Agent Garbo (37 page)

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.

As for Araceli, she had seen through the scheme. Perhaps she’d wised up after Pujol’s performance in Camp 020, but she never bought the malaria story. In 1957, she even wrote her ex-husband and asked him for a divorce so she could marry Edward Kreisler.

After Araceli left for Spain in 1948,
Pujol had rebuilt his life from scratch at the age of thirty-six. He met and married a woman twenty years younger than himself, Carmen Cilia Álvarez, a mixed-race descendant of Canary Islanders, well known in Spain for the beauty of their women. They married in Mexico in 1959 and had two sons, Carlos Miguel and Juan Carlos, and a daughter, Maria Elena. Pujol ran a newsstand to support his family but eventually went to work for Shell Oil in Maracaibo, teaching English to the Venezuelan workers and Spanish to the imported foreign staff. In the small resort town of Lagunillas, he also opened a small souvenir shop in a luxury hotel—ironically, the same business that Araceli had found herself in briefly. He kept the Iron Cross in its fading silk-covered box, and when a friend came across it, Pujol said, “Oh, I won a medal during the war,”
and nothing more.

His last attempt at being an independent businessman—operating a hotel called Marisel (“Sea and Sky”), in the former plantation town of Choroní, where there were hardly any roads to deliver the tourists—failed spectacularly, as all his ventures had. Children in the village remembered the movies Pujol showed at the little cinema in the hotel, one of the last remnants of his old life in Spain, but that business, too, went nowhere. He’d chosen a town that today boasts dozens of hotels and has become a well-known tourist destination, but he was too early for the boom. Through it all, Pujol never grew bitter. He delivered food regularly to the poor and was a devout Christian, until Maria Elena after giving birth to her son. Then Pujol gave up the faith in anguish.

So the greatest spy of World War II lived in obscurity, telling stories about his escapades to his family but nobody else. “I wanted to forget all about the war,” he said. He’d never found a role in life to equal his work as Garbo; his fertile and riotously colorful mind had never proved useful for another occupation. He worked, raised a family and traveled occasionally to see his sister and brother in Barcelona. Araceli had never spoken about him to their children, however, and his sons and daughter by her grew up believing he’d died years before. Pujol also mourned his friend Tommy Harris: “[He’d] endeared himself to me right from the start, not just from the firm way he had shaken my hand but also from the way he had also put his arm around my shoulders in a gesture of protection.”

As with Harris, the war had never left Pujol; it had turned him into a kind of permanent double agent. “He had the mania for safety
that all spies have,” one journalist remembered. In cafés, he would sit with his back to the wall, facing the entrance, so he could observe everyone who came in. He would never leave a phone number or tell his contacts where he was calling from.
When visiting Spain, he stayed in a hotel close to the airport, “just in case he had to make a fast getaway.” When he visited his family in Barcelona, he was always heading to the consulate on mysterious business he wouldn’t talk about, and he refused to give his own family his address in Venezuela. Making up an excuse about its being a “very difficult address to write to,” he handed them a slip of paper with a post office box written on it. When he wanted to post a letter,
he’d walk by ten mailboxes on the way to the central post office. He just didn’t trust the boxes.

Pujol’s family in Barcelona loved him deeply, but there was no question that Uncle Juan was different. “We thought it strange,”
his nephew admitted. “A normal person doesn’t do these things.” He would realize later that in fact his uncle was two people: “There was Juan Pujol and there was Garbo. With Juan Pujol we had a close, loving relationship.” But Garbo they didn’t know at all.

In 1973, Pujol’s youngest son
in Venezuela, Juan, received a call from his father. Two strange men with British accents had called Juan Sr. out of the blue and asked to meet him in a Caracas hotel. Juan knew the stories of his father’s World War II adventures; they’d become a small part of his childhood. It was hard to think of this gentle man playing spy in London and pitting his wit against the Nazis; Pujol just didn’t seem like a man who’d mastered the art of deception. “He was a very simple man, an honorable man. If he said he was going to do something, he did it.”

