Agent Garbo (38 page)

Pujol’s reemergence into a brilliant and welcoming light, however, also exposed the dark ending of the London story: How could this warm-hearted man, who adored his father and his second family, have cut himself off from his own Spanish children for decades? It was the final mystery of the secret agent’s life.

When he saw the headlines in the British newspapers, Pujol asked West if the news would reach Spain. Of course, West told him, you’re the greatest World War II hero Spain has. You’ll be everywhere.

Pujol grew nervous. Even after all these years, he was fearful of old Nazis and neo-Nazis learning his name. In fact, when he returned home to Venezuela after the D-Day celebrations, five American skinheads, “blond and Teutonic-looking,”
showed up searching for the man who’d betrayed Hitler. “My telephone rang and rang with threats and intimidation and malicious words of every kind.” He had to go to the mayor to get the thugs run off.

But Pujol had a deeper fear. “He told me that some of his Spanish family
were unaware that he was still alive,” West remembered. And now his children would know his secret.

In Madrid in June 1984,
Juan, Pujol’s eldest son by Araceli (he’d given the same name to his youngest son by Carmen Cilia), was in the bathroom getting ready for the day when the radio announced that a long-lost Spanish war hero had resurfaced. When the announcer said the man’s name, Juan froze in astonishment. He began calling his brother and sister and everyone in the family he could reach. At around the same time, Pujol’s sister Elena was riding the Barcelona subway when a work friend spotted the article about the Catalan spy who’d saved D-Day. Elena glanced over and saw her brother’s photograph; she stared at the picture in shock. Araceli, too, saw a Spanish newspaper with Pujol’s face on the front page. “She went to bed for three days,”
her granddaughter remembers. The reappearance of her first true love shook her to the core.

A reunion between Pujol and his Spanish children
was arranged at Barcelona’s Hotel Majestic. Before the meeting, Araceli gave her children—Juan, Jorge and Maria—one piece of advice: “Don’t open old wounds,” she told them, adding, “Just listen to whatever he says.” When they saw each other, the children and their father burst into tears and ran to embrace. Pujol apologized profusely for missing out on their lives, and they spent a wonderful few hours together. But he never really explained the lost decades.

In the absence of that explanation, his children could only speculate. His eldest son, who was a boy in London during the bombings and the Garbo adventure, spreads his hands. “Perhaps he felt he couldn’t do anything for us.”
Juan Pujol’s own father had provided for his son’s education, but Pujol himself had no money to contribute to his Spanish family; perhaps the thought of showing up in Madrid empty-handed cut him too deeply. Pujol came from a time and a stratum of Spanish society when fathers were expected to provide for their families. But his budget was stretched too tightly to see to his children’s education. Nazi retribution was another possible factor; Pujol genuinely feared it. Keeping in touch with his family, to him, perhaps meant putting them in danger too.

In the years that followed their reunion, Pujol wrote his children and grandchildren long letters full of love and regret. “Destiny intervened in a very painful way,”
he wrote his son Jorge about the moment Araceli took him and his brother and sister to Spain. “I wanted to die.” But the full explanation never quite came. “I was always a good father, but I don’t want to talk more about this because it’s the past and it makes me very sad.” In another letter, more hints: “I don’t talk much about my personal relationships.
My life has been very full of events, patience, illusions, sufferings and deceptions.”

For his children by Araceli, those decades without their father still burn. Even today, his eldest son cannot talk about Pujol without weeping openly, though he swears he feels no bitterness. The letters, however, did help repair the deep wounds of abandonment. They were beautiful and sad, filled with a longing to recapture lost time. “Today, as yesterday, as always,
your letters are fountains of happiness and love for the health of this old man. Reading your letters is like receiving fresh energy and a love that makes me come back to life. I’m very happy to believe that you remember me . . . I love you very much and I’m very sad that I was not able to enjoy more years with you.”

But in reading them, his family must have known that, in some way, the old fabulist was at it again. Wasn’t this the method—long, passionate messages written from a distant exile—that had bewitched the Abwehr? Weren’t the missives written by, as one Spanish journalist who met him said, “the great pretender, the comedian nonpareil”
? And weren’t the details a bit sketchy here and there? He wrote that after the neo-Nazis came looking for him, he “had to disappear for a long time”
and so couldn’t write. Yet his Venezuelan children don’t remember any such disappearance. Isn’t it possible that even with the most painful episode of his life, Pujol couldn’t resist inventing a dramatic detail or two?

