Agent Garbo (5 page)

Araceli had grown up in the province of Galicia, in the small northwestern town of Lugo, the only extant town in the world still surrounded by intact Roman walls. It was as ancient and insular as it sounded. When Araceli claimed that “Lugo was the kind of place
where people died in the bed they’d been born in,” she meant it literally. Instead of receiving a first-class education that would allow them to make their way in the world, Araceli and other girls of her station were sent to “ladies’ school” and then to be trained in a minor profession where they could meet a respectable husband. Araceli was steered into nursing. “It was the best way to leave us
without culture,” she wrote bitterly. “I always wanted to talk, to reason, to discuss.” Everything modern and exciting was far away: “We lived in a fantasy world
of the good girls of Lugo.”

Araceli rebelled. After her nurse’s training, she raced off to the regional center, Burgos, and volunteered to treat the wounded. She took with her an enormous wooden chest,
custom made by one of the finest carpenters in her hometown, which held all her dresses, shoes and warm coats. The closet became a kind of movable Lugo, lugged by moving men to each new residence she found herself in, filled with memories of the happy but smothering town she’d left behind.

Araceli was fiercely intelligent, adventurous, dramatic and a bit vain. “All my friends would say,
you have to fly away and see the world, you’re too special for here.” They were right, actually: Lugo was too drab and backward to hold her. But Araceli also had the grit to back up her ambitions. A friend and fellow nursing student,
Cachita, remembered their first day of working at the hospital in Lugo, where the Nationalist wounded were brought in from the front. Araceli and Cachita were told to clean up one of the treatment rooms. Cachita, who’d grown up with maids at home just like Araceli, was appalled at the blood-soaked wrappings and pus-smeared bandages. She stormed out; cleaning was beneath her. Araceli, to Cachita’s amazement, not only stayed but proceeded to pick up the dressings, sweep the floor and make the room fit to receive more wounded. It wasn’t work for a society girl: wrapping amputated legs, smelling the gangrene and the blood, watching young men die. But Araceli didn’t turn away.

Pujol and Araceli met in the spring of 1939. “I went to Burgos
and that’s where my destiny was waiting for me,” Araceli said. Meeting Pujol “was where my life began.” She called him Juanito and he called her Aracelita. They were both young, in their mid-twenties, and bursting with ambition. “Where he was weak, she was strong,
and vice versa,” their daughter Maria said. And they were both dreamers: Antoñita la Fantástica and the boy who wanted to be Tom Mix.

As the two fell in love, Franco’s super-Catholic, hysterically nationalist regime clamped down on the country. In Navarre, men in short-sleeve shirts
were banned from cafés, and women had to adhere to strict rules of dress—which makeup was suitable and which too provocative. Books by Jews and Freemasons were publicly burned in Pamplona. Movie censors snipped parts of the Gettysburg Address from D. W. Griffith’s 1930 film on Abraham Lincoln, which must have cut at Pujol’s Hollywood-loving heart. The regime’s suppression reached all the way down to the menus of neighborhood
cervecerías:
“Russian salad” became “National salad,” as Moscow was still affiliated with the defeated Reds. Newspaper editors received official edicts telling them articles were to be written in “the language of Don Quixote” as opposed to the more modern vernacular. Identity cards had to be carried at all times. On them, each citizen was given one of three possible ratings: “Addicted” to Franco’s cause, “Indifferent” or “Disaffected.” The disaffected were fired from their jobs.

Pujol hated extremism and intolerance above everything else, and here they were, running roughshod over the Spanish. He hated the suffocating atmosphere of Francoist Spain, the near outlawing of free thought. Not only that, Franco made his sympathies clear when it came to the increasingly tense “phony war” between Hitler and the future Allies. Spain’s police and Seguridad—the intelligence service—worked closely with the Nazis: passports for Spanish citizens were granted or denied based on German lists of who was trustworthy. Those suspected of speaking against the Führer
were often kidnapped and brought to Berlin for trial. The rabidly anti-British press was under the thumb of the sinister and all-powerful Hans Lazar, a Turkish Jew turned Catholic and a rabid Nazi who’d married a Transylvanian baroness and come to Madrid as the press attaché for the German embassy. Lazar reportedly had a bedroom done up as a chapel, complete with plaster saints and candles. He slept under the altar. With his jet-black eyes glinting behind a monocle, this morphine addict threw extravagant dinner parties featuring goose liver flown in from Paris, parties attended by everyone who was anyone in Madrid. He was considered the best-informed man in Spain, and the two hundred newspapers under his control fed Nazi propaganda to a receptive nation. Under Lazar, Spain practically became a German colony.

