Agent Garbo (2 page)

For Eisenhower, Hitler was a cipher, quite possibly mad: “a power-drunk egocentric
. . . one of the criminally insane.” Pujol had less experience with military leaders than the American general but more with fascists: he had actually met and fought with them. And he’d spent months trying to get inside Hitler’s mind, to imagine what the German leader was thinking and then, from six hundred miles away, to obscure entire divisions and armadas from the Führer’s eyes. Pujol’s view of Hitler reflected the spy’s Catholic boyhood and the scenes of executions he’d witnessed as a young soldier in the Spanish Civil War. “I had the idea
that this man was a demon, a man who could completely destroy humanity.”

That cool January day, Pujol emerged from the Underground station and walked down Jermyn Street. He arrived at his building, ascended the stairs to his office, greeted the young British secretary, Sarah Bishop, who kept the records of his spectral army, and said hello to his MI5 case officer, Tommy Harris, the man they called Jesus,
already filling the small room with the smoke of his black Spanish cigarettes. Pujol knew that D-Day, his final test as a spy, was coming, and he was increasingly nervous, even as he looked—like Eisenhower—cheerful and confident.

Pujol had failed in almost everything he’d tried in his thirty-two years: student, businessman, cinema magnate, soldier. His marriage was falling apart. But in one specialized area of war, the espionage underworld known as the double-cross game, the young man was a kind of savant, and he knew it. After years of suffering and doubt, Pujol hoped he was ready to match wits with the best minds of the Third Reich.

“I wanted to start a personal war
with Hitler,” he said. “And I wanted to fight with my imagination.”

Pujol sat down at his desk. Perhaps he asked Sarah Bishop about her evening. Or he exchanged a few words with Tommy Harris about lunch at the nearby Martinez Restaurant, one of their favorite haunts. But despite the close bond between the two, forged over two years of creating intrigues and counterplots spread across Europe and roundthe world, the enigmatic Harris was keeping not one but two secrets from his star agent: the deception plan that would hide D-Day from Hitler—code-named Operation Fortitude—was in deep trouble. And, even more worryingly, an Abwehr spy in Lisbon had recently revealed that he knew all about Garbo and could soon expose him to the Gestapo, ending his quest once and for all.

Unaware, Pujol began to write a message to the Germans in a beautiful, sloping hand. He was acquainted with secrets. He had a few of his own.

I. The Making of a Spy

1. Tom Mix in Barcelona

J
UAN PUJOL WAS BORN
into turmoil, even though no one realized it at the time. The baby boy was entered into the Barcelona Civil Registry as Juan Miguel Valentín García Guijarro and the date of birth given as February 28, 1912, although the baby had actually been delivered two weeks earlier, February 14, the “Day of the Lovers.” What was more troubling was the missing name of his father. In the appropriate box, the registrar listed the baby boy as illegitimate.

It was a not uncommon story. Pujol’s mother, Mercedes García Guijarro, had grown up near Granada, in the southern region of Andalusia, the beautiful and high-spirited daughter of a family that was so devout they were known to locals as
Los Beatos
(The Blessed). The family moved to Barcelona when Mercedes was eight, and when she was in her early twenties, the trim-waisted and effervescent woman went to work in the factory of Juan Pujol Pena, who lived at 70 Muntaner Street, a respectable and historic address in the heart of the Catalan bourgeois district. Pujol Pena was a highly successful dye merchant, completely self-made, whose factory was “famous for its dark shades,” especially the deepest jet black, which was an important color in Catholic Barcelona.

The merchant’s first wife was alive when Mercedes began working in the factory, but passed away soon after the young woman started there. Pujol Pena and Mercedes began a relationship—whether before or after the first wife was dead is unknown. At the age of twenty-two, Mercedes gave birth to her first son, Joaquín, and then a daughter named Bonaventura. Juan followed, and inherited from his mother a “complicit expression in his ironic gaze”
that the British operative Desmond Bristow would catch years later. A younger sister, Elena, followed two years later, after Juan Sr. and Mercedes had married.

The ironic gaze and his small stature were about all Pujol took from his mother. He looked strikingly like his thin, elegant father and he would inherit Pujol Pena’s liberal outlook on the world, as opposed to Mercedes’s stark Catholicism. When Juan was four, his father finally accepted the young boy and his two older siblings as his legitimate children. It was a fortunate moment for Juan: to be a bastard in status-conscious Barcelona in 1912 was a serious matter.

