelling into the office in Jermyn Street, off St James’s, every day. Once in the office I would sit down and write letters in Catalan hour after hour, leaving wide spaces between the lines so that I could then insert whatever Tommy and I had concocted in between in invisible ink. When the V-1s began, I went to live at a hotel near Taplow in Buckinghamshire owned by a Spaniard who came from Valencia. There were about twenty-five other guests there, including a red-haired girl of Jewish extraction who was always asking me for Spanish lessons, and I also remember a Spanish vice-consul and a Czech couple. It wasn’t a bad existence. I told them all I worked for the BBC and I commuted up to London every day by train. When I returned in the evening, we would sometimes have a party and I would dance. At that time I was very good at the paso doble and the foxtrot.

V-2s were more frightening than V-1s. On 8 September at 6.43 p.m. there was a screaming noise followed by a great explosion, which shattered about twenty buildings in the centre of London. Sixteen seconds later a whole block disappeared in another part of London, literally falling down like a house of cards. No one had heard the characteristic whine of the V-1’s engine nor seen any plane in the sky. This was the beginning of the V-2s.

The first V-2 fell on a school and killed seventy-eight
children
. No one knew where it had come from. It seemed to fall straight out of the stratosphere and it left a crater over eight metres deep. Everyone was surprised to find ice in these craters, a by-product of the rocket’s stratospheric route. There was no possible defence then known against these flying bombs.

Soon the Germans wanted to know exactly where the point of impact was for each V-2, so we sent them false information
in order to make sure that the rockets fell on the outskirts of London and not on the most densely inhabited areas, but doing this pricked my conscience. It was not easy to find areas of low population density near London and I was all too well aware that the least error could cost thousands of innocent lives. The Germans became more and more insistent with their demands for details and I became increasingly nervous, as they could easily discover that I was giving them false information.

Then on a glorious – though for many people also tragic – day, 6 June 1944, British and American troops landed in Normandy and were eventually victorious; and so we were able to bring Western democracy back to Europe and to end
hostilities
with the least possible number of casualties.

The work Tommy Harris and I did was hard at times because it meant having to solve complex problems and make difficult decisions. All the messages we sent exist on file, and I hope that one day they will all be published in full. For the time being, MI5 keeps them secret, even though some of them have leaked out. I was very proud to be given the MBE during the war; although it had to be presented to me privately, I had prepared a little speech for the occasion and, when I had been given it, all those present began to bang on the table to congratulate me. It was a very moving moment.

In my last message to the Germans I told them that I would try to go to South America by boat as soon as I could. Then, on 7 May 1945, London exploded with joy: people invaded Piccadilly Circus and Regent Street, and traffic came to a standstill; everyone was drinking beer, singing and dancing to celebrate the arrival of peace. Our office was disbanded;
GARBO
had no more messages to send and the whole team was broken up. I lost touch with most of them except for Tommy Harris, who had always been my best friend in MI5. They didn’t want me to leave the country and even offered me a managerial job with the Eagle Star Insurance Company, but I had made up my mind to go to South America because I believed that the pact
between the Allies and the USSR was not going to last and I feared that another war would soon follow.

I left Great Britain in June 1945 on board a Sunderland hydroplane for the United States, accompanied by Tommy Harris, for MI5 were determined to look after
GARBO
right to the end. The British were always marvellous to me and, at the end of the war, MI5 gave me £15,000 as a reward for my work; they arranged for this money to be sent to Caracas through the Banco de Londres y Sud América.

We left from Southampton and landed in Baltimore after a twenty-four-hour flight. From there we went to Washington, where I had an interview with J. Edgar Hoover, the boss of the FBI, who wanted to meet me personally. He invited both Tommy and me to his house, where we had dinner in an
underground
room. Hoover showed great interest in my activities as a double agent and was most affable throughout, but he never asked me to work for him.

Tommy Harris and I then stayed in New York for a few days, after which I left him there while I went on to visit Cuba, Mexico and several other countries in South America. I was looking for somewhere which appeared safe and comfortable, free from nationalist extremism, and whose future looked
prosperous
and likely to become democratic, a country where I felt I could settle down permanently; finally, I chose Venezuela.

In 1945 Caracas, a true ‘Sultana del Avila’, had about 400,000 inhabitants and was a peaceful city, except for the appalling traffic. The traffic was so bad, even then, that when President Roosevelt’s wife was asked what she thought of the city by a local journalist, she replied: ‘Caracas? Oh, it’s just a huge garage.’ General Medina was governing the country, although he had originally been a member of the dictator General Gomez’s government, but he was gradually allowing the country to become more democratic.

