The Spy with 29 Names by Jason Webster Read Free Book Online

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 hissupposed 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