Yet most of the turmoil that churned Pujol’s early years had an inner origin. As Pujol grew up in a house full of nannies, chefs, seamstresses and chauffeurs, with vacations to the shore in his father’s gleaming Hispano-Suiza, his parents quickly saw qualities in their second boy that they couldn’t trace to either of their personalities. Pujol was wild, very wild, or as his mother saw it, bad, very bad. “In my house,
the name ‘Juan’ was constantly ringing,” he remembered, “followed by ‘
What have you done this time?
’” Pujol banged into walls, scraped his limbs raw, crashed into banisters and, in one memorable incident, plowed straight through a floor-to-ceiling window on his tricycle, sending glass crashing into a thousand pieces all around him.

Miraculously, he emerged unscathed. “I really believed
that Don Quixote in his adventure with the windmills was not so destroyed as I was,” he later wrote. But that day was the exception. “I was constantly covered
in bandages through my whole boyhood.” Though they loved him, Pujol’s brothers and sisters would hide their toys from Juan, convinced that anything he touched would soon be shattered.

His family despaired. Mercedes, especially, couldn’t understand her son. He was incorrigible: threats, punishments, near-mortal injuries seemed to have no effect on a trail of destruction that stretched wider and longer the older he grew. But what looked like sheer mayhem to his parents and the rest of his family were, for the boy, marvelous and exuberant adventures that he saw in his mind in blazing, sharply defined color, always with him as the hero of the tale. As Pujol tore around the mansion, he became a knight, a desperado, a daredevil, an explorer or, his favorite role model, Tom Mix of the Hollywood westerns that he attended as faithfully as Mercedes did Catholic Mass. “That cowboy
was doing these wonderful things, and I decided that I should imitate him.”

Pujol would later describe his boyhood imagination as something that he had no real control over. Like some alien host, it compelled him to do things. “The contents of my fevered fantasies,”
he wrote, “ran my imagination.” Whatever bloomed in his brain, Pujol would set out to do. Most boys have adventures spinning through their heads at all hours of the day, but Pujol actually seemed to live solely in his dreams, lost to the real world. “I wanted to be the beloved hero
of a Hollywood silent movie.” But no one else saw the sets and the props, only Pujol with the crazy look in his eye, approaching at top speed. On the soccer field, he was even more terrifying; his nickname was Bullet.

He wasn’t malicious, and in fact he had a good heart, always rushing in to help when the neighborhood runt was losing a fight. “I didn’t hurt anybody,
I was just very, very naughty.” Pujol’s mother tried to snatch him out of his fantasies and mold him into a nice Catalan upper-class boy, a boy she could fully love. “Punishments and retribution”
rained down on Pujol’s head one after the other, but they rarely had any effect. Pujol’s genial father could only sigh.

When he was seven, Pujol was sent away to a strict boarding school, run by the Marist Fathers. Pujol’s older brother, the “sturdy and straightforward”
Joaquín, was forced to go along to watch over Bullet. In the Spanish expression, it was Pujol who broke the dishes but Joaquín who paid for them.

The priests did their best, but Pujol would always be a mediocre student. He hated the boarding school, and waited impatiently for his wonderful father to arrive on the train, as he did faithfully every Sunday, to take Juan and Joaquín for walks by the sea. There Juan Sr. would tell his boys entrancing stories about the world and dispense advice about life. “He taught me to respect
the individuality of human beings, their sorrows and their sufferings. He despised war and bloody revolutions, scorning the despot, the authoritarian ..." The Marist discipline wouldn’t stick, but the seaside lessons would. In Pujol’s four “interminable” years
with the Marists, however, he did manage to become fascinated by history and especially languages. Eventually he would be able to speak five: Spanish, Catalan, French, English and Portuguese.

The elder Juan had more to worry about than a high-spirited boy. Barcelona in the 1920s was a prosperous city known as “the Unrivaled,” with nearly one million citizens and heavy industries that led the world. The city’s cotton industry was second only to mighty Liverpool’s, and the first railway engine in the world had been built in its thriving factories. The young Pujol loved going to the train station, where he would watch the steam engines blowing and hissing as they pulled out of the grand terminal. “My imagination would travel with them
as they sped away to remote destinations to the echoing sound of a whistle.”