It didn’t matter to his children and grandchildren. They accepted Pujol and welcomed him back into their lives. The letters matched the person they met: compassionate, funny, gentle and wounded. Even the evasions were filled with tenderness. His children embraced Pujol as he was, and he loved them back. “He seduced us with the writing,”
admits his granddaughter, without regrets.

Pujol never stopped being Pujol. When, in Spain after his public coming-out, a woman saw the old spy being interviewed, she came over and asked who he was. “I’m a famous writer,”
he said nonchalantly, and his interviewer stared at him in horrified amusement. Pujol posed for a photograph for the Spanish newspaper
El País
wearing an army hat and holding a grenade in each hand, re-creating his death-defying escape from the Republican lines during the Civil War. And at the German embassy in Madrid,
he climbed up the stairs and posed with a smile on his face, the light dancing mischievously in his eyes. As much as he’d risked his life for humanism and for those innocent boys in uniform, it was clear that making utter asses out of the Nazis gave Pujol a wicked, unending pleasure.

Araceli, too, wasn’t safe from his mischief. When he saw how well his Spanish children had turned out, he turned to her and asked, “Why don’t we get married again?”
(Never mind that they were both happily married to other people.) Araceli, for once, was speechless. She relayed the story to the children later, saying only, “Your father is crazy.”

Forty years before, Pujol told a story to his debriefers in that house on Crespigny Road, a story about his brother Joaquín and terrible Gestapo massacres, as Tommy Harris watched every twitch of the Spaniard’s handsome face. That white lie allowed Pujol to connect his fantasies to the real world of war and espionage, enabled him to walk out of the realm of boyhood dreams and into the great drama of his time. But his imagination remained stubbornly his own; he reserved all rights to employ it as he saw fit. One senses Pujol believed that, no matter how much he let his secrets into the world, they belonged to him and to him alone.

On October 10, 1988, Juan Pujol died after suffering a stroke. He was buried in Choroní, next to his daughter, in Venezuela’s Henri Pittier National Park, filled with cloud forests and swept by warm rains from the Caribbean Sea. The graveyard is poorly maintained and overgrown with weeds. Many of the graves are missing their markers. Pujol’s tombstone, however, remains untouched. It has a simple inscription—“Remembered by his wife, children and grandchildren”—along with his name and dates of birth and death.

What else could one write, really, about Pujol’s life other than the usual clichés about “loving father” and “dutiful husband”? The blank stone is true to his achievement. The best spies dwell in silence.

Appendix A: Organizations

Abwehr:
The German intelligence-gathering organization responsible for human espionage, established in 1921.

BiA:
Section within MI5 that “ran” all the controlled agents in England.

German High Command:
The military staff that coordinated the activities of the Luftwaffe, the German navy and the Wehrmacht, the German army.

London Controlling Section:
Founded in June 1942, the LCS was an arm of the Joint Planning Staff responsible for the creation of strategic deception policy and planning.

MI5:
The British internal counterintelligence and security agency.

MI6:
The British Secret Intelligence Service, responsible for foreign intelligence operations.

SD:
the Sicherheitsdienst (“Secret Service”), the intelligence organization of the SS and the Nazi Party.

War Office:
The British government office responsible for the administration of the British army.

XX Committee:
The organization that supplied information to the double agents in Britain, chaired by J. C. Masterman.

Appendix B: The Garbo Network (Entirely Fictitious)

J (1): Pilot on regular flights between England and Portugal. Garbo’s courier.

J (2): RAF officer and “unconscious collaborator” who passed information on rocket batteries in Hyde Park.

J (3): Top official in the Spanish Department of the Ministry of Information. Another “unconscious collaborator” who was assumed by the Germans to be the real W. B. McCann, head of the Spanish section of the ministry. Perhaps Garbo’s most essential agent.

J (4): Censor at the Ministry of Information.

J (5): Secretary at the Secretariat of the Ministry of War and Garbo’s mistress.

No. 1: Portuguese commercial traveler named Carvalho who reported on Devon and Cornwall. “A rather colorless individual,” somewhat lazy and haphazard in his reports.

No. 2: William Maximilian Gerbers. An Englishman of Swiss-German ancestry who was the source for the “Malta convoy” report that first revealed Pujol’s operation to the British.