The first thing I did on arrival was to go to the Spanish consulate in Caracas and obtain a resident’s permit, an identity
card, a driving license and all the other essential documents which would enable me to settle down there for good. I wanted to be forgotten, to pass unnoticed and to be
untraceable
. I therefore pretended that my passport had been stolen and asked if I could have a new one. I did this so that I could destroy my old passport; then no one would be able to see all the visas in it and so find out where I had come from. The Spanish consular offices in Caracas quickly furnished me with a brand new passport and, armed with this and all my other documents, I embarked on a liner for Barcelona. I wanted to see my family again and I had arranged to meet Tommy Harris in Madrid.

The ship was called the
Cabo de Buena Esperanza
and, after various stops, it eventually reached Barcelona. I found that my brother Joaquin had married after the civil war and now had two sons. Sadly, he never lived to enjoy the company of his grandchildren for he died at sixty-two, a victim indirectly of the privations he had undergone during his months in the front line, spent wandering up and down the mountains with his Republican unit, retreating toward France. Elena was still single, while Buenaventura was still happily married to the most sensible, hard-working, honest and affectionate man ever to be wished for by any woman. Although she and Frederic had no children, God had blessed this union from the start with love and harmony.

I then went to Madrid to join Tommy Harris, who now introduced me to Desmond Bristow, an MI6 officer who had spent the war in Gibraltar and North Africa. Both of them now put forward a new project which they had thought up: they suggested that I renew my contact with members of the German Secret Service still in Spain and offer to continue to work for them, so that eventually I could get in touch with those Germans who were in Soviet-occupied Germany. At that time all the Allied intelligence services were on the
lookout
for German intelligence officers who were thought to be
roaming around Europe, the idea being to penetrate the Soviet Secret Service through those Germans whom the Soviets had recruited. I volunteered to go ahead with this plan though, thinking back, it showed alarming temerity on my part, for no one knew how the Germans in Madrid would react to seeing me again. But, anyway, I agreed to do it: I made contact again.

In the end I telephoned Madrid 333572 and asked for Gustav Knittel – the real name of the Abwehr agent Federico – who lived at Plaza Aunos 6. A voice answered that he wasn’t there, but now lived outside Madrid, and the person to help me was Eberhardt Kieckebusche, who lived in Calle Sil 5 in the El Viso quarter of Madrid.

I had never had direct contact with Kieckebusche but, when I arrived at his house, he seemed very pleased to see me and invited me in for a meal. He looked like a Prussian, had been a commander in the Abwehr and a very good friend of Admiral Canaris. Kieckebusche had been in Spain ever since the civil war; he’d arrived at the same time as the Kondor Legion.

We shut ourselves in his office and he began to show me the greater part of all the messages I had sent him; he even produced the book which we had used for sending objects in, which had had its centre pages cut out in order to turn it into a secret box. He talked to me about ‘our great task’ and explained to me that things were difficult for the Germans in defeat. He told me that he was running an import/export
business
, which was doing quite well, and offered to help me in any way he could; he then handed me 25,000 pesetas in gratitude for all that I had done for the Reich. He also gave me Federico’s address and told me that he was hiding in a little village in the Guadarrama Mountains.

Federico was not at all at ease when I met him. He gave me the impression that he was a very frightened man. Spain was a relatively safe country for Nazi officers to hide in, but many members of the intelligence service seemed to fear that they might be kidnapped or eliminated by their opposite numbers
on the Allied side. Federico was greatly saddened by Germany’s defeat, so I continued to play my role of a Nazi sympathiser and told him that better times lay ahead. I offered my services and said that I would be glad to continue to work for him. He fell for it completely – he believed me – and advised me to tie everything up with Kieckebusche.

I went back to Madrid and had another meeting with Kieckebusche, during which he said that all the members of the German Secret Service in Spain were either disbanded or out of touch with one another. He said that his old friend Canaris had been executed by the Nazis themselves and that most of his superior officers were either dead or had been arrested. It was therefore difficult for him to plan anything at the moment, as there was no organisation left; he would have to wait a while. I told him that I was thinking of settling down in South America and he gave me the Barcelona address of some people he thought I might find helpful, should I think of importing Spanish goods. Federico had been quite critical of Hitler and his conduct of the war, but Kieckebusche was much more prudent and suggested that the Nazis had been defeated by bad luck.