Madrid and its suburbs in the winter of 1939 gave a preview of what London could reasonably expect
from war. “The countryside . . . was pockmarked by shell holes,”
said the MI6 officer Desmond Bristow, who passed through Madrid just after the ceasefire was declared. “The empty trenches wound their snakelike courses, twisted tanks and trucks lay around, all presenting a scene which not only saddened me, but gave me nervous twinges . . . As we slowly rattled northwards, the dangling power-lines, broken telegraph poles, bomb-shattered and machine-gun-bullet-marked walls, really wakened me to the destructive elements of war.”

Desperate to survive in the city, Pujol answered an ad in a Madrid newspaper and took a job as the manager of the three-star Hotel Majestic near the city’s famous Calle Velázquez. The thirty-room hotel had once been an elegant destination for the middle classes, but during the war its suites had been commandeered by the International Brigade. It was now a half-wrecked shell, its central heating system constantly on the blink and its hallways grimy. “It didn’t even deserve one star,”
Pujol sighed, but the Majestic gave him a place to stay and a meager income.

Pujol hoped, like his entrepreneurial father, to build the hotel back into a thriving gem, but soon it became clear that there would be neither funds nor paying guests to bankroll a functioning furnace, let alone fresh wallpaper. He walked the shabby halls growing more and more depressed. He’d found a tenuous foothold in the dark city, but he refused to settle in. “Francoist Madrid was too small for him
and Araceli,” said a Spanish journalist. “They were looking beyond the horizon.” It was easier said than done, however: getting a passport in 1939 Madrid was a nearly impossible task, requiring luck and connections in high places.

On September 1, 1939, German panzers rolled over the Polish border. World War II had begun. For Pujol, Hitler was “a maniac, an inhuman brute.”
He was shocked by the suffering of the Polish people as the Nazi SS swept through town after town, executing resisters. “My humanist convictions
would not allow me to turn a blind eye to the enormous suffering that was being unleashed by this psychopath.”

Pujol had stayed on the sidelines in the Spanish Civil War, with its multiple factions and brutal extremes, but this was different: one side was evil and one was good. Everything he held dear—humanism, tolerance, freedom—lay with the Allies. He threw his allegiance to them and never wavered in his loyalty.

But what could Pujol do? He was a hotel manager, an ex–chicken farmer and a committed pacifist. He had very little money. There were no openings for men like him in the Allied ranks, and besides, he was trapped in Madrid. Pujol stewed in the wrecked Hotel Majestic, listening obsessively to the radio, whispering to friends about the Nazis and suffering what sounds like mild symptoms of post-traumatic stress: “I would be tormented
by odd pieces of information and graphic details which merged in my imagination into a confused and horrible nightmare.” By 1940, the news on the wireless got darker and darker. In April, Denmark and Norway fell. The next month it was the turn of Belgium, Holland and France. On May 26, the tragedy at Dunkirk unfolded. On June 10, Italy entered the war on the German side. Two weeks later, Pétain surrendered in the name of France. Hitler seemed unstoppable.

The only relief was his marriage to his beloved Araceli in April 1940, in Madrid. Otherwise, Pujol listened, brooded and plotted, both his despair and his convictions growing stronger as the days passed.

After months of talking with Araceli, Pujol decided he had to find a way to volunteer for the Allies. Perhaps he could go to London and work for the BBC, write and produce shows in Castilian on freedom and politics. Or
something.
The details were vague. But he desperately wanted to be part of the fight.

There was more to it. Perhaps Pujol wanted to prove himself worthy of this vibrant woman on his arm. Perhaps he realized that life as a hotel manager wouldn’t hold Araceli for long, that she deserved—no, required—something altogether more rare and dramatic. Certainly she’d given him a shot of confidence.

The lure of espionage spoke to some of the deepest and earliest desires within Pujol: it promised to give his imagination a chance to run riot in the world, and at long last answer the echoes of his father’s entreaties—
do good, believe in your fellow human being.
He’d tried to be a dutiful son, but he had no talent for business and he’d been a farce as a soldier. Spying would allow him to honor his father and at the same time declare his own rather eccentric personality, which happened to find great joy in the thought of tricking fascists.

