This newspaper Article tells the story of Tomas Harris during the Second World War, especially his relationship with Pujol and how he created Garbo. The Article was written by Andreu Jaume, published in the Spanish newspaper El Pais, 19th January 2010. Andreu kindly sent me this article for publishing on this website. To view the original Spanish version <- please click…
TRIBUNE
ANDREU JAUME
Garbo Portrait
Edmond Roch premieres’ Garbo, the spy, “a documentary on Joan Pujol, agent of British secret services. Along with Tommy Harris, created a fictitious web of 27 agents to deceive the Germans
In Garbo, the Spy, the recently released documentary by Edmon Roch on Joan Pujol, alias Garbo, a Catalan recruited by British intelligence as a double agent, whose task was decisive to feed false intelligence to the Nazis about the Normandy invasion, is cited, and very casually, the name of the person who was the case officer in MI5: Tomás Harris (1908-1964). Perhaps the adventure of Pujol is too complex (there are still pages of shadow in his biography, many characters in blurred image of his life) to synthesize it in just 90 minutes. The result is certainly an admirable effort and a stimulating contribution to the genre and the dissemination of one of the most spectacular episodes in the history of espionage, but it is a pity that the image of Harris, inseparable from that of Pujol, has not had the prominence it deserves.
It is true, moreover, that the life of case officer of Garbo give, by its unusual versatility, for another documentary monograph. English, Spanish from his mother side, Tommy Harris was a painter, art-dealer, compulsive collector, millionaire, art scholar specializing in Spanish —his name is in the Prado as one ofthe main donors to the museum—, and legendary host spy ware. At 14 he began studying painting and sculpture at the Slade School of Art in London, where he agreed with Sir William Coldstream and Claude Rogers and studied under Professor Henry Tonks. After a stay in Rome dedicated to sculpture in London followed the footsteps of his father as a gallerist and dealer in antiques. From the thirties to late forties, Harris led the Spanish Art Gallery, one of the most prestigious galleries in England, a showcase of the best classical painting, not just Spanish but also Italian and Flemish. Roger Fry, for example, gladly discovered El Greco in those rooms. And the formidable Gongora portrait painted by Velazquez, to name just one of countless masterpieces he owned, was exhibited in the galleries of Harris, who ended up selling it to the Boston Museum, where it still is.
When war broke out, Harris was recruited by the secret services, first as host of a school for spies called Brickendonbury Hall, in north London, where he met one of his closest and more controversial friends: Kim Philby, the third member Cambridge Circle, the sophisticated Soviet moles in the service of Her Majesty. When the school closed, Harris joined MI5, particularly in the counterintelligence department. Through his deep knowledge of Spanish culture and society he quickly became one of the most valued and respected members of The Circus, as the service was known among his staff. His work was crucial, for example, to break the spy network that Franco was trying to organize in England, but surely the moment of glory came when his superiors appointed him official of Garbo, the most delicate strategy of diversion in the twentieth century.
Together, Harris and Pujol created a fictitious web of 27 agents scattered all over England who allegedly provided to Garbo confidential information about the movements of the allies on the island, which in turn Arabel —Pujol’s nickname for the German— filtered to the Abwher, Hitler’s secret service, through its German links in Madrid. They managed to convince the Nazis that the Allied landing would take place in the Pas de Calais rather than Normandy —what was called Operation Fortitude. There is no doubt, as Roch’s documentary explains in detail, of Pujol’s talent for storytelling, deceit, improvisation and risk, but it is also true that without Harris, Garbo would have not reaped the extraordinary success that is recognized today.
Pujol, unlike what is often assumed, was never in the offices of MI5 and only later learned exactly what was going on and what was the ultimate meaning of their work. Harris became his shadow and the choreographer of the phenomenal real farce that ended up deciding the course of the war. In an apartment in Jermyn Street, Harris and Pujol, assisted by a secretary, Sarah Bishop, imagined and directed, like Prospero and Ariel, the lives of the spectral agents, their profiles, their movements, their mishaps, sometimes even his sudden death. Among his creatures there were Welsh Nationalists, a waiter in Gibraltar, confidents in the Ministry of Information. Harris, who had access to top security sources, selected, dosed and then reflected the information that Pujol handled and distributed, while the D-Day approached. His powers of persuasion proved so unbeatable that even two days after the allies landed on the beaches of Normandy on 6 June 1944, the Germans still believed that the decisive attack would occur at Calais.
After the war, Pujol, for safety reasons, had to go and start a new life and Harris, which basically was always an illusionist, a magician in the shadows of the stage, saw to that. Pujol made with him a long journey that took them first to New York and Washington, where J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI feared dictator, invited them to dinner to meet the duo who had revolutionized the intelligence services and whose methods he wanted to know first hand. From there they went to Venezuela, where Pujol decided to settle with the new identity that Harris had given him: teacher and art specialist. Harris returned to England to spread the news that Pujol had died of malaria in Angola, a theory which was believed until 1984, when the writer Nigel West discovered the whereabouts of Pujol.
For his part, Tomas Harris, exhausted by the stresses of war, decided to sell his business in London and devote himself entirely to his own painting. King George VI had named him Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and even General Eisenhower had wanted to thank him personally for his contribution to victory. For his retirement he chose Camp de Mar, a beautiful bay in Majorca, where he bought and refurbished a house that became his residence and art studio. There he worked feverishly: prints, oil paintings, lithographs, sculpture, ceramics, stained-glass and tapestry designs. Also swelled his collections of furniture, sarcophagi, Reinassance jewelry, XVI tissues, paintings and engravings, mainly by Goya, Durer and Rembrandt. He came to collect the world’s largest private collection of the graphic work of Goya, now in the British Museum under the name of The Tomas Harris Collection. The passion for Goya’s prints led him to write at the very end of his life, an impressive catalog raisonné: Goya engravings and litographs (Oxford, Bruno Cassirer, 1964), reference still inescapable.
Tomas Harris died in a traffic accident in January 1964. Since then his name faded away and only revived when he was wrongly accused in the eighties, of belonging to the network of Soviet spies, because of his close friendship with leading members of the circle of Cambridge: Guy Burgess, Philby and Anthony Blunt. But that’s another story that deserves yet another documentary. In regard to his relationship with Joan Pujol, there is a hitherto unpublished detail that reveals his personality and his peculiar sense of humour better than anything. When he returned to Venezuela, after making Pujol disappear, he brought with him a few canvases in which he had been working and showd them in an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in Madrid, the first in Spain, opened in June 1947. Among Caribbean landscapes and still-lifes, visitors could see a portrait of a man in white and green. The painting was untitled ‘Portrait of Joan’. There he was, for anyone who wanted to see him.
Andreu Jaume is publisher of Lumen
Note from Anita Harris : Read more : The book, ’Garbo’ – written by Juan Pujol (Garbo) and Nigel West
Post written by: Anita Harris