No. 2 (1): William Gerbers’s widow, recruited into the network,

used as a radio operator and “cutout” between Garbo and his agents.

No. 3: University-educated Venezuelan, nicknamed Carlos, and chief deputy of the Garbo network.

No. 3 (1): Noncommissioned officer in the RAF, stationed in

Glasgow. The agent who purchased the aircraft recognition handbook, later baked into a cake by No. 2 (1).

No. 3 (2): Lieutenant in the 49th British Infantry Division, used mainly in Operation Torch.

No. 3 (3): Greek merchant seaman and fervent communist based in Glasgow, used in Operation Fortitude.

No. 4: “Fred,” a waiter from Gibraltar, essential to the Chislehurst Caves scheme and later used in Fortitude South.

No. 4 (1): Left-leaning technician who helped Garbo obtain a wireless set.

No. 4 (2): Guard in the failed Chislehurst Caves plot and source for No. 4.

No. 4 (3): American NCO, befriended by No. 4 and the source for much of the information on
FUSAG.

No. 5: Brother of the Venezuelan student, No. 3, and a “restless character” who roamed the southern coast of England and Wales before relocating to Canada.

No. 5 (1): Commercial traveler and cousin of No. 5 who passed information on American subjects from his home base in Buffalo.

No. 6: Nicknamed Dick, a South African linguist with strongly anticommunist views. Had to be killed off when his real-world scribe died in a plane crash while traveling from Scotland.

No. 7: Welsh sailor known as Stanley who became head of one of Garbo’s subnetworks.

No. 7 (1): British soldier in the 9th Armored (“Panda”) Division who was used during Operation Starkey.

No. 7 (2): Retired Welsh seaman and founder of the Brothers in the Aryan World Order, used extensively in Fortitude South.

No. 7 (3): English secretary of the Brothers in the Aryan World Order who was the lover of No. 7 (4). Later moved to India.

No. 7 (4): Indian poet and Aryan fanatic known as Rags who reported from Brighton during the run-up to D-Day.

No. 7 (5): Welsh employee of a commercial firm who monitored the areas around Taunton and Exeter.

No. 7 (6): Low-grade operative and member of the Welsh fascists who reported from Swansea.

No. 7 (7): Treasurer of the Brothers in the Aryan World Order who sent in military updates from the Harwich area.

Notes

The references to KV, AIR, PRO WO, PRO AIR, HW and WO all refer to files kept at the National Archives at Kew, England.

Introduction

page

xi “This damned secrecy thing”: George S. Patton, letter to Beatrice Patton, March 6, 1944. Quoted in Patton, p. 421.

xii “a living dynamo”: Quoted in Ambrose,
Eisenhower,
p. 88.
He was smoking four packs: D’Este, p. 326.
“bowed down with worry”: McManus, p. 116.
Waiting for him in France: Hesketh, p. 101.

xiii “thought to be held as a centrally controlled mobile reserve”: Ibid.
“slim, elegant little man”: Holt, p. 216.
“Just keep the Fifteenth Army”: Quoted in Holt, p. 579.

xiv “the best actor in the world”: Pujol and West, p. 120.

xv “power-drunk egocentric”: Quoted in Ambrose,
Eisenhower,
p. 52.
“I had the idea”: Juan Pujol, interview with Josep Espinas,
Identities,
Catalan TV documentary, date unknown.
the man they called Jesus: Bristow, p. 271.
“I wanted to start a personal war”: Author interview with Rafael Fraguas.

1. Tom Mix in Barcelona

4 “complicit expression in his ironic gaze”: Juárez, p. 39.
“In my house”: Juan Pujol, letter to Tamara Kreisler, May 6, 1988.
“I really believed”: Ibid.
“I was constantly covered”: Ibid.

5 “That cowboy was doing”: Ibid.
“The contents of my fevered fantasies”: Ibid.
“I wanted to be the beloved hero”: Ibid.
his nickname was Bullet: Ibid.
“I didn’t hurt anybody”: Juan Pujol, letter to Tamara Kreisler, May 8, 1988.
“Punishments and retribution”: Ibid.
“sturdy and straightforward”: Pujol and West, p. 22.
“He taught me to respect”: Pujol and West, p. 24.
four “interminable” years: Ibid., p. 23.