How exactly he came upon the scheme that would turn him into one of the war’s great double agents is somewhat mysterious. There was no master plan. “If a Pythian oracle
had foretold the checkered existence that lay before me,” he said later, “I would have sneered sarcastically at the soothsayer, so little intention did I have of behaving the way I actually did.” But the germ of the idea came with news reports from Hitler’s Germany. Pujol was always listening to the BBC or paging slowly through a Spanish newspaper, then rushing off to the local café to argue about what he’d just read. And he kept hearing phrases that chilled him: “Aryan race,” “superior being.”
Gradually Pujol came to believe that the “diabolical dogmas” that had come to rule Spain were going to be implemented in Germany. Spanish censors attempted to withhold all news of concentration camps and “extermination through work,” but word leaked out. And Pujol decided he had to act. “I must do something, something practical,”
he said. “I must make my contribution toward the good of humanity.”

Step one: leave Spain. A little caper over the Portuguese border gave Pujol a shot at the passport he’d need to get to Allied territory. A guest at the Majestic who called himself the Duke of Torre knew of two elderly pro-Franco princesses who craved a supply of whisky, then unobtainable in Madrid. “They considered such a drink essential,
given their social position and entertaining commitments.” Pujol looked the capable type. Could he get them a case of good Scotch? Pujol told the Duke and the spinsters to find him a passport and a visa, and the deal was as good as done. The trio of Francoists soon acquired the documents, so Pujol drove his two elderly coconspirators and the Duke over the Portuguese border, bought six bottles of Scotch on the black market and wheeled home in high spirits, the contraband tucked safely in the trunk. The passport was Pujol’s reward for the jaunt. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of Madrileños trying to become informers or spies who would have looked at the document with barely disguised envy.

But what to do with it? In his room at the hotel, Pujol felt twenty-odd years of frustration well up within him. He wanted to take a stand for a world he’d witnessed only in the novels he’d read and in the stories told by his father so many years ago, walking by the seashore: “We were just fighting for the right to survive. And we had to feed our optimism in order to live. I yearned for justice.
From the medley of tangled ideas and fantasies going around and around in my head, a plan slowly began to take shape.”

Pujol was ready to take the next step. He possessed a talent that hadn’t fit anywhere before—not in the peacetime economy of northern Spain, not in the ranks of two very different armies. But perhaps in espionage he would finally find his purpose.

He’d decided he would use his riotous and unrivaled imagination to help defeat the Third Reich.

On a cold day in January 1941, Juan Pujol walked into the British embassy in Madrid and volunteered his services.

“Your services of
what?
”
was the response.

Pujol couldn’t or wouldn’t explain. (In fact, even he didn’t know what he was offering. “I must confess that my plans were fairly confused.”
) His original idea had been to offer to produce radio programs for the BBC. But his ambition had outrun his brain. He only repeated his request and stood there, shoulders thrown back, his warm hazel eyes burning with intensity. It became a game for the embassy staff, as the Spaniard was handed on from receptionist to secretary to clerk to minor official. Finally, having got no further than the embassy’s lowest rungs, Pujol was told to write down exactly what he proposed to do for England, and was shown the door.

Pujol was green, but he wasn’t that green. Madrid was practically a suburb of Berlin in 1941, the papers full of pro-German slogans and the cafés crowded with German agents and their local informants. Even to write down some nonsense about the BBC would mean risking his life. He was beginning to believe that espionage, not a radio show, was the best way he could serve the cause. There was only one problem: he didn’t know anything about espionage. Yet he did not give up, and he was not alone. Araceli tried next. She went to the embassy with an enigmatic offer of getting information for the Allies. She was turned down flat.

These refusals didn’t reflect on the Pujols’ skills as potential spies. Instead, they reflected a complex political reality the couple knew nothing about. The British ambassador to Spain in 1940 was Sir Samuel Hoare, an Oxonian and longtime Conservative politician who had once—as an officer in MI6—recruited the young Benito Mussolini during World War I. The future Il Duce
was then the thirty-four-year-old editor of an influential and virulently right-wing newspaper. England was eager to keep Italy on the side of the Allies, so it paid Mussolini the princely sum of 100 pounds a week ($9,300 in today’s dollars) to publish fiery editorials against the Germans. Mussolini’s controller, Sir Samuel, later became an establishment politician who saw plenty of skullduggery as he waded through various international skirmishes between the wars. He knew espionage, and he wasn’t necessarily opposed to it. But his mandate in 1941 was to keep neutral Spain out of the war. So Sir Samuel passed the word to the Madrid head of MI6, a man named Hamilton-Stokes: he would tolerate no incidents or spy capers under his watch. Pujol and Araceli had been turned down as a matter of policy, not because of the merits of their offer.