Agent Garbo (8 page)

“Why he had such blind faith
in me I do not know,” Pujol would write later. He was being too modest. His performance had been precise and convincing. He’d taken control of the game away from the much more experienced Federico. He’d intuited what the Germans wanted and how they would best be seduced. He hadn’t ham-handedly presented them his scheme on a platter all at once; he’d made them work for it. He had charmed Federico, enticed him with his daring, then frightened him half to death with the phone call out of the blue demanding a meeting. As a finale, he’d stage-managed the ultimate reveal in the café with the eye of a Hollywood director. “With the British he was British,
with the Germans he was German,” a journalist who met him much later on would say. Actually the opposite was true. Pujol created a completely original character, stuck to it until death and pulled less confident operatives toward his creation. But he
understood
the Germans like a German and the British like a Brit.

Federico was so taken with his new agent
that he passed along the name of a German spy already working in London: Luis Calvo, a well-known newspaper correspondent. Perhaps the spy-runner was courting Pujol, trying to impress him with the Abwehr’s extensive network in England. Or perhaps he was just talking shop. But instead of being impressed, Pujol erupted: he didn’t want to know the names of any of their operatives, he roared, and how dare Federico offer him one? If they unmasked Calvo so easily, he snapped, did that mean they’d “out” Pujol to the next agent who came along? How dare he risk his spies’ lives like that!

Federico, his future now partially invested in this fiery Spaniard, had to sit there and take the tongue-lashing. After all, Pujol was right. It was bad form in the spy world to give away an agent’s real name to another agent unless absolutely necessary; it endangered both spies. Pujol didn’t learn this from an espionage manual, he intuited it on the spot. He wasn’t just thinking like a German, he was thinking like the spy-runner Federico wished he was.

For the last meeting, Federico had a surprise. His boss, Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, showed up to see Pujol off. Kühlenthal’s MI5 file described him in detail: “Oval face . . . fleshy.
Boneless cheeks. Fresh complexion, high color on cheekbones. Curved, hawklike nose. Searching grey eyes.” He was a regular in Madrid cafés and
cervecerías,
where he was known as Don Pablo.

Kühlenthal handed Pujol several bottles of secret ink, ciphering codes to encrypt his first messages, a list of cover addresses to send them to and $3,000 in cash, the equivalent of about $44,000 today. The Abwehr was rich and not afraid to spend on good prospects. Kühlenthal shook Pujol’s hand and gave him his marching orders: don’t underestimate the British, be patient, don’t expect a quick Nazi victory. Above all, try to develop a set of subagents who can be left behind like sleepers if you’re forced to leave England.

With that, Pujol gathered up his young family and, in July 1941, headed to Lisbon to practice “my own bizarre form of espionage.”

To get by the border controls, Pujol rolled up most of the $3,000 into a rubber sheath and inserted it into a half-empty tube of toothpaste. The rest went into a can of shaving cream. As he made his way to Portugal, he imagined he was carrying the keys to the kingdom, that the bottles of secret ink stashed in his luggage, the money and the secret codes would be enough to get him hired by the British as a double agent and whisked off to London. “[He] had no idea
of the adventures and experiences which were to envelop him,” recalled MI5’s Tommy Harris.

After arriving in the Portuguese capital, Pujol rented a room from a poor fisherman in the Cascais district, outside Lisbon, and headed straight to the British embassy, making sure that he wasn’t being tailed. “What follows may seem unbelievable
but it is true,” Pujol would write years later. “After all that I had done, all that I had gone through, all the subterfuges I’d invented, the deceptions and the chicanery, the tension and the strain . . . I was no further forward than I had been when I made my first attempt.” The British turned him down flat. Again. For the third time. And the rejection forced Pujol deeper and deeper into a game he didn’t fully understand. He couldn’t just impersonate a spy anymore. He’d have to become one.

But he would have to do it from offstage, faking all the way. Pujol bought a map of England, a Baedeker tourist guide to the country and a copy of Bradshaw’s railway timetables. He had never been in England in his entire life; now he had to convince his handlers that he lived there. He also got back in touch with the Spanish friend, Dionisio Fernández, who’d sent the fake telegram from Varela that said he was in Lisbon to carry on the affair with his mistress. Could he use Fernández’s name to rent a post office box to receive letters from the woman without his wife finding out? Fernández agreed.

On July 19, Pujol sent his first message to the Germans in Madrid, pretending that he’d arrived in England. The “cover” letter in black ink was filled with the first impressions of a “passionate Catalan democrat” who’d fled to Britain to escape Franco. Between the lines, in invisible ink, Pujol carefully wrote out the real message: he’d made it safely to the British Isles and on the way had met a pilot with the Dutch airline KLM who’d agreed, after much persuading, to carry letters from London to Lisbon, to avoid the British censors. (This would later amaze Pujol’s handlers
in London, because the chief pilot on that route was a real English spy. Pujol didn’t know this; it was a lucky fabrication.) There the pilot would mail the letters, which would have a Portuguese postmark, on to Madrid. The Abwehr could respond to the same poste restante address, and the messages would be ferried back to London by the pilot. The imaginary pilot thus became the first of the subagents that would soon pour forth from Pujol’s brain.

Pujol waited anxiously for the response. Ten days later, a letter from Federico arrived at the poste restante box: “The method of communication is good
and the letter developed well. We await with interest further news . . . Kindest regards and good luck.”

The Germans had bought his KLM story. “I had become a real German spy.”
Now he could pretend to be in London while in reality living in Estoril, where he’d just moved from the fisherman’s shack to a proper house, along with Araceli and his baby son.

There was, of course, one overriding problem with the plan: Pujol knew next to nothing about the country he was supposed to be living in. He didn’t speak a word of English and was unfamiliar with its currency, its culture, its terminology, not to mention its regiments, army groups and the types of ships its merchant navy favored. How could he compose convincing reports about a place that was as distant and strange to him as the North Pole?

As he struggled to figure this out, the farce with the English continued. Pujol went to the British embassy in Lisbon and told the assistant to the military attaché everything: the secret ink, the Abwehr questionnaires, the names and descriptions of Federico and Kühlenthal. He wanted to make a deal, and fast. With Lisbon swarming with German spies, and with the Abwehr expecting precise reports about the Allied war effort, time was against him. If the Brits would get him to America—his new escape hatch—he’d happily turn over everything. It was his fourth approach to the British.

The assistant told Pujol an official would meet with him the next day at the English bar inside the Estoril Casino at 7 p.m. to discuss the proposal in detail. The following evening Pujol arrived at the bar and waited, nervously sipping a drink as the minutes passed. The promised official never showed. Pujol went back to the embassy the next day, found the assistant and demanded an explanation. The man palmed Pujol off by claiming he’d been unable to contact the official. The farce was now complete: the Nazis he despised were enamored of him, and the Allies for whom he was willing to risk his life regarded him as a nuisance. “Why, I kept on asking myself,
was the enemy proving to be so helpful while those whom I wanted to be my friends were being so implacable?” Pujol stormed out of the embassy.

The spy needed more ammunition to get on that flight to London. He called on the real Varela, head of security at the Spanish embassy. Varela immediately demanded to know the meaning of a telegram that Federico had sent him days earlier, announcing Pujol’s arrival in Portugal. Who the hell was Pujol to telegram him? The spy quickly charmed Varela out of his anger and patiently explained that he was a currency smuggler working on something called the Dalamal Operation. Varela calmed down and listened, but told Pujol nothing could be done about the scheme unless the real Dalamal (who didn’t exist) came to Spain. Pujol was crushed—teaming up with Varela on a real operation would have boosted his credibility with the Germans—but at least, should an Abwehr agent phone the security official and ask about a Spanish spy named Pujol, Varela would confirm they were in touch.

With very few tools at hand, Pujol fell back on the one thing that had never failed him: his imagination. He began to dream up the team of subagents that Kühlenthal, the Abwehr chief in Madrid, had demanded. Not only would these imaginary people be able to feed him information from sources he didn’t have access to himself, they could also take the fall if the information proved incorrect. First up was “Carvalho,” a Portuguese with Nazi sympathies who lived near the Bristol Channel, an important shipping lane in southwest England. He could report on convoys and tankers steaming through the local waters and the shoreline defenses. (The fake spy’s name was a silent tribute to Araceli, whose last name was Carbollo.) Pujol also recruited “William Gerbers,” an imaginary Swiss national who could keep an eye on Liverpool. The spy’s second letter to the Germans detailed these minor coups, as well as the news that the BBC in London had offered him a job as a freelance translator.

Pujol wrote the letters in a bombastic, florid style that the historian Thaddeus Holt once called the “verbal equivalent
of the extravagant confections of Antonio Gaudí.” It’s an apt description. “I do not wish to end
this letter,” Pujol wrote at one point, “without sending a Viva Victorioso for our brave troops who fight in Russia, annihilating the Bolshevic [
sic
] beast.” Not only did the style match the personality he’d created, but it had the advantage of taking up a lot of pages without conveying too much information. Any mistake could have cost him dearly, so as he sat in his house in Lisbon he concentrated on “recruiting” agents and wrote only one letter each month, sticking close to the theories of espionage that he’d developed over the past few weeks. “I tried hard to introduce new information gradually
and to be cautious when I mentioned the new contacts I had recruited to help me.” He made the information hard to come by, describing “in detail how I had grappled
with a whole string of obstacles.” His methods would have been well known to any mystery writer or con man—ground every revelation in lived experience, let the mark come to the con, not vice versa—but Pujol had to work them out on his own.

That couldn’t last forever, though. Sooner or later he’d have to come up with some actual information. So in his third letter, postmarked in October 1941, he began to add some red meat to his reports: His subagent William Gerbers
had spotted a convoy of five Allied ships leaving Liverpool, headed for Malta. That Mediterranean island, rich in Christian history, was a vital link in the British defenses, key to the Allied campaign in North Africa. Over a two-year period beginning in 1940, the Luftwaffe carpet-bombed the small island with 3,000 raids; in February 1942 alone, more than 1,000 tons of bombs would be dropped on the rocky outpost. German destroyers and cruisers regularly laid siege to the Allied tankers and freighters hoping to resupply the station. The news that a major convoy was on its way to the battered island would be of great interest to the Third Reich’s war planners.

Despite this phony coup, Pujol was increasingly like a rat in a maze, looking for the exit. He traveled back to Madrid to try the British embassy again for a fifth attempt, showing one of the staffers the miniaturized questionnaires that Kühlenthal had handed to him, but the official sent him away. After this latest rebuff, Pujol was convinced his luck was going to run out, and soon.

Meanwhile, Federico was peppering him with fresh demands: “Try to find out the details
of the formation of a new expeditionary force of several divisions: Where are they destined for, the Middle East or Far East?” “Try to get an agent into northern Ireland at the arrival port of American shipments. Ireland is very interesting and important.” The Abwehr also asked him to obtain a series of pamphlets from the Institute of Statistics in Oxford, a way not only to get much-needed information but also to confirm that Pujol was indeed living in England. The last request was easier than it sounded. The spy simply went to the British Propaganda Office in Lisbon, claimed to be a “student of statistics” and asked a clerk to send for the publications. But the dozens of other inquiries were harder to answer from Lisbon. Pujol would have to improvise.

The spy began to scour the city for usable information. An advertisement in a Portuguese paper
gave him a few facts about a British naval firm. A French newspaper had a small article on infantile paralysis and food rationing. A telephone directory yielded the name of a British company. Pujol rifled through the Blue Book, published by the Office of National Statistics, for the text of Churchill’s speeches, and sent Federico the best bits. When he went to a Lisbon cinema to relax for a couple of hours (the movie itch was still with him), he watched a newsreel before the main feature that included a few seconds’ footage of a Canadian warship called
Esquimalt.
Pujol sat up in his chair, instantly alert. His next report included a detailed description of the ship, including his completely made-up descriptions of its capabilities. A sketch of a “very secret apparatus
which had been copied from plans” by his “sub-agent No. 3” had in fact been copied down by Pujol, standing in front of a Lisbon shop window that featured a picture of an Allied commando barge. Pujol scribbled out a quick drawing, which he refined later, then added an avalanche of false data on how long and wide the barge was and what armaments it carried, and for good measure he sent along a fake eyewitness report on how the thing maneuvered on water. Even a British propaganda leaflet—whether dropped from the sky or handed out by pro-Allied sympathizers—was turned into a lengthy report: “R.A.F. Pilot School situated near Sandwich,
the camp is camouflaged and also used as a landing ground for coastal defense plans. It is on the right bank of the river Stour . . . just by the cross roads of the main roads leading to Ramsgate and Sandwich.” Other things he just made up out of whole cloth, including enormous “amphibious tanks” he’d seen maneuvering on Lake Windermere.