The secret had flashed out only a few times. Once, when Juan Jr. was a college student
in Mississippi, he began dating a local girl. Her stepfather didn’t like Latinos, or anyone dark-skinned, in fact. “He was very old and very racist.” When his father came to visit him, Juan mentioned the problems he was having with the man. It stung the ex-spy. Soon after, at lunch with the girlfriend’s family, Pujol leaned across the table and talked directly to the stepfather. “He told him what he’d done during the war, how he’d tricked the Germans and saved thousands of American lives.” The stepfather listened silently to the story, “amazed” that the Spaniard with the strange accent sitting across from him was the man who’d helped save D-Day.

Now the past had emerged in the form of these British agents. Over the phone, Pujol asked his son to come to the hotel as backup, in case something happened. Exactly what that might be, Pujol couldn’t say. As he thought about it, the young man grew worried. South America was honeycombed with old Nazis who’d fled Germany after the war. What if this was a setup? What if his father was at long last going to be assassinated for the murky things he did in the forties? Juan decided to be ready: he went to a friend and borrowed a gun.

He arrived at the hotel with his father, and Pujol went up to meet the two agents. Downstairs, Juan felt the weight of the pistol in his pocket as he counted the minutes on the lobby clock. “Thirty minutes and you come up,” his father had said. Five minutes passed with no sign of his father. Then ten. At about twenty-five, Juan realized that he was so frazzled he’d completely forgotten the number of the room where the rendezvous was taking place. He hurried to the front desk and got the number. The gun slapping against his thigh, he ran to the elevator and pressed the button for the right floor, but the car began sinking toward the basement and stopped. Panicking a little, Juan got the elevator car moving upward, found the room, pushed open the door and rushed inside. It was empty.

He found his father in the lobby downstairs, smiling. The two men were officials from the British embassy in Caracas who’d wanted to discuss some MI5 matters. There were no Nazi assassins on his trail. And the agency’s files, thankfully, didn’t reveal Pujol’s real name.

The identity of Garbo had been the holy grail for espionage historians of World War II for many years. One book,
The Counterfeit Spy—
written by the agent Sefton Delmer, who’d taught the Germans how to say “I burn” after the rumors of a flammable English Channel had spread across the Continent—had laid out some details of the operation, with Pujol given the code name Cato. But most people believed the real man was long dead. Even those who’d worked closely with him at MI5—Cyril Mills, Desmond Bristow, Tar Robertson—believed he’d succumbed to disease in the jungles of Angola. The number of people who knew the truth could probably be counted on one hand.

The British intelligence historian Nigel West, however, had made finding Garbo a personal cause. He’d begun searching
for the legendary double agent in 1972, after reading Sir John Masterman’s account of the double-cross operations in World War II. Twice West thought he’d found the real Garbo, only to have his candidates turn out to have nothing to do with the case. Then, in 1981, West interviewed Anthony Blunt, a friend of Tommy Harris’s and member of the Cambridge spy circle. Blunt had mentioned Garbo in a book he’d published, and West asked for more details. Blunt recalled only one: Garbo had used the name Juan or José García.

West included the name and the story of Garbo in his book on MI5. A former member of the agency picked up the book in Málaga, the southern Spanish coastal city dotted with pubs and fish-and-chips restaurants that was a favorite of British retirees. Desmond Bristow, the man who’d first debriefed Juan Pujol, read the book and wrote West a letter, describing the young Spaniard he’d met forty-odd years before in the house at 35 Crespigny Road. When West flew to Spain, the two Brits met and Bristow revealed the man’s name: Juan Pujol García.

West felt the prize within his reach. He hired a Spanish researcher to call every Juan Pujol García in the Barcelona phone book. The researcher asked the men and women who picked up the phone three questions: Did they know a Juan Pujol García, was he in his sixties or seventies, and was he in London during the war? For weeks, the investigator worked his way through the names. But each call gave the same result: there was no elderly Juan Pujol García who had spent time in England during the forties. For West, years into his quest, it was another dead end in a case full of them.

In reviewing the calls, however, the researcher did remember one that didn’t go like all the rest: “I spoke to one person,
who I could tell was too young to be our target, who kept on asking me questions. After so many abortive conversations, this one stands out in my mind as being quite different.” The young man demanded to know who was looking for Juan Pujol García, and why.

