Agent Garbo (3 page)

This about-face was clearly a major capitulation to his family, and to reality. “I felt my stubbornness,
my not studying and continuously disappointing my father were going to bring me to a bad end,” he later explained. He even took up with Margarita, a sensible and tender Barcelona girl who was very like his mother: “prudent, very religious”
—and afraid of sex. The mad charms of girls like Luisita, as well as the adventures of Tom Mix and Don Quixote, were quietly put on a shelf.

In 1933, Pujol reported for compulsory military service. Soon he was sporting around town in the tailored officer’s uniform of the 7th Light Artillery Regiment, sworn to serve the leftist Republican government against all enemies. After a few months, Pujol had learned to ride
a horse and salute correctly. It was of his last successes before death and war darkened his life.

After a series of small strokes, his sixty-seven-year-old father soon took to his bed. The 1934 flu epidemic had struck Barcelona, and Juan Sr. was sick with the virus. In another room, Pujol was also laid out with the flu, and the two of them spent their days only yards apart, their faces burning with fever. On January 24, a doctor was called. Half delirious, Pujol listened from his room as the physician examined his father, the only sound the murmuring of his mother and sisters. Though sleepy and dazed, Pujol heard the doctor say that an injection was needed. He heard the thump of the front door closing and the rapid footsteps of a servant running off to the nearby pharmacy. A few minutes later, the sound of the door again: the servant had returned with the medicine. There was silence and Pujol imagined the doctor poking his syringe into the vial, then rolling up his father’s sleeve, holding his pale arm as the needle slipped into the vein. And then Pujol heard a scream that he would never forget. “Everybody was crying and shouting.
I heard someone cry out, ‘What happened? What happened?’ My mother and my sisters were crying, crying. I could hear the doctor saying he couldn’t understand what had happened, why the injection had that effect.” Finally, someone rushed in and told Pujol the news. His father had died the instant the doctor pushed the syringe’s plunger.

Pujol, too ill to attend the funeral, was devastated. His father had been his closest friend, the ideal of what a man should be. “The flight of his soul
from the world left me oppressed and overwhelmed,” he said. “I had lost the one I loved the most, forever.” To make matters worse, his father had died knowing that his son was struggling. As he listened to his family tell how the workers at the dye factory had taken his father’s coffin on their shoulders, tears streaming down their faces, and how children from the San Juan de Dios Hospital had joined in the procession, paying tribute to the man who’d quietly paid for their medicines and their beds because it was the decent thing to do, the wayward son cried and contemplated a hard truth: he’d fallen short in his father’s eyes.

With his father gone, Pujol struggled to find a place for himself in increasingly chaotic and violent Barcelona. Perhaps sparked by boyhood memories of Tom Mix, he bought a movie theater, then sold it and bought a smaller one. Both failed miserably. A trucking company bought and run with the long-suffering Joaquín bled red ink and had to be closed. Then a chicken farm. Everything collapsed in frustrated hopes, costing the family untold sums. “He was a
terrible
businessman,”
says Pujol’s eldest son, who would go on to be a successful entrepreneur and art gallery owner. Pujol simply wasn’t a practical thinker; he threw himself into things with passion but little planning or strategic vision.

Finally, at twenty-four, Pujol took up a sales position with a poultry farm in Llinás del Vallés, just under twenty miles north of Barcelona, and got engaged to the quiet Margarita. Was he in love with her? “I don’t know.
She was very nice to me but I was bored,” he would say years later. Pujol had seemingly reconciled himself to a life of anonymous work and family life in a small town in Spain. He owed his family that much. And he needed to eat.

Then, on July 17, 1936, Spanish soldiers in their Moroccan barracks staged a revolt. The Spanish Civil War had begun.

2. The Training Ground

J
ULY
18
WAS A
blisteringly hot Sunday. Pujol had planned a day trip with friends to Montseny, a mountainous region thirty miles northeast of Barcelona. But then fragmented reports of the barracks rebellion came in over the radio: General Franco and his troops in the Canary Islands were joining the fray; officers and men across the nation were swelling the ranks of the coup against the Republican government. As Barcelona tensed, Pujol made his way through empty streets to his fiancée’s house in Calle Girona. There he heard the news of escalations and fresh outbreaks of violence: cathedrals and political headquarters were burning; priests were being hunted down and murdered by leftist radicals; a general strike had been called by antifascist unions; food was already growing scarce and people were killing each other in the streets. Rebel fascist units had stormed the Telefónica building and the Hotel Colon, and marched toward the intersection of Paseo de Grácia and Diagonal, where a workers’ militia waited to oppose them, rifle stocks growing slick in their hands.