But there were good reasons for a young boy to want to escape Barcelona: it was a combustible, highly dangerous place to grow up in, a place where the leftists’ idea of a joke
was to soap the stone steps of churches so that the hated Catholic bourgeoisie would slip and break their necks when leaving Mass. The Catalan capital often seemed on the verge of tearing itself apart: waves of riots, strikes and violence left dozens of mutilated bodies on the streets; radicals burned down churches and convents, fascist gangs responded with kidnappings and mass murders. Political coups seemed to be the city’s leading industry. “One day a right-wing faction
sitting outside a coffee-bar would be machine-gunned,” Pujol remembered, “the next day it was the turn of the left.” Anarcho-syndicalists battled Catholic workers, proto-fascists shot communists, military supporters bombed antimonarchists. Assassination became so common that when a politician or union leader was found dead on the street, it was said almost casually that he’d “been take for a
paseo,
” a stroll.

As a leading industrialist and a progressive, the elder Juan was a potential target of several factions. “Every morning
my father went to work, he said goodbye to us as if for the last time; each parting was heart-rending.” The paterfamilias despised the violence and poison-tipped rhetoric that had become so common in Barcelona. He was a committed humanist who believed in science, progress and, above all, tolerance. (Mercedes’s sympathies no doubt lay with the Catholic traditionalists who backed Franco.) Finally, the tension became so thick that Juan Sr. moved his family away from the city center to the northern suburb of Putxet, where after living in a succession of apartments they settled into a magnificent home
on Homero Street.

Pujol grew up strong, athletic, “a hefty fellow of fifteen,
with an incipient beard,” as he boasted later. He was charming, loved to dance and quote Catalan poetry, to hike in the mountains and sweet-talk the local girls. But he found his lessons to be “endless and dull,”
and after one particularly loud fight with a teacher, he marched home and announced that he was dropping out. Cannily, Juan Sr. agreed, with one proviso: the impulsive teenager had to go out and get a job. Pujol agreed, promptly marched off and talked his way into an apprenticeship at an enormous hardware shop just off the world-famous Rambla.

His duties were to sweep the floor, run errands, deliver packages and replace the tools that the shop assistants had left out after demonstrating them for customers. It was his first real job, and the long hours and menial tasks quickly wore him down. As his father had no doubt foreseen, Pujol lasted only a few weeks before quitting the shop. Then he zoomed to the opposite extreme, locking himself in the family library and delving deep into the arcane philosophical and literary texts that lined the walls. Pujol was searching for a vocation, and like everything else, he pursued it at top speed. The teenager was all velocity and no direction.

The young man’s intense, headlong nature also propelled him into a series of mad love affairs. “I’ve always adored romanticism,
and I’ve always been a slave of what is usually called the weaker sex.” When he met Luisita, a vivacious dance-crazed girl from Andalusia, he pursued her all the way to Granada, begging his father to drive him there in the family’s Hispano-Suiza. In Granada Pujol discovered that his beloved had a violently jealous boyfriend. Pujol sent Luisita poem after poem and declared his everlasting love, but the girl chose the brute, and Pujol’s father had to drive back to Barcelona with his heartbroken son weeping in the passenger seat. “I was destroyed
; the chef of the house couldn’t find anything to make me happy. A few months after I left, Luisita married that abominable cretin.”

One day when he was nineteen, Pujol began to feel knife-like pains in his abdomen that doubled him over. His appendix had burst. He was rushed to the hospital and into the operating room. The surgeon successfully removed the appendix, but three days later, as Pujol recovered in bed, the incision became infected. The young man raved with fever, wavering between life and death. In between hallucinations, he would awaken
to find his father by his side, day and night, holding his hand and saying nothing, only crying. It was the first time young Pujol had seen his father’s tears.

The fever seemed to burn something out of Pujol. After he recovered, he made another hairpin turn in his life: he would stop dreaming of romance and foreign travel. He gave up studying Aristotle. Instead, he began taking classes in—of all things—poultry management. After a six-month course at the Royal Academy of Poultry Farming at Arenys de Mar, Juan Pujol became a fully certified chicken farmer.