West urged the investigator to try again, and after a series of guarded conversations, the man on the other end of the phone made a startling admission: he was Juan Pujol’s nephew, and he’d received a postcard from his uncle several years before, postmarked Venezuela, though he hadn’t seen him for twenty years.

In 1984, as the fortieth anniversary of D-Day approached, West invited Tar Robertson, Cyril Mills and Desmond Bristow—all of whom knew the spy’s real identity, and all of whom believed him to have died decades before in the jungles of Angola—to the Special Forces Club in London to meet “the real Garbo.” The former intelligence officers agreed, believing West was going to make an ass of himself once again. “I’d been wrong twice before. They probably thought they were going to get a free drink off me. They assumed the character that I was going to produce from South America was almost certainly the wrong person.”

At the appointed time, Juan Pujol walked into the room. In silence the men studied the features of the old man standing in front of them. Finally, Cyril Mills shouted, “I don’t believe it. It
can’t
be you. You’re dead.” Tar Robertson burst into tears, and the men rushed to embrace the diminutive Spaniard as his wife, Carmen Cilia, looked on. The former spies, separated for forty years, “hugged each other like footballers after a goal.”
Watching, West thought it was “one of the most remarkable things I’d ever seen in my life.”

The man who’d been there at the beginning, the tough-minded Desmond Bristow, embraced Pujol, but still couldn’t figure out who he really was. Was Pujol a hero or a con man? “Some very strange things happened
around Pujol . . . I’m still not sure of his reasons [for spying] today.” Bristow’s friendship with Araceli after the war had soured him on the man. “My father respected him in a certain way,”
says his son, Bill, “but didn’t like him as a human being. He thought Pujol was cold, calculating and totally self-motivated.”

The rest of the world disagreed. Pujol was revealed to the British and the world as the last great hero of World War II. “The Spy Who Came Back from the Dead” announced the
Mail on Sunday.
A newspaper ran television ads saying, “You’ve heard of General Eisenhower.
You’ve heard of General Montgomery. On Sunday we reveal the name of the third person who made the success of D-day possible.” Pujol was invited to Buckingham Palace to formally receive his MBE, and there he met the Duke of Edinburgh, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II, who asked him why he’d felt compelled to volunteer to save England and the free world. “I knew the Nazis had to be destroyed,”
Pujol told him. “And I knew they could only be destroyed from within.” In the whirlwind of interviews and personal meetings, Pujol reinforced one point over and over again: his greatest satisfaction hadn’t been about ideology or nationalism. It came from knowing that he’d saved thousands of lives, including those of the German soldiers who would have died had D-Day failed and the war dragged on for months or even years longer than it did.

Omaha Beach, then, came as a shock to the ex-spy. West took Pujol there as part of the D-Day remembrances; the sands swarmed with 100,000 visitors, many of them American and British veterans of the invasion. When Pujol visited the cemetery that housed the remains of thousands of servicemen who’d died yards away on the beaches, he began to weep. He knelt on the sand, made the sign of the cross and bowed his head. West remembered thinking that they’d come to Normandy to celebrate, but here was Pujol, inconsolable. When he finally rose from his knees and approached West, all Pujol could say was “I didn’t do enough.”

But soon word spread along Omaha Beach just who the diminutive Spaniard was. One American colonel was being interviewed
on the beach and the journalist asked him if he’d heard of the spy code-named Garbo. “Yes, I’ve heard of that gentleman,” the colonel replied. “Well,” said the reporter, “he’s standing right next to you.” The man turned to embrace Pujol. Another soldier took him by the hand to a group of veterans and said, “I have the pleasure of introducing Garbo, the man who saved our lives.” Old men jostled to shake his hand, and the wives and daughters of the soldiers hugged and kissed him. Tears were shed. “It was very, very exciting,” Pujol remembered. The happiness of seeing that these men had gone on to live full lives, to raise children and see their grandchildren born, because of what he and Tommy Harris had done, was written on Pujol’s face with a certain sly joy. These were the soldiers he’d walked among on those strolls in London’s parks, their guardian angel who prayed for their deliverance.