Soon it became clear that Barcelona was firmly in the grip of the Republican forces. As a cavalry officer, Pujol was required to report for duty, but he refused to take up arms “in such a fratricidal fight.”
Even if he had to die, he wouldn’t kill a fellow Spaniard.

Politically, Pujol was his father’s son. “I loved liberty,
tolerance and religious liberty,” he said. He hated the wild rhetoric of the communists and the anarcho-syndicalists, who declared that “nothing great has ever been achieved without violence
. . . the possession of revolvers and machine guns distinguished the free man from the slave.” Franco and his Nationalists were just as extreme in their hatreds, but Barcelona was a leftist city, its buildings draped with communist flags and the red-and-black banners of the anarchists. “Every shop and café had an inscription
saying that it had been collectivized,” wrote George Orwell. “Even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black.”

Pujol shared none of the left’s infatuation with the Republicans. He’d seen the massacres, seen the bodies being pulled from the church ruins. His younger sister Elena and his mother were arrested by the Republicans on charges of supporting Franco, but the family managed to contact an anarchist friend, and the pair were “snatched from certain death”
and returned home unharmed. Pujol’s older brother, Joaquín, was sent to the Republican front; like his brother, Joaquín didn’t believe in the cause and soon deserted, slipping through the hills of Girona province, starving and near naked. The family’s dye factory, on whose profits the Pujols depended, was taken over by the workers who just a few years earlier had carried his father’s coffin on their shoulders. Pujol despised the vicious war that tore families apart, the massacres in bullrings, the shadowy groups of men known as “uncontrollables” who hunted fascists and their peers on the right. He saw firsthand what one thoughtful anarchist called the release of
“
a brutish appetite,
a thirst for extermination, a lust for blood inconceivable in honest men before.”

Barcelona was Pujol’s first experience of war—and of espionage. In Spain, the spy game shared little with the remote gentlemen’s pastime popularized in pulp novels. It was all-pervasive, blind and savage. “A horrible atmosphere of suspicion
had grown up,” wrote Orwell, who arrived in the city in late 1936. “Various people were infected with spy mania and were creeping round whispering that everyone else was a spy of the Communists, or the Trotskyists, or the Anarchists, or what-not.” Men and women were executed on the mere charge of “Trotskyist treachery.”
Even those who weren’t spying, as Orwell wrote, somehow
felt
that they were. Pujol would emerge from the Spanish Civil War naïve about the techniques of espionage, but not about its costs. People were put up against a wall and shot in Barcelona on the strength of a rumor.

Not wanting to fight for the Republicans, Pujol took his chances as a fugitive and holed up at his fiancée’s family home, one of many young Spaniards
who fled the ranks of both sides. For months he lived there, unable to leave the premises, glued to the radio as gunshots echoed outside and the airwaves filled with reports of massacres. It was too risky for him to speak above a whisper or glance out the window, and every time the doorbell rang he had to hide. Capture could mean being shot as a deserter.

Just before Christmas 1936, Pujol was in the kitchen cracking hazelnuts and walnuts with a hammer, the shells flying everywhere. Enjoying himself, he forgot about the need for silence; in fact, he was making such a racket that at first he didn’t hear the knock at the front door. An informer had turned Margarita’s family in for storing valuables for pro-Franco families who’d fled Barcelona. When the police poured through the front door, they marched straight to the spot where the jewelry was hidden, a lintel between two rooms. Then they began to search the rest of the house. When the police reached the kitchen, they found Pujol, hammer still raised to smash a walnut. He was arrested at gunpoint and marched out of the house, along with his fiancée’s father and brother, into a waiting car.

Had Pujol and the others been found by an irregular posse of full-blooded radicals, they would most likely have been “taken for a stroll” and executed. But luck was with them: the somber group was brought instead to the local police station, which meant they were in the hands of more moderate Republicans. Pujol breathed a sigh of relief—which quickly evaporated when he was accused of being a deserter. “I was petrified,
fearing that I might have to pay with my life,” he recalled. The young lieutenant was taken to the dungeon below the station and locked in a dark, cold cell.

Day after day, as his warders brought his meals, Pujol could only sit in the gloom and listen to the voices of his jailers and fellow inmates. Every day the door to his cell would be opened and a police officer would sit down and interrogate him. “I kept assuring [them]
I had only been in the house because I was engaged to the eldest daughter, but they continued to question me remorselessly.” The war was growing even more savage, with atrocities and mass killings on both sides. The execution of a suspected Nationalist sympathizer would barely be noticed.

After a week in the jail, in the middle of a freezing night, Pujol awoke with a start. The cell door had swung open and a man he’d never seen before was standing in the dim light. The man whispered for him to get up and come with him. Pujol, half asleep, stumbled after the stranger as he led the prisoner through a bewildering series of hallways and offices in the predawn darkness. Pujol now realized that the man was no policeman; Pujol had unwittingly become part of a jailbreak. At every turn he feared running into a Republican militiaman in one of their mismatched uniforms. A deserter might catch a break, but a deserter-cum-escapee was certain to be shot. Finally, the stranger reached ahead and pushed open a small door, and Pujol felt a rush of cold air against his face. The man handed him a piece of paper and pointed toward the starlit road.

His fiancée, the pious and prudish Margarita, whom he wasn’t even sure he loved, had saved his skin. She’d contacted a secret Catholic organization called the Socorro Blanco (White Aid), which ran a kind of Francoist underground railroad for fugitives. But now Pujol was on the streets of Barcelona, a hunted man without the identification needed to pass the Republican checkpoints. He looked at the address on the paper and began walking quickly, keeping a sharp eye out for the barricades behind which soldiers stood guard around the clock. The dizzying fall from the dreamy existence of his childhood was nearly complete. “I had . . . become a criminal.”

The address led him to the Gothic Quarter, one of Barcelona’s tough and dirty working-class neighborhoods. Pujol climbed the stairs of the apartment building listed on the paper, not daring to turn on the hallway light. Feeling his way forward in the dark, he touched the smooth surface of a wooden door and knocked gently. He heard footsteps. A woman slowly opened the door. Without a word, she gestured him inside. The flat was a Socorro Blanco safe house occupied by a taxi driver, his wife and their bright-eyed nine-year-old son. Pujol was safe for the time being.

Unable to get word to his family, Pujol spent his days in the cramped apartment, often hungry, as food in Barcelona was becoming increasingly scarce. When Pujol had to speak to his protectors, they would turn up the radio to muffle the conversation. Otherwise, he lived in silence. He helped the boy with his math and history lessons—the schools in Barcelona had closed during the war—by whispering his corrections in the nine-year-old’s ear. Outside, he could glimpse fathers and mothers lining up for food and could feel the impact as bombs thudded into nearby houses. At night, Pujol had difficulty sleeping, his vivid imagination serving up nightmares in which a sudden knock on the door was followed by arrest and a firing squad.

The only relief from the boredom were moments of unexpected terror. One day, when he was whiling away the time with the taxi driver’s son, with the parents away, the knock on the door finally came. “
Policía,
” a voice shouted. Pujol silently pointed to the boy’s bedroom, and the boy nodded. As he hid himself, Pujol heard the child open the front door and inform the policemen that his mother was shopping and his father was out fighting the fascists. The boy invited the men in and casually showed them the apartment as they asked detailed questions. When he came to the room where Pujol lay hiding under the bed, the boy flung the door open, hit the light switch and in a bored voice announced that this was where he slept. The police nodded and passed by.

After months of this precarious existence, in the summer of 1937 the taxi driver took his family to live in a small village in Lleida, in western Catalonia. Pujol was left alone. He had to strain to be completely quiet, as the neighbors believed the apartment had been left empty—no radio, no clattering of dishes, no singing to pass the time. When he walked across the floor, he shuffled to keep the noise down. The apartment windows were kept shut even during the blazingly hot Barcelona summer, so Pujol roasted; when winter came, his teeth chattered with cold. He couldn’t turn on a lamp, afraid the glow from behind the drawn curtains would be seen from the street. Pujol’s eyes, like those of a nocturnal animal, became sensitive to bright light. Only the surreptitious visits of a girl from the Socorro Blanco with packages of food under her arm broke the monotony and kept him from starvation. She came every three days, but as the weeks passed the time between visits stretched